continuity (with a side of baby butt)

i am sitting in my bedroom, in a chair my mother rocked me to sleep in 38 years ago, rocking my son to sleep. he has been experiencing annoying & worrisome (for me) painful & frustrating (for him) gas and spitting up for the last couple days. i was relieved to go to the pediatrician today to ask about it, except i wrote down the wrong day and we all hauled ourselves to the docs for nothing today. we'll go back on friday when they'll actually be expecting us. hysterical mistake with 2 infants, eh? to make it worth all the effort, we weighed the babes. pequita shocked us by only having gained half a pound per week, which means she's on a normal trajectory; she now weighs 22 lbs and a couple ounces (we didn't take off their diapers since it was an unofficial weigh-in.) monito, whose nickname might become brutus, is still gaining a pound a week and is now 12 lbs +. the woman in the waiting room thought he was 2 months old; he turned 9 months two days ago.

the hormones and time have worked - i am as over the moon for our son as i am over pequita. he looks a lot like me and the side of the family that he is named for (his real name, that is; you all know that i didn't really name my kids what i call them here on the blog, right?) monito lools so much like my dad as an infant, too, that it is clear my family genes, blond and blue-eyed though they may be, are sufficiently sturdy as to trump the 4 generations (that we know about) of dark-eyed and -haired donor genes. it is very special. he's got my eyes & eyebrows, nose, crooked pinky fingers, and (sadly) my enormous skull.

we ended our afternoon of errands today at the local university's psych l ab, having volunteered pequita for a linguistics / language acquisition experiment. or so they said - i took enough psych courses in college to know that they don't tell us what the real experiment is about so we don't impact the results. while i nursed an unquiet baby boy behind 2-way mirror, homestead mama played w/ pequita in the lab's playroom to acclimate her to the space. the tester commented that pequita crawled amazingly well for the short time she's been mobile while i beamed and bit my tongue to keep from recounting the 6 million ways in which she manifests her superior intellect and physical prowess. tomorrow we take pequita back for another 30 minutes of play - the first and third 10 minute stretches h-mama will do more free play, and the middle 10 minute stretch h-mama will do what the experimenter tells her to do in an earpiece a la fbi operative. very interesting so far. i've always wanted kids that i could volunteer as lab rats. too many psych electives and too much college town living, i suppose.

a couple days ago the kids has their first experience in a pool. we filled a cheap plastic pool with about 3" of bracingly cold water from our well and eased them out of the 95 degree humid air into the liquid heaven. unsurprisingly, monito (who really only had his toes dipped for a split-second) hated it and squealed in his usual protest sound. pequita fell in love with her pool, cold water, hot summer days and her moms for bringing it all together for her. behold pure bliss:
at this rate, i think our upcoming vacation to the cape cod beach will be a roaring success. and can i just take a little credit for finding the perfect swimsuit for the baby daughter of two dykes? recognizably gay with rainbow stripes but tastefully executed with cute but not frou-frou bows on the hips. and all for $1.50 at the used baby goods store. damn, but i'm good. and pequita's most amazing built-by-breastmilk hunk-a hunk-a burning baby butt & thighs. we are so proud.