Killin' It



You lions will recognize this... Aside from Squeek being almost
offensively cute, my second favorite thing about this picture
is that you can see skinny Matty J in the background.  see him?
next to nathan.

 I had a video that I was going to upload, but it's been long enough since the last post that it's not even relevent anymore.  Squeek was crawling across the kitchen floor chasing a little wind-up bug that was speeding away from her.  She is such a good crawler now that the footage feels like ages ago.  It's sorta like if you watchstar wars.  the cinematic technology is so progressed now that the story almost feels irrelevent.  It's not so much the special effects, but just how the special effects inform the storyline.  Jurassic Park, on the other hand, has aged surprisingly well.  I remember when I first saw that in the theater, with Oma, and the opening sequence was so loud that I knew I was in for a show.  Then all night in the Golf house I envisioned velociraptors stealthily coming up the stairs to the kids room.  Yikes, but Awesome!!!  I'm off topic...
So squeek is crawling very well and speedily.  yesterday she crawled from the far end of the living room to the office, where she knew she'd find me.  That's like 25 feet, with 3 turns.  Pretty impressive.  Also, she chased me around the house as I was crawling (and hiding behind corners to scare her)(she doesn't scare all that easily.  she startles, certainly, which is hilarious, but not scare. It's more like surprises, which she loves, and is a bonified way to get a smile out of her).

More impressively, though, is that she is pulling up on everything to come to a standing.  she even passed the blank wall test, the most feared rubric of baby agility this side of mount desert island.  (It's where you use a blank wall to come to standing.  super hard, requiring punishing core strength. try it).  She still isn't super at cruising around the room using furniture as a hand rail, but does it every once in a while all the same.  She also does the one-handed assisted walk.  quite stable. 

Oh! and how could I forget?  Sienna said her first word!  She was nursing before bed, and I kissed her goodnight and went to leave the room and she pulled off and reached out to me and said, "Da-Da."  Laura assures me that this was really cute (I don't remember because I passed out, hitting my head on the wall).  Then, out of respect to me, she proceeded the next day to call the fridge Dada, and the lamp dada, and the chair dada, and mama dada.  Some might suggest that this doesn't really count as a first word, since it's apparent that she wasn't actually refering to her dada by saying dada.  This, however, is BS.  As parents, we have the right to pick and choose these things as we see fit.  It's our right.  I'm already anticipating when she first walks.  She'll be on the floor playing with mama, and then I'll be headed out the door to go to class.  Sienna will reach over, pull herself up on the sofa, and then strike a strut in my direction, arms outstretched and smile glaring.  It's gunna be great.  And, it fits into my neatly constructed worldview that she loves her dada more than anything, except mom.    It's too bad I can't do a future-blog-post, cuz I'd put it up. 

She also responded to her name. It was in the airport on the way to seattle, and a very friendly lady (too friendly?) followed us around saying, hi sienna. Surely enough, sienna whipped around to see who it was.  She has since responded somewhat predictably, which is surprising since we never call her sienna, but instead refer to her as squeek, or squeekalicious, or ms squeek, or squeektastic, or squeekathon, or squeeker, or squeekie two shoes, or sir squeeks a lot. 

at the pike place market.  we paid the fish guys ten bucks to throw
her like she was a fish, and they did.  they had such a good time
they gave us twenty back.

so yeah, went to seattle.  interviewed at UW, and got some omie/loonie baba time.  Fun stuff.  laura had strep, so she was tired and achy, but rallied for: zoo, sounders game, strolls, dentist visit, filling (dada), birthday party, visits with friends (marcus/kelly, cody/meredith/hans, alex/eric/adam/kassia, ty/patience/katie/graeme, saradel/mike, harry/kelly/marsh, chris, and probably more but can't remember because I've never been that social in my life), shopping downtown.  Good times, and of course seattle was fantastic. 
To stop beating round the bush, we heard back from UW, and we got in, and after mulling it over, we have accepted!!!!  so it's official, there's another dr schoene on the way, though this one will be meaner and more spiteful, and more prone to prescribing meds to family.  so we'll be in bozeman next year, then move to seattle to be there for the next three years.  hot diggity.  we are very excited.  they called on the phone and I had the lady repeat it on speaker phone so that laura could hear her say "you have been accepted to UW medical school."  then we hung up and started balling like little children.  no, more like adults that were really happy.  Sienna thought we were super wierd.  then  we drank champagne and started trying on UW SOM memoribilia.  omie found me an appropriate zip-up hooded muscle shirt.  Go Dawgs.  can't wait to take laura to a football game.

she likes the bubbly

so that's about it.  we've been partying ever since.  talk about a cheap date...

had to include this. so this trip was kinda a trip...
here she is in the high chair that I used, and we
bathed her in the tub that I bathed in, and read books
and played with toys that I grew up with.  kinda wierd, and
kinda awesome.  also really really dusty.

amoxicillin

Oh boy, so much to report.  First off, to get your appetites appropriately wetted:

so much has happened in the last few weeks... where to start.  We left off with sienna crawling and me getting back from oregon.  Well, the week before that she was congested and feverish and diarrhea-ey and rashy/eczyma-ey.  Poor girl.  so she wasn't exactly sleeping the best (since she couldn't breath), which gave her 12+ extra hrs to exercise her lungs and vocal cords.  This means we weren't sleeping, and by the time I got back from oregon, we realized why she was crawling.  Sienna was distraught to be away from us, so anytime we'd pur her down she'd double over to crawl back to us.  How cute, but also kinda sad.  Well, then this last week we noticed her bottom two teeth coming in.  so finally, she's officially teething, and it explains all of this.  poor girl.  but wait, yesterday we noticed that her left eye was red and green mucus was coming out.  bummer.  When I was in belize, I got the conjunct-a-junk, so I could recognize it well.  yup, she has pink eyes, so we took her in to the ped doc, and she had a look at her ears and sienna flipped out.  yup, ear infection too.  Aaahhhh, so that explains it.  well, along with everything else.  She has managed to have everything that could make her go off, within reason, all happen at once.  poor girl.  but now she's on antibioticas, and feeling much better.  back to her usual self because she actually wants to play with things.  We've also learned just how fearless she is.  when she pulls herself up to standing (second position), she often immediately launches into walking without help.  Despite some bonks, she is unperturbed and continues on with her antics.  crazy girl.

Ah, but here's the real news that I couldn't wait to tell.  Laura fed her pizza.  A couple weeks ago on the blog I was joking about feeding her pizza...joking.  well, laura had an epiphany saturday night and said "hey peter, what if we order some pizza" (you have to understand, this is the first time this has happened in 9+ years of being together.  needless to say, I laid an egg, and out sprouted a monkey with cymbals.  While laura was being distracted by the banging monkey now circulating around the room, I dialed up the pizza co., whose number I had memorized just for this moment. I also went to the secret stash of cash that I had been saving for about 7 years in order to pay the pizza guy at just this moment.  needless to say).  Anyway, we were enjoying our pies and sienna was on laura's lap and of course sienna was trying to grab her pizza.  To my amazement, laura sez "you want some pizza? okay sweetie," and proceeded to give her pizza.  sienna sunk her little fingers into the velvety cheese, watching tomato sauce squirt up between her nails.  The look of joy on her face was unmistakable.  My mouth dropped wide open, and as the monkey marched over my pink tongue which had unrolled onto the floor, laura looks up and says, "wait a minute..."  It was at that moment that i came to know heartbreak for the first time.  It was as if someone had flipped a switch and all the stars and moon went dark and all the crickets stopped chirping, and suddenly you were only aware of the overwhelming loneliness emitted by the nothingness of  empty space-that was sienna's expression.  people talk about not wanting to traumatize their children.  I guess my question is, what if the child is already traumatized. what then?  I guess we'll find out.