Ellie is two months old today! I can’t believe it. I thought the second pregnancy flew, and it turns out that the baby days are flying, too (though as someone said to me the other day, it’s a marathon, but each day is a sprint).

It hasn’t been easy, adjusting to two kids. I feel like I’m dropping all the balls most of the time, but each time we have a good sleep night (which last night was, after a hideous, horrid miserable weekend including one 11-1:30 a.m. period where E woke up every 3 to 15 minutes) I feel like I might just make it through to the other side. One thing that is making it go faster is keeping up with Tuck, who has classes to go to and friends to play with and doesn’t let me just sit around staring at the baby.

I found this ominous, especially since T just said “I fix baby Ellie” while brandishing his screwdriver

And now I know what we’re working towards, having done it before. As Ellie starts smiling, I turn and see Tuck making jokes. He is so very, very funny these days, all silly faces and perfect mimicry. “Gee whiz,” he says to himself when something is hard, and “oh, Tuck, silly Tuck” when he’s amusing himself. He’s been pretending to be a doctor and heal his little orange doll’s stomachache (“Make Neddy feel better”), or he puts on his hard hat and gets out tools to work on his “cherry picker” (step stool) with the “jackhammer” (grabber claws).

We had a bad scare a week ago–through a variety of misunderstandings Tuck was alone in the room with Ellie on the window ledge/changing station, and he pulled her off, three feet, onto her face. She’s too young for any “is the child acting normally” observations to apply, so we ended up in the pediatric ER until 1:30 a.m. getting Baby’s First Head CT. I was so furious at Tuck; he’d been being pretty aggressive towards Ellie and ignoring anything we said about being gentle or nice to her. But my friends Ann and Greta encouraged me to turn on hardcore positive reinforcement techniques, and a week later they finally seem to be working. Yesterday he played gently with her, tickling her feet while she smiled for a couple minutes.

And honestly, how could I stay mad at this face?

Besides, he’s just two. He’s so big that even I sometimes treat him like he’s older, which isn’t fair at all. I had a sad week or two recently when I realized most of his friends have started school this fall, so we’re on our own during times when we used to have consistent playmates. But suddenly I met a bunch of new people–mostly through the awesome block party our neighborhood threw the weekend before last–and it turns out there are lots of new babies and families with kids Tuck’s age within a block or two. It’s nice to expand the circle.

Meanwhile, Ellie, as I said, has started smiling and is suddenly much more interested in the world. She loves to lie on that ledge (now ALWAYS with an adult right next to her, sigh) and stare at our faces or at the windows. And she appears to be deeply in love with the dangling monkey rattle on her bouncy chair. I don’t have nearly as many photos of her because much of the time we look like this:

She’s so snug, she snoozes through all our morning activities, and I don’t think Tuck even realizes she is there.

It’s fun to see her starting to emerge from that newborn haze, all unfocused eyes and eat-sleep-poop. I think we’re going to like her.

And I can’t wait until both kids are sitting on a blanket with me at the farmer’s market, enjoying a grilled cheese and soaking up the early-fall sun.

Ellie is up, after a record-breaking 40 minute nap not on me WHILE TUCK IS ASLEEP, miracle of miracles. Off i go!

Next time (which will be sooner): Apartment stuff!