Standing up, for reals

Maya stood up today!!!!

(Some of you who are avid readers of this blog (I mean, who isn't?!) may be thinking . . . um, this was news circa Oct. 2009 . . . remember, the post titled "Things I do, 2 awesome updates"? But that phase of pulling up to stand only lasted a week. She would pull to standing and then cry hysterically because she was stuck . . . she locks her legs and couldn't bend to get down. And then she stopped pulling up.)

This morning after PT she crawled across the mat and stood right up next to her "table". I was so psyched and took a pic:


Carol (her therapist) and I watched and waited to see what would happen . . . and she managed to get down (she puts her hands down onto a little stool that was next to her, then bent her legs down). And over the course of the day she stood a bunch more times. Dave didn't get home until late, so we taped it so that he could see:



(Signing Times is a dvd series that teaches American Sign Language to kids . . . it's what Maya is learning, we usually watch a dvd once a day)

More updates hopefully to come soon. Here's a mini-update in the form of a giant run-on sentence. The content is what's been going on, and the writing style expresses my mental state :)

Maya learns more words everyday and is still trying to sign a lot but is tough to understand, starting to vocalize more which I'm trying to encourage, playing in a rice bin (boy that's messy) to desensitive her hands and feet, working on eating more textured foods (involves some crying and protesting), working on chewing solids, still doesn't like to stand up . . .I'm still working on painting #2, have made almost no headway in putting the 1300 pictures into albums, doing projects around the house (which has resulted in 2 weird photo galleries), also I'm the cat whisperer, and the rat babies have fur and are cute and their eyes should open any day now.

Oh, and Maya got a headband:

It's been a busy few weeks here. Here are some pictures:

Maya got sick, but Dave helped her feel better with tissues and Sesame Street songs on YouTube:

Then she got better and we took a day trip to NJ and hung out with Grandpa:

Then it was time for her 2nd haircut :)

Then it was Dave's birthday!!!!!!!!!!! Hooray :) I made a cake after enlisting some recipe advice from my brilliant baking friend, Sarita:

But for real, who cares about the human goings on when we have a bunch of little babies here. In all honesty, while I've done the whole baby rodents thing a bunch of times, not everyone has. It's really pretty crazy to watch how quickly they grow.

There will end up being 8 white ones and 1 black one. Here is the black one, 1 full day old, barely pigmented:

Pile on a dinner plate (for perspective's sake):

See the difference in the size & coloring (5 days old)

When you lay them so that they are touching each other, they just instantly fall asleep. Here are all 9 of them (one head is underneath the pink guy all the way to the left) sleeping in my hand.

Doctor update: Maya saw her ENT today (again, he's a fantastic doctor). She seems to always have ear issues (fluid, pressure is off, failing routine hearing tests---but then passing the very sophisticated ones). All of these issues, combined with her speech delay, might justify putting ear tubes in. We'll go back next month to check her ears and decide tubes or no tubes.

Oh brother.

So, for those of you who might not know our pet situation, we have 2 snakes, Ramona & Kona. (and 2 rabbits, who aren't part of this story). Both are ball pythons, both are somewhere around 4-5 ft long (it's hard to measure snakes, and who really cares, anyway). Dave brought home 2 rats on Monday night for the snakes (circle of life, my friends). Kona ate right away, Ramona wouldn't eat. Weird. She's never done that before.

We put the rat in its own little cage. Dave dealt with him, because rats have too much personality for me to feed to snakes without getting sad (mice, ok, rats, not so much). Tuesday night he tries again, Ramona won't eat. We feed the rat more, joke about our new pet.

This morning I go into the spare room (where the rabbits, snake, and our rat friend reside) and hear a weird high pitch noise. For a tiny fraction of a second I think one of the rabbits is having some sort of respiratory issue and then I think "O. M. G. I know that sound" . . .






Yes, those are babies. Apparently, Ramona is a humatitarian (rodentitarian?) and wouldn't eat a very pregnant momma. We moved mom & babies to a larger cage tonight and counted 9 babies.

Pile o' babies:

One baby, with woodchip:


Two babies:


PS: The glove was for two reasons: 1. Some first time moms are sensitive to human scent on a baby. 2. Some anxious moms will attack a human hand. Neither one proved to be an issue.

Other projects

Besides the paintings and new couches, we started a bunch of other projects over break:

-Dave made a fantastic shadowbox using old Scrabble tiles (we got a new set for Christmas):

-We uploaded, cleaned out, organized and ordered 1,320 pictures from Kodak.com. Yes, one thousand three hundred twenty. (That's typed out for emphasis). Some of these are fairly recent:

(fingerpainting this fall)

Some are older:

(first haircut in August)

Some are really old:

(first day home from the hospital, June 2008)

Some are super duper old (like my baby shower, April 2008). That's about as far back as we go. Who wants to come slap these things into albums?

For perspective's sake

So the back story to the painting is that Dave and I wanted to find some art for the apartment. Someone in his family joked over brunch "Oh, why don't you just paint it?" Ha ha ha. Good one. We went browsing for art here and there and found nada.

That same night, we watched the movie "My kid could paint that" (fantastic movie, btw). I had never seen anyone really paint before and kept thinking "Hmm, maybe we could do that". The idea was something big and abstract, to go over the couch.

Somehow that idea evolved into 4 paintings: 1. Something big and abstract. 2-4 Smaller paintings that were more still-life-ish (but not realistic) for the kitchen. I found something I liked for the first canvas, drew a grid on it, drew a grid on the canvas, sketched the design, and painted. Just basically created my own paint-by-numbers.

And now it's inished, for real. We debated on whether to leave the backgroun blank or paint it, I compromised by doing both----a white mini-border, a purple-ish frame. The picture is from my cell phone, so it's not ideal but I'll put nice ones up when they're all done. We picked the next painting to copy last night :)

(more info to come soon, but I've got to stick this here for now)

Mini-break update

Christmas break has come to an end :( It was so nice to have Dave home for a while, and we got a ton of projects done over break . . . so much so that I can only do a mini-update now:

1. We saw Santa:


2. We decorated (and then promptly undecorated so as to get the new furniture in, see #4)


3. We dressed up:


4. We got new couches. The other ones made you lean to the side when you sat on them. Despite our best reconstructive efforts, it was time for them to go. These ones recline . . . our gut reaction was that reclining couches might be a little low class, but our bodies' reaction was that they are fantastic. Here are Dave & Maya on the loveseat: (The loveseat has 2 separate recliners and the couch has two more. If you'd like to come put your feet on you can email me to get on the waiting list.)

You'll just have to wait for more :)