Two Months

Nathan is now 2 months old! I'm not sure if he has "grown up so fast," but he sure has filled out so fast! He is now 14 pounds - and I'm sure that most of that is in his neck and thighs. Actually I asked the doctor if this is okay, and he assured this nervous first-time mom that it is. At five weeks and 22 inches he was in the 90% (really big) but now at 23 inches he is in the 50%. I guess his round face, and no neck, just makes him look extra chubby.

We went for a walk the other night. A neighbor told me that she runs down a road, and it loops around. Jon (who has lived here much longer than me) didn't think so, but we kept walking anyway. It got dark and we were still walking down a gravel road. Three ankle-biting dogs came out in the road. I was torn between the mother bear instinct to stand in front of the stroller and bark back, - or being nice and friendly. I chose the latter. One dog bit at my knee, but it wasn't hard, so I think it was playful. We didn't want to turn around after that, so we kept walking! We hit a main road we knew, but did not want to be near traffic. So we pushed the stroller through tall grass filled with bugs and the possiblity of all sorts of things. We pushed on until we found a road back. This is when Jon found the speed limit sign that made us smile. We got home, and Nathan woke up. Very good timing!Okay, I'm having trouble with this blogging site at the moment. I can't type my wonderful thoughts in a word document and paste them in here. I can't move the pictures in the order I want without resizing them. And when I hold down the shift key to resize, the picture still distorts. So, I'm sorry about the slightly distorted pictures. Any tips - anyone?

Here is one last picture of the cutie. We got this (I don't know what you call it) at a consignment sale for 1 dollar! He really likes to look at the pictures. This was taken yesterday - officially 2 months old.

How to name a blog

Why have I never started a blog? A primary reason was that I didn't know what to title it. That seems like a very important thing for a blog. This is probably a testimony to my personality, as I have had the same (very difficult to spell) email address, uuchlauk***@email.com, for 9 years, simply because I could not think of a better email address. (It's a Mongolian word - and there's a story there.) I know that Velazquez is also hard to spell, because every fourth piece of mail has it wrong, so having that in the title was out.

If I had been smart, I would have started the blog before I had a baby. That would have been a much more ideal time. Now, with our bundle of joy (and especially when he is not so joyful), I barely have time to do anything without holding him. So my first ideas for a blog were:

Blogging One-Handed (and I have typed this one-handed)
Colicky baby
No Showers for Mommy
The Crying Chronicles

My Mom reminded me that colic won't last forever. She suggested that since Nathan's name means "a gift" I could title it "Mommy's Gift." I was a great idea. Perhaps this is a testimony of my lingering self-centeredness, but I wanted to leave room to blog about me sometimes, and not just Nathan. :-) Actually, I often told myself that Facebook provided all the attention I should get, and who would want to go to an additional site just to read about me? But then I found out that a few family members don't do the Facebook thing, but would like to see pictures of Nathan. So I'll pretend that that is the real reason that I'm now a blogger, and it has nothing to do with finding pleasure in updating the world with more than a one-sentence status line. So then I figured I should have some super creative, funny or intellectual title like:

Soporific (This is one of my favorite words, but I don't want people to fall asleep reading my blog)
Failed to Get a Degree in Oikology (the study of housekeeping)
Foofaraw (frills and fancy finery, or a disturbance over a trifle)

If I ever decide to get really personal here, though, I will probably start to betray pain that I carry from the last few years. Since being married and having a baby, though, life has been so different than that - happy and idyllic. But I have this sense in the back of my mind that it could all end in a moment. Perhaps this is a testimony to my painful losses in the past, but the title also allows for the unexpected joys of being a mother. So I have finally started a blog and called it:

Warning! Unknown Future Ahead

Next thing you know, I'll start Twittering.