Horrible Disfiguration

On Wednesday, I noticed that Lupe all of a sudden developed what I am now calling "The Horrible Disfiguration". It's a devastating blow, of course. As you can see in the picture below, it in fact is quite horrible.

Alright, all kidding aside, he all of a sudden has a quite large, if also quite faint birthmark covering the entire left side of his forehead (his left side, the right side in this picture). In case you can't quite make it out in the picture above, I adjusted the contrast to make it more visible than it really is in the picture below. Click on both of them to see them a lot better.


We obviously have no idea if it's permanent, but in going back to older pictures, it does look like it was there, but so faint that we didn't notice it until now, so it very well may be that it is currently getting and will continue to get darker. Or, maybe he got a bit of sun, which brought it out. We just don't know, but we'll ask at his next Dr. appointment in mid July. I'm not assuming, though, that they'll venture a very firm prediction.

At first I thought it looked like a very light coffee color, perhaps a super light latte. But, upon further thought, the story will absolutely have to be that I spilled a bit of that Alaskan Smoked Porter I was drinking on him, and neglected to wipe it off, resulting, sadly, in his Horrible Disfiguration.

Right?

Happy Father's Day

Indeed it was. And then, when it wasn't Father's Day, it wasn't.

We started out by going to brunch at the local brewpub, Magnolia, with Karen & Walt. Then they all took the kids to the playground while I went to the pharmacy to pick up some medication, since I'm having one of the worst Arthritis flare-ups I've ever had during this last week. It was certainly a beautiful moment that I will always cherish with pride when, all alone on Father's Day, I sat in the car in the parking lot outside the pharmacy knocking back my meds with a huge jug o' beer that we had just procured from the brewery.

In any case, it was worth it, as I am still hobbled, but the pain is much reduced today.

After that touching moment, we took the kids home, and Walt and I met up with Chops and Russ at Toronado for some old school , kid-free beer drinking. In the middle of the afternoon, no less!! It's the kind of thing that I don't dare to even dream about doing any more, so it was truly beyond my wildest dreams.

We drank and watched Tiger be Tiger as he forced a playoff on the last hole, then hopped in a cab for the four block journey home in order to catch the Laker game. Which, miraculously, they won, living to see another day.

We watched bit of post game commentary, I caught the second half of an episode of Rome, which I had been watching a couple of days ago. All in all, a quite happy day. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Natasha for making it that way.

Oh, right, and then it wasn't Father's day any more. Ruby woke up shortly after midnight, got up from her bed and crawled into ours. Which happens about half the nights at some point, so it's no big deal. Even though I miss the space, I actually do like waking up with her, so I don't really mind that much.

What I do mind, though, is being thrown up upon at 2am, which is what she did. And it wasn't just a tiny bit of some fairly innocuous spit up type thing, which has happened before. This was a huge amount of exceedingly foul and chunky vomit spewed all over both of us. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, and sadly, she didn't understand it enough to turn over, so she continued to lay on her back until I picked her up and turned her on her side, but we both had it all over us by that point. I am actually gagging a bit as I write this, and was o-so-close to adding to the fun last night.

Thankfully, Natasha sprang into full on Mother-protector mode, whisking her into the bathroom, scooping up all of the bedding, and then giving her a middle of the night bath, which was unfortunately necessary mostly because of the stench of her hair (not to mention the clearly visible chunks hanging there sadly). It could have also been worse, but thankfully, the Good Little Boy went right back to sleep once he was unceremoniously dumped on the couch. And Ruby was surprisingly unfazed once she was stripped down and had a bit of water.

So, it was a rude welcome back to the regular life of days that are not Father's Day. Oh, well. I suppose I can't complain, since I actually got a Father's Day, while Natasha is still waiting for her Mother's Day. It's scheduled for this weekend, provided my body doesn't completely breakdown yet again in some unforeseen fashion...

Go Lakers!!

Just prior to tip off for big, big game 4...

Wow!

We've been getting much the same response that Jeremy describes, but Natasha thinks that Lupe was "only" 13.7 lbs at the same check-in that Kentaro was 14.4 lbs. What's particularly crazy is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that either of them will grow up top be big people.

Well, as you all already know, our little Lupe is a genius. This week, he has started to grab toys in order to further study their geometric structure in his sustained investigation of applied physics. In addition to his hands and eyes, his primary assessment tool is his mouth. We are, of course, very proud of the work that he is doing, and fully expect it to lead to important breakthroughs in the coming months.

In addition, we are equally proud of the four hour stretch he slept last night. Natasha, in particular, is looking forward to a more consistent application of this behavior.

Camping at Butano

We went down to Butano State Park for a couple of days last week, Lupe's first time camping!
It's actually quite incredible that a place so utterly gorgeous is about an hour and fifteen minutes away, so not surprisingly, it gets booked up really quickly. In fact, when we went to book something a few months ago, the soonest we could get a spot on the weekend was September. So, we decided to go for Thur-Fri night while Natasha is on maternity leave. The forecast said that it was going to be quite warm in SF, so we assumed that it would be fairly warm there as well.

Wrong, of course. While is was mostly sunny, we were deep in a redwood forest, where little light makes it all the way to the ground, and a fiercely cold wind cuts through. Mommy was nearly reduced to tears, mainly because we just didn't prepare well enough, but the little boy was plenty warm, as you can see here,

Ruby, of course, was quite unaffected. She was very, very excited. Here she is out on a hike, baby in hand. All told, it seemed to me that she had fewer meltdowns than she typically would during a two day period at home.

One of the things she was most excited about was roasting hot dogs over the fire, at least in part because Nana gave her a book about camping a while ago, and they do it in the book. Also, it seems to be an inherently exciting thing for a kid. How can it not be fun for a two year old to grab a stick off the ground, spear some food with it, then stick it in the fire?

I don't remember what, exactly, was going on here, but it's certainly typical of my delicate, decorous daughter.

Out on the trail. If we said it was a walk, she would insist that it was a hike. Of course, if we called it a hike, she would correct us, calling it a walk.

Warm and cozy.

Hangin' in the campground.

There was a LOT of this.

Chillin.

Believe it or not, there are even more pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/quetzpalin

Photo Shoot

Here are a bunch of pictures from last week, just to give an idea of what Lupecito is looking like these days. In some ways he still looks a awful lot like both Ruby at the same age, and pictures of me when I was a baby, but he is definitely starting to look more like himself, and less like a carbon copy of one of us. He is a very smiley boy, and this first one is a good example of that.


Here we have a fairly common sight, with big sister caring for her baby brother. It looks to me like she's really, really trying to be gentle here,

Just a nice picture of the siblings,

A bit of a sly smile,

He's been chewing on his fist a lot lately, which it looks like he's about to do here,

He's also actually looking at things now, as opposed to just staring off into an undifferentiated void,

Throwin out a "Westside" sign for all his peeps,

Looking a little leery (or perhaps just wondering what that thing blocking my face is).

Naptime

Cruising

Smiles all around

Funny

Primas

Papa & Su Hija

A Pic

I know that I have been extremely remiss in posting, but as most of you well know, It's been a bit rough lately. As soon as I started feeling better, Natasha got a sinus infection, which she is still battling...