Clownin' Around (Lyla edition)

Will's first bath.

We gave Will his first bath this past week. We got a little behind schedule giving it to him because of the unplanned trip back to the hospital. Fortunately babies are resilient and he seemed no worse for the wear.

Will wasn't too happy with the bath, though he seemed to like the warm water. And he really liked it when I sat him up. Katherine even says he fell asleep like that, though I couldn't really tell. The whole thing was reminiscent of Lyla's first bath... just not as stressful for the adults.

It was good to see him all clean and shiny. His hair definitely is blondish, though the jury is still out as to whether he'll be blond haired/blue eyed (like his mom) or come over to the dark side, by which I mean dark brown hair, dark brown eyes (like his dad and sister). Either way, he is super cute.

Loud

For a long time, whenever we would ask Katherine's brother David how our little niece Emily was doing, he would invariably answer "loud." When you are around a child all the time (as opposed to just seeing them for short durations) you get to know this whole other part of their personality that doesn't always come out when other people are around.

We're pretty lucky that Lyla is a low-key and content child. I think a lot of people see that side of her a lot. Lately, a different side of Lyla has been developing... the "loud" side. See what I mean for yourselves:

More Aunt Timmie!!!

So far it's been a good weekend with Kim, if you ignore the fact that it feels like minus 23 degrees outside and that both Katherine and Lyla caught my cold (Lyla's been a trooper; she's only a little snuffly and is fine as long as she's upright or on her side - when she's on her back, she snorts when she breathes and sounds like a little piggy. It's cute/sad.) Because of the weather and illness it's been a very low key weekend, a lot of sitting around. We watched the season premieres of Survivor and LOST. We watched Live Free or Die Hard which was good, not to complicated, required us to suspend our disbelief a few times but the action scenes were, uh, action packed. Katherine and Kim went to Babies'R'Us and the East Grand Rapids Library on Friday. On Saturday, Katherine and I went down to the mall to look for some clothes for Katherine. Good times.

The pictures are Lyla and Kim (of course). Lyla is wearing the purple, giraffe/"I love mommy." jumper that Kim gave her for Christmas. She was wearing it on Thursday in anticipation of Kim's arrival, but then she had a (what we call) "poop-splosion" and had to change outfits. Kim's really good with Lyla (she's gotten a lot of practice with her own younger brother and sister and with her two nephews and niece). Lyla likes to bounce on Kim's knees, or at least it distracts her enough from her fussing.

Take note of Lyla's awesome mohawk. The combination of the dry winter air (static electricity), Lyla's soft hair, the fact that her hair usually stays in the same shape it's in when it dries, and they way it naturally lays (forward and to the right) make for a good mohawk. After bathtime, Lyla and my ritual is to dry her off, put on a diaper, apply lotion, put on her onesie, put on her socks, put on her jumper, and finally comb her hair. Depending on how tired she is, her tolerance for this process does not always extend through the combing of hair, so I'm luck if I can get it all going in one direction before she starts yelling (she doesn't really cry, she mainly starts yelling and those yells sometimes morph into a loud crying, but it's hard to tell if her yells are happy yells or sad yells at first).

Anyway, after bathtime on Thursday I combed all the hair on the left side of her head over to the right and all the hair on the right side of her head over to the left. The result: a pretty cool mohawk. So we put her to bed and when we woke up Friday morning, there was our little angel with an awesome little mohawk. I mean, it puts that Brangelina kid to shame. So cute. So, anyway, that's why she has a mohawk in the pictures.