Congratulations Mina and James!

Mina had their son Louis James Kumar Spindler at 3:28pm on Monday October 12. He is 7 lbs. 6 oz. and 20 inches long. We visited them at the hospital yesterday - Louis is doing well, very healthy and rather serene, all in all a good baby.

Beatrice, Month Four

Another month for Beatrice - this one started with Beatrice's first airplane flight, a trip to Seattle to visit our friends Chris and Lindsey and their daughter Charlotte, and then to attend Chuck and Monica's wedding. On the flight home from Seattle she was so cheerful and charming that nearby passengers actually thanked us as we disembarked deplaned.

The biggest news this month (at least for me) is that Beatrice is now watched by a babysitter one day a week. I drop off Beatrice every Thursday from 9-5pm at Mina's house, where Mina's sitter Leticia watches both B and Rosemary. That means I get eight uninterrupted hours to work. (The rest of the week I work while B is napping or after she goes to bed.) If I plan carefully, I can get almost a week's worth of work done in that one day.

I get so much done on Thursdays, in fact, that I can spend Tuesday mornings at the excruciatingly named "Mommy and Me" - which Beatrice adores. About thirty babies and their mothers gather in a room at 10am every Tuesday for singing and games for young infants. B's two favorite activities are bubble blowing and parachute time. For the former, the teacher plays soft music while filling the room with soap bubbles; for the latter, all the babies lie on their backs while the mothers take hold of a rainbow-colored parachute and wave it back and forth over their heads to the babies' evident delight.

In addition to bubbles and parachutes, Beatrice's favorite things are reading Fluffy Chick and Friends, listening to Paris Combo, watching the fountains at the Americana shopping mall, and going to the aquarium. Joanne and I took B to the Long Beach Aquarium and Beatrice was mesmerized by the brightly colored, well-lit, and continuously moving fish, very easy for even an infant to see. The hot pink jellyfish were her favorites - she liked them so much that Dev and I took her back to see them again the following week.

Sadly, the Los Angeles Zoo's petting zoo (or, as they have dubbed it, the "contact yard") wasn't such a big hit. Beatrice seemed blandly indifferent to the many goats, pigs, and sheep - at one point I tried to rub her hand over a sheep's wool but she didn't even turn around. Maybe next month...
Meanwhile Beatrice has stalled a bit on rolling over. After rolling over eight or ten times last month, she seems to have tired of it already - she hasn't rolled over in weeks. I assume she is storing up energy for the Next Big Thing.

Watch her fail to roll over!

And here she is, endeavoring to put her whole fist into her mouth (also available on the Baby Fail Blog).

Beatrice is now sleeping in her own crib, in her own room, and you can watch her do so by clicking here.

As always, there are many more photos on Facebook and Flickr.

Next month -Baby's First Halloween!

Welcome Baby Spindler #2!

Dev and I hosted a small party at our house this weekend for Mina, James, Rosemary, and their new family-member-to-be. We were able to sit outside despite the still-warm weather and enjoy mini sausage pies, roasted vegetable and ricotta pizzas, and other autumnal fare. And grandparents Dan and Mary Spindler were visiting in Los Angeles and so they were able to come, too. Now we're even more excited about Baby Spindler, we can't wait until next month...

Goodbye Joanne!

Yesterday ended a great week with Joanne visiting us in L.A. As usual, we packed a lot into her stay, including the Long Beach Aquarium, the Getty Villa, LACMA, the tar pits, thrift store shopping, and veggie Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley.

Can't get enough of looking at our baby?

Now you can keep tabs on the unsuspecting infant around the clock with our new cribcam!

DIY is not always the best solution

On the plus side, Dev learned that shaving a dog is a lot harder and more time-consuming than it looks and now he understands why we should pay to have a professional do it.

On the negative side, our dog now looks like this.

Beatrice, Month Three

Month three has been a big one for Beatrice (as are most months when you are an infant). Beatrice started off her third month with the family trip to Ojai for her Grandmother Suzan's 60th birthday party.

Later the same month we drove to the Bay Area to attend Edward and Vanessa's wedding - Beatrice had fun with her other set of grandparents while Dev and I got to enjoy two baby-free nights in San Francisco.

Back in Los Angeles we also had a lot of fun, including attending a children's outdoor performance of Cymbeline and a Bollywood kids' concert, both with Mina and Rosemary. I also joined a mother's social group in my neighborhood and took Beatrice to several "play dates" - though since I have been assigned to the youngest infants' group, there's little real playing, as you might imagine.

Developmentally, the big news is that Beatrice can now really engage with toys and other objects. Favorites include the sleep sheep and the $20 rubber giraffe. But above all, she adores the (somewhat banal) soft book Fluffy Chick and Friends - she will spend more than an hour at a time staring at the book, transfixed, slowly turning the pages.

Playing with the book:

She spends a lot of time staring at and grabbing her feet, trying to stick her entire fist into her mouth, and grabbing other people's fingers and putting them into her mouth. She babbles a lot, mostly saying either "goo" or "ah-goo." She's also picked up the rather distasteful habit of blowing bubbles - but (specious) research shows that babies that blow bubbles often develop superior verbal skills as older children, so blow away!

Also this month, Baby's First Pants, Baby's First Subway Ride (the Gold Line from Pasadena to downtown L.A. with her aunts Mina and Julie), and Baby's First Dive Bar, in Studio City.

Baby's First Pants:

Overall she's an incredibly smiley baby, spending most of the day smiling, laughing, and looking around contentedly.

Some video of Beatrice waking up in an excellent mood, as usual (she really starts rocking out around second 45):

And just this morning she rolled over for the very first time! and burst into tears immediately afterward. Sadly I missed catching it all on film, but I did catch her frantically clinging to the mat to make sure she doesn't ever do it again...



As always, you can find more baby photos on Flickr and Facebook.