Mom Remembers

It's long overdue but this is my official blogger announcement: the Duede family is expecting again! I'm pregnant and excited to welcome Baby #2 in late August. In connection with this announcement, I will be changing pretty much everything about this website, including the address. When I switch to the new site in a couple of days, you will be able to find updates on my children--plural children!--at www.momremembers.blogspot.com. I will also be making available a back-log of posts I have written and kept private for the past few months. You can find them in the archives, although I imagine they will pop up on your readers, too, as soon as I publish them. Eek! Isn't this exciting?

We went for our 19-week ultrasound this afternoon. I got a friend to come sit at home while Soren napped and then picked Scott up from work. We drove to the Women's Clinic, parked, and held hands while we walked through the corridors to the lab. "I'm mostly excited to make sure that it's healthy," I lied. "It's more important to count the limbs than know the gender." Scott smiled and squeezed my hand. He knew that I could barely contain my excitement to find out whether we would be having a son or a daughter. He saw right through my paper-thin disguise, I think because he felt the same way. There was only one important question: boy or girl? I'm sure the technician knew why we had come. I'm sure he knew we were all chomping at the bit to see those all-important boy or girl parts. But he took his sweet time getting there, looking at the heart and brain, measuring the bones and belly, snapping pictures of the limbs and spine. Everything ...

For a while now, I've noticed our son developing a funny quirk. When playing or eating happily on his own, Soren would sometimes look up at me and blink very deliberately. It was obviously a sign of contentment, as it was usually accompanied by an amusing smile, and he always seemed so proud of himself after he had done it. For a while, I thought it was just amusing and unusual. I would think, huh. My son blinks at me when he's happy. Weird, but ok. And then, one day, I figured out why he did it. I was reading a book on the couch and Soren was flipping through his own books on the carpet. I paused at the end of the chapter to watch my son for a moment. He looked up at me. I smiled and then I winked at him. And he blinked back. Suddenly, I understood! He was trying to wink! Excitedly, I winked at him again. He blinked back. Having confirmed my hypothesis, it is now really fun to see Soren blink/"wink" at me. He often does it without my winking first, and then...

Soren zipped into the kitchen while I was folding laundry this morning. I heard him open his favorite cupboard and start rustling around with the canned goods. I figured he'd be occupied for a while. I just kept folding. A few minutes later, he crawled out of the kitchen and back into the living room to play with some more conventional toys. When I finished the folding, I got up to put the cans away. I scooped Soren up and started singing our "clean up" song while walking to the kitchen. But when I got there, there was nothing to clean up. None of the cans where out of the cupboard. Instead, I saw this:

On Sunday, our family went to visit Scott's old mission trainer, James (Elder Russell); his wife, Darlene; and their new baby boy, Hudson. Soren was tired and cranky most of the visit but, near the end, he did something to make us proud. He took two consecutive steps! And then, he did it again! Ever since then, Scott and I have really gotten into the spirit of bribing him to walk. Scott's favorite trick is to hold marshmallows just out of our boy's reach and make him walk for them. Soren wants the marshmallows so badly, though, that this sometimes causes more problems than steps. Blinded by his desire, he is suddenly wobbly and inadept, and so sure that he is incapable of reaching a treat just beyond his grasp. It can frustrate him but is very rewarding in the end. Because he always gets it in the end. I prefer a more subtle method. Even more than eating marshmallows, Soren likes to turn the pages in a book. So when I read to him nowadays, I keep the book at...

Soren has gotten much better at standing up on his own. He will now stand up unaided for an extended period of time, even if he is in the middle of an empty space. He used to stand up only when he was right next to a table or chair, probably so that he could grab it if he felt unstable at any moment. But now, there is no longer the need for that mental safety. He is brave and strong enough to stand all on his own. This is such a common occurrence now that I even managed to run and grab the camera and snap several photos last night before he sat down. *** On Valentines Day he made a very humorous and disastrous attempt at walking. He was playing with a flimsy doll stroller at his friend's house. It looked very much like his walker but it was not built to support any weight at all. He was standing up, holding the handles, and he took a few confident steps forward, completely expecting the stroller to sustain him. With each step it slipped further away from him until he f...

It's been exactly three months since the start of my last menstrual cycle and so, of course, I have known that I was pregnant for a while. But, as a part of my whole paranoia about this pregnancy, I hadn't taken a pregnancy test until this morning. I didn't want to get a positive and then loose the baby. But the more time that passed, the more excuses I had to forgo the exciting pregnancy ritual of peeing on a stick. It seemed silly to rely on a test when more and more I could feel the life growing in me. Or maybe I'm just too cheap to buy a $15 test when I already know the answer (or will in a few more months at no extra charge!). But Friday night I mentioned to a friend that I hadn't yet taken a pregnancy test. She told me she had a spare and offered it to me. I took it, laughing. I used it this morning. Even knowing everything I did, it was still exciting to see the little plus sign appear in the window. It took hardly any time at all to materialize but e...