#2

You might think from the title of this blog entry, that I (Ash) am just going to wax poetic about our second son. That's partially right. But what I really want to talk about is poop. (Ed. - if you're squeamish, you may want to skip the next two paragraphs.)

We're pretty much immersed in the stuff. There was the visit to the pediatrician's office on day 8 of Oliver's life - a volcano of ballpark-mustard-yellow feces started erupting out of his tush while I held his little naked self above the examining table. Just before his big weigh-in! Couldn't he have held it in till after we weighed him? Luckily, Oliver is gaining weight like a pint-sized sumo wrestler and impressed both the nurse and the doc by having already gained back all the weight he lost after birth.

Then I upped the ante at home and switched to cloth diapers. Gabe is playing along so far, while holding his nose, literally. We set up a spray bidet nozzle on our toilet to spray Oliver's excretions off the cloth diapers and into the toilet. This task is - surprise! - something of a drag. We decided we'll keep up the cloth experiment till he starts solid foods and his poops get to be more like Ezra's - pretty gnarly and not something you'd want to spend minutes spraying into the toilet. Although, speaking of Ezra's poops, we're having to come into more contact with those now, too, since we introduced a potty chair. His one and only time pooping on the potty so far actually started on the floor of Oliver's room. Awesome.

In other news... Aunt Lisa came to visit and provided non-stop Ezra care. It's not easy. Playing with him these days takes some creativity and brainpower! It all goes back to one meal not long before Oliver was born when - in an effort to keep Ezra engaged enough to keep eating his food - I invented a story between two bath toys - Elmo and Turtle. Pretty soon, Ezra was begging us as soon as he'd wake up - "Elmo and Turtle say, please?" or "I want Elmo Turtle talk, please!" Now the cast of characters has expanded to include praying mantis and iguana, along with mechanic, doctor, farmer and "regular guy" (figurines that go to his train set... regular guy's reference to poop was inadvertent.) The most popular storyline so far involves space travel and martians, cheese on the moon and avoiding asteroids.

It's all very charming, except... in the past couple of days, he has unleashed Demon-Ezra. Full-blown tantrums with tears and shrieks that occur multiple times AN HOUR. Gabe just looked at me shellshocked tonight and said, So I guess this is just how our lives are going to be, huh? We're not sure if it's him acting out because of Oliver being here, or just a rite of passage in turning 2, or that he's truly had a psychotic break. But we're scrambling to order some books on discipline.

Luckily, Oliver is as sweet as can be. He's now put on 2 1/2 pounds since birth and is awake more often and noticing us and the world a little more. He has a fussy period that strikes at about 4 am every morning for a couple of hours, and that's not fun, but we've decided to keep him anyway.

Love,
Ash, Gabe, Ezra and Oliver