I’ll set the stage for you.

Dad and son are at the park together. Mom and daughter stay home to work on dinner. Well, mom is working on dinner and daughter is watching Daniel Tiger in the bedroom. She’s giggling and talking to herself and it feels like the best kind of Friday evening at home.

Sadly, idyllic times like the one described above aren’t meant to last when there are young children at home. In between prepping the vegetables and dredging the meat I went back to check on what exactly what was so funny about Daniel Tiger and found my duvet cover, baby girl, and baby girl’s stuffed lion covered in globs of hair wax.

She was so proud of her work! Dinner was put on hold and That Husband got home just in time to strip her down and scrub her hair while I washed the bedding and kept the rice from burning.

The next day, a bout of overdue toddler proofing commenced. I’d say we were lucky to be able to put it off this long. I’m going to think about styling her hair sometime, but with a much more conservative dollop of hair wax (the lion has hopefully seen his last round of sticky hair styling).

She’s officially on the move. So far the house has remained intact, but we’ll have to make some changes pretty soon. She’s crawling at just-shy of 8 months, and her brother was walking at 10 months. Take your time T2, there’s no rush.

She’s so close to crawling and this means I’ve got to jump on every opportunity to take pictures of her before she starts scooting away from me all the time.

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Throughout my pregnancy we spent hours talking about first and middle names for our second child. We didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl, so we discussed both male and female combinations that we liked. Our criteria for first names was the same as before (minus my thoughts about a theme) and I wanted a family name for the middle name (T1′s middle name is my FIL’s first name). About an hour after I gave birth to our baby girl the midwife asked if T2 was going to take my last name or That Husband’s. We both laughed because we had never considered anything other than the American standard, children take husband’s last name. And so on all the paperwork filled out post-birth the midwife used TH’s last name.

When giving birth in a hospital in the US, the birth certification process is streamlined and under normal circumstances it’s all taken care of by the time you are discharged. Having a home birth means that the parents have to go into the local municipal office with a stack of paperwork and apply for a birth certificate. After a few weeks of procrastination we were preparing for our appointment when I thought back on what the midwife had asked and realized “I want her to have my last name.” I have had a different name from my husband for almost 5 years now, and so far it hasn’t caused any problems. I’ve had a different last name than my son for 3 years, and that hasn’t been an issue either (even with multiple trips out of the country and back). But most of the males I know would not even consider such a thing with their own children. Read more →

Yesterday I came home to my babies after a long weekend in Portland with That Husband. I wanted to have something more substantive up by today, but substance will have to wait (I do plan on writing up a review of our Portland trip at some point).

Today I’ll leave you with T1 and T2 playing in the master bedroom of our EPA house as I packed and worked on the laundry. Four pictures down you’ll see T1 doing something with his fingers - it’s one of his most adorable personality traits. Maybe I’ll be able to share it with all of you now that Instagram has video! You can follow me at http://instagram.com/thatwife.