Jonas was born on Saturday morning. At that point, our little family grew by 33 percent. Izzy is no longer an only child and the singular baby car seat now has a friend. It’s the beginning of a whole new series of adventures.

Technically the adventure started on Wednesday. Ciri started having strong contractions. Thursday I called in from work, we figured Jonas was on his way and it was time to start getting ready.

Izzy was our first priority. Thursday evening, Ciri’s dad came and picked Izzy up – she would stay with them until Saturday night. The moment he drove away, my heart hurt in a way that that I never felt before. But it had to be done.

We didn’t leave for the hospital until Friday afternoon, but we were sent back because Ciri wasn’t dialated enough yet.  So, we went home, watched some TV, talked about how much we missed Izzy and took a long nap.  Around two Saturday morning, we drove off again towards the hospital.  This time, no exam was needed, Ciri’s water broke half way to the hospital.

Jonas was born at 5:15 in the morning, weighing 7 pounds, 8 ounces and was 20 inches tall.  In comparison, Izzy (born 7 weeks early) was just over 3 pounds and was 18 inches tall.  Their little bodies and minds are amazing.  You see them come to the world so tiny and frail and soon their pulling all the DVDs out in your living room while you’re not watching.  They really are something.

So, I guess you could call this their first adventure together. I know they weren’t together, but their separate adventures merged when Izzy offered Jonas a piece of her toast during lunch.  From now on, Izzy’s adventures will be peppered with stories and tales of her new sidekick, Jonas. Kinda like Mario and Luigi.

Izzy is learning by leaps and bounds.   Chewing, crawling, opening cabinets and drawers, spitting her food in my face… yup, leaps and bounds.

This video is a couple of weeks old, and she has since stopped spitting her food.   Instead she now screams at the top of her lungs when she wants more food.   A couple of times she actually made my ears hurt – it was that high pitched.   In the past week, we’ve started to put our finger on her mouth when she does that and tell her “No,” in a quiet but firm voice.   She’s picked up on this and now when she screams, she follows it up by looking really sad and shaking her head.   This kid is one manipulative little squirt!   She knows that she shouldn’t scream but she does it anyway and then reminds me that it’s wrong to scream.

Anyway, just wanted to put that little update out there along with this video.   The video, by the way, makes Ciriana laugh everytime she watches it.   In it, I am torn between laughing at her cute face and trying to get her to eat her peas, makes for a perfect daytime drama…

Ironically, her shirt reads, “My heart belongs to Daddy”

Fresh Powder

You may have heard of the east coast getting hit with this arctic blast. It was cold enough to cause some freezing temperatures and eventually some snow. Actually, as I type this, it is still snowing. The neighbor just cleared his drive way and in a few hours, it will be covered in snow again.   Ciri got the day off due to the road conditions – I think she’ll probably get tomorrow off as well, or at least go in late.

Snowy roads

I drove to the grocery store at Ciri’s friendly request – she was craving homemade chili. I tried to take the truck, but because of the inclined driveway, I couldn’t drive out; the wheels would just spin over the ice. I was able to get the Sentra out, though. Kind of emasculates my poor little Pin-stripe Alpha. .

The roads weren’t too bad – we’ve driven under worse conditions back in Germany.   Once I got back to the house, I started building a snowman.

SnoRS

I tried to form bricks from a bin of kitty litter, but they would fall apart.   I was going for a robot snowman.   In the end I gave up and just mish-mashed the snow, the kitty litter bin, and some planters together.   I call it my Snowman-robot-sentry, or SnoRS.   SnoRS sits near the walkway, making him the perfect sentry for the house. (I just went to check on him and poor SnoRS is dead.   He fell apart.   Sigh.)

As I was building SnoRS, Ciri came out with a bundled up baby.   We had a quick snowball fight, that ended short of declaring a winner because of very, very cold hands.   It was fun, though.   The last time Ciri and I had a snowball fight was when I first visited her in Germany.

Bundled baby

Izzy had a great time as well.   Some snow fell on the tray of her stroller – the entire time Ciri and I were chucking snowballs, Izzy was trying to scrape some snow into her mouth.   It was funny watching her lunging for snowflakes as they fell in front of her.

After our snowball fight, we broker her out of the stroller and bundled her under our sweaters.   We walked around the snow and took pictures.   Finally, I laid on the snow and made my very first ever snow angel.   It came out looking very angel-y, even for a snow newbie like myself.

Check out my Flickr page for the rest of the pics.   Got lots of ‘em.