thebullards

Sleepytown update: early mornings

2012-01-31T11:11:00.001Z

Asher has slept all night 4 out of the past 5 nights. This is a dream come true! Literally. We are actually starting to have dreams again. You know how when you don’t get good, solid sleep, you can’t remember any dreams? After a long reprieve, I’m back to waking up in the mornings and getting to hear Collin rehash all of his dreams. (They are mostly about him being a superspy, running from the mob, or escaping from prison. Yes, I am serious.)

So hooray for sleeping all night. Here’s the downside: Asher has been waking up really early. This morning it was 5.40am. And he’s up for the day. :( I’m wondering if this early morning waking is due to hunger, since he was previously waking up for a brief feed anywhere between 2 and 4am. OR could it be because he’s just had enough sleep? We’ve been putting him to bed pretty early and he’s been sleeping around 11.5 hours. So maybe we should keep him up a bit later in the evenings? Or some other factor altogether?

Any ideas for us, mamas and daddies and grandmas and nannies and mannies out there?

Candice is funny

2012-01-29T20:42:00.001Z

You really have to know some Ritchie Valens, Usher, Justin Bieber, and Rebecca Black to think these are funny… nonetheless, there a couple of things that Candice does every now and then that really make me laugh. Oh the joys of 8 1/2 years of marriage…

1. Candice can only sing the chorus to Rebecca Black’s “Friday” if she sings to the tune of Justin Bieber’s “Baby”. It started out as innocent pop confusion… now she just does it on purpose: “It’s like Friday, Friday, Friday, Ohhhh!”

2. Candice is unable to say “It’s seven o’clock” without following it up immediately with “on the dot, I’m in my drop top cruisin’ the streets…” – 1997, people, that was 1997 and she still can’t stop after “o’clock”.

3. She refuses to sing the words to the song “La Bamba”… she insists on replacing them with whatever food we happen to be eating at the time… “Ma-ma-ma-ma ma mango, ma-ma mango, ma-ma-ma ma mango… ta-ta-ta-ta ta taco, taco taco, ta-ta-ta-ta taco.” Then later, “taaaa taaa ta-co, taaaa taaa ta-co” – c’mon guys, you have to sing along to really get it… she’ll have it stuck in your head soon. Her plan is to get it stuck in my head and make me look like a fool in the library, walking through the book stacks singing under my breath, “aaa-vaaa ca-do, aaa-vaa ca-do”.

Sleepytown, USA. I mean, UK.

2012-01-28T09:05:00.001Z

Before Asher was born, I got a lot of sleep. I mean, A LOT. I always slept through the night, slept in when I could, and took naps pretty often. I just function so much better with a lot of sleep. So you can imagine the shock to my system when the little man was born. Sure, people had told us that we would be tired and would not get much sleep, but I don’t think I was really prepared for what it was going to be like to be woken up that many times in the night until it happened, not to mention that when you do wake up, you have to be somewhat functional in order to care for a tiny human who is demanding your attention. Anyway, the quality and quantity of our sleep plummeted so far and so fast, I didn’t think I would ever recover. (I like to be dramatic sometimes. :)) I would get frustrated when people would tell me to “sleep when the baby sleeps”, because my baby wasn’t sleeping for more than 35/40 minutes at a time! So by the time I got him down, had a drink or a pee, got myself settled and into dreamland, I was jarred out of sleep, only more groggy than before the nap. So I gave that up. It wasn’t worth it.

For several months I struggled with figuring out how to function without a proper rest. I know every new parent must go through this. (Please tell me I’m not alone.) In the past when new parents mentioned they were tired or sleep deprived, I gave a sympathetic nod, but more often than not, I didn’t give it a second thought. I read a book awhile back and the author said parents deserved a “ticker-tape parade” for their heroic, middle-of-the-night efforts. Maybe that’s a bit over-the-top, but for sure,the next time a parent tells me they are tired from sleepless nights, I will feel a true compassion for them and understand the very real need for sleep to happen in their home.

We are finally feeling like we are leaving that mind-numbing infant sleep stage. Those first few months after Asher was born were the worst, as one would expect. But Asher has now really gotten into the groove of sleeping well at night and for naps. There is no more holding and bouncing for an hour to get him to sleep. A few verses of “Tis so Sweet” and a kiss and the kid just lays down and goes to sleep (most of the time… not yesterday, though, when he screamed like a banshee). But this has got me feeling rather hopeful: Asher has now slept ALL NIGHT, without waking up, for three nights in a row. I’m talking nearly 12 hours a night. Three long, uninterrupted, glorious nights of sleep has made us feel a bit more human, but we still have a ways to go. You see, the problem is that our bodies have become so accustomed to waking up in the night, that even when Asher does sleep for a long stretch, we still wake up. We feel like we now have our own night waking issues and we’ll have to sleep train ourselves!

Still, it’s these small victories that keep us going in the sleep department. But I’m being reasonable; I’m not getting my hopes up because I know very well that today could be a totally different story altogether. He might decide naps are for the birds. Or tonight he could decide he actually does want to wake up 47 times. I know it might not be our new normal just yet. But it’s coming, I can feel it. :) Here’s hoping for night-o-bliss #4 tonight!

Gender reveal party

2012-01-26T10:25:00.001Z

This weekend some friends got together to find out if Nicki and Eric are going to have a baby girl or baby boy this summer. The anticipation was building because they found out on Monday and made us all wait nearly a whole week before sharing the news!

We went with a bumble bee theme for the party: What will it Bee? I found most of the ideas on Pinterest and tweaked them to work for us. Pinterest is a gold mine for party planning and food ideas!

We had some great food. Several people brought yummy things to share:

My first attempt at decorating sugar cookies, modelled here by the new mama and daddy:

There were some fun decorations:

The spray painted jars ended up working perfectly:

Everyone wore either a moustache (if they thought the Appel's were having a boy) or a bow (for a girl):

The cake was a bit of an experiment, to say the least, but in the end it served the purpose:

Eric and Nicki getting ready to cut the cake for the big reveal:

It’s going to beeeee a:

BOY!!!

And because we are just that cool:

And because these are too cute not to post:

Amy and I even got to eat some food while these ladies entertained our boys. We love our Cambridge aunties!

Congratulations, Appels! Can’t wait to meet baby boy in a few months!

Ten things I’ve learned in the past ten days

2012-01-25T09:44:00.001Z

10. It's okay to call for backup. I had been working on a few things that needed to be finished by Sunday, but by Saturday night I realised that it wasn't going to happen. That's when I sent a text to a friend saying, "Hey, do you have a few minutes tomorrow when you could come help me out? Please, pretty please, and please again?"

9. Room temperature eggs work best when making a cake. The eggs will fluff up and help the cake rise.

8. You can make your own self raising flour if you don't have any and you don't want to brave the cold to go to the store. You just add a bit of rising agent and a pinch of salt. Like I said, you can do it. Apparently, I cannot. From now on I will just find a different recipe. It's really better than throwing away two cakes and then starting on a third. Not that I did that or anything.

7. A hot, bubbly parmesan dip with crusty bread will meet the deepest needs of your heart.

6. Baking sweet potatoes in the oven is a great way to prepare them for baby. It’s way easier than peeling, chopping, and steaming them. Just bake the whole potato, scoop out the inside, give it a quick pulse with the hand-held blender or mash with a fork. Annnnd, you're done.

5. With a bit of motivation in the morning, we can have the whole flat clean, everyone showered and dressed, breakfast eaten and cleaned up, bed made and baby down for a nap by 9am. It makes the whole day more enjoyable.

4. The Mentalist is an intense show. Sometimes we have to watch The Daily Show afterwards so I don't lie in bed thinking about how Patrick Jane is totally going to catch Red John one of these days.

3. Stephen Colbert is ridiculous and there's a good chance I would vote for him for President of the United States of South Carolina.

2. Our 10 year high school reunion was just scheduled for this summer. Already? Didn't we just graduate?

1. Getting together with girlfriends in the middle of the week for no reason really makes my day.

The slow retreat

2012-01-17T17:33:00.000Z

The world’s covered over, but here and there, the frost, in slow retreat, relinquishes its hold. The cold is no match for warmth; darkness no match for light; death no match for life.
And people say God is invisible… Nonsense.

What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup. —Frederick Buechner

Starting solids

2012-01-16T09:21:00.000Z

This post is mostly for our own documentation, so we can look back and see what our little guy has been up to. Feel free to click away if you're bored with baby routines. :)

I'm super invested right now in starting Asher off with healthy foods and hopefully some healthy habits. Our little man is over six months old now and is such a big, strong baby boy. He's also a very hungry boy! We were digressing in the sleep department because he started waking up several times every night to eat. I thought we were finished with that! He was wanting more and more milk to keep up with his growing appetite (and his growing muffin top!), and the middle of the night was the only time he could get the extra milk. He was also starting to get very hungry long before the usual four hours between milk feeds. So we decided to get going on the real food! It's been a learning experience for all of us. (Isn't everything when you're a new mama?) I can't help but think that with our second (if we have a second) child, all of this will be so much easier after doing it one time around!

Here's the basic set up: I have a list of foods that Asher has already tasted and those that I'm going to introduce to him soon, as well as a good idea of the portions he is taking. I make sure I always have these foods cooked, pureed, frozen in 1 Tablespoon cubes, and tucked away in the freezer. (I'm working on the storage system for all of it... Ziploc bags are on the way!) A while before it's time for Asher to eat, I get the food out of the freezer to defrost, putting the cubes in individual ramekins. (I need to find some plates with separated sections.) While a lot of books and "experts" suggest mixing the stronger tasting vegetables together with some sweeter ones, we are mostly keeping it all simple and separate. I don't want Asher to never have really tasted broccoli or green beans because I always mashed them with sweet potatoes or whatever. We will get a bit more adventurous after he's happily eating the plain stuff. So far he hasn't rejected anything, so we'll keep it up as long as he's willing to chow down. (Then I'm certain I will start hiding the veg in pizza and chicken nuggets!)

For a while, Asher was super uninterested in anything other than milk. I think this was partially because we had the timing all wrong. With a few tweaks to his routine, he's now happily attacking the spoon (and any finger foods we give him) three times a day.

Here's his basic schedule right now at 6 months + 1 week:
6.30am (if we are lucky!) Asher wakes up and comes into our room for some sleepy snuggles
7am milk (lots of milk!)
8am breakfast (a bit of yogurt and fruit)
9am nap
11am milk (just a little, we are working on gradually eliminating this milk feed)
11.30am lunch (3 or 4 different veggies)
1pm nap
2.30pm milk
4.15pm nap (only about 20 minutes, just to push him through until bedtime)
5pm dinner (wholegrain rice and 4 grain baby cereals {Is there a better cereal for babies???} and fruit or veggies)
6.15pm milk
6.45 bed
Middle of the night milk (just once the past few nights, yay!)

I try to be flexible and not force him to eat or sleep at exactly those times, but the schedule above is more or less the one Asher has demanded for himself. We tried to do something a bit different, but he made it clear that this was the only way to go. Now that we’ve been doing this routine for a week or so, he will let me know if I'm off even by a few minutes! He is so predictable; hungry and sleepy right when I expect it. It’s funny, though, because I know right when I get this down, something will change and we’ll be re-evaluating again. But for the moment, it’s working well. Now I just have to figure out how I’m ever going to leave the house with that jam-packed schedule!

Anyone have ideas on how I can make the baby food adventure any easier/better? I'm all ears. You know, sometimes it's nice to have someone give an outsider’s perspective.

Spray painted jars

2012-01-15T10:27:00.000Z

You know those women who are brilliant when it comes to making things, sewing, photography, etc.? Those ladies who whip up gourmet meals in half an hour, who sew crib bedding for their babes, who decorate their homes with ease? I’m not one of them. Sure, I can make a tasty dinner or scribble out some block letters, but I’m pretty useless with a paintbrush, a needle and thread, or a fancy camera. But I just can’t ignore all of those good ideas on Pinterest! So I’ve decided to embrace my inner craftiness (or lack there of) and give a few things a try. My current motivation is a gender reveal party we are hosting next week for some friends. They will finally find out if they are going to have a boy or a girl and a big group of people are coming over to celebrate! Fun.

I’ll tell you more about the details of the party after it happens because I don’t want my friend (hi Nicki!) to know all of my tricks before the big reveal, but one small thing I decided to do was spray paint some jars to use as decorations. Luckily, I had a few empty jars and bottles in the kitchen that we had been saving, so I scraped off the labels and used them for the project. (Tip: If you just cannot scrub off that last bit of adhesive that’s left on the jar, WD-40 works like a charm.)

We spread out some newspapers and Collin got to work with the spray paint. I kind of wanted to do it because spray paint is fun, but if you know Collin, this type of thing is right up his alley. Armed with enough spray paint, he could take over the world. (I saw that quote on Pinterest… so funny. So Collin.)

Then we had to take a break to get Asher down for his nap. I may have taken one too. It was an early morning, y’all. Collin headed off to the library and then when Asher and I woke up, I had to put these adorable leg warmers on the babe. Had to. I felt they were a necessity because they are just so darn cute. :) (These baby legs are also reason number 37 I want to learn how to sew.)

Back to the spray paint! Because I was inside playing with Asher, I didn’t realize it had started raining all over my freshly painted jars! I should have known; this is England after all. You can’t really expect it to not rain.

So needless to say, the rain made the paint a little less… shall we say… smooth? Oh well, I sprayed on one more coat and called it good. Good enough, anyway.

Embrace 2012

2012-01-14T13:59:00.001Z

It seems as though friends in real life and bloggers alike have been focused on New Years resolutions more than usual. Or maybe not, maybe I’m just now tuning in, since I don’t typically make resolutions for the upcoming year. I know I’m a bit tardy to the party. But all of this goal setting amongst my friends has made me look at the year ahead with a bit more intention and care. There are areas of life that I’ve been thinking of tackling for a while and the start of the year is the perfect time to finally cement these ideas and get the ball rolling.

I don’t want to look back and think of what I could have done during this season of life. There are too many things that I wish I knew how to do, too many times I’ve thought of giving something or doing something for someone else but have not followed through, too many hours that have passed without purpose. So in the coming year, there are a few specific things I would like to accomplish, including learning how to sew, mastering the art of making nutritious baby food, documenting a bit more through the blog, as well as some creative and some relational things that I’ve been tossing around.

But mostly I want to embrace what we’re doing in life, as Collin is working on a PhD and I’m staying at home with the babe and everything that includes; I want to embrace our friends, most of whom are also very far from home and need community just like we do; I want to embrace our circumstances, living 5,000 miles from family, in a flat that has a mouldy bathroom. Sometimes I think, “When we move back to America, we’ll ______.” Or “If we lived closer to our families, then ______.” And I think that’s fine; it’s okay to dream and think ahead. And I’m not saying I won’t fall into lethargy or apathy from time to time, I’ve had far too much practice in those areas that it’s sure to happen, so I’m allowing lots of space for grace. But I want to be true to today, to this year, this first year of our boy’s life. I want to look back on this year in Cambridge and be able to see what I’ve learned, what I’ve accomplished and how I’ve grown and changed. I want to be able to see the ways in which we’ve made our lives more full and rich when we look back this time next year.

So raise your glass… here’s to embracing the important things in 2012. Cheers.

And if anyone wants to give me sewing lessons, that would be brill. :)

Just a glance at 2011

2012-01-07T12:11:00.001Z

Today we were doing a bit of housecleaning, trying to catch up after a few days of neglect. I was vacuuming the stairs with Asher attached to me in the baby carrier, and I thought, “Hmmm… not the easiest thing I’ve ever done, yet it’s working and even satisfying.” And it occurred to me that this very thought might be the best way to describe 2011 as we look back over the year. We got pregnant (okay, true, that happened in the last bits of 2010, but let’s just go ahead and clump it in with 2011 for the sake of remembering), we moved flats (twice), grew a baby into a real, live, precious boy, birthed him (not so much we on this one) and kept him alive and thriving for 6 months (happy 6th months today Asher!), travelled internationally with the babe, and returned home to Cambridge to embrace another year here. And somehow we’ve come out on the other side, finding our normal again. A new normal, maybe. 2011 brought a lot of joy and celebration to our lives and we realise how blessed we were in the past year. On the flip side, it wasn’t always easy. Some of it was very difficult. Some bits came to us naturally, while other bits seemed foreign, things for which we were unequipped. But when I pause and look at my two favourite guys, I am reminded that this thing we have going, this little family of three, is working. And I love it and I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world than right here, making a pot roast and washing bottles. :)

New Year’s Visitors

2012-01-06T15:39:00.001Z

One day Candice was talking with our very dear friend Tiffani, and they were discussing the sad fact that we had taken absolutely zero photos of Tiffani with Asher when we attended her wedding in November. They started joking about how fun it would be to spend New Years together… and what do you know?! The next morning when Candice and I woke up, our phones were abuzz with messages from Curby saying that they were buying plane tickets to come over here! A few hours or so later, Tiffani and Curby scored major “awesome points” by sending us the confirmation that they had, in fact, purchased plane tickets to come see us on New Years!

We were excited for many reasons, not least because our friend Rachael had planned a fun “Chopped” New Year’s Eve, and we were pumped to get our friends in on the competition. But most of all, we were thrilled to get to spend some good quality time with Tiffani and Curby, since during their wedding, as it is with all weddings, there was very little down time for hanging out and doing nothing with your friends.

In preparation for their visit, Asher donned his UCLA football shirt that he got from his Auntie Tiff…

We had a very low-key visit with them, which was a nice follow-up to the holiday hubbub (not that our holidays were particularly hubbubly). I always hate it when Christmas is over because you have that terrible after-Christmas letdown and it’s no longer “crisp and magical” outside, it’s just “cold and gray.” We made good food together, walked around Cambridge, visited a couple of ye-olde-English pubs, and had a rockin’ New Year’s Eve.

We walked into town wearing fun hats…

… we discussed important issues, like why we believe jackets with those shoulder loop things are superior to regularly shouldered garments.

We ate cinnamon rolls together on New Year’s day. We had some frozen from the batch we made before Christmas… they were still just as good and just as fattening. However, the barrage of New Year’s resolution posts from other blogs has me rethinking the whole idea behind eating cinnamon rolls on New Year’s day… it’s not exactly the kind of thing that fits with the “let’s eat healthy this year” mindset. Oh well, that wasn’t one of my resolutions anyway… and, in any case, I think you’re not really supposed to start doing the resolutions until week 2, right?

On the last day of the visit, we went to Anglesey Abbey (a National Trust site close to Cambridge) and saw the “Winter Garden” with the “Himalayan silver birch trees” (photo courtesy of Tiffani Piehl). It was good English fun despite the somewhat muddy state of the countryside.

It was a great visit. We were extremely happy to see our friends, and Asher was very happy to hang out with Aunt Tiffani and Uncle Curby

Chopped!

2012-01-06T09:33:00.001Z

I’m a little upset right now because I wrote a fun, comprehensive, and, if I may, brilliant post about our New Year’s Eve fun… and I could have sworn that I posted it. Alas, it’s nowhere to be found :(… so I’ll do my best to recover from my memory all the cleverly worded anecdotes, but I’m afraid I’ll never, as no one ever does, live up to my preconceived, mostly imaginary, genius of the past.

Our friend Rachael planned a super fun get together for New Year’s Eve that was based on the TV show “Chopped”. On the show, competing cooks have to make something brilliant using a specific set of four different ingredients, and they’re graded on how well they “transform the ingredients” into one tasty dish.

Candice and I were assigned the following ingredients: 1) semolina, 2) Asian pears, 3) rose water, and 4) Werther’s Original hard candies. Our sole competition was the formidable Team Piehl (Tiffani and Curby)… let’s be honest, if they’re awesome enough to fly over on a whim and visit us on New Years, they’re probably awesome enough to make a killer “Chopped” dish.

Here’s Candice showing off our tasty creation. We made a “maple cheesecake on a Werther’s and semolina shortbread crust topped with roasted, rose water glazed, Asian pears.

And here’s the competition, “Werther’s toffee, apple, and pear crumble with semolina and ginger topping and rose water and pear ice cream.”

In the end, the judges decided to give the gold to Team Piehl instead of Team Bullard (lookout panel of judges! we WILL have our revenge!). While I am properly outraged at their decision, I actually agree that the competing dish was hard to beat. Overall, there are several things that we would do differently with our recipe the next time around. First of all, we were mistaken to trust in Martha Stewart for the original cheesecake recipe… it was “no-bake”, which I was wary of to begin with, but I trusted in her assessment that it was just as good. Let me just say, I’m sick of people telling me that “no-bake” cheesecakes are “just as good.” There is nothing as delectable as a genuine, original, don’t-mess-around-with-a-classic, baked cheesecake. No.thing. This is the last time I trust Martha Stewart… in the New Year, I’m putting my trust in Jesus (who is, in many ways, like cheesecake).

The rest of the night was as fun as the cooking competition. Rachael and Ben (a.k.a., The Organizers) made a really good gumbo for the main course, and after we were all stuffed, we chatted and traded fun stories until the fireworks went off in London (they were spectacular, by the way, I think because the Olympics are this year). Just look at this smiling bunch, how could you not have fun?

Here’s one with the guys added in, not nearly as pretty as the above picture, but fun nonetheless.

Cheers!

Christmas day

2011-12-30T20:31:00.001Z

Christmas day was very relaxed around our house. We had our big to-do on Christmas Eve with our friends, and then Christmas day it was just us. I’m sure Christmas morning will be even more fun as Asher gets older, but it was still fun to give him a couple of toys and watch him play. Here’s one of his Christmas toys… he’s supposed to lay on his belly and spin around and play with this mat. I got it for him because he’s always on his belly but he can never quite handle the toys because he’s laying on his arms. I thought this would be a good solution, but as you can see… he’s HUGE! It looks like he’s going to outgrow it pretty soon.

He liked opening the presents, and loved the wrapping paper, and he thought the boxes were pretty fun!

Overall, we didn’t really get that much for Asher because we figured this is going to be the one Christmas where he doesn’t know the difference. Thinking about future Christmases makes us wonder how we’re going to handle the present situation… seeing as how Christmas isn’t about presents and all, we’re trying to think about creative family traditions that might take the emphasis off the presents, at least .

Candice and I exchanged gifts, and I got some pretty cool stuff. We both got each other several kitchen gadgets, including an awesome knife sharpener for me (I REALLY don’t like dull knives).

Of course, our best gift of the year was the little man himself, and that’s no joke… watching a new little life being formed and nurtured is a gift. The “givenness of life” has never been so apparent.

Christmas Eve

2011-12-25T15:28:00.001Z

Yay! We love Christmas Eve around the Bullard house. This is Asher’s “I’m ready for Christmas” face :).

And here’s our little Christmas crew all decked out for Jesus’ birthday…

We had a full day of fun planned with a few friends. Everything was prepared for holiday merriment: we had Christmas music playing in the kitchen and back-to-back Christmas movies going in the living room. The stockings were hung from the chimney with care (a.k.a: radiator)…

And we had our presents placed ever-so-carefully (not really) around the tree…

We started the festivities early with some awesome cinnamon rolls in the morning. This was followed by some resting (in order to recover from the sugar coma induced by the cinnamon rolls). Then things got a little crazy when all the guys gathered ‘round the Christmas puzzle which occupied BOTH of our coffee tables.

Asher got a few presents in his stocking… of course, he was more interested in eating his presents than looking at them…

He was also more interested in eating the furniture…

And basically anything shiny….

We opened presents, watched movies, chewed on the furniture, and worked the puzzle all while preparing a delectable holiday feast :)! For starters, we had bacon-wrapped dates as a pre-dinner snack (= yum!). We boiled our ham in Dr. Pepper and then glazed it in brown sugar (=double yum!). And we rounded out the meal with cornbread dressing, sweet potato casserole, roasted vegetable medley, green bean casserole, and sweet tea (a special treat over here).

Candice had the table looking very festive… yes, that is a Christmas tree drawn on my cup and those are cranberries frozen into the ice cubes!

Here’s the girls about to dig in to some pumpkin pie :)

To finish off the day and before settling into a long winter’s nap, we gathered ‘round to hear the story of Christmas. I grew up hearing the Christmas story read from this book every year. It takes the text from the birth narratives of both Matthew and Luke, uses the lovely King James English (“For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” – that’s a great line if I ever heard one), and it has big, beautiful illustrations for the kids. I loved this book growing up and have looked for a copy many times before to no avail (it’s out of print). This Christmas my mom was able to find copies for both me and my brother so we could read the story on Christmas Eve with our families (way to go, mom!).

Asher was a precious angel the whole time and liked reading the story with mommy and daddy… here he is holding mommy’s hand and checking out the manger scene. #favoriteChristmasmemories

Christmas spirit

2011-12-22T10:00:00.001Z

I don't know about y'all, but we are in the Christmas spirit here at the Bullard hacienda. We are looking forward to a quiet, stress-free holiday with just our little family of 3, along with a few dear friends who will be joining us for dinner and a simple celebration. We have been getting organized, wrapping a few gifts, and ordering food. (I love online grocery shopping and delivery, especially the week of Christmas when the grocery store is a mad house!) Menu planning is not my strong point, but I've been able to decide on a few meals for the week and even prep for some of them. Today we’re making up a big pot of beef/veggie stew to get us through the next few days. Luckily, for the big Christmas dinner, our friends are pitching in and bringing lots of yummy dishes and treats.

A few days ago, we decided to make one of our holiday favorites, candied pecans and almonds. We were kicking ourselves for not picking up a huge bag of pecans while we were in Oklahoma… they are, as we soon discovered, something of a commodity here. They cost somewhere in the range of $15-$18 per pound. We would prefer to do all pecans; the extra surface area allows for more yumminess in every crevice. As it happens, we’re not rolling in the dough, so we had to supplement with almonds. Here’s Asher helping mama stir the pot:

Yesterday, we tackled Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls. A few friends are coming over Christmas Eve to have Christmas dinner, but in order to sustain us while we cook and make merry, we will be starting out the day with plenty of cinnamon rolls soaked in icing. This is our second time to make PW’s famous treat. The first time we tried it we didn’t own a rolling pin, so it was very challenging and the rolls didn’t end up being very pretty. This time around was much easier, but it was a HUGE mess, which Asher enjoyed very much.

There are so many things wrong with the cinnamon rolls… they are not nutritious, not even just a little bit. They are full of butter and sugar and all the things that are right (and wrong?) with the world:

And they are oh-so-yummy.

Even Asher is in the Christmas spirit. We sat him down in front of the tree with the presents; this is him right in the middle of quoting the Christmas story from Luke 2. We were so proud.

Lots of change

2011-12-20T19:49:00.001Z

Lots of things are happening at once these days… a lot of different Asher issues have converged this week and we’re doing our best to keep up with it all.

First of all, Asher has started rolling non-stop from his back to his front. He won’t lay on his back for any length of time; he only wants to be on his belly. Like this…

(Yes, that is a Christmas tree on his butt… so cute!)

Of course, he can’t crawl, or even really scoot, so he gets frustrated with being on his belly for too long… so we turn him to his back, then he rolls over… repeat :). This new trick he’s learned has been causing us grief not because we have to continually turn him over when he starts yelling, but because he is still sleeping in the swaddle and he has now started turning over in his crib while swaddled! That’s a bad thing.

So this week we’ve been talking about taking the swaddle away. We’ve tried this before and it ended badly… he won’t sleep without the swaddle because he keeps hitting himself in the face or rubbing his eyes or jerking in his sleep… and then when he wakes up he can’t go back to sleep on his own so he wants to be held and bounced…. all.night.long. Hence the reason that after 4 or 5 failed attempts to remove the swaddle, we’ve returned every time.

I think there are really two issues at work and we needed to tackle both simultaneously: 1) he can’t GET to sleep without being held and bounced; and 2) he can’t STAY asleep without the swaddle. Ergo, if we got him to go to sleep without the swaddle by bouncing him, then whenever he would wake himself up in the night he would need us to bounce him again to get back to sleep. If we could teach him to go to sleep on his own, then he could come out of the swaddle because even if his arms woke him up in the night, he could put himself back to sleep.

Well, at the same time as all this, we’ve had to deal with another very pressing issue… namely, this…

… whole hand, in the mouth, all the time. Yes, he’s teething, but he’s also hungry… all the time. He weighs 17 pounds now and the milk is just not doing it for him anymore… this boy needs some food! Of course, this means that our “teaching him to sleep” plan is complicated by this new hunger issue. Normally he would sleep until 4am until he woke up hungry, but now he’ll wake at around midnight starving.

So what are we doing? Well, we’re trying to tackle them all at once, which means yesterday was a very big day for Asher.

1. He ate his first solid food :)… a little bit of baby cereal (okay, so it’s not really solid). He didn’t really like it, or perhaps I should say that he didn’t get the concept… he doesn’t understand food coming from a spoon yet.

2. We started a new sleep routine that does NOT include feeding him to sleep with a bottle. He didn’t like that so much… but it had to end some time.

3. It was the first night we put him down for bed WITHOUT bouncing him to sleep. I did, however, bounce him to try to get him to stop screaming for us to let him have that bottle in order to go to sleep.

4. It was the first night we put him to bed WITHOUT the swaddle.

Overall, it was a pretty successful night. He finally went to sleep and I think he’s learning how to get to sleep and stay asleep with no swaddle or bouncing… he’s discovered sleeping on his side, which he apparently likes very much.

Oh, and one more thing, change number 5 happened today… he is now sleeping in his own room! He has slept by our bed every night since he was born. That ends tonight… or, at least, we hope it does :).

By the way, whoever came up with the phrase “sleeping like a baby” should be shot.

The end result:

(A note for my photophile friends: 8 sec., f/3.5, ISO 800. It was nearly pitch black in the room, hence the 8 second exposure. Shooting wide open at f/1.4 would have helped, but it was hard to manual focus in the dark and f/3.5 is more forgiving.)

Land of the red man (or woman)

2011-12-18T14:27:00.001Z

Oklahoma welcomed Candice, Asher and me back with open arms. We flew from LA to Oklahoma City without incident; however, we were on a much smaller plane this time, so the rocking and shaking of the plane was much worse than the transatlantic jumbos we’re used to. I have a habit of feeling very ill on planes during the last 30 minutes or so (though I’ve never actually thrown up), and I had always wondered how the motion sickness would figure into the whole “I-have-to-take-care-of-a-kid” kick that we’re on right now. The answer: better than I expected. In fact, being forced to focus on something else besides getting sick actually might have helped… even though I did have to put my head in my hands for a minute to try to stabilize my aura (polite way of saying, “trying not to puke”).

The first thing I noticed when we got to Oklahoma, besides the accents, was the faint but very real smell of Mexican food on the Oklahoma breeze. You don’t realize when you live there all the time, because you’re used to it, but when you’re gone for a while and come back the whole state smells like Mexican food.

When we got to Oklahoma, Asher got to see his Lala (Candice’s mom) and Aunt Baylee, which he loved very much:

Asher warned me not to take any pictures of him right after a long flight, he wanted to look his best. But I couldn’t resist, and I think I offended him a little bit.

After that, we went to see Asher’s Grandie (my mom), and we played a little bit of dress up with some of my old baby clothes. Check it out…

Basically the whole time we were in Ardmore Asher was being doted on, exhibit A…

Asher also got to hang out with his Grandpa Mike and seemed pretty darn happy about it…

That weekend we went to have Thanksgiving at Nana’s house. We showed Asher the horses… but it was a bit windy outside… this is the face Asher makes when the wind blows in his face. Every.Time.

Asher also got to meet his cousin Gracie… she was very loving and helpful with ‘baby Asher’.

Our next stop took us to Chickasha to see Candice’s dad, sister & crew. Papa was very proud to have all three of his grandsons together.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of everyone we got to see. It was beyond life-giving to see family, it was such a special time to get to introduce Asher to his family.

Very First Snow!

2011-12-16T20:31:00.002Z

Today was the first snow of the season, and it was Asher’s VERY FIRST SNOW! Yay for snow! We set him up on the kitchen counter to watch it and he was enthralled :)

It wasn’t quite cold enough to stick, but before it stopped and all melted, we got a good ‘father and son’ shot in the snow. I like this one:

Cambridge is really beautiful in the snow (see last years’ pictures), but the snow today was just a tiny taste. Hopefully we get a really nice snowfall before Christmas, or at least by New Years so that people visiting Cambridge around that time might see it at its best :). I will say, in general, these few short weeks in December are some of my favorite in Cambridge: the students are gone and there are no tourists, so you pretty much get the town all to yourself.
On a side note, I’m not sure what the deal is with this, but apparently Asher’s new trick this week is sticking out his tongue ALL THE TIME! “Catch a snowflake, son!”

Piehl wedding

2011-12-16T10:10:00.000Z

We were so excited to be in LA to celebrate with Curby and Tiffani and be a part of their wedding. I found myself weepy several times and although I would like to blame it all on sleep deprivation, I have to say much of it was because I was so elated for Tiffani and just thrilled to watch her live in the happiness that Curby has brought her way. Those hours together seemed short and busy (they usually do during a wedding week), but I will always treasure those times with my dear friend. Here are a few highlights of our time in LA:

*Being a part of several wedding events such as Tiffani's bridal luncheon and bachelorette party- All the ladies were able to celebrate and honor Tiffani and it was such a sweet time together.

*Spending a few brief hours with Tiffani doing things like buying flowers for the bouquets and getting our nails done- After a hectic few months for both of us (with her planning a wedding and me having a baby and all), it was a sweet blessing to get to be together, chat and catch up.

*Talking with Curby on our way to and from the flower market- I loved being able to get to know him a bit more and could really see how well he and Tiffani fit together.

*Meeting Tiffani's friends from across the country- I had heard of Jessica, Laura, Barb and Karen for so long and in such detail I felt like I knew them already, but I'm so glad to finally know them in real life. Can we all be friends? :)

*Spending time with our friends Matt and Whitney, who also came for the wedding- What can I say? These two are just a good time! And they didn't hate us for asking them to help us with baby Asher over and over again. (At least they didn't show it!) SO glad we got to see these friends.

Congratulations, Curby and Tiffani! Wishing you many, many happy years, lots of babies, and plenty of family vacations with the Bullards! ;)

A week in LA (with a baby)

2011-12-15T09:13:00.001Z

After arriving in LA, we went to pick up the rental car. We were worried that all our stuff wouldn’t fit in a car, especially since we were supposed to be sharing the car with our friends Matt and Whitney. We totally lucked out; they didn't have any full-size cars available, so they upgraded us to the SUV for free! Fo’ free, y’all! So we were driving around LA in a brand new Jeep, telling America how much we love her. We honestly needed the extra space... all our crap barely fit in the SUV, despite our very best efforts to pack light.

It was hard being in a hotel with an infant. There were so many things that we had never thought about before. When we used to travel to a new city, we’d drop our bags at the hotel and then go out to explore, find a nice place to eat, do some shopping, see the sites, and the hotel would just be for sleeping (lots of sleeping). Let’s be honest, who wants to see the inside of a hotel anyway! Well, needless to say, all that has changed. The first night we put Asher down for bed at 6:30, then we sat out in the hall staring at each other with the “what-do-we-do-now” look. I got us a burger and club sandwich from the bar downstairs and we ate in the hall. Where are you supposed to go when you put your kid down to sleep in a hotel room? I considered putting him down in the bathroom, which I’ve heard of some people doing… but that leads to my next question: where would you go to the bathroom?

Overall, the week in LA went really well. We were there for basically one reason: to be at Tiffani and Curby’s wedding, and as long as we got to do that, the trip was a success. Stay tuned for a recap of wedding festivities! But as a side note, I heard the names Tiffani and Curby spoken together so many times that week that I started combining them a la movie star couples: who else is thinking Curffani sounds pretty great? I also like Tiffacurb. In any case, both are better than Tiffurby.

Transition

2011-12-06T20:27:00.001Z

We’ve been settling back into life in Cambridge the past couple of days. It’s pretty cold, and it’s dark by 4:30pm, so it requires a bit of transition time to get used to it after being in Oklahoma, where the sun is still reasonably warm during the day even when it is colder outside. Not only that, but seeing our families was so nice, and it was hard to leave… I think our families had a hard time watching us Asher go. So, this week will be a ‘transition week,’ which might involve some general complaint sessions about England… in fact, most of the Americans we know have a period of hating on England when they return from trips to the states… luckily, another friend of ours just returned as well, so we can commiserate with one another, which helps. Christmas is a really lovely time to be in Cambridge, so that is some consolation for being away from family. We’re also happy to have some time to relax after what was a really busy trip… although, Asher still isn’t over the jet lag yet, so we haven’t really slept that much.

In other news, Asher is five months old today :). Yay! I’ve been noticing his eyes changing color since he was born, and they’ve gone through many stages… at first they were a very dark blue, then they lightened up and became a nice baby blue. Then after a few months I started noticing some little flecks of amber in the blue, which made me really excited because Candice has really pretty green eyes with flecks of amber, and I was totally hoping he would get her eyes! Today I got a great picture of his eye, and I’m happy to report…

… he’s totally a green-eyed boy :). I hope it lasts. I know they can still change color some more, but it’s totally fun to watch. Here’s a close-up…

And on that lovely note… it’s time for bed. Everyone say a prayer that Asher sleeps really good tonight :).

The First Flight

2011-12-05T20:13:00.001Z

Here’s an account of Asher’s first flight: London to LA! What a flight to begin with! But Asher doesn’t like to do anything halfway, so when we asked if he was up for flying, he said, “Go big or go home, guys.” This was written the day after we arrived in the states:

“Wow! Yesterday was Asher's first trans-Atlantic flight (and first flight ever!). Candice and I spent the whole of Monday getting everything packed and preparing the house to be lived in by some of our friends while we’re away. Candice gave me a haircut, we did a lot of laundry, and we made three trips to different stores to buy formula, 7 boxes in total. They don't sell Asher's formula in the States and we didn't want to switch formulas. So we packed nearly an entire suitcase worth of formula (we sound like crazy parents, or ‘hoarders’, and there was a time when I totally would have judged us for it… but I’m so tired I don’t have the energy it takes to be judgmental of myself)! I guess it will work out well though, because we'll have a lot of extra space to bring stuff back with us.

“We didn't sleep super well the night before our trip; we were both excited/anxious about the flight the next day. We had been anticipating this trip for a while, and we just weren't sure if Asher would handle the 12-hour flight well or not... I had definitely had some visions of us standing in the back of the plane with Asher screaming his head off while everyone on the plane shoots us disapproving glances over their shoulders.

“We were also nervous just about getting to the airport in the morning; we were driving ourselves, but there were a lot of things to do in the morning and we wanted to be gone by 7:30, which is only 30 minutes after Asher wakes up. So we made a list, got up at 5:50, showered, got everything ready, fed Asher, turned the heat off, took out the trash, emptied the fridge... and we were out by 7:45! Not too shabby.

“Traffic was horrible on the way to the airport, and we went a route I'd never taken before, because Kate (our temperamental GPS) was taking us to an off-site parking place... it took FOREVER! But we finally made it and kept joking about how we have an inability to make it to the airport two hours before the flight, which is always our goal. We didn't do too bad, it was 10:30 when we pulled into the terminal, and our flight left at noon.

“Since it was our first time traveling as a family of 3, there were a lot of unknowns... should we check the stroller or take it to the gate? Will it get roughed up too much? Can we get Asher his own seat, in which case we would carry on the car seat and strap it in? The guy at the counter worked his magic and gave us three seats at the front of the bulkhead... perfect!

“We checked two bags and the stroller, and carried the car seat, Asher, and two backpacks through the airport... we had a lot of crap, but we managed very well. We were even delighted to see that they had a "family" line through security that meant that we didn't have to wait long and they were totally prepared for all the formula stuff we had. It was like magic :). And, as a side note, when we passed all the others waiting in line, I was like “suckahs,” which is, I was sure, a sentiment they would be repeating to us later while they’re fast asleep on the plane and we’re messing with a four month old… oh well, I guess it all evens out in the end.

“Finally on the plane, we got settled into our three seats, with the car seat strapped in between us. I wanted to apologize to the people sitting next to us as soon as we got on the plane, since I’m sure they were sending awful thoughts our way, but I resisted... I was trying to have faith in our little guy that he would handle it all well. We were on the plane for about an hour before it took off, and we worked a while trying to get Asher to sleep... finally he went down and was in his car seat, passed out, when, sure enough, they come on the flippin' PA with about a thousand announcements and it was so loud that the little guy just couldn’t sleep through it... so, there goes nap #1. Oh well, we just shrugged it off, and Asher seemed to be happy even though he only slept a few minutes, so we left him alone. (Parenting Rule #1: if he’s happy… leave.him.alone.)

“He was very interested in everything that was going on, so he just sat in Candice's lap and in his car seat for a while looking around, smiling, talking... being very very sweet. He smiled at people and of course they thought he was the cutest thing ever. Candice got him back to sleep and he slept for a while on her chest while she watched "The Help". He got fussy around his bedtime, but we were ready and immediately sprung into action. We went about the bedtime routine with a flurry of activity that probably looked funny from the outside looking in, not least because both of us were engaged in trying to soothe our baby with the same seriousness one might have when defusing a bomb… change the diaper, get bottle, formula, mix, shake, find blankets, swaddle baby… boom, situation handled. We managed to get him swaddled and in his seat and he slept for a full 4 hours!

“All in all, he did amazing on the flight. Beyond our expectations I'd say. We got through customs in LAX in a flash and as we were waiting for our bags more than one person commented to us about how sweet he was on the flight... one lady even asked us what the heck was wrong with the other kid that was screaming for an hour. She was totally judging those parents for not bringing enough toys for their toddler to play with. I kept thinking that it's probably dumb luck whether your kid starts screaming and won’t stop… but, in any case, it’s a little easier with a younger baby because you can just bounce him around to distract and entertain him. But anyways, I was happy that the general perception on the plane was that we were awesome parents :).”

Blog neglect

2011-12-05T19:07:00.001Z

Obviously, we haven’t blogged in a while. I usually don’t like posts that begin with “it’s been a while,” but let me explain. We use this blog primarily as a means to keep in touch with family while we are away in the UK. Therefore, since we’ve been gone to the States for a while and have been visiting family, the necessity of blogging was temporarily removed.

Nonetheless, we realize we have other blurkers who might like to know some of the things we were up to. Now that we’re back from the craziness of traveling, we’ll try to resume our normal posting about what’s going on. We also use this blog as our own little memory bank; a record of our lives just for our own benefit, so perhaps we’ll throw a few retrospective posts in the mix as well.

Ready for winter

2011-10-30T14:03:00.001Z

The weather around here has been changing rapidly… Autumn has definitely arrived and Winter is right around the corner. We told Asher he better get ready for some cold weather… and that’s exactly what he did…

Okay, mom, I’m all set :).

First Night Out

2011-10-20T20:33:00.001+01:00

We had our first night out last weekend. Some friends of ours offered to stay here with Asher so that we could go out and have a bit of a date. We decided we’d be crazy if we didn’t take advantage of the offer, but we hadn’t left Asher with anyone yet, so there was a little anxiety going into the evening. Since we’ve gotten him on a schedule, his bedtimes are (more) predictable… nonetheless, we were worried he would wake up screaming at some point.

I guess it’s sort of cliché to say that parents can get a little crazy when it comes to leaving their kids for the first time… and with that said, I can’t think of anything more appropriate than this “Friends” clip, which pretty much sums up the whole experience. This is Rachel and Ross’ first time to go out and leave their daughter, Emma, with someone (Ross’ mom)… as they’re getting ready to go, they accidentally lock themselves out of the apartment with Emma still inside, hilarity ensues (those of you with iPhones can watch it here):

type="application/x-shockwave-flash">

Anyways, back to our date… I made a reservation at a place we like, and we got ready for our big night out, which was just dinner, but still… it felt like a big night out. When we got to the restaurant, Candice said that she wished our little camera rig would work away from home so we could see him while we were out (she claims she only wanted to watch him for a second)… I said that this basically defeated the purpose of getting out of the house and going on a date! We had a great time and laughed a lot. We talked a little bit about Asher, but I was glad that we still had other stuff to talk about as well.

It was sort of like old times again, back when it was just the two of us and we did whatever the heck we wanted… oh how times have changed :). Having the night out was fun, but by about 9:30 we were both ready to call it a night… when you’re used to going to bed at 9 and you know you’re going to have to get up at 3am, staying out late just doesn’t sound as good as sleeping.

It’s what we do

2011-10-12T17:45:00.001+01:00

Asher Henry loves to be outside! He can be fussing it up like nobody’s business and the minute we take him outside, he chills out, gets wide-eyed, and stops the fussing. Usually. So when we get stir crazy and just need to get out of the house, we walk. Sometimes we hit the road with a girlfriend, sometimes with Collin, sometimes just the babe and me. I sure am hoping this nice weather continues!

Asher Rolling Over :)

2011-10-12T10:26:00.002+01:00

Last week we caught Asher on video rolling over… this is really the first time he’s been able to roll over multiple times and it didn’t look like an accident. Yay Asher!

Crisis Averted

2011-10-09T09:46:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, the three of us walked into town after Asher woke up from his morning nap, as we’ve been in the habit of doing recently. We looked around for some baby mittens because, sadly, the autumn chill is in the air and the summer sun has quickly faded. We went to baby Gap, then went to a Starbucks to feed Asher (we don’t drink coffee usually, so that’s typically the only reason we go there). I went to the Apple store to pay homage, and then we headed back home.

On the way out, however, Candice and I started talking about how much we miss getting burritos from Nannamexico, a good lunch place we used to frequent. We’ve been having lunch at home while Asher takes his noon nap, so we haven’t had a chance to grab our fix of Mexican food.

I had a flash of brilliance while we were walking, and we decided that I should run to Nannamexico and get two burritos to go. Meanwhile, Candice would take Asher home and get him ready to nap. We figured by the time he was asleep and in his crib, I’d be back with fresh burritos and we’d be ready to dig in. Sounds like a good plan, right?!

Well, all was going well at first. I ordered the burritos from our friend Mane (the guy who runs the place), and while I was waiting I got a call from Candice. She was halfway home and discovered that she didn’t have any keys to get in the house, Asher was starting to get fussy, and it had just started raining. So, basically… everything that could go wrong.

At this point I did something that I would never normally do… I got a taxi from the city center to home. It’s a little embarrassing, actually… taxis are overpriced and I had a perfectly good bike at home and… a thousand other reasons why we don’t like to take taxis. But, since our plan was going south rather quickly, I was just trying to get home quickly so that I didn’t stroll up to the house thirty minutes later with the burritos only to find my wife and screaming baby outside in the rain freezing and soaking wet!

So I took my losses and paid the taxi. I arrived just in time to let Candice in, then we ate, Asher took a long nap, and we laid down on the couch and relaxed, just enjoying our Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, my wallet was still in the taxi taking a ride around the town.

That’s right, in my haste to pay the taxi and grab the burritos and answer an incoming call all at the same time, I left my wallet sitting right there on the seat.

This story could have turned out very very badly, but, as luck would have it… or, rather… as divine providence saw fit to spare me from a crappy day. I got an email before I even realized the wallet was missing. Of all the people in the world to be getting into the same taxi, it was a guy doing a Masters degree in Philosophy of Religion who lives in the theological training school just down the street from us. We are both doing degrees in the Faculty of Divinity and had never met, but he found my wallet :). All in all, it was a pretty good day; crisis averted. John saved the day.

So… all that to say… thanks, John!

P.S. – Here’s the picture of the day. This is the face you make when you realize you’ve lost your wallet…

Cuteness factor: 11

2011-10-04T19:55:00.001+01:00

We have been getting tons of smiles and laughs and squeals from our little guy lately, and y’all, it is just the sweetest thing. And, he is officially rolling over. Fun!

Asher can’t wait to meet all of his aunts and uncles. We are so glad his aunties know how to buy baby clothes… even if they are self-promoting. :)

Check out that bald head! He lost all of his hair except for some in the back and a little bit on top which can be styled into a nice, thin comb-over. He’s like a little old man. Adorable.

Life on the wild side

2011-10-01T20:30:00.001+01:00

We are headed to America in a month (!) and we are pretty pumped about lots of things: seeing our family and friends, celebrating the wedding of great friends, central heat and air, going to familiar stores, and, of course, eating at some of our favourite places! But in light of our new “schedule” with Asher, we are realizing that we might not actually be able to go out to dinner at all! OR… we could go and get the senior citizen’s special at 4.30pm at Denny’s. Who knew life with a 3 month old would be so thrilling?! ;)

A steep learning curve

2011-09-30T19:59:00.001+01:00

Before Asher was born, I was pretty confident in my abilities to care for a baby. During my growing up years my mom always took care of other people’s kids and I was there to ~~help~~ get in the way and learn. And Collin and I have nieces and nephews galore. I’ve burped, rocked, changed, and played with more babies than I can remember. My sisters may have accused me of being a baby hog at more than one family gathering. So when I was pregnant, I was nervous about and preparing for the labor and delivery, but when it came to actually caring for our boy, I thought, “How hard can it be? We can totally do this.”

<I’m sure you are laughing at my naiveté right now. Go ahead. I’m laughing too.>

And then Asher was born. And we quickly found that there was more to it than we had anticipated. You don’t just feed the baby. We have to make decisions about when and what and how much to feed him. Wait a minute, this is way different than my sister passing off her little one and saying, “Here, feed him this.” We have to figure out how to get the boy to sleep and when he should go to sleep and for how long. And where. And how dark and warm and quiet is should or should not be in the room. But… I thought you just rocked him for half a minute and sang a song and that was it? Also, we thought that if we wanted to go somewhere and do something, we wouldn’t let him hold us back, we would just take him with us! But when you’re faced with the decision of staying home and keeping him happy or taking him somewhere and him getting so tired that he screams for an hour… well, you get the idea. Needless to say, we have been learning a ton in the past few months. I’m so grateful for the times my sisters and friends and other family members let me care for their little ones. I would be lost even more without those experiences.

We’ve been having a bit of a hard time figuring out sleep around here. We didn’t want to impose a strict routine on little Asher Henry, for lots of reasons: we want him to eat when he’s hungry, sleep when he’s tired, we wanted him to be flexible, etc. And we didn’t want to be THOSE people who can never go anywhere or do anything because their kid has to read 4.5 books, sing 3 songs, have a bath, and be asleep by 7.01pm every night. But in our efforts not to be those people, we turned into those people because our days are so unpredictable. And it just isn’t working. He’s not settled. We’re going stir crazy.

My mom said to me the other day, “Maybe he needs fewer naps.” Well, yes, that makes sense. He has been growing and changing and we have to adjust with him. So we are trying out a new schedule. Today is the first day. And it’s going beautifully so far. Wish us luck!

Smiley boy

2011-09-28T02:24:00.001+01:00

Today Asher had a lively conversation with his mama. We think that he has started to get a little bit of a laugh… here’s the video.

11 Weeks

2011-09-25T10:07:00.001+01:00

This week Asher is 11 weeks old, which made me think: when are you supposed to stop counting in weeks and start counting in months? “How old is your son?” “Well, he’s 37 weeks old this week… gosh how the time goes by… seems like just yesterday he was 33 weeks old.” While that would be funny, and I might still do it, I’d like to know where the cutoff is.

Anyways, we took some funny pics of Asher yesterday in his baseball cap…

First of all, I can’t believe how chunky he is getting… look at those legs!

“I’m street, y’all… watch out, or I’ll cut you.”

“Just kidding… I’m actually very sweet and adorable.”

“When I look at people like this it makes them love me :).”

Here’s his grumpy face…

He likes to sit on the couch and hold his hands :)

Here’s a few more from last week…

Bye for now…

The Embassy

2011-09-20T20:31:00.001+01:00

Today we went into London to go to the US Embassy. Asher isn't officially a US citizen until we go and do a "Consular Report of Birth Abroad"... which basically means we fill in all these forms that say, "Hey, we're American y'all!" And then they say, "Oh, ok, well then your kid is American too." How exciting! It's a big day for Asher. Not only is he getting a Social Security number and a passport and citizenship and all that; it's also his very fist trip on a train! I'm pretty sure I know which one he was more excited about. We were sad that we couldn't take any pictures of his first train ride, but they don't allow phones or cameras or any electronics into the embassy, so we left our phones in Cambridge and hopped on the 7:15 morning train to Kings Cross.

Yikes it was early... Asher had woken up at 2, 3, and 5:30am, so by that time we just gave up and got up to get us ready to leave in time to catch the train. The commuters were out in full force, and the train was packed with people on their way to work... they were all dressed business savvy with their ipods and macbooks, or their fancy spreadsheets with lots of numbers... and everyone pretty much keeps to themselves and is very quiet. And here we come getting onto the train with a whole ton of baby stuff, barely dressed and hoping that our baby wouldn't scream the whole way to London. We were pretty apprehensive about the day, because Asher hasn't been sleeping well anywhere else but home, and no sleep equals upset baby.

We should've known not to underestimate him... he was a perfect angel on the train. We navigated the London Underground with a little difficulty; strollers are not made for the Tube :). Finally, we made it to the embassy.

It was technically our first trip back to American soil in almost a year... there was a HUGE American flag waving over the top of the building and an equally giant gold eagle perched on the edge of the building. There was even an Oklahoma flag waving in the lineup :). All of it was enough to make the patriotism well up in us and we both spontaneously started singing, "You're a grand ole flag, you're a high flyin' flag, da-da-da da-da-da da-da-da..." We sang until we got into line and then is was better just to whistle rather than be the guy outside the embassy singing like a dorkus.

Security was pretty tight... the guys with guns were big, and their guns were big too, and the sight of the baby didn't seem to soften them up at all. In any case, we got in no problem... except for the part where they told us we needed to "test" the water in the baby bottle to prove it was water. Candice understood and took out the baby bottle; I thought he meant to test all the water, so I picked up our water bottle. Then we both started to take the lids off and he said, with a little shaking motion of his hand, "No, no, just put a little on your wrist and taste it." He was telling Candice that she could just shake the baby bottle instead of removing the lid... I thought he was talking to both of us, so I shrugged, and was like, "Well if you say so man." So I popped the cap off the 'sport lid' and shook it onto my wrist... of course, a TON of water came out and went all over the floor, then I tasted it off my wrist and thought to myself, "Well we all knew THAT was gonna happen, but I guess you gotta do what the security guy tells you, right?" The looks on the face of my wife and the security guard were enough to tell me I wasn't supposed to do that. Oh well, I was just following orders :).

So, when we finally got inside we were relieved to see that it was only 9:15 and our "appointment" was at 9:30. What a crock! They tell you that you've made an "appointment" to fool you into thinking you're actually going to see someone at 9:30 who is going to deal with your application. Wrong. You go into this room with about a hundred other people, most of whom are there with their tiny babies trying to do the same thing you are. On one side of the room there's a long row of "bank teller" windows and they just give you a number and tell you to wait. Basically, they don't care what your "appointment" time was, they'll just call your number after they finish with the other hundred people in the room with screaming babies. All in all, we were there for just under two hours, during which time we made several trips to different windows to drop off the applications, pay, answer questions, and then swear an oath. The oath part was pretty cool, but I thought they were going to make Asher swear an oath too, since, after all, HE was the one becoming the citizen. He didn't seem to care, though... in fact, he didn't seem to mind the room full of screaming babies either, because was a perfect angel (again) and slept in the carrier with me while I walked around judging all the other parents :).

When we left, I bid farewell to the big guys with guns and saluted the red, white, and blue. We were exhausted and went home straightaway… we all settle in for a nap, and Asher took the longest nap of his life. Mission accomplished. Now we can bring Asher into the United States… getting him back into the UK is another story altogether, one that we haven’t figured out quite yet :).

Mum’s birthday

2011-09-13T18:31:00.001+01:00

Today I turn 28 years old. My first birthday as a mom. I told little Asher Henry that I only wanted one thing for my birthday: for him to have a good night’s sleep, thus giving us a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, he did not deliver. Instead, he woke up at 2.45am and continued waking up on and off until his final wake up around 8.30am. The little guy just has a hard time getting to sleep and staying asleep.

While I fed Asher his morning bottle, Collin made quick work of whipping up some yummy blueberry pancakes! They were delicious and reminded us of Cracker Barrel. :) Collin was too cute. Apparently he had snuck downstairs last night to get all of the pancake ingredients measured out and ready to go. Sweetest.husband.ever.

This afternoon we were going to walk into town to get a sandwich for lunch, but it started raining so we jumped in the car for a drive. We joked about the lack of drive-thru places in England and I suddenly wished we were living in America with our small boy. Drive-thrus abound in middle America… food, drinks, the bank, pharmacy, post office, just about any errand you need to run can be done through your car window, with your sleeping baby in the back. Alas, we could only find one drive-thru and it happened to be McDonald's. Collin said he never thought he would see the day when I wanted to have McDonald's drive-thru for my birthday lunch (because I don't like McDonald's and it happens to be just about the last place I would ever choose to eat), but what's a girl to do with such limited options and a fussy baby falling asleep in the car seat? Whip through, order a diet coke, and get the show on the road so her sweet boy can nap, that's what.

I’m sure some of you more practical types might be thinking we could have just stayed at home and put Asher Henry down for a nap. Well, yes, yes, we could have, but he isn’t really into sleeping these days. More specifically, he isn’t into going to sleep. The car is what they call a sleep ‘prop’, which you’re not supposed to use. I’m going against my normal let’s-follow-the-rules mindset and embracing the do-what-it-takes motto. :)

We drove around a bit after the McDonald's stop and saw a lot of farmland outside of Cambridge. It was really calm and quiet and just lovely to ramble along the bumpy roads, whispering with my love as my baby love snoozed in the back.

Looks a lot like Oklahoma, doesn’t it?

Collin and I joked about what Facebook status updates we could use today:
For me:
McDonalds drive-thru for my birthday lunch. #spoiled;)
Or for Collin:
Taking my woman to the drive-thru at McDonalds for her birthday. #bigspender

I’m enjoying a quiet night at home with my boys.

Photo Shoot

2011-09-11T21:30:00.001+01:00

Sorry we haven’t posted many Asher photos lately; here’s the latest.

Here’s him posing for the cover of ‘Baby Vogue’ magazine.

He thinks his mama is funny.

When you lay him on his tummy, he thinks about more serious things…

He makes this face a lot, I think it means, “What is that guy doing?”

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid…

My mohawk is awesome, but it looks a bit like a cowlick and kind of makes me look like the Gerber baby.

That’s enough pictures… put me to bed, daddy…

September 10, 2011

2011-09-10T21:53:00.001+01:00

Today was a crazy day. Asher slept good last night, and woke up around 8am ready for the morning light. He gets sleepy within about an hour of waking up, so we tried to settle him into a little nap… then we tried again, and again… finally he took his ‘morning’ nap just before noon, and Candice and I made a quick sandwich for lunch and decided that we were completely out of food and desperately needed to go to Tesco (WalMart)… plus, we wanted to get out of the house. So, right when Asher woke up, we headed out the door and whisked away in the Happy Honda.

Carrying the little man around Tesco has been a good experience because he usually takes a little nap while he’s in the carrier. This time, however, Tesco was a madhouse with like a thousand people and it was a little too close to his eating time for a nap, so about 3/4 of the way through our Tesco run, Candice decided to go out to the car and feed Asher while I finished the shopping. We both felt like we’d had a pretty unsuccessful morning and afternoon so far… nothing was really working out like we’d planned (welcome to parenthood).

By the time I got finished checking out and got out to the car, I found Candice and the little man chilling in the front seat with the windows down just soaking up the sunlight (don’t try this in Oklahoma, a frozen lasagna left in the car during a Wal-Mart trip would be cooked, steamy, and ready to eat by the time you got out). Surprisingly, by the time Candice got Asher to the car to feed him, he was out cold, so she left him in the carrier and he was just sleeping on her chest – WIN! Apparently, all we have to do to get the kid to take a nap is bring him to Tesco on a Saturday, then leave and he’ll be so glad to be out of that place he’ll fall peacefully asleep :).

We sat and talked for a few minutes, then I decided to start the car because I was getting a bit toasty. I turned the key… nothing. “Oh no!” I thought, “C’mon girl, don’t let me down now!” I tried again… nothing. The battery was totally dead. It died a few weeks ago when the dome light stayed on for several days, and this time it must have had something to do with sitting in the car while the key was in it (it was probably already pretty low on juice). In any case… Asher was about to wake up, and I could just see us running around the parking lot with a screaming baby looking for someone to jump our car!

I acted fast. I ran into Tesco and bought jumper cables, instructing Candice not to let anyone park directly in front of us unless they were going to jump us (that sounds weird). I came out and searched for the perfect target to ask for help. A middle-aged woman loading her SUV… no, she’s probably headed somewhere important or has something frozen that needs to go home quickly. I looked around, everyone looked busy and occupied… then I saw them, our heroes. Two teenage guys who obviously had nothing better to do than stand behind their car and have a cigarette before driving aimlessly to nowhere in particular… perfect!

In no time we had the car jumped and we were on our way, Asher had just ate and we were about to pull out when…. blowout! And no, I’m not talking about one of our tires. I’m talking about another kind of blowout altogether… and when I say blowout, I mean BUH.LOH.OWT! We spent the next 10 minutes or so in a flurry of cleaning activity, all the while making various exclamations to Asher about the extent of his little disaster. He thought it was really funny that he ruined his cute outfit and we had to strip him down and dress him again.

Okay… so we FINALLY left the Tesco parking lot and headed home. We unloaded the groceries and Candice said she wanted to go for a drive, I agreed since I figured we would be charging the battery all along. We loaded right back into the Happy Honda and set off for our drive to nowhere. The UK is a great place for wandering drives. There are all sorts of interesting, small, windy roads leading between and around villages in the outskirts of Cambridge. We went from one village to the next, enjoying the picturesque countryside in between (it’s mostly flat like Oklahoma, which makes it feel home-ish).

Asher fell asleep in the car, and we knew if we stopped driving he would wake up, so we just kept driving and chatted about this and that. We ended up driving to Anglesey Abbey, an old country manor not far from Cambridge. It’s a ‘National Trust’ site, which means they’ve made it into kind of a ‘state park’ tourist attraction and charge you to get in. We just wanted to check it out and figured we wouldn’t go in, but when we got there, we realized it was the annual ‘Heritage Open Day’ and everyone gets in free! The crazy coincidence was that, without realizing it, we had gone out for a drive exactly a year ago and had also decided on a whim to visit another national trust site where it happened to be the one weekend a year where people get in free. To top it all off, we got there just as Asher was waking up from his car-nap, which happened to be 15 minutes before they stop letting people in, so we had a good 45 minutes to grab a drink and walk around enjoying all the pretty gardens (they do gardens really well in this country).

Me in front of the main house :)

This is probably the best picture I’ve ever taken with my phone… and it was totally by accident. The light was exactly right, one of the really rare moments when you get ready to take a picture and everything aligns perfectly for a brilliant shot: the sky is cloudy and dramatic so it’s not too bright that it throws off the rest of the picture, the sun peaked through the clouds for only about 5 seconds at the perfect angle to throw sunlight on the face of the house, and I just happened to be in the right spot to frame the grass nicely in the foreground. (I wish I’d had a better camera with me!)

So, as it turned out, the day that started off not going according to plan eventually came together perfectly once we’d thrown our plans out the window. In the end, I guess it’s a little bit like this picture… not one part of it was planned, but it came together brilliantly at just the right moments.

Tomatoes and September

2011-09-08T21:35:00.001+01:00

We had the bright idea of planting a few things earlier this year in hopes that we might find gardening fun and rewarding. It was cool at first… of course, the lettuce is always the first stuff to come in, and picking a bit of fresh lettuce for our salads was pretty fun. I kept things reasonably well watered… that is… before we had a child.

Now, the last thing on our minds is, “Did we water the plants today?” And not only that, but we planted the garden back when we actually planned for and cooked real meals for dinner. We’ve gotten into the habit these days of using the short time we have in the evenings to scramble together just enough to get us by… this allows us to go to bed as early as possible. In other words, sleep is the priority, not food. This means that even though I’ve had some really nice looking tomatoes on my tomato plants for a while now, I haven’t gotten the chance to go and pick them. Today, however, I decided I’d make a salad and use only the tomatoes from the garden. I picked a bunch… I was surprised at how many still looked alright. It’s really a testament to the kind British weather rather than my gardening skills. In any case, here’s the result :)… and the salad, by the way, was yummy.

Don’t they look good!

On a related note… summer is over here in Cambridge :(. Sadly, autumn comes pretty early in the UK, and even though we’ll probably have several more nice days, I’ve already noticed the autumn chill hitting the air. I was less sad about this than I normally am. Normally, I’m very upset that summer is ending.

This year, however, I’ve decided that September is actually a really nice month to be in Cambridge (or to visit if you’re looking to!). The weather is still fair, the leaves start to turn all sorts of really beautiful colors against the buildings, most of the tourists have cleared out, the students haven’t arrived yet… all in all, it’s just a very quiet, serene, picturesque place to be. Thanks be to God… for my kid and my wife, for the tomatoes, for the seasons, and for a pretty nice sunset tonight.

Post baby look

2011-08-28T22:11:00.001+01:00

The Hollywood Housewife is hosting a link up over on her blog and I thought ‘Why not give it a go?’ So… you’re supposed to show your summer fashion style, which, if you know me, is kind of humorous because I don’t really have a style on the best of days, especially this summer. Lately I’m living in a random assortment of tank tops and one pair of jeans, because, well, these jeans fit. And most things in my closet don’t. I’m still in that awkward in-between phase where most of my pre-baby clothes are just a little too snug to be comfortable, but maternity clothes make it look like I’m wearing a table cloth. And that’s no good. Here’s me today:

The one piece of jewelry I’ve been wearing since July is this necklace (find it here, Hi Vicki!). You’ve probably seen it before when I wrote about a few fun things I found on Etsy. My sweet hubs bought it for me and gave it to me while I was still in the birthing room after Asher arrived. It’s dainty enough for me to wear everyday and special enough that I want to.

And although this has little to do with fashion, little A is my new permanent accessory, especially today when all he wanted to do was hang out with mama in the sling or in the rocker. Lately I’ve sported a few different slings lent to me by my friend Bonnie, as well as the Baby Bjorn, the Ergo, the Moby, and another little peanut sling… Asher and I definitely have our preferences when it comes to carriers, but that’s a whole other post.

If you look closely, you can see that Asher has a bit of a mohawk happening. :)

Check out what others are wearing this summer here.

Asher Cam!

2011-08-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

Caution: this is a techie post (you’ve been warned). We’ve been talking for several months about our baby monitor situation. We really liked the idea of being able to SEE Asher through the monitor; that way if he was making a noise, we could see if his eyes were open, if he was thrashing around, or if he was just fine and we could leave him be. The problem is that those flippin’ video monitors are way too expensive! So, we decided before Asher was born that we would get a standard audio monitor for cheap on eBay, and then later on I would see what I could do to rig up a camera.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that day has come. Feast your eyes on this :)

That’s right, folks, that’s Asher on my iPhone. I got a Wireless IP Camera on eBay, (which is basically just a webcam that you don’t have to plug into a computer, it just connects directly to a wifi signal) and now we can just walk around the house (or the garden) and check on him whenever from the phone or computer. Also, the room above is pitch black, and you’ll notice he’s still visible… that’s because the camera can see infrared in the dark :). Don’t worry, though… the whole system is perfectly secure and doubly password protected.

I have to say, sometimes this tech stuff doesn’t work like it’s supposed to (more often than not)… but in this case, I’m quite pleased with myself.

Asher now and then

2011-08-27T14:48:00.001+01:00

Well, very little in our lives has changed over the past week or so, which is saying a LOT considering the seismic shift that was each of the previous weeks. Our routine, or lack thereof, is at least more consistently erratic, and Asher is sleeping, for the most part, very well at night.

As for Asher, he is now seven weeks old. He is growing. A lot! We figure he weighs about 11 pounds now, and has grown about 3 inches longer since he was born. As an illustration of that… here he is on the day he was born wearing his super cute cloud sleepsuit.

And here is at six weeks old… um, your tummy’s poochin’ out of your clothes, son. Not only that, but he’s almost too long for it! I can’t believe it!

The cheeks have definitely gotten fatter along with the belly (and everything else). Here’s the cheeks on day one:

And here’s day 46… whoa, that really makes him look fat, doesn’t it :).

He’s opening his eyes wider and looking at the camera a little better now…

He’s also opening his mouth a little wider and talking a little louder now…

His hands are unfolding a little more, and he’s almost gotten the hang of the iphone… he’s like, “Daddy, I’m just too cool for school with these iphones, aren’t I?”

But, in the end, he’s still very tiny and needs to be kept very warm… this may be a little overboard, but I was afraid he was cold :)!

The Happy Honda Lives Again!

2011-08-18T21:03:00.001+01:00

Well, the other day I went out to the Happy Honda to make a quick trip to the Thai place just down the street to pick up our dinner. Now, I have to be honest… nearly every time I’ve started the Happy Honda since we got her, I’ve given her a ‘good game’ pat on the dashboard when she starts up. I did that because I knew it would just be a matter of time before she gave out… she is, after all, 21 years old.

Sure enough, I tried to start her up, and she wouldn’t even try to turn over. “Oh, no,” I thought, “it’s over.” But after a quick look around I surmised that my problem was most likely just a dead battery. The back left door had been left slightly ajar and the dome light was on. Usually that’s not quite enough to kill a battery, but we don’t drive our car every day, or even every other day, so who knows how long it was on.

As a rule, I usually say that things like this always happen at the worst possible moment. But, perhaps as a testament to my never-failing positivity, the first thing I thought after I got out of the car was, “Well, all in all, this is probably the best time for this to happen.” After all, I wasn’t going on an urgent errand, I was just headed to get Thai food; I wasn’t headed far, the place was easily within biking distance; it wasn’t raining or freezing cold, it was a lovely Cambridge summer evening, and the bike ride down Sidgwick Avenue was quiet, peaceful, and pretty.

The next day I set out to fix the car. Step 1: find another car to jump mine; step 2: find jumper cables. As luck would have it, some friends of ours (Sarah and Joel) are out of town and we happened to have their car keys, so step 1 was covered. Step 2 was a little more complicated, as we don’t know very many people who have cars, and none of them have jumper cables. After a couple of days searching, I stumbled upon some today, and was able to get the job done with minimal hassle. In fact, Candice and I made a lunch date out of it… since the car needed to be driven for a while to charge the battery, we drove to a shopping center and left the car on while I ran into Subway for sandwiches. Asher was in the back just chilling in his car seat.

I’ll give it to you straight, folks… when it comes to blog posts, I tend to have a flair for the dramatic… and a dead car battery has such potential for being a dramatic blog post… but in this case, bringing the Happy Honda back to life was… well… ~~almost~~ enjoyable.

I’ll leave you with my favorite picture from today… sleeping on daddy’s chest:

The many faces of Asher Henry

2011-08-17T11:57:00.001+01:00

For the most part, when taking a picture of someone, you try to get them smiling. Sometimes it’s cooler if you get a sort of half smile or sexy smolder, and occasionally you’ll have what’s called a ‘crazy’ picture, where people make funny faces. Well, taking pictures of Asher is like trying to take one normal looking photo in between a hundred of the crazy faces he makes. So we thought we’d take a look at some of these faces and see what we could make of them…

“Hello, mama’s phone, Asher here.”
or
“Hey girl, I gots to go, Ihit you back latah.”

“<burp>”

“Grglgrgl… oh yeah, mama… that’s the good stuff…”

“Goooooooooooal!!”

“Muah ha ha ha, the world is mine I tell you, mine!”

“What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”

“What’d you say about my mama, fool?!”

“What with these powers… I could rule the WORLD!”
or
“What is this thing attached to my arm?”

“Haaaaay party people!”

“You’re gonna wear THOSE shoes with THAT?! … whatever.”

“Shhh… I just pooed and they have NO idea… he he he :).”

Photo of the day, Aug 15th

2011-08-15T22:16:00.003+01:00

Gotta love this face :)

A note on regular blog maintenance

2011-08-15T10:59:00.001+01:00

Some of you may have noticed that our blog has received a much needed makeover, featuring a slick new background and color scheme. We also made a couple of changes to make room on our blog for our new addition... you might notice Asher's name now appears in the page header, and the title in your browser tab/window is no longer "Collin and Candice," but just "thebullards".

On a related note, for those of you who read mainly from your phone, I've enabled a "mobile" version of our blog that will automatically load when you go to our blog from an iPhone (or similar device)... it looks like this:

It’s obviously much easier to read and scroll through the list of recent posts; it’s also easier to comment and switch between posts (you can swipe left or right to move to older or newer posts). On the other hand, if for some reason you prefer to view the regular site, just scroll to the bottom and tap “view web version”, and you can view the full blog in all it’s glory… like this:

That’s all for the updates… thanks for reading!

2011-08-12T22:02:00.004+01:00

I am totally loving this picture today... lov--ing--it.

As a side note... I'm also very into the photo corners at the moment. It makes it feel nostalgic :).

Visitors: Part 2

2011-08-11T15:46:00.001+01:00

After Candice’s dad and sister left, my aunt, Donna, came into town a couple of days later. We were very glad for the extra help, since Asher was only two weeks old when she got here and we still didn’t have everything figured out (by a long shot). Here are some highlights:

One of the main events of Donna’s trip was our house move. Some of you will remember that when we moved out of the vicarage, we moved into a temporary flat at Tyndale House where we would stay until we moved into a more permanent place at Tyndale House. Well, we did. We moved into our flat when Asher was just 16 days old, so, needless to say, it was our most disorganized move yet.

Donna helped us get everything packed and ready to go, and then was basically a rock star at organizing and decorating for the rest of her trip. A big part of the organization was our trip to Ikea; I won’t get into the details, because you can read about that trip here. Putting the Ikea stuff together requires something like a PhD in diagram reading, which, thanks to my years of experience in Lego building, I have. Even though putting the six drawer dresser together took the better part of two days (with plenty of Asher interruptions), I enjoyed it a lot because it reminded me of childhood Legos. Hanging stuff on the walls was also fun because I got to use my drill… a lot. Asher tried to help daddy, but he got sleepy real quick: “Gah-lee, guys! All this moving has me tuckered out.”

Asher really enjoyed getting to hang out with aunt Donna…

After several days of moving drama, we finally got out of the house and showed Donna a little bit of the Cambridge summer… the gardens were beautiful…

We had high tea outdoors at a nice English tea spot called the Orchard…

And had a little trouble figuring out how to get Asher into his car seat… Donna snapped this picture, just one instance out of many where I’m sure she had a good laugh at us trying to get the knack of parenthood.

Doing things like tea at the Orchard was made easier with the extra help. We tried to take advantage of our outnumbering Asher 3 to 1 by going out as often as we could. We took Donna to some of the pubs/restaurants that we like, which helped to make us feel less cooped up in the house.

We were happy that she came, and very grateful for all the help, especially considering that it’s no easy (nor cheap) feat to get over here.

Going to town

2011-08-10T21:54:00.001+01:00

The thing about carrying a tiny baby around town is that you start to notice that everyone is looking at you. It’s weird… usually one of the reasons Candice and I like walking into town is because the people watching is so great; this time of year there are tourists from all over the world, and they make for really funny and interesting entertainment. In the past, we could walk through town in relative obscurity, analyzing and talking about people without really being noticed. The problem with watching people when you have a cute baby strapped to your chest is that everyone starts looking at you, so your people watching cover is effectively blown.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty fun. It must be what really good looking people or movie stars feel like when they walk through a crowd. People will just stare at Asher cuddled up in his little carrier and as they pass I’ll hear them whisper something like “Ahhh, precious” under their breath. Today, I was walking behind two women and one of them caught a glance of Asher, she turned to the other lady and said, “Have you seen this baby behind us? So cute!“ The checkout lady at the grocery store couldn’t resist striking up a conversation; the lady in Subway making our sandwiches was so overwhelmed she had to tell us that she was pregnant (and only a few weeks in and hasn’t told anybody). The bank teller couldn’t stop staring, and the Gap employee gave googly eyes every time she passed us in the store. It’s really incredible.

Another part of the whole gig that I find equally interesting is that people are extremely nice to us now. Not that people weren’t generally nice to us before; but it seems that now servers in restaurants are quicker about bringing us the check and people in general are just friendlier and more delighted to talk to you. It’s like having the baby instantly garners the goodwill of everyone around you. That lady in the Gap today was like, “Why don’t you sit over here instead of standing with him.” I’ve never been offered a seat while waiting for Candice to try on clothes in my life!

Now, obviously WE think our Asher is gorgeous, but I don’t think that’s the only reason people stare or are friendly. I have a theory about why this is… on the one hand, there are women who are pre-children whose ovaries are jumping as soon as they see your baby. They are kind because they’ve just been hit with the “motherly mood”. On the other hand, there are those who have had children… they are admiring your baby, sure enough… but they are essentially nice to you because they have a special pity for you. The first question is always, “How old?” When we say five weeks, they look at him and say, “Oh, five weeks… bless him.” Then they look at us and think, “Oh, five weeks… poor things.”

Visitors! Part 1

2011-08-06T14:43:00.001+01:00

Candice’s dad and sister (Ray and Cara) had been planning to come see Asher from the moment they found out we were expecting. We had thought we would have almost three weeks with Asher before they got here, but when the little guy was 12 days late, it turned out that he was only six days old when they arrived! This meant that we were especially chaotic and scattered during their visit; in the end, this worked out to be a good thing, since we were especially grateful for the help and company at such a crazy time. Here’s some highlights:

Of course, Asher loved hanging out with his Aunt Cara…

Out for a stroll with Asher in the Moby wrap…

Proud Papa holding grandson number 3!

On Sunday, we got out of the house and went for a quick tour around Cambridge. We ate out for the first time since we had Asher; he slept basically the whole time and pretty much missed out on his first trip to a restaurant… he didn’t seem to mind.

Here’s mom and Aunt Cara doting over that day’s “little monkey” outfit.

On a separate note, it just so happened that the Open Championship (big British golf tournament) coincided quite nicely with the visit, so as a Father’s Day gift to Ray, we got tickets to go watch the tournament on Saturday. Ray and I drove down to Kent and spent the day at Royal St. George’s golf course watching the pros :). We watched Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler play most of their back nine, and spotted countless others as well. It was a fun day, despite me being a little sad to be away from Asher and Candice. We were decked out in our rain gear, since it was a brutally windy and rainy day. By the end of the day, though, the rain cleared off and the sun peeked through the clouds onto the 16th green, where we watched several pairs play through.

The trip went by much too quickly, and before we knew it, we were driving them to the airport. We were sad to see them go, but very happy that they were able to meet our sweet little guy.

Ikea

2011-08-05T15:04:00.001+01:00

My Aunt Donna came to visit us for about a week to help us with Asher, and lucky for us, her trip happened to coincide with a rather hectic move from the temporary flat we were in to our more permanent home.

After moving in and seeing that we had a lot stuff to fit in a very small space; we decided to go to Ikea to get some things with which to organize it all. On our way to Ikea, everything seemed to be going wrong for us. It was a Saturday and we thought this would give us a break from the commuter traffic around London. I didn’t have any gas, so we stopped at the services around Stansted Airport. Apparently, this was a huge mistake. It took us nearly an hour to get through the one way loop system at the services. An hour to get gas! Ridiculous! It must have been because it was a Saturday during school holidays or something… and then around London we hit pretty bad construction traffic… so it took us nearly 2 ½ hours to make a 1 hour trip. Very annoying.

Finally, we rolled into Ikea. Just in time, too, because Asher was getting ultra hungry. Donna had never been to an Ikea and honestly, it can be rather daunting at first. We had a lot of things to think about between all of the various ideas we had for organizing different rooms. We debated on how and where we would hang things; what we would put on which shelves; what would look good where. This is very difficult because Ikea requires you to write down and keep track of everything you like in the “showroom” so that you can locate it later in the “market hall”. It’s actually pretty hard if you’re buying a lot of stuff.

It took us a couple of hours to make our way through the store, and Asher seemed alright, since he had been fed right when we got there. The rest of us were probably feeling a little less than 100% since Candice and I hadn’t slept since Asher was born (grant me the hyperbole) and Donna was still recovering from jet lag. By the time we got to the check out area, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and were very ready to get out of Ikea.

At this point, Candice wasn’t feeling very good. Her breasts were feeling very engorged and painful. Candice has been pumping (a whole other story) and just the day before we had acquired the key to our pumping success: a giant breast pump (the pump itself was giant, not necessarily the breasts… although, at this point, let’s be honest). (Smaller, battery operated pumps wouldn’t work… another long story… we needed the pump that was piston driven and had 300 horsepower!) So we hadn’t been doing the pumping thing for very long, just about a day, and we weren’t really experienced with judging the timings between pumps. We had also expected the trip to Ikea to take about half the time, so we were in the store a little longer than expected. At the self-service hall, where you’re supposed to look up the larger items you saw and go get them off the shelf, we split up. I was left with the basket to get the remaining items (dresser, shelves, etc.); Donna and Candice were going to the car to get the typewriter (the breast pump- which we call “the typewriter” because the giant plastic carrying case resembles the case for an old style typewriter). After they got Candice situated, I was supposed to meet Donna at checkout.

I quickly went to the computer and started searching for the location of some of the items. I soon found out that one of the key items we wanted, the shelves, were located about 5 miles back through the winding path of the store in the “Home Organization” section. It took forever to find the shelves and even longer trying to sort out which shelf in which color went with which left, right, and center brackets (all sold separately and in different piles).

I finally felt like I had the goods when Candice called and said that she was inside a changing room with the pump, but they had left the collecting bottles in the car, so she still wasn’t able to start pumping. Donna didn’t have a phone, so we couldn’t call to see where she was, but she was probably wondering around the self-service hall searching for me… and I wasn’t there. I went as fast as I could back to the checkout, with the shelves falling off my basket the whole way, since I couldn’t get the proper flatbed cart for larger items, since I couldn’t push it and the basket at the same time. I found Donna, holding a screaming Asher, obviously hungry. I left the basket with her and ran to the car to get the bottles and stuff. Finally back in the room with Candice, we set it all up. I sent Donna back in with Asher so he could eat and to help Candice while I went to get the chest of drawers, the medicine cabinet, and the mattress topper from the self-service aisles. Finally, I made it back to checkout; Donna came out and told me that Candice was feeding Asher on her right side but they STILL weren’t pumping, because they couldn’t get the electrical outlets to work in that room. I guess they had disabled some of the publicly accessible outlets so that people couldn’t use their electricity. All the while Candice’s left breast was growing worse and worse; getting harder to the touch and red all over (all bad signs); and she was getting a bit panicky. We checked out; went to get the car; loaded the car with all our crap (a lot of stuff!).

Now… where were we going to pump Candice’s left breast? (Let’s pause for a moment at that question and reflect on how very changed our lives are!)

We decided to head back into the store and find another changing room with outlets. Donna went in to scout; she found outlets on the first floor… they didn’t work. I went to try to explain our situation to one of the staff members to see if there was a place she knew of where we could get electricity… this was the strangest conversation I’ve ever had with anybody; and I’m sure no less strange for her. Some frantic dude running up to her and saying something about giant, infected breasts, a pump, and no electricity! She was no help, she just looked stunned and I didn’t have time to explain any further; I needed to take action!

There was a first aid room across the hall… Candice went to speak to the Ikea people this time. “Please, man! You don’t understand! My breast will explode if you don’t help!” There was an Ikea staff member opening the first aid room within 90 seconds. Sure enough, there were outlets… this was it! Nope… even the outlets in the first aid room were not working! How is this possible?! This is the room where you treat injuries… tell me, people… where would you plug in the defribulator? Wherever that is, that’s where you need to take me!

The Ikea employees were dumbfounded… they had a lady with a giant, swollen left breast that was close to getting infected if not exploding; a pump so big it looks like a karaoke machine; and no apparent explanation why none of their electric outlets would work. At this point, I knew we were at zero hour… it had to be now. This had gone on long enough. We had wasted enough time and every hour that passed was critical... Candice was holding it together, but I knew she was on the verge of a breakdown. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I set out into the huge Ikea on one mission… find electricity! Anywhere! I mean, c’mon people, there a thousand displays with bedrooms and kitchens that all have light and you’re telling me there’s no place to plug in a breast pump! I went upstairs to another set of changing rooms… room 1, nothing; room 2, nothing; room 3, eureka! Outlets! Now to plug in the breast pump… it worked! I was thrilled. I ran down the stairs like my pants were on fire, the giant typewriter swinging in my arms as I sprinted passed Donna and shouted, “I found electricity!” People were definitely staring; we must have looked ridiculous running about with a breast pump like idiots.

I got Candice, all our stuff, and we ran upstairs only to find the changing room occupied. This was the last straw! Are you kidding me! There was a lady in there with her toddler, and she was just standing around looking puzzled, asking her husband if they had extra trousers. He left to find some in their car and she was just waiting for him to get back. What felt like an eternity passed, and we were like crazy people at the end of our rope, and I just knew Candice was going to lose it, barge into the changing room and just start screaming at the lady to “Get out! Get out! Get out now! Now! NOW!” When the lady finally came out, the most awful smell of crap came with her… perfect… the one room in Ikea that holds the solution to our problem is the crap room. The changing room smelled as awful as you could imagine it smelling… but who cares at this point? Just plug in the typewriter and keep this left breast from exploding. We got it all sorted, both of us trying to breathe shallow so that we inhaled as little crap as possible. I looked at Candice and said, “Honey, do you think at some point in the distant future we’ll look back on all this and laugh?” She looked at me, at her left breast, and back at me; a grim look was on her face… I saw her hand twitch and I could see her toying with the thought of putting the pump directly over my mouth.

Just then the air freshening system, located directly across and about 3 feet away from Candice, turned on and sprayed the room with mist. It was the most awful, cheap, musky, air freshener smell ever, and combined with the strong smell of crap from the Satan child, it was unbearable. I stood at the door holding Asher and waited for the hall to be clear so I could open the door quickly enough to waft some fresh air into the room.

This was it; take a picture, folks… our low point. Candice in the crap room, looking pitiful, hair all frazzled, trying not to breathe, sitting on a tiny stool next to the trash can trying to reduce the swelling, pumping away. Me, clutching my two week old son and rapidly opening and closing the door to the hall in order to catch a breath.

Finally, after it was all said and done… we packed it up and sat down in the café with Aunt Donna; we were exhausted, and really questioned why we had been so foolish to think we could make a trip to Ikea in our condition. We felt like we were barely functioning. Afterwards, the mood lightened up considerably. We went to TGI Fridays; had a drink; had nachos, ribs and shrimp… and then had a peaceful, easy drive home.

Asher’s birthday according to Dad

2011-08-03T17:13:00.001+01:00

I woke up Tuesday (July 5) morning to Candice getting back into bed from the bathroom. Since we were at 40 weeks + 11 days, I had already asked like a thousand times, “What?! What is it?!” whenever Candice would gasp, groan, roll over quickly, breathe deeply, or breathe shallowly. Nonetheless, even though I had asked before and knew it was probably nothing, this time I asked and the answer wasn’t ‘nothing’. Something cramp-like was happening inside and it was joined by something called ‘the show’ on the outside. At this point, though, she was sure to dismiss it quickly because it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

It was a really nice day outside, so we got out and about to walk and distract ourselves a little… watched some ‘Lost’, ate ice cream, etc. Around mid-afternoon, Candice was still having pain, so I started making some mental preparations for things that needed to be done… first things first, I put two baked potatoes in the oven… we would need to eat and I didn’t want us to have to cook anything.

I was super psyched at dinner because I got to use my “Contractions” iPhone app for the first time to start timing Candice’s contractions! Exciting! (The contractions were exciting; the iPhone app was a bonus.) They were 10 mins apart. I suggested a bath and a paracetamol (Tylenol)… relaxation is supposed to help the labor progress a little more quickly, although I’m skeptical that there’s really anything you can do to help, hinder, or bring about the labor stuff… we’d tried everything already to try and get things started and nothing worked.

Candice wasn’t really aware that her labor was progressing as quickly as it was. I was staring at the numbers on my phone, and it was pretty clear… just a couple of hours later, we settled in for some sleep and my phone was telling me that the contractions were coming on more frequently, about 7-8 mins apart and getting measurably closer with every hour.

I slept like a baby, and felt a little guilty when I woke up to Candice, in pain, having more serious contractions and saying she’d given up on sleep because they kept coming. I reached for my phone and started timing again as I drew another bath and lit some candles to try and help Candice relax. While she was in the tub, I realized that it was nearly go time… they tell you when you have 3 contractions in 10 minutes, come to the hospital. Well, the contractions were 4-5 minutes apart, which is really close. So we called the hospital and I talked to the midwife… I don’t think the midwife was very happy about talking to me, and maybe it’s unusual for the husband to be doing the talking, but Candice was bent over with pain every 4 minutes and wasn’t really into chatting it up… besides, I think the midwife wanted to know things like frequency and strength, which I readily gave and tried to explain how my phone was helping me keep track (just kidding). She asked what we’d done about pain relief and I gave her the schpeal about trying paracetamol and a bath.

Just about 30 minutes later, Candice was like, “Let’s go.” And I was like, “Dude!” This was my moment! Bill Cosby talks about running out to the garage to get in his Ferrari, doing 110 in the driveway to the door, ready to zoom to the hospital. This was my chance to run out of the house with bags flying and engines roaring, but it was a little less dramatic in the Happy Honda. It was 2:30 something in the morning and we were headed to the hospital to have a baby; my adrenaline was pumping, but at the same time I was praying to myself, “Please, Lord, don’t let them tell us to come back home.” We’ve had friends go to the hospital here and be turned back repeatedly because they’re not in ‘active’ labor or weren’t far enough along. The midwife gave Candice a warning on the phone… she told me, “That midwife just told me I might not be in ‘active’ labor…” and her face was like, “Shut up, you crazy bi*%$!”

I kept timing the contractions all the way to the hospital: 3 minutes apart… that’s the golden number, surely they wouldn’t turn us away. Candice could barely walk at this point, so I drove up to the door before driving to the car park and running back to meet Candice at the front. We rang the buzzer to get in the hospital and I was like, “Let us in! My wife’s having a baby!” (Seriously, how many times do you get to say that!) He was the lamest security guy ever, he lectured me for a minute about driving in the wrong way on a one way loop to drop Candice off at the door… I was like, “Forget you dude! I have no idea what you’re talking about, just let us in!”

We got into the delivery unit; the midwife came to check us out. I felt like we were taking a test and had to perform well otherwise they wouldn’t let us stay. They checked Candice: 4 cm dilated! Yippee! They put the monitors on her: super intense contractions every 3 minutes! Yowza, they were really hurting her, but at least we weren’t going to be turned away. We passed the ‘active’ labor test with flying colors and we were well on our way to having the little guy that night!

At this point, I was so excited to see the numbers on my phone getting closer and closer together, I didn’t notice Candice telling me, very kindly, that I didn’t need to time the contractions anymore. I sent some text messages out to tell people we were in the hospital, then we waited. They were cleaning a delivery room for us, which took about 45 minutes, and in the meantime, the midwife wanted to talk about pain relief. Before she even finished her sentence, Candice was like, “Epidural! I want an epidural now!” The midwife got the picture, and while we were waiting gave Candice the ‘gas and air’. It was good stuff, and Candice started feeling the effects pretty quickly. The midwife’s name was Annette, and Candice says, “Annette, will you be here all night?” She replies, “My shift ends at 8am, so someone else will be with you then.” And Candice turns to me and says, “Will you tell Annette that I want her to stay? Tell her she can’t leave.” I did, and Annette was very kind, but said she wouldn’t be staying.

When we finally got into the delivery room, the midwife started setting up to do Candice’s IV. This is where things started getting really intense. Candice is sucking on this gas and air, and every few minutes these really brutal contractions are just making her crawl all over the place trying to cope with the pain. I’m trying to encourage her, telling her, “Good job. Almost done with that one. You’re doing great.” It’s all we can do to maintain… and now the midwife is saying, “okay, this is going to hurt a bit,” and we try to keep Candice’s arm still while she puts a HUGE IV needle into her vein… Candice was saying, “No, wait, don’t do it while I’m having a contraction!” I’m saying, “You can do this honey, you’re doing great.” And the midwife is like, “Nope, I’m doing it now, the contraction will distract you from what I’m doing.” Then Candice just looked at me with pleading eyes and the big gas tube thing pressed tightly in her lips. She would breathe through it and then wail a little through the tube… it was so intense!

After the IV, we got a little break before the anesthetist came in to give the epidural, and Candice started getting a little more loopy on the gas. She would pucker up her lips a little bit every time she took the gas thing out of her mouth… I think the gas was making her extremities tingle a little bit. She would smack her lips like she had just drunk a fine wine and had her lips pursed out trying to taste it repeatedly… I had to turn away to laugh when she made the face, because it’s not cool to laugh in the face of a woman in labor, no.matter.what.

The intensity picked back up when the anesthetist arrived… Candice is writhing on the bed and the lady is telling us all these things that can go wrong with an epidural… I’m pretty sure paralysis and other crazy stuff was in there, but Candice was like, “Where do I sign! Give me the gravy!” Then the anesthetist, Anna, said, “Okay, let’s do it.” And she and the midwife and I sprung into action… they were turning Candice to sit on the side of the bed… I was trying to hold her gas contraption and keep my hands on her shoulders at all times so that she stayed perfectly still while Anna inserted a giant needle in between two vertebrae in Candice’s back… Candice was arching her back out like a cat and trying to remain stone still through these really brutal contractions… and just when a really bad contraction set in… Anna says, “Okay, whatever you do, don’t move, I’ve got a huge needle in your back.” We both froze, even though I didn’t even have to be still; I stopped breathing.

Half an hour later… Candice was pretty much pain free, chatting it up with Annette and Anna about their kids and how they both thought epidurals were the only way to do this birthing business.

About an hour after that they gave Candice the hormone that made her contractions even more full on so that it pushes the baby down into the go position. The only thing was, after a little while, Candice slowly started to recover feeling and now was having these even more brutal contractions without the help of the epidural. Quickly, another anesthetist came in and fixed the problem, and then the midwife came back in and examined her… to our surprise… 10 cm! The midwife was like, “Alright then, that’s it. You’re about to have a baby.”

Everything up to that point had been a little bit surreal… mostly because everything you do for 9 months is basically just an exercise in preparation… even the going to the hospital and getting the epidural, you’re just preparing… it’s like you’re waiting at the starting line to run a race for 9 months and then someone just says, “Okay, go!”

Sure enough, it was go time. Suddenly, the action was palpable and the intensity knob was cranked up to 11. Two doctors, the midwife, me and Candice, and a pediatrician all waiting to see the little guy. The doctor said Asher’s heart rate was low and that they were going to use the vacuum pump… Candice turned to me and said, “What is that doctor’s name?” I said, “Deepa.” With a little bit of a droopy eye, she gave me this incredulous look and said, “Nuh-uh!” As if I were making that name up and trying to fool her. It was funny.

One doctor was getting the pump ready; the midwife was watching the monitor and telling Candice to push; I was telling her, “Go, go, go!”; the other doctor was checking where Asher’s head was and giving us a play by play on the progress. Candice was holding her breath to push, I was yelling and pressing my head up against hers so she didn’t have to watch the doctors pulling on this vacuum thing that was connected to Asher’s head. There was a loud, “POP!” and Candice cried out. The doctor had pulled so hard on the vacuum that it had popped off… it startled all of us… but they just reattached it and kept going. Candice pushing, the doctor pulling, all of us yelling… and the doctor says, “Look down here dad! The head!” This was the first time I got a full view of the brutality… so much blood, Asher’s head was coming out, things looked crazy and terrifying… the cord was wrapped around his neck and his head was just… there. There he was, just waiting for the next contraction and push and he would be out. He looked fine, unphased, just waiting. I told Candice I saw him and she kept asking how he looked and if he was okay… I told her was perfect and fine… then the final push, I looked… all of a sudden he was coming out quickly, shoulders, back, bottom (teeny tiny bottom), and legs… then a huge amount of blood, tissue, and gunk followed and splattered all over the floor…

There we were, in the middle of what seemed like a bloodbath in this room that just a moment ago was terrifying and chaotic… holding our son. He was alert and responsive… eyes open, looking right back at us like, “Who are you guys and why is it so cold and bright out here?” And we were like, “Look at you! You’re here. We made you! You’re so perfect and wonderful. We love you.” It was amazing to finally meet him; absolutely terrifying and beautiful. It was probably the most intense experience of my life; every different emotion you could possibly imagine all happening at once. Life just isn’t the same afterwards… and never will be.

Asher’s birthday, Part 2

2011-08-02T18:04:00.001+01:00

All of a sudden there was the midwife, two doctors for me, a pediatrician for the babe and a nurse in the room. The intensity level and the noise level both went up about ten notches and I could feel the anxiety seeping out of Collin. I was shaking uncontrollably (was it nerves? or the drugs?) and hanging on to Collin. The doctors were getting all set up and preparing for the delivery.

Doctor Deepa said she wanted to use the ventouse (vacuum) to get him out quickly so she and Doctor Sandra went to work getting it ready. I thought it was pretty lame that they were going to use the vacuum without me even trying to get him out, but of course I just wanted him to arrive safely. They checked and told me that his head was in position, rotated the right way, and ready to come out. So I asked, “Can I at least try to push him out?” Doctor Deepa said, “Well, you’re welcome to give it a go while I get this all ready, but as soon as we’re ready to take him, we’re going to get him out.” So now that everyone had the game plan, the midwife looked at the monitor and said, “Okay, this is it, a contraction’s coming on… and…. PUSH!”

And there we were, just like every Hollywood movie you’ve ever seen (only they typically skip right to this part in the movies)… the midwife on my left, Collin on my right, and the two doctors down below all yelling in unison, “Push! You can do it! That’s a good one, I can feel his head coming down, keep pushing!” I was pushing as hard as I could push, but I couldn’t feel anything, so I couldn’t tell if it was doing any good or not.

Then we would rest; with the contraction finished they would all go about preparing and checking heart rates. It was chaotic, and through the chaos every couple of minutes the midwife would shout, “Here we go!” And I would push all over again. This only lasted for a few contractions until Deepa had everything in place. Then we waited for a contraction, I would push, and one of the doctors would pull down on that little vacuum pump. This went on for a few minutes until the midwife shouted something about the baby’s head coming out! They kept telling dad to “look down here and see your son”. With the head out, only one more contraction and it would all be over… sure enough, without really knowing what all was going on and everything happening so fast, after the next contraction everyone in the room shouted and there he was, our little Asher Henry, cradled up on my chest like a little perfect bundle of wonderfulness. The cord had been wrapped around his neck, and they think that’s what was causing the dip in his heart rate; but he was absolutely perfect. In between the cuddles and ooohs and aaahs, Collin and I just kept saying, “Here he is, look at him, he’s so perfect, he’s so tiny!” He didn't cry much and I kept asking if he was okay, even though somehow I knew he was just fine. Soon the pediatrician had him and did a quick check to make sure everything was good… of course, he was great and there were no problems at all. And he looked just beautiful.

Collin immediately turned into an amazing daddy, soothing and caring for us both. Asher was really gorgeous, with lots of brown hair and the smoothest, most perfect skin. He felt so tiny to us, weighing 7 pounds and 3 ounces. We were beside ourselves with relief and joy and love for our little one. We felt so blessed to have this sweet boy as our son. The three of us spent the next several hours in the birthing room cuddled together while I recuperated a bit and Collin sent messages to family and friends.

Later in the afternoon I was moved to a new bed in a room with 5 other women and their new babies (!) and Collin had to leave because they don’t allow partners to stay overnight… and that’s when our peaceful cocoon began to crack. We’ll be back with more on the aftershocks of labor and delivery…

Asher’s birthday

2011-08-01T22:51:00.001+01:00

Our babe was 12 days overdue and had given us no indication that he was making a move out of the womb and into the world. I was scheduled to go into the hospital on Wednesday to be induced and we anticipated a long labor with a lot of time to hang out. We bought raspberry yogurt bars for the occasion, we made a 'Having Asher' playlist full of soothing music, and we decided it would be great to have some of Collin's famous chocolate chip cookies while we waited. Collin had the video camera and tripod all ready, and a complex system of communication in place to let our family and friends know what was happening. In the end, we didn't have time for any of those things.

I woke up on Tuesday, July 5th at 5.30am feeling like something was different about my body and having some minor pains. We spent the day hanging out, watching Lost, resting, and taking short walks. I didn't think I was having contractions, but rather just some pre-labor crampiness. This would have been the perfect time to dig into those yogurt bars, but after waiting so long for labor to arrive, I wasn't going to allow myself to believe that this could really be it and then be disappointed. By early evening, I noticed that Collin was starting to gather things for his hospital man bag which held the camera, tripod, video camera, computer, chargers... you know, all things techy that would allow him to document the birth of our son and communicate with family and friends. When he insisted that we eat an early dinner and told me I really needed to eat because I probably wouldn't feel like it later, I thought he was being overly optimistic about how fast labor would progress, after all, some people are in labor for days, and I didn't want to be one of those women who says, "OMG I'm in labor!", but then is sent home from the hospital because they weren't in "real" labor. I listened to him, thinking that his judgement of the situation was probably a bit clearer than mine after a long, tiring day. After a nice dinner of grilled chicken and baked potatoes we took a short walk, but I felt pretty vulnerable and didn't want to stray too far from home. We walked down the road a bit, stopping whenever I'd have a contraction. We actually passed some people we know on our walk; at that point the contractions were far enough apart that we chatted for a minute without incident and nobody had a clue. When we got back, the contractions were a little stronger, so we decided to do what all the midwives here say to do for "pain relief": "Take a bath and a paracetamol (Tylenol)." Collin and I stood in the kitchen and he said, “You might think about calling the hospital soon... you are in labor.” I'm pretty sure I just looked at him like he was crazy, thinking this wasn't really it. It must have hit me suddenly because soon I heard myself repeating back to Collin, 'Um, babe, I think I'm in labor'. I had been in denial all day until that point.

We laid down in bed to watch a Lost episode, but I was pausing it every few minutes when a contraction would come, and we finally gave it up. We decided to try to rest for a while. I laid there in bed, sleepy, but every time I'd start to doze off I'd have another contraction. I soon realized there was no possibility of sleep and became frustrated with just laying there through the contractions. I woke Collin up, feeling like things were picking up quickly. He started timing the contractions again; they were closer together than before. I told Collin I couldn't just lie there, so he suggested maybe taking another bath to try to relax a bit. He lit some candles and started the water; I laid in the tub trying to relax, but found myself turning sideways trying to cope with the pain. Meanwhile, the contractions kept coming closer and closer together and were harder to ignore. At this point, Collin said they were close enough together to call the hospital. It was about 1am when Collin called and told the midwife on the phone everything that was happening. The contractions were between 3 and 4 minutes apart and becoming more intense. I heard Collin on the phone, "Yes, we've tried pain relief. Yes, bath and a paracetamol." It was as if that were the magic combination and they wouldn't let you come to the hospital until you'd tried taking a bath and a paracetamol. I couldn't answer questions or think of anything else when a contraction would come. I got on the phone between contractions with the midwife at the end of the conversation and she suggested I try to stay at home for as long as possible and 'snooze' and 'eat and drink' between contractions, and then to call back when we felt like heading to the hospital. We hung up the phone, but just a few minutes later realized that there wouldn't be much more waiting around and definitely no snoozing or eating. Our yogurt bars and chocolate chip cookies would have to wait. We got in the car and called the hospital to let them know we were on our way. The midwife told me to be prepared to go back home because I might 'not be in active labor', to which I responded, 'What do you MEAN I might not be in active labor?!' I don't remember much of the ride to the hospital, except that I was mad at the lady for saying I wasn't in labor and trying to text my family between contractions. Collin seemed to be calm and collected at this point, though I'm sure he was panicking on the inside. We'll have to get his side of the story.

The first midwife we had was called Annette and turned out to be very attentive, competent and patient. She said she would assess me to see if I was progressing well enough to stay, but I think she was soon convinced when a few contractions come on quick and strong. I was 4 centimeters dilated. She listened to the baby's heartbeat and said it was too slow, so immediately strapped on the monitors. I really wasn't a fan of the monitor; the straps were tight and I really didn't need more action going on in the belly region. The doctor came in to watch too. I noticed that Collin still had a death grip on his iPhone and was timing the contractions, which I thought was pretty funny, since we were all watching the contractions on the monitor.

Annette said she would get a room set up for me and then we could discuss options for pain relief. I said something along the lines of “no need, Annette, I'll take a strong cocktail of epidural and gas and air.” All throughout the pregnancy, I thought I would just wait and see how it was going, thinking I would give it a go without the epidural if things were manageable, but had given myself permission to get the epidural if I needed it. In that moment, there was no question in my mind, the epidural could not come fast enough, but the doctor wanted to monitor baby's heart rate for at least half an hour before getting the epidural because of the dips they saw right when we arrived.

Forty-five minutes later, I was letting everyone in the room know that it had been MORE than half an hour and I wanted the darn epidural. After the room had been cleaned and we got all set up, the contractions were pretty intense and I was crawling off the bed every time one hit. It was like I was trying to escape from the pain but couldn't get away from it. Soon enough, the anaesthesiologist came in and read me what seemed like the entire warning label on the side of the epidural bottle. It doesn't really matter what they tell you could happen at this point; because all I heard was, "Blah, blah, blah." It was pretty crazy, but they got the epidural in and there was a sudden calmness in the room and I started chatting it up with the midwife and anaesthesiologist, asking about their children and their own birth experiences. I was finally able to relax for a short while, until I started having more pain. The anaesthesiologist was called back in and determined that the epidural was leaking a bit and I wasn't getting all of the medicine and gave me a 'top up' of a stronger drug. The midwife did some checking and told me we were at 10 centimeters and it was time for our little boy to be born. I was so glad I had gotten that top up at just the right time!

While there had typically only been one midwife in the room with us all night, there was suddenly 5 more people present. I wasn't really sure what was going on, but they told me that our little boy was getting tired in there and it was time for him to come out. His heart rate was dropping again, this time lower than before. I remember wanting to know everyone’s name (don’t ask me why!) and then I started shaking and felt very scared about what was about to happen.

To be continued…

These days

2011-08-01T14:22:00.001+01:00

Haven’t had much time for the blog, as you can tell.

We’ve been busy getting lots of cuddles in while this guy is still teeny tiny… they grow up fast, and it’s already started happening!

Asher’s got a serious case of bed hair going on…

So mommy decided to brush it…

Now it looks nice, but it’s getting more red everyday and starting to look like daddy’s hair!

All in all, Asher’s been very patient with us while we play with him and dress him up in funny clothes…

Seriously, though… how cute!

Ten Thousand Days

2011-07-19T09:23:00.001+01:00

Sunday was my 10,000th day of life. It takes roughly 27 1/2 years to get to 10,000 days, so it’s quite an achievement! I really didn’t think much of it on Sunday. Then yesterday it occurred to me, “Today is ten thousand and one. I wonder what the next 10,000 will be like?” The worlds pre- and post-Asher are about as different as they could be. Essentially, I feel like I had “10,000 Days of Childhood.” The next chapter of life, then, would be something like “10,000 Days of Parenthood.” Farewell childhood, I’m a grown-up now. It’s someone else’s turn to have their “10,000 Days of Childhood,” and I hope his are as good as mine were.

My name is Asher Henry

2011-07-17T18:15:00.001+01:00

I’m only 11 days old today, but I’ve been around dad long enough to figure out how to write a blog post… so here is my first.

On Thursday, my mommy put pants on me for the first time… I wasn’t sure what to think, but I got used to it after a while and started to like them. The pants are blue because I’m a boy.

Here’s me with my aunt Cara, she came to visit me this week. I like her because she reminds me of my mommy.

I went for my first walk with mommy and daddy this week. They’re silly and like to put me in little hats and wrap me up like a burrito strapped to their chest… I pretend to be fussy about it, but I secretly like it.

Aunt Cara and my Papa came on the walk too; here we all are in Selwyn College.

There are a few things that I like to do… besides wee-ing and poo-ing, I like being cuddled… here I am on daddy’s chest, thinking about how crazy the last 11 days have been.

Here’s me in my ‘little monkey’ outfit, doing my best monkey impression.

Daddy got a little carried away earlier; he was saying something about the Lion King… I didn’t really know what was going on, but I went with it anyway… daddy seemed to think it was funny.

Sometimes I get upset and daddy tries to comfort me… but daddy just doesn’t have what I need sometimes :).

I took a bath the other night, and I decided that I like the water… hehe, water’s funny.

Cambridge family

2011-07-12T14:37:00.001+01:00

We are planning to look back and share the story of Asher’s birth, but for now, this is what’s happening. Our sweet Asher is 6 days old today and we are so grateful for his safe arrival. He is strong and healthy and beyond gorgeous. I know he’s a boy, so I should say he’s handsome or good looking, but beautiful seems to be the best way to describe him. We just keep saying ‘he’s so pretty and tiny.’ :)

The last 6 days have been amazing in a lot of ways, but they have also been very hard, long days and nights. Feeding our little man has turned into quite the challenge that we weren’t expecting. Because of this little (okay, big) trial, we have been left depleted and a bit unable to care for ourselves while caring for our sweet boy. Thankfully, our friends in Cambridge have proven to be our stand-in family over the past week.

Just yesterday, after an incredibly difficult night and morning with no food and no sleep, our friends, once again, showed love and practical care for us. One couple appeared with the diapers and pain killers that we needed from the shop in town and then held Asher while we ate some lunch. Literally minutes later, two friends showed up, hugged me and sent me upstairs with Asher while they cleaned our entire flat, including the not-so-fun jobs like changing sheets and vacuuming the stairs. Another family showed up for a brief visit, bringing gifts and snacks. These two are veteran parents and were able to tell us that what we are experiencing is normal and that it will get better. They were soon followed by other friends who brought us an amazing, hot, homemade dinner. I know this sounds like a lot of people in and out, and it was, but in the moment, it was exactly what we needed. Sure, there are days when we need quiet and no interruptions. But yesterday, we needed help.

Our friends have seen us at our worst in the past few days, desperate for sleep and food, emotional, looking like two people who had forgotten how to shower. They are patient with us when we are consumed with our own world and forget that they have their own lives happening too. They have extended us grace and provided more practical support than I could have imagined. Most of all, they have loved us and confirmed our suspicions that Asher is truly amazing. :)

Asher Henry

2011-07-10T10:20:00.001+01:00

We waited so long to meet him, and on Wednesday, July 6, 2011, he finally showed up. Here’s the journey to his birthday.

Fourth of July, 2011

2011-07-04T23:26:00.001+01:00

Well, contrary to our hopes, it doesn’t look like our little guy will share a birthday with America… (I’ll bet you people are tired of us blogging about how we’re NOT having a baby… but, believe me, we’ve done our darn’dest to change that). In any case, we had a nice little cookout with some friends this evening, and even though we didn’t have any fireworks to round out the fun, we did have homemade ice cream. Fireworks would be a little anti-climactic in the evening, however, since it still isn’t getting properly dark until about 10:30.

Since the Fourth of July is not a holiday over here, most of our friends had to work today, hence the evening get together instead of an all-day event. Here we are… happy campers after some particularly good BBQ beans and roasted sweet potato fries.

Here’s one of the girls…

One thing you might notice (particularly if you’re reading this in Oklahoma today) is that all of the girls have on a light jacket. That’s because it was a pleasant 72 degrees today and things were cooling off to a crisp 65 degrees for the cookout. We hear it was a sweltering 107 degrees in Oklahoma today… that’s 42 degrees hotter! 42! I can’t even imagine it… your body forgets what that’s like if you don’t feel it for a while. We met a couple of people who had just recently come from the states the other day. They were headed out for an afternoon walk and they both had North Face fleeces on… it was 68 degrees that day, and I had decided that it was a “shorts-and-a-tee-shirt” day. I guess it’s all about what you’re used to.

Happy Fourth of July everybody! Go America!

People are starting to stare…

2011-07-03T22:02:00.001+01:00

9 days overdue! Are you kidding me?! People are starting to stare… we were walking by an ambulance one day and I swear the guy driving the ambulance was eyeing Candice, just waiting to see if she’d go into labor right then. A few days ago, a guy passed her on the street and just shook his head from side to side saying, “Oh no, ohhh… no.”

It’s kind of a funny place to be, though, it’s like everyone is rooting for you, which is really sweet. But at the same time, it’s the only time in my life someone has ever said to me, “Well, I hope the next time we see you guys, you’ll be in the hospital.” What an awful thing to say at any other time. It’s like people are cheering for you to be in pain… wierd .

It’s also impossible to think about much else right now… even my music choices have been influenced. I’ve taken to playing the song “Let’s Hear it for the Boy,” from the hit Broadway musical Footloose, really loud in hopes that he’ll get the message.

Anyways, we’ll see how long this lasts; and I guess it could be worse. Candice is feeling really good, so at least she’s comfortable while we’re waiting :).

41 Weeks

2011-07-01T23:20:00.001+01:00

Today is 41 weeks. Still no baby. We’re watching ‘Lost’ to keep us occupied while we wait to get this show on the road. We made peach ice cream yesterday (yes, with fresh peaches, why would you even ask such a thing?); it’s my consolation for not being able to hold my son yet.

Candice looks amazing, as usual… she’s really good at this pregnancy thing. Way to go, honey… you make it look so easy :).

Also, our tomatoes are coming right along, so that’s cool…

Pictures

2011-06-25T12:56:00.001+01:00

I thought I would put up some pictures to satisfy everyone’s queries about whether Candice still has a baby in her tummy.

Here we are at 39 weeks :)

And here she is today, 40 weeks + 1 day pregnant:

So, as you can see… there’s definitely still a baby in there. And he’s taking his sweet little time, too… maybe he likes keeping everyone in suspense.

Speaking of… everyone has been really sweet… texting and emailing us asking how Candice is doing (one person even asked how I was doing!). We feel like you’re all waiting with us :). One small note, however, about my facebook post a few days ago when I said that we were “ready whenever he was ready”… just to clarify, I was NOT saying that Candice was in labor. I was just saying we were ready and waiting. After I had said that, I realized that I had just ordered some ribs and was really looking forward to eating them, which made me think, “maybe we’re not ready just yet, but in 30 minutes after I finish my ribs, then we’ll be ready”… sorry for the confusion.

40 weeks!

2011-06-24T21:31:00.001+01:00

Well, today Candice is 40 weeks pregnant… and still no action. In fact, the percentage of women who give birth on the exact due date is quite low (so I’ve learned). But I’ve also learned that 80% of women give birth within 10 days of the due date, and, to be honest, this means absolutely nothing to me because it still tells us nothing.

Then again, I quite like the fact that they can’t really predict things like this… it makes it exciting, and, in some way, might be nature’s way of getting you to really want it before it happens. The only statistic that really matters is this: we are 100% having a baby in the imminent, very near future.

I have found myself checking my phone more often when I’m away from Candice, just making sure I haven’t missed any calls… or texts maybe? That would be funny, though, wouldn’t it? I can imagine the autocorrect on the phone making some pretty humorous mistakes with a text message.

Unfortunately, Candice’s phone has been acting up lately, and it won’t keep a signal! If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmm, this sounds like just the sort of situation where Collin would have a backup phone in the drawer for just such an occasion.” You are correct :). Sadly, Candice is not very happy with her £5 phone. There was a time when we all lived very contented lives without iPhones, but now is not that time. Once you’re able to access email, facebook, skype, and everything else on your phone… it’s hard to go back to the standard Nokia where all you’ve got is the “Snake” game. This may sound like a trivial thing to have to go without (and it is, in the big scheme of things), but right now we are really missing our families and friends, and somehow having facebook and email in your pocket helps a little. Also, Candice would like me to mention to anybody looking to get rid of an old iPhone 3GS: you have her personal assurance that it will have a good home and will NOT be accidentally dropped in the toilet. IPhone 4’s are also welcome. :)

This week’s highlights

2011-06-23T12:17:00.001+01:00

Tomorrow is the supposed, guestimated, calculated-by-the-percentages, day you should have your baby. It’s the day we’ve been planning for and waiting on… but whether that means we’ll see any action from the little guy tomorrow or not, nobody knows. Here are some highlights from the past week:

1. Last weekend we decided we needed to get out of the house so that we could take our minds off the sitting around and waiting. I think there was a small part of us that thought the “watched pot never boils” axiom might just hold true for pregnancy… though I’m not sure what the literal translation would be (a watched belly never pops?). This thinking was probably influenced by Hollywood, where the rule is that as soon as you act like you’re not going to have a baby and drive an hour away from the hospital… that’s when you’ll go into labor. Regardless of what we thought, it obviously had no effect… but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a nice day out. We went to a place I like to call ‘Little America’… I call it this because there’s a TGI Fridays with unlimited drink refills, free parking everywhere, a Gap outlet, and a Best Buy. This specific combination of things that are thoroughly un-British is refreshing.

We ate ribs and shrimp, bought some shirts on sale at the Gap, and went to the mall where we discovered another little bit of American culture: the mix-it-up-on-a-cold stone/marble slab ice cream store. I had to try it… and, as I suspected, it was a bust. The guy totally didn’t know what he was doing. I asked for a relatively simple combination (so I thought): vanilla ice cream with Oreo mixed in. After ten minutes of waiting on the guy to carefully scoop out the ice cream, flatten the scoop into a perfectly round disc on the marble slab, and carefully place a single Oreo cookie precisely in the center of the ice cream circle, we both just start laughing. The caution exercised by this very British guy was just too typical not to be funny. “Be careful, man! You don’t want to be reckless, someone could get hurt!” <sigh> You just have to go for it. Let it get sloppy. That’s why it’s fun!

2. I learned how to use a Moby wrap! I have to be honest, I was not optimistic about rolling out a piece of fabric that could run the length of my house, and then trying to figure out how to tie my baby to my chest with it. Nonetheless, I gave it a shot.

There was also another aspect of the whole thing that I wasn’t too thrilled about… namely, the “baby wrap vibe” is decidedly feminine. I think that the companies that make these things have picked up on that, which means that they eagerly and blatantly want to convince you that CARRYING YOUR BABY IN A WRAP IS MANLY.

Exhibit A:

Can you get more manly than this? It’s the kind of outfit that looks like it was purchased entirely at Tractor Supply or Orscheln’s. Camo hunting cap, tight(!) wrangler jeans, a sporty wristwatch, work boots, and white t-shirt that says, “My other shirts clash with my rifle.” The moustache, of course, tells a story all on it’s own: “Anyone who thinks that carrying your baby in a wrap isn’t manly, meet Butch. He’s a former marine who loves to go hunting Bears with his newborn son. Also, as an added bonus, the fabric folds across the back to form a perfect sheath handy for carrying any large hunting knife, finally solving that age-old problem: what do I do with my machete when I’m carrying my rifle and my compound bow?”

In any case, I learned how to use it, but didn’t feel any more manly… maybe I was using it wrong? Or maybe I need the moustache to complete the look?

Well, this post is long enough for now… I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.

10 days and counting

2011-06-14T22:08:00.001+01:00

Our laziness in blogging might be related to our increasing focus on eating, sleeping, cleaning, and nesting… in any case, here are a few thoughts for the home stretch:

1. Only 10 days until the due date! That’s craziness people! It could really be any day now, and judging by Candice’s discomfort, it seems as though she would like it to be sooner rather than later. Any guesses as to the day? Any attachments to a particular date? I thought being born on the solstice would be cool (that’s also Tiffani’s birthday, which would be cool for Tiffani, but less cool for the rest of you). Candice doesn’t really have a preference, but if anyone suggests that she’ll be two weeks late, you might get a punch in the gut next time you see her (just kidding, but she’s ready to get this baby out).

2. Last Monday we went to a breastfeeding class at the hospital. The lady who was running the class was a little bit out of control… she fit right into the mold of “midwife-who-is-judging-you-because-you-aren’t-parenting-her-way.” Literally, she told a story of going to someone’s house a few days after they had given birth and seeing magazine’s fanned out neatly on the coffee table. She said, “Hmm, seems like we’ve been spending a little too much time cleaning the house, haven’t we?” In other words, a clean house equals parental neglect. The class wasn’t a total bust, however, they did show two videos that were quite informative… a couple of times, I made sound effects to go along with the breastfeeding video… I’m so not grown up enough to have a kid :)!

3. We took a few pictures the other day… thought you might be interested to see what 38 weeks is looking like:

4. I also took a picture of this:

This is Collin’s famous chopped BBQ… I felt a little uneasy about the possibility of a food shortage after having the baby. We got some great foil containers (the kind with the little cardboard top), and I went to the butcher and got six pounds of beef roast! 14 hours later, we had a crock pot full of BBQ… and this picture is just the part that we decided to freeze for later. The real genius of the whole system is that you can take the container directly from the freezer and put it in the oven, then an hour or so later you can have chopped BBQ but you don’t have to wash any dishes, no tupperware to store it and no casserole dish to cook it! Genius! That is, of course, if I understand how all this works… can anyone comment on how to reheat frozen stuff? Is it okay to take it directly from the freezer to the oven?

That’s all for now, folks. Not sure what the update plan is for baby Bullard’s arrival, but it will be something between the extremes of a live video feed from the birth centre and a Facebook status update a week later. :)

3 weeks and counting!

2011-06-05T12:06:00.001+01:00

Friday marked 37 weeks for Candice carrying our baby, which means that we have less than 3 weeks to go until the due date! What’s even more freaky is that people keep telling us, “Well, it could be anytime now, couldn’t it?” First of all, that’s so British to end a statement with a question- stop it. Second of all, that is the last thing you should say to someone who is trying not to be stressed… now I’m just gonna be on the edge of my seat for the next 3 weeks! If Candice sneezes, I’m googling, “Can sneezing cause labor?” It’s just not healthy to be that high-strung for so long.

Of course, some of the above is for comic effect, and I don’t feel super anxious just yet, mostly because statistically Candice is much more likely to go past her due date rather than deliver early. But still, knowing that it could be any time is a little unnerving.

People have told us that we need to eat out more often since it will be more rare for us to go out after we have the baby. We’ve really taken that bit of advice to heart, I think, and have been giving ourselves permission to eat out just a little more. We went out to a nice place on our anniversary this week, and yesterday we went to pizza hut, which was the polar opposite of the nice place. I think we were the only ones in the restaurant who didn’t have three screaming kids; there was crying, running, yelling… and that was just the parents trying to corral their kids. It was like we were being shown the reality of what our life will be like soon. All in all, I think we’re fine with it… after all, if having kids means you take them to pizza hut on Saturday, we feel like we could handle a little more pizza in our lives.

We’ve also been ‘nesting’ a little bit… but I’ve realized that my nesting is very different from Candice’s. Candice wants to get all the laundry done, while I’m more concerned about having all of my camera and camcorder batteries fully charged, memory cards cleared off, and picture organizing and backup protocols set up and ready to go. All of which, let’s be honest, is just as important as laundry :).

The other humorous part of my ‘nesting’ instinct is, big surprise, related to food. I’ve been really eager to make a giant crock pot full of chopped barbeque and freeze it all. Apparently, I don’t feel prepared to bring this baby home unless I can, at any given moment, have a chopped barbeque sandwich at the ready.

I’d better go, I’ve got a lot of restaurant dining, computer organizing, and chopped barbeque making to do before we have this baby!

8 years (or 28.87% of my life)

2011-05-31T23:41:00.001+01:00

Eight years ago today we stood in our church back home and blindly and enthusiastically said ‘I will’ to each other. At 19 years old, I’m sure some people thought we were crazy, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was marrying the best man around and I was completely confident that we would make it work. Happily – luckily – I’m here to report that Collin is still the best man around and, praise the Lord, we’ve made it work. Later that night we road off in a little black Nissan to begin our married lives together. Here are just a few of the things I’ve learned in my 2,923 days of being married to the one and only Collin Bullard:

*It isn’t a federal requirement to be a total grump in the mornings. You can be a perfectly nice and pleasant person when you wake up. Oh, and you don’t have to yell when you’re upset about something. (Truly a revelation to this girl at 19 years old.)

*There is a certain combination of ingredients that makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie and, yes, it is necessary to figure out the precise combination, no matter how many batches of cookie dough you must endure.

*You might be appalled and outraged at a particular situation, and rightfully so, but that doesn’t mean outrage is the best or most productive response. Sometimes being calm and quiet and understanding brings about the most change in a person or situation.

*Friends episodes really do make life more enjoyable. This is especially true when watched together or with friends and, naturally, with some homemade chocolate chip cookies.

*It’s okay to dream big and believe that everything will work out for the best. Sure, there are worries and details to muddle through, but it’s all going to be okay in the end. Let’s just all calm the heck down.

*Generosity is really important in a group of friends. Don’t calculate who does/gives/offers what… just keep doing, giving, offering. Generosity inspires generosity and we are all happier and understand a bit more of God’s grace because of it.

I’ll stop now, as this could go on for a while if we let it. He’s a smart man, my husband. Who knows what I will learn in another eight years.

Cowboys and Indians

2011-05-29T20:28:00.001+01:00

Last weekend was our baby shower, and it was the awesomest day we’d had in a while (rivaled only by what was, admittedly, an epic Easter Sunday, see here). We have such sweet friends, and when we told them that we wanted the shower to be a rockin’, co-ed, day of fun, they came up with just the thing to fit us perfectly: a Cowboys and Indians backyard BBQ.

Bandanas and boots made the food look even better; of course, this was just the pre-meal. The BBQ chicken, corn on the cob, BBQ baked beans, bacon wrapped green beans, coffee cake, and apple pie was still to come.

One of the coolest things about the party was seeing special touches from each of our friends scattered throughout the party; from the decorations to the coffee cake to the diaper cake. We saw the personalities of each of our friends in different parts of the party, and that was as fun as the party itself. Nice teamwork everybody!

Not only that, but they all actually dressed up to make the theme complete. Exhibit A:

Sarah (right) seems to be channeling the denim spirit of her Oklahoma roots; and Jackie (left), who is an Aussie, is presumably showing off a bit of the ‘outback’ spirit :). With the denim, plaid, and pigtails, you’d never guess we were in England!

Others were a little more creative with the theme:

Simon (right) seemed to misinterpret the ‘cow-boy’ theme; and Eric (left) thought that no good Western would be complete without a Mexican… I’ll leave it to my student affairs buddies to comment on the diversity issues involved.

Nicki was the only one sporting Indian garb, but Candice did technically come to the party as a Native American too.

Somewhere in the middle of the party, there were games… and good ones too. The first was a bottle drinking competition. I had the idea of trying to bite a bigger hole in the nipple in order to suck more out (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type).

I chomped and chewed, but it was not going to give… there was no way to cheat, I was just going to have to attack it the old fashioned way. After what seemed like 10 minutes of nursing these baby bottles, no one was even halfway through, and a few people were even complaining about tongue cramps :)! Don’t worry, no people (or nipples) were seriously harmed in the playing of this game.

As for the next game, I’m not so sure the same can be said… the level of competition definitely escalated… take Jonny for example… he seems fun loving enough when watching the bottle game:

But during the next game, in the heat of competition, the gloves came off (or stayed on, depending on how you look at it) as we battled it out…

Sadly, I did not prevail over Jonny… here he is celebrating… thank you, by the way, to whoever took this picture, priceless:

(Sorry, Jonny, the pictures we got of you simply demanded an overarching narrative).

Thanks everyone for an awesome shower. Here’s one last photo of us with a ‘project’ gift from the shower… it looks even better hanging over the crib :).

I heart etsy

2011-05-14T18:21:00.001+01:00

I discovered Etsy.com some time ago and it has potential to become a real problem. I will get on the site to look for one thing, but of course, come across about 10 things that would either make life easier or just prettier. :) Luckily, I have been able to maintain some sense of self-control and haven’t spent loads of money (mostly I’m deterred due to the shipping costs from the U.S.) but I am so tempted! Here are a few of my recent finds:

Wouldn’t these be just adorable for a new little babe? Look for yourself. There are also a lot of shops that make these to look like miniature Uggs!

I’m not one to collect a ton of jewelry, but I’m girly enough to like it and want to wear it. The problem is that the stuff I do have is thrown into random old make-up bags, which means everything is tangled together and you can't really even see what's there. This is one reason I rarely wear any jewelry... I don't have the time (okay, patience) to sort it all out every time I want to wear a necklace or a pair of earrings. I think something like this jewelry hanger would help me be more organized, less tangled, and more frequently accessorized. Find it here.

I love all the initial necklaces that are floating around everywhere these days. I would love a charm for my hubs and for our boy. Most of these types of necklaces are much more simple and understated than this one, which would probably be fitting for every day wear. Still, I can't help but think this one is beautiful. (Don't worry, our boy's name does not start with a J!) Check it out.

The fact that all of the stuff on Etsy is handmade makes me think that I should probably try to make some of it myself. However, since it’s unlikely that I’ll pick up knitting or silver-smelting in the next six weeks, for now I’ll have to go on admiring other people’s work.

Photography: Time-lapse

2011-04-26T09:01:00.001+01:00

I’m pretty bad at keeping plants alive, and I have had a basil plant for a while that can attest to the number of times I have almost let it die. For some reason, I just wouldn’t think about watering the basil plant until it was almost completely wilted. I’m getting better and better at this, but the amazing thing is that the little plant would bounce back so quickly, going from wilted to vibrant in no time!

I thought it would be cool to capture the process on camera, so I let the plant wither a little bit, then I watered it and set the camera to take a picture of the plant about 8 seconds for a couple of hours while the plant slowly came back to life… here’s the result. In case you’re wondering, the sweet guitar melody is just a little something my brother recorded on the fly years ago, but I thought it went nicely with the video.

Easter Day

2011-04-24T22:50:00.001+01:00

He is risen! (Feel free to respond loudly to the computer monitor.) We had a great Easter day today. We went to the early service at church, dropped by the market to grab some freshly picked Cambridge strawberries, and then headed home with said strawberries in order to fire up our newly purchased ice cream maker :). That’s right, folks, the world is a different place now that the Bullards have an ice cream maker. Every item in the grocery store is now split into two categories: (1) things we can put in ice cream, and (2) I forget what the second category is… it doesn’t really matter.

We’ll give you a run down of the ice cream making later, for now, all you need to know is that we were making the strawberry ice cream to take to an Easter BBQ at a friend’s place. It was fantastic! Of course it was great to be around people that we love on Easter, so the awesome food and beautiful day was just a bonus. Plus, it’s hard to beat THREE different kinds of homemade ice cream on top of everything else… we had Oreo (cookies n cream), Chocolate, and (my favorite) Strawberry.

I ate a lot, and I thought I had a bit of a belly going… so we had a comparison…

The guys manning the grill…

After the BBQ and ice cream, we sat around chatting for a while, and then decided that it was a lovely day for a bit of croquet… so went over to Jesus College, where the grounds are so beautiful that any excuse to get your toes into the grass is a good idea. Here are the girls with a couple of croquet mallets with Jesus college in the background.

Candice got the hang of it pretty quickly, and nearly led her team to victory… I think our little guy was making it difficult for her though :)…

Here’s a shot of the boys sitting back watching the girls battle it out on the croquet pitch…

After the croquet matches, we were feeling a bit too English, so we tried to compensate with America’s favorite past-time… we had a bat and a tennis ball, and enough people to have a pretty respectable game of six on six Baseball! Needless to say, after all the chatting, croquet, and baseball, we were all beat and starting to get hungry again. So we headed back to see what we had leftover from the BBQ that we could turn into dinner.

It was a full day, in more ways than one… life felt very full indeed.

Cambridge Springtime

2011-04-23T22:14:00.001+01:00

The weather has been glorious. Cambridge is a different place in the spring and summer. If, for example, you come to visit us in the winter, we would probably have your pity for having to cope with the short days; but if you come to visit during the summer, we would probably be the object of your envy for living in such a beautiful place.

I’m sure this is exaggerated; those of you who are lucky to have good weather most of the year may not think anything of a day that is sunny and 75… but to us, there’s something about it that is healing to the soul.

In any case, I’ve blogged about all that before… but the change in the weather is just such a big event over here that I thought it worth the mention.

So, in true British fashion, we’ve been doing several things over the past couple of weeks: a) looking out the window every 30 mins. just to make sure the sun really IS out, b) going outside just to stand there and put our faces in the sun, c) exclaiming to everyone how hot it is when the temp gets above 70 :).

Here’s a few highlights from our recent walks along Grantchester meadows to enjoy the weather:

Friends: the Dixons and the Appels.

Our way was blocked by some cows, so we had to take a detour… and things didn’t work out so well for Nicki… I really like this picture, though… I think it’s a good image of fun on a spring day :).

Candice looking happy… probably because she is.

Here’s one from yesterday… our friends Simon and Alice got back into town and we got to hang out with them for first time in nearly 5 months! Here’s Simon throwing a grape at me :)

Here we are… looking happy again…

Here’s Candice at 32 weeks! Doesn’t she look great?!

Here’s the delightful lemon cake from the Orchard (a nice place to have tea near the river)… while I was in line getting the lemon cake, I’m pretty sure a British girl hit on me! She said that my lemon cake looked good, so she got the same thing. Then she asked if I came to the Orchard often, and was sure to mention that the guy she was with was just her ‘friend.’ Yep, Collin’s still got the magic :)!

The rapeseed is full on, and it makes the fields along Grantchester meadows bright gold… it’s pretty awesome…

There’s so much more to blog about… Happy Easter to everyone. Talk to you soon.

Mail call

2011-04-11T18:09:00.001+01:00

Who doesn’t love getting mail? And when something special from a good friend arrives, it's even better! Two days in the past week turned out to be good mail days.

Last week we got a much anticipated package from our dear friend Tiffani. Inside was this beauty:

It's a gorgeous baby quilt with a classic look on one side and a fun monkey print on the other. We love it! I have seen a few other things Tiff has made for other expecting mums and dads and think this is, without a doubt, her best work yet! Since I'm no sewing expert, you can read more about Tiffani's adventure in making this quilt here.

And then today Collin burst through the door carrying a box that had clearly made its way across the Atlantic. I couldn't wait to tear into it, especially when I saw it had come from the Anderson's, who are our long lost friends in South Dakota. Inside we found this too-cute of a plush toy block, handmade by Carrie:

Along with a these two precious blankets, made by Carrie's awesome mama. (Thank you, Ms. Evie! I love that we are Facebook friends!)

Carrie and Marc also sent us the most adorable little hat that I cannot wait to put on Jabar and several books, a few for baby and a few for us. This is right up our alley, especially with my newfound freedom and extra time to read. I will share with you the funniest one:

On the front is a spinner titled 'The Wheel of Responsibility'. 7 out of the 8 options on wheel say 'dad' is the responsible party. :) Thanks for a good laugh, Andersons! Carrie blogs about life and crafty things here.

While we are far away from family and old friends and could let that be a bummer during this pregnancy and the arrival of Jabar, small and large things are always reminding us that the same people we are missing are already loving our little guy from across the ocean.

Caution: your baby is in mortal peril

2011-04-04T18:05:00.001+01:00

Parents-to-be should be given a directory of people to call who have been-there-done-that-got-the-t-shirt. You know, so we could call a veteran at any time of day or night just to say 'Is it really NECESSARY to buy a cute (read: expensive) hand-made bumper for the crib?' (The answer appears to be no, it's not only unnecessary, but may cause actual harm to my baby should I invest in such a cute, decorative accessory. Who knew?) Thankfully, we have an army of family and friends of the parenting variety on whom we can call to discuss our hyper-sensitive wonderings. Just today I Facebooked a friend and said 'Do we really have to wash Jabar's clothes in a different detergent than the brand we use for our own clothes?' (She said it's a good idea; the baby's skin will be much more sensitive than ours.)

The hard part about all of this is that every family does it differently, don't they? And everyone, not just super-moms like Michelle Duggar, but everyone who has a child, has ever been around a child, or even has as second-cousin-in-law under the age of 15, thinks they know the way and the truth about all things baby. And they aren't shy to share their inarguable truths, are they? Which, don't get me wrong, is great when we have questions or feel lost about just what size of diapers (don't even get me started on what KIND of diapers) we should use for our little man.

But sometimes I just have to wonder if it's all necessary. Will my baby's brain really not develop properly if he watches the television screen for 5 minutes? Will his hips really align incorrectly if we put him in a particular brand of carrier a time or two? I just can't help but think probably not. Hey, I'm no veteran, but I have a few second-cousins-in-law who don't seem to fret about such things, and they are doing just fine.

End note: While we like to think we are super calm and relaxed about all of this, don't hold us to it. :) We fully recognize and admit that once the little guy arrives, we are going to be a big bundle of nervous energy and will be forever grateful for anyone who shows up at our flat reminding us not to sweat the small stuff. I think I might just cry tears of joy when my sister shows up and laughs in the face of all of this 'that's going to kill your baby' hooplah.

Moving day

2011-03-28T22:38:00.001+01:00

We “moved house,” as the British say, on Saturday. We were a little sentimental about leaving the vicarage, since it was the first place we called “home” while in Cambridge. We had good times there; lots of relationships were nurtured; it’s where I perfected my chocolate chip cookie recipe; and, more importantly, it’s where our baby was…. well, you know.

We were stunned at how much stuff we had accumulated in a short 18 months! So on moving day, we called in the troops. I sent an email out to “the guys” asking for help, and then I started preparing what I hoped would be the most awesome move ever. Of course, I couldn’t have a move where we all just picked up boxes and carried them; that would be boring.

Ideally, since we were moving from the third story of one house to the ground floor of a place across the street, I would have liked to rig up a zipline from one place to the other, sending the boxes zooming down from the ‘top flat.’ Candice convinced me this was a bad idea. (Although, I will say that Candice suggested that we just throw all our crap out the bedroom window directly into the trunk of our car below! I convinced her this was an even worse idea.)

I decided that having two steep flights of stairs to carry boxes down might be a safety hazard… after all, what if someone fell?! So as an alternative to our zipline, I decided to build a slide :). I thought that a bunch of cardboard duct taped together would form a nice slide for us to zoom the boxes down. This way, no one would fall down the stairs, and we would have some fun while moving.

After some testing, I discovered that the heavier boxes would just collapse the cardboard slide, and they would also pick up a LOT of speed…. so, to avoid a 30 lb. box of books zooming toward the person at the bottom of the stairs at 40 mph, I decided to rig up a kind of “sled” on which to lower down the boxes.

Here’s me tying nylon cord to the end of the sled :)

Here’s the slide in all it’s glory…

As you can tell, these stairs constitute something like a 14 foot drop, so this smaller box, one of our “test shots,” tumbled down, end over end, pretty quickly… so we decided the sled was a better way to go. Once we got in a rhythm, we had the whole flat 95% cleared in about 30 min! The slide on the outside didn’t fare as well, so they had to give it up and do it the old fashioned way.

Here’s a pic of us in our new place… I thought the John Deere shirt and cowboy hat were appropriate for our style of moving…

After the move, we treated “the troops” to some pizza and had a nice Saturday lunch.

A big shout out to all our homies who helped us move. Thanks everyone! Even though the pregnant girls were not in on the heavy lifting, they made quick work of the unpacking and organizing, which, as everyone knows, is really the hardest part.

Farewell, Vicarage, you’ve served us well, but it’s time for us to part ways.

Kelleigh and Jared

2011-03-27T22:30:00.001+01:00

We recently had some visitors from Oklahoma, our old friends, Kelleigh and Jared Whaley. Even though they had the absolute worst travel experience getting over here, they were in very good spirits and we had a great time!

We toured around Cambridge on a reasonably nice Spring day… the city was beautiful, obviously, but the best part was getting to catch up on the latest with friends that we don’t get to see nearly enough. Here’s a picture where we really look like American tourists with our North Face jackets worn proudly :). The guys who work for the punting companies kept asking us if we wanted to “go for a punt”, and Jared asked me how they knew we were tourists… this is how:

We went to see Kings College Chapel, which I’ve seen like a bajillion times (or is it bagillion?), but every time I go inside, I feel like I’ve forgotten how cool it is. I think this is the best shot I’ve taken so far.

Candice and Kelleigh grew up cheerleading and slumber partying together, so we’ll put this photo with the large bunch of pictures from the days of braces and jean shorts.

This one turned out great! I know it looks fake… but it’s not.

We were sad to see them go… they were a little less sad to go, I think, because they were headed to Italy for 9 days. Nonetheless, they left us a nice present upon their departure… part of which you can see Candice wearing in the photos posted a couple of days ago :).

Nice Oklahoma shirt! On a nice Oklahoma girl :)

2011-03-24T21:22:00.001Z

We went for a walk on a nice sunny day last week, and we did a little bit of an impromptu pregnancy photo shoot. I must say, I’ll be darned if ever there was a cuter pregnant girl.

Royalty

2011-03-19T21:15:00.001Z

We had a couple of sunny days this past week, and one afternoon, Candice and I went for walk towards town. We turned the corner by Corpus Christi College and stumbled upon a crowd of people just standing around looking across the street at the entrance to the College. There were a few men in suits with earpieces and walkie-talkie’s, so we were intrigued and asked someone what was going on. They were all waiting for Prince Charles to come out!

It’s not unusual for members of the royal family to be doing things around Cambridge, in fact, the Queen has been in town a couple of times since we’ve lived here, but we’ve never seen any of them before. Since we had absolutely nothing going on, and nothing better to do, we decided to stand and wait for him to come out… it was, after all, somewhat exciting to watch the crowds build.

It was kind of humorous that no one seemed to show up at that place and time for the purpose of seeing Prince Charles, people just gradually joined the crowd as they were walking by, and apparently, they didn’t have anything better to do either… much like us :).

Here’s his car:

It was actually quite shocking how very little security there was for him… the car didn’t look bulletproof, and there were only a few bodyguards… I guess that’s how they roll over here. Here he is waving at the crowds.

And here he is staring RIGHT AT ME!

Nice to meet you, Charlie; next time stop in for a spot of afternoon tea :).

A friend of mine…

2011-03-15T17:20:00.001Z

Last year I think I wrote a post about how Cambridge can be really nice for a couple of days in March, just enough to make you think Spring has arrived, but then it turns cold again and laughs in your face for thinking it was going to get warm. I called this the Fake Out, and I think it’s happening again.

This year’s winter hasn’t been nearly as bad as last year’s, but, nonetheless, I’m still desperately looking forward to sunshine and warmer weather. Well, in the past few days, we’ve had a glimpse of the sunshine and it warmed up enough so that if you were standing with your face in direct sunlight, it was just warm enough to be pleasant. Alas, these times don’t last long, and it soon grows colder and gray again… but I know that these times will get more and more frequent until, finally, summer arrives.

When you live in a place like Cambridge, it’s hard not to draw analogies between life and the seasons, between the “long, cold death that the Winter brings, and the sweet resurrection, Spring” (see this blog post). Somehow, the darker, colder winter makes the resurrection of Spring sweeter. The truth that the seasons illustrate is a deep truth, going well beyond the lengthening days and warmer temperatures… the truth is that death is not the end. The reality is that sometimes, when you’re in the middle of winter, death feels like the end.

A couple of weeks ago a seminary friend of mine named Clint was murdered. I absolutely hate writing those words; they ring with such finality. Clint was a pastor of a church in Arlington, TX, and he and his assistant were both attacked in the church, and Clint was killed (last I heard, his assistant, Judy, was still in critical condition). He was only 28. He was the kindest, most compassionate guy you’d ever meet, and all he wanted to do was serve the Lord and help people.

It is senseless… a brutal end to a good life.

Sometimes I wonder if the truth of resurrection is deep enough for this kind of tragedy. The darker the death of Winter, the sweeter the resurrection of Spring… by that measure, on That Day, Clint’s resurrection will be about as sweet as it gets.

Photography: Filters!

2011-03-09T19:12:00.001Z

This post is about photography stuff, so if you’re interested in that kind of thing… keep reading :).

50 years ago, Photoshop was called “filters”. In other words, before there was computer photo editing, photographers put special pieces of glass up in front of the camera in order to produce different effects (e.g., a sepia colored piece of glass in front of the camera would give you a nice ‘antique’ looking image). Nowadays, most of these effects can be easily reproduced on the computer, so filters have largely gone the way of the dinosaur.

However, there are a few things that are still so difficult to photograph that the best way to do it is with a filter. “What could be so hard?” you ask. Well, have you ever tried to photograph a sunset (or, even, the lesser appreciated but still spectacular, sunrise)?! It’s nigh impossible to get the thing to look in the photograph like it did in real life (a testament, perhaps, to how awesome sunsets really are).

There are a few ways to get a good sunset shot, but one of the best is to use something called a “neutral density graduated filter.” Don’t let the confusing name scare you, it’s just a piece of glass that looks like this…

It’s simple, the top is darker and the bottom is clear, and in the middle, there is a “gradient” that blends from clear to dark (hence the name, “graduated filter”).

When you try to take a picture of a sunset, you usually have a really bright sky and a fairly dark foreground, so your picture either look like this…

… where you have darkened the exposure enough to get the detail in the sky, but you’re foreground is just a silhouette of shadows. On the other hand, if you brighten the exposure to get the foreground, you end up blowing out the detail in the sky, like this…

Now, if you’re a photoshop whiz kid, then you could try to combine those exposures into one… but, trust me, it’s not easy, and it takes forever!

It’s much easier to hold this little piece of glass up in front of the lens (you’re supposed to have a “filter holder” that holds it in place for you, but mine hasn’t arrived yet).

Anyway, here’s an example of what it does:

I’ve just dipped the corner of the filter into the sky to show you the effect it has. See how the foreground is properly exposed, but this time, the filter is darkening a part of the sky so that the camera can capture the bright sky and the dim foreground all at once.

So, the end result is something like this…

Now that’s more like it… this is closer to what it looked like in real life. Also, for those who doubt, I will add that this picture is completely unedited. It came straight from the camera looking great. All for about $16 (£10) on eBay! There are about a billion different kinds of these filters, but, in case you were wondering, mine is a Cokin P121.

Top ten ways to know it was a rockin’ party…

2011-03-06T18:29:00.001Z

10. People keep showing up with food and drink that you didn’t ask them to bring.

9. Better than half of your guests have or are in the process of getting their PhD… and the party is fun in spite of that.

8. People mention sleeping over because they don’t want to leave.

7. You ask if anyone wants water and no one raises their hand. You ask if anyone wants Scotch and 8 people raise their hands.

6. Midway into the party, one of your guests starts going by the nickname, “Blade.”

5. There was ranch dip (you have to live in England to truly appreciate how important, and rare, the Hidden Valley is for a party… apparently, there are no Hidden Valleys over here).

4. By the end of the night, the women had sequestered themselves in the food room to plot world domination.

3. The cake has four layers with chocolate strawberries on top.

2. The people who were there were all people you love!

1. You were at the party with the cutest pregnant girl ever!

Birthday project

2011-03-01T22:30:00.001Z

I like projects… and I don’t like to work on serious stuff on my birthday. So this morning, after dropping my wife off at work (by the way, thanks for going to work, honey), I went to the electronics store to find a project to work on (I mean, thanks for going to work while I play all day, honey).

For several days, I’d been annoyed with how terrible the twenty-one year old speakers in our Happy Honda sounded. Fair enough, they’re old speakers and I’m pretty sure they’re all blown out (which causes a really awful rattling noise), but I can only take so much. So I went into the store with the goal of giving the Happy Honda an audio pick-me-up.

Now, it may sound crazy to want to do that… after all, why spend money on a car that only cost £125, right? I understand your thinking, but I wasn’t looking for something extravagant, and my goal was to spend less than £20.

I have some decent speakers in the house that plug into my computer, and I thought about buying a power inverter so I could plug those into the car… which would effectively bypass the entire car stereo system, but then I would have wires and loose speakers to deal with, and I wouldn’t be able to plug anything else into my cigarette lighter (like the GPS or phone). Not a very elegant solution (and I drive a 1990 Honda Accord, so, clearly, I’m looking to keep things classy). And, in any case, the power inverter was £30, which was over budget.

Now, I’ve done a lot of things in my 27 years, but I have never done a single “car audio” related task in my life. However, when the guy in the electronics store asked me if I needed help, I started talking car stereos with him, and before long I was convinced that if this guy could replace car stereo speakers, then I could definitely figure it out!

So, after an hour and a half of me crawling around the back seat/trunk of the car… the task was completed. The new speakers sound great, and the whole project only cost me £16. It was a good birthday project… just me, some multi-tools, and my headlamp… and, let’s be honest, any day where I get to use my trusty headlamp for over an hour is a good day.

Oh how times have changed

2011-02-24T21:17:00.001Z

I think it started back in high school. I busied myself with school, church, the boyfriend, cheerleading, etc. so much so that I rarely had a free night at home. My senior year I had two jobs and helped my mom with a third. I would sometimes eat dinner and change clothes in the car (while driving, don’t tell!) in order to make it from one commitment to the other. The craziness continued in college, although life was streamlined a bit when Collin and I got married and I worked at the same church where we attended with all of our friends. Still, when there wasn’t something official happening, there were people at our house. We started to get antsy if it had been more than a few nights without someone coming over to eat our food or just hang out. Grad school only made matters worse as I became unable to even sit at home for any significant amount of time without getting bored. We went out to eat all the time, busied ourselves with who knows what (really, I don’t even know) and rarely lasted more than a few hours in our little on-campus apartment.

And then we moved to Cambridge. Oh, praise the Lord; life has changed. Now we don’t go out often at all, we cook a ton, we enjoy our friends but aren’t frantic about filling our time with activities. The first year we were here we were involved in a particular activity, but this year decided not to participate because, get this, it lasted until 10pm! Seriously, what’s happened to us that we can’t stay out until 10pm? If we have multiple nights in one week that are busy, I get anxious and sometimes even panic because I feel we aren’t getting enough time at home.

And don’t say it’s because I’m pregnant; this change happened long before little Jabar came along. Regardless of what brought about this change, I’m thankful for it. Thankful that we are content enough in life to want to be at home, doing nothing together. Thankful that we have good friends who make our lives full. Thankful that life isn’t so hectic and scattered all of the time.

We think he will like boats…

2011-02-15T21:15:00.001Z

Last night we did something that neither of us had ever done before… we painted a real painting on a real canvas! Here’s the video of the project :).

[If you’re on an iPhone, or other non-flash enabled device, click here (larger, if you’re on wifi) or here (smaller, for you, Cara).]

type="application/x-shockwave-flash">

Our latest scan :)

2011-02-06T15:44:00.001Z

So we’ve taken a little bit of a vacation from blogging over the past few weeks. But don’t worry, you haven’t been missing out; the lack of blogging has more or less coincided with a very quiet few weeks.

This past week, however, was quite exciting. As many of you may know, we found out that we are having a BOY! We were very excited to get this piece of news, as we’ve been anxiously awaiting the time when we could buy gender-specific baby clothes/stuff!

We went to the hospital on Thursday morning to have our scan. People had been asking us for a while what we “thought” the sex of the baby would be, but we honestly had know idea. We had, however, been referring to the baby as “she” for a while, mostly in an effort to avoid the “it” pronoun. We intended to switch off between “she” and “he” but just didn’t switch to “he”. So over time, I think that we started to envision having a girl, which is something that we didn’t want to do, since we really wanted to go into the scan with zero expectations. To that end, Candice started saying “he” the day before the scan and I adopted the reasonable proposal that since all our friends were having girls, we would probably have a boy, since the 50/50 average has to work out somehow!

The scan itself was fun… I think it would have been more fun if they let me put the jelly stuff on my stomach and then see what I had going on in there, but, alas, that’s not how they operate. The “ultrasound technician” took us on a tour of the cathedral that is Candice’s uterus, and Baby Boy Bullard and I agreed that it actually looks like a nice place to live. He moved around A LOT during the scan, mostly rocking out on the air guitar… although, at one point he did a move that looked like a triple salchow (sow cow), but it was hard to tell with all the air guitar.

At the end of the tour around the uterus, the nice lady gave us a clear shot of the “between the leg” area… and there it was, unmistakable… the lady says, “Well, those look like little boy bits to me.” Indeed they were :). The only trouble is, now I’m confused as to whether he’s going to be a figure skater or a rock star? Maybe he’ll take after his uncle Chris?

Kick in the face

2011-01-18T20:19:00.001Z

I got kicked in the face tonight. Have you ever been kicked in the face? Typically, getting kicked in the face is not a fun experience, as I can attest from going three seasons in the Octagon. There’s usually a lot of dizziness and bruising involved, and, inevitably, someone asks you some stupid question the next day: “Hey man, what happened to your eye? It looks like you got kicked in the face!”

Like I said, not a fun experience… except, that is, when the person that is kicking you in the face is inside your wife’s belly. Such was the case tonight. So if I’m smiling tomorrow, feel free to ask, “Collin, what happened to your face?” The reply will be, “My baby is a ninja-daddy-face-kicker.”

Resolutions

2011-01-09T22:21:00.001Z

I’ve given a lot of thought to resolutions this week… but not that much or I guess I would have made some by now. Honestly, I’ve always had a real dislike for resolutions, mostly because I thought they were cheesy and meaningless. But I do like the idea of a New Year being a new start… so here’s some resolutions that may or may not be my own:

1. First, I have to get this out of the way; it’s a not-so-clever joke that my more geek inclined friends will get: my New Years’ resolution is 1024x768.

2. Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way. I decided this week that I should start running again, but I didn’t want to set a goal for myself that would be totally unachievable, so I resolve to go for a run at least once this year. Maybe next year I’ll double that, but for now, I’m shooting for one good run before 2012, which is more than I can say for last year.

3. I resolve to write a PhD thesis. This is something that I really should get done this year, so tomorrow I’m gonna go get started :).

4. I resolve to have a baby, which requires very little from me until about June-time, so this one shouldn’t be too tough, that is, until June.

5. I read something the other day that was a “fill-in-the-blank resolution” – “The person I want to be more like this year is ______.” High on my list would be Superman and Spiderman, but if I were being more serious, I would probably say I’d like to be more like Candice… she’s way more thoughtful and a much better listener than I am. In fact, if you’re thinking, “Wait, I think Collin is pretty thoughtful.” That’s probably because at some point, Candice reminded me to be thoughtful.

Jean Louis as 'the man'

2011-01-03T20:58:00.002Z

We went to John Lewis (big department store in the UK) today… we had eaten lunch and didn’t have anything else to do. There are 4 floors in John Lewis, and even though we’ve been there a hundred times, I don’t think I’ve seen everything Johnny has to offer. In fact, I had never walked through the baby section before. Recently, however, my interest in all things baby has gone up considerably. I considered my stroll through the baby section as an opportunity to do a little research, something I like to do before spending a lot of money on an item.

So… there we were… standing in front of what felt like an ocean of baby strollers, pushchairs, buggies, car seats, and prams. At first it felt very foreign… but then, I noticed the showroom like arrangement, the different makes and models with their various features and accessories, and slick-looking salespeople walking around showing potential buyers the new features on the latest models. Suddenly, a warm feeling came over me and I knew exactly where I was: a car dealership!

For some reason, people take on a certain persona when they walk into a dealership shopping for a car… and I noticed that my attitude toward the showroom was beginning to change as well. I was scrutinizing different designs, taking the pushchairs for test drives, comparing the handling on different models, and admiring the suspension on the high-end strollers, all the while eyeing the salespeople suspiciously, wondering if I could talk them down from their asking price.

Unfortunately, there’s no wiggle room on the prices… and these puppies were expensive. In fact, the car analogy isn’t too far off when you consider that for the price of one of these strollers we could have paid for our Happy Honda six times over! It’s pretty bad when you’re looking at a stroller and all you can think about is how many cars you could buy for that price!

It’s not just the stroller, though, it’s the carrying cot, the car seat, the car seat adapter, the rain cover, and on and on. The salesman did show us a cheaper solution that was more of an all-in-one package kind of approach, but the handling was awful, like a front-wheel drive KIA. I wanted the Mercedes with the nice tires and aluminum wheels… glides along effortlessly and turns on a dime with one hand! Of course, if you go for the strollers that actually have tires, it’s possible you could get a flat… I wonder if they sell roadside breakdown assistance for that?

You would think people are crazy to spend that much money at John Lewis on a stroller, but ‘the man’ knows what he’s doing. Johnny will tell you that your kid’s spine won’t develop correctly if you don’t buy the special infant carrying cot. Then Mr. Lewis will point out that if you loved your baby as much as the other parents, you wouldn’t have a problem giving him your money to assure your child’s safety… “After all,” he says, “how can you put a price on your own child’s well-being?” Well, as it happens, they have put a price on it, and it’s around £1000.

Thank you for your help in the store, Mr. Jean Louis, but I think the Bullards will be looking on eBay to see if they’re selling our child’s well-being for around the price of just one car.

Have a favorite stroller/pram/buggy that you would recommend? Or have any tips on finding a deal that will help us stick it to the man? Leave a comment…. we could use the help.

2010, a summary

2011-01-02T00:03:00.001Z

I thought about several different ways to summarize the year… going month by month (too long), giving just the highlights (too repetitive, since that’s what our blog was supposed to do all along)… then I thought about what I will really remember from 2010. What will I tell my kids about 2010? Essentially, the whole year can be boiled down to two related stories.

Story 1: On the one hand, you might say the story of 2010 was the story of us adjusting to Cambridge. You might think about our first couple of months in Cambridge as a ‘trip’, where we were observing a foreign country as outsiders while trying awkwardly to fit in. And after three months, we went ‘home’ (to the US) for Christmas. This meant that we started January 2010 with a return to Cambridge after feeling very much at home in Oklahoma… in short, Cambridge didn’t feel like home. It felt cold and dark, which, sadly, is not a metaphorical way of saying that it was lonely, it was really cold and really dark.

We’ve come along way from last January to this one. Building meaningful relationships makes a world of difference. We just finished an absolutely lovely Christmas holiday in Cambridge where we felt very much at home… mostly because we had people to share it with. Cambridge has never seemed so bright (unfortunately, in this instance, I am speaking metaphorically).

Story 2: On the other hand, you might say the story of 2010 was the story of us trying to have a baby. Trying to trust God and have patience within that process is not an easy thing. It’s the kind of thing that drives you to throw yourself on the mercy of God continually. The waiting is also the kind of thing that drives you to depend on community more and more. Looking back now, God’s provision seems so clear that I’m embarrassed I ever doubted it… our journey towards building meaningful friendships became more and more life giving at the same time that trying for a baby became more and more exhausting. Of course, at the end of our waiting, you can imagine how sweet life seemed when our good news brought relief and tears not just to us, but to our friends, who, we realized, had been waiting and praying along with us. At this point, having to wait two years seems a small thing compared to the challenges others face, and we count ourselves blessed.

So, in summary, 2010 was like a pair of shoes that you try on and at first don’t know if you like them or not. But as you wear them, you like them more and more.

2010 Video Review

2010-12-31T21:02:00.001Z

Here’s a collection of random video clips from this year… mostly from the various places we traveled. Also, I might mention that, at the beginning of this year, my goal was to post 100 blogs by the end of the year. As of this post, the count is 101… goal achieved :)… just barely. Enjoy the video, and happy new year!

type="application/x-shockwave-flash">

Baby Name Poll Results

2010-12-31T11:08:00.001Z

Well, the poll is over and nearly 90 of you voted… so, where did we land after all the poll taking?

First of all, on the girl side, Emma just barely squeaked out a victory over Caris, but all the other names had a good showing as well, with Abigail, Francie, Hannah, and Isabel getting a little love from everyone it seems. I think this result mirrors our own feeling toward the girl names; there are many that we like and no clear winner yet.

As for the boy side, we were surprised to see Asher with a comfortable lead over Henry. And, to be honest, I thought Jack would come out on top by a mile; although, given that 5 of you voted for “Jack Daniel,” we might assume that some of those 5 would have gone to Jack, which would make it a near tie with Henry [unless, that is, it was the particular combination of Jack and Daniel that drew the votes :)].

Unfortunately, Jabar only got 2 votes :(… but just out of curiosity, who voted for it (besides my wife)?

Thanks for the input, it was fun to see the results! Many of you sent your own “write-in” votes during the poll (mostly requesting that we name the baby whatever your name is). Please continue to send write-ins, who knows, we might put all the names in one of those rotating barrels and have a lottery drawing for the baby’s name (but we probably won’t).

Cinnamon has loads of health benefits… right?

2010-12-30T19:18:00.001Z

Recently my friend Vanessa made homemade cinnamon rolls and shared the love with us. These rolls were delicious and met the deepest needs of my life. That is, until we had eaten the last of them. A few days later, the desire for more cinnamon rolls returned to our house in a fierce way.

And then I remembered that our friends Reagan and Kelly had both made Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls in the recent past. And then today Laura mentioned them too. Seriously, I can’t get away from the cinnamon goodness. I really want to make these babies, but here’s the thing: they look like a lot of work and I need to know if it’s going to be worth it! I can’t deal with putting in hours of time and countless amounts of emotional energy into these cinnamon rolls if they aren’t going to cut the mustard. Have you made them? Was it worth your time? Did you make the same frosting that PW recommends? We aren’t coffee fans, so I’m not sure if we’ll like it. Help.

I may or may not be making too big of a deal out of this quest for cinnamon rolls. Just ask my husband. I’ve only mentioned it 47 times in the past three days.

Most ridiculous Youtube moments of 2010

2010-12-29T00:29:00.001Z

Just a few of the videos from this year that kept me entertained while trying to write a PhD thesis…

1. Double Rainbow… if you’re interested in the original video where the guy flips out after seeing a double rainbow, watch it here. Personally, I think the auto-tune song is the best part:

2. Bed Intruder… this ridiculous video stems from this original news report of a family who has just had someone break into their house. Again, the song is the best part.

3. Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer… this is a great parody on what has become a kind of genre in its own right, the movie trailer. Funny comment that you will only get after watching the video.

4. Mary Poppins recut trailer… speaking of movie trailers, here’s a recut of Mary Poppins to make it look like a horror movie… pretty brilliant. (Also, if you’re a Seinfeld fan, here’s one. I’s a little longer, but still entertaining).

5. Walkthrough for every video game… you really must have grown up on video games to get this one, but if you did, then this one will make you realize how shockingly similar most of them were.

Well, that’s enough ridiculousness for one day. Hope you found one that made you laugh :).

Christmas Day!

2010-12-26T21:55:00.001Z

Yesterday morning, after a long winter’s nap where not a creature was stirring, we awoke to find that Santa had managed to get down through one our old bricked up coal fireplaces and put presents in our stockings!

First, let me just say that I love stocking stuffers! They’re so fun, and they’re usually some of the more creative, practical, and surprising gifts. I got a ‘cord wrap’ gadget that keeps your headphones wrapped neatly so they don’t turn into a bird’s nest in your pocket :). Anyone else get some cool stocking stuffers?

As for the bigger presents, those are cool too. Among several other fun gifts, I got a pair of gloves that have finger pads that will work on an iphone (one of the more annoying things about the iphone is that you can’t us it when wearing gloves… until now, that is). This probably doesn’t sound that important to those of you who live in Texas, but it’s frickin’ cold here and having to take your gloves off every other minute to work your phone is just plain annoying!

For Christmas lunch, since Candice has an aversion to uncooked meats, I was in charge of the ham. I had decided beforehand that the best way to cook a ham is to boil it in Dr. Pepper for about an hour and a half. The only problem was that I did not have a pot big enough to boil an entire ham! “What am I going to do?” I said to myself. If only I had a Le Creuset 28cm Round Cast Iron Casserole Dish! Well, guess what Santa brought for Candice this year! That’s right, check it out, featured in the middle of our Christmas lunch spread… you see, one of the benefits of the Le Creuset is that it can go from stove top, to oven, to table (this should be a commercial!). The ham was delicious, by the way.

We loved our Christmas day. We got to hang out with a few friends who made the day very special for us, and even though we were away from family, we very much enjoyed being at home, lounging in our pajamas, cooking great food, opening fun presents, and watching Christmas movies.

Christmas Eve

2010-12-25T22:22:00.001Z

In 1918, the first ‘Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols’ was held at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge on Christmas Eve. Since 1928, the service has been broadcast every year on the BBC and has become something of a national past-time in England. They even broadcasted it during World War II, when all of the glass had been removed from the chapel to keep it safe from air raids. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is now one of the most famous Christmas Eve services in the world, and is modeled by churches and chapels across the globe (and at Baylor in Brooks College Chapel).

So, yesterday morning we woke early to a very cold wintry day in order to join the line of people waiting outside the chapel for the 3pm carol service. We put on layer after layer of clothing…. warm stuff, North Face stuff, serious cold gear. But when you’re just sitting in a camping chair for five hours in the freezing cold, it doesn’t matter how many layers you have on, you’re going to freeze!

Thankfully, I had brought a backup plan for Candice. Just in case her many layers weren’t enough to fight the cold, I brought a mummy sleeping bag to encase her in a cocoon of warmth. [The sun had just started to hit the chapel in the background, making it glow beautifully :).]

The fun thing about this was that every time someone walked by our little huddle, they did a double-take (or stared outright) back at Candice. One time, an old lady walked by and laughed, and then she came back a couple of minutes later with a camera so she could take a picture of Candice in the mummy bag… I can only assume she wanted the picture to make notes on what she would do next year. :) Those people may have laughed when they first saw the mummy bag, but I guarantee you that they weren’t laughing after they had been standing in the cold for 5 hours, cursing themselves for not bringing their own mummy bags. :)

Luckily, we were joined by our two friends, Nicki and Eric, so we were able to take the cold weather in shifts a little bit… we went to eat lunch at subway while they held our place in line, and vice versa.

So at 1:30, they let everyone in to be seated, and even though it’s still very cold inside the chapel (it’s just stone and glass, after all), it was loads better than sitting outside.

The service was beautiful, very beautiful. I’ll never forget it. I think this was one of those things that would be on my list of ‘things to do before I die’…… check.

Later in the evening, several people came over to have Christmas Eve stew, candied pecans, eggnog, and sugar cookies. Here’s the finished product on the decorating… mine’s in the lower right… he’s a gangsta snowman who took three shots to the chest. Candice’s is in the middle on top, she’s the alien snow-woman who shot my snowman.

There’s also a cookie for the baby, which we put a ‘J’ on just to intrigue those who might be trying to guess our baby’s name (hint: the ‘J’ stands for ‘Jabar’) (another hint: stop trying to guess, we don’t have a name yet).

Merry Christmas, everyone! We missed you all today. We’ll tell you about Christmas day tomorrow. We’re sleepy.

The night before the night before…

2010-12-23T22:46:00.001Z

‘Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and all through the town,
Every single creature was scurrying every which way around.
They were trying to buy up their presents before the shops closed,
And get home by dark before all the streets froze. :)

A little poem to end a bit of a hectic day… then again, I guess every year it turns out that the night before the night before Christmas is going to be the time when you try to get everything done and ready for the holiday. We’re not really having a big to-do, but it’s the small things that make it special, and the small things take time, so that’s what I was working on today… stocking stuffers, candied pecans, etc.

Our first Christmas in Cambridge, our first Christmas as Collin and Candice +1, and our first Christmas away from family. We’ll miss everyone, I’m sure… but we have so much to be thankful for, it’s hard to be anything but very very happy. Hope everyone’s preparations are going well. I’m going down for a long winter’s nap, and I’m looking forward to spending the next couple of days doing very little with people whose kindness and generosity has made our life in the UK a blessed one.

Cambridge in the Snow

2010-12-21T10:16:00.001Z

Cambridge takes on a completely different shape over the Christmas holidays. It’s really the one time of the year when Cambridge is given back to the people who actually call it ‘home’. The students are gone, and tourists don’t start flooding the streets until the weather gets a bit nicer. For that reason, when I awoke a few days ago to see Cambridge blanketed in freshly fallen snow, I felt compelled to venture out into the quiet beauty of the city…

Those of you who live here know how rare this photo is… I’m standing opposite King’s College with a clear view of the chapel, not a tourist in sight :).

Not a soul on the river… just ice and ducks (not that ducks are soul-less).

I felt pretty sly getting this one… the guy had no idea (or maybe he did and he just didn’t want to turn around and acknowledge the crazy guy taking pictures of his feet).

For all you dog lovers out there :)…

I love this one… it’s like a gate to nowhere in the middle of a forest… seems like something you’d see in Narnia.

Does this hat make my face look fat?

Baby names poll!

2010-12-18T11:24:00.001Z

We definitely did not wait until now to start talking about names. We’ve been talking names for years, and there are several contenders that have stood the test of time and have remained near the top of our list. Then again, there are also a few new names we’ve discovered that have the allure of sounding fresh and original.

If you’ll look at the side of our blog, you’ll see a random collection of names we may or may not like. We’re not going to tell you which names are veterans or newbies to our list, nor will we divulge if we’re leaning toward one particular name at the moment. In other words, the poll to your right is for us to gather information from you, not vice versa.

In some ways, it’s a little bit scary to talk about the new names you like, for fear that in talking about a name too much it will lose its newness and become another boring name. But at some point, we’re going to have to call our kid something, and a name can’t stay new forever.

I’m not sure what makes a name sound good or bad when you hear it. It probably has something to do with your experiences in elementary school with that guy named Chaz or Vince that you really didn’t get along with. For me, however, much of the attraction to a name lies in what the name actually means. By this, I’m not referring to the little cards you can buy in Christian book stores that have some made-up meaning for names like Collin or Ainsley. I remember getting one of those cards when I was younger and it claimed the name Collin meant “Victory.” I thought to myself, “Well that’s a load of crap. You could put anything you want on those cards and, let’s be honest, a card that tells you your name means ‘Defeat’ is not going to sell well.” (In reality, Collin is sort of related to the name Nicholas, which means, “victory of the people”). This is probably why I’m more drawn to biblical names at the moment, because I like the meaning.

As it stands, we don’t know if Baby Ninja is a boy or girl yet, so we’re not sure which section of the baby names book to start with first. Nonetheless, we’d be delighted to hear what everyone thinks about the names in the poll. You can only vote for one name per gender, so make it count!

(If you get this blog in a feed or an email, you’ll have to actually visit the blog to see the poll.)

Frost

2010-12-13T21:00:00.001Z

One of my favorite wintry days so far was last week. Apparently, this is what’s known as “hoarfrost”, and it makes everything look like a winter wonderland. “Hoar” is old English for gray (as in, hair), venerable, or old. And they say it’s called hoarfrost because the ice crystals form in tiny little wisps or spikes that resemble an old man’s beard :)! Anyway, enough of the trivia, here’s the pictures:

Show yourselves

2010-12-12T13:30:00.001Z

Okay, so I just looked at the “Stats” page on our blog, and some really strange statistics struck me. Google says that we have 27 hits on our blog from someone in the Dominican Republic. Does that really mean that someone in the Dominican Republic is interested in our blog, or did someone we know go on vacation there and just had to find a way to read our blog 27 times? Maybe there are international spies who are monitoring our posts about babies? Or maybe they’re just accidental hits from people googling “awesome Americans” or “people who love cookies” and then stumbling upon our blog. Whoever you are, thank you for bringing the Bullards to the Caribbean audience, I like to think that our posts have a little something for everyone. We’d be delighted to hear from you if you’re out there.

On a related note, I’d like to challenge all our readers to access our blog from the most remote places you might go. It would be AWESOME to have some hits from Antarctica or Zimbabwe. And for as many people as we know from Australia, it’s kind of sad that we don’t have any hits there.

In conclusion, if you’re about to travel to another country over Christmas (let’s say, to Spain or Australia), then please do us a solid and put our blog on the map in more countries!