Party Time?

I've been feeling unbelievably unmotivated lately. Work, home, you name it... I don't feel like doing it. No particular reason. (Actually, it's probably lots of small reasons, but whatever.) At least today is Friday; I'm hoping to recharge this weekend, and be able to attack everything with renewed vigor come Monday.

LL is doing great. He's up to seven teeth. The only one of the "set" that he's missing is the bottom right one, and that one seems to be taking its sweet time, since it's not even puffy. He's still chewing on everything he can reach, though, so maybe it will surprise us. LL's four top teeth are descending fast, now that they've broken through the surface, so it is becoming easier to see them when he laughs. He's still getting used to the feeling of them, though, and we hear him grinding his teeth and slurping through them all the time. It's very cute.

His sleep is doing much better, sleeping through the night more often than not. His wake-up time, however, seems to be moving earlier and earlier. For a long time, he was a 7:00-on-the-dot kid. Over the past week or two, that time has been slowly creeping closer to 6:00am, and this morning he woke up at 5:15. Way too early, but we don't quite know how to break him of it. We've also been finding him on his tummy a lot, which is very cute, but a bit frustrating for him since he still can't crawl, so he just lies in his crib and cries to be rescued.

As LL approaches the ten-month mark, we're getting pressure from family to start planning his birthday party. I'm still in denial that he's going to be a year old soon, so I had been trying to avoid thinking about it. We finally had to at least pick a date, though, because my mom needed to apply for time off from work, and all of the grandparents (plus aunts and uncles, apparently) needed to start booking airline tickets. We were hoping to do something relatively small, but as it stands right now, we have fifteen relatives (yes fifteen!!!) flying in from out of state for LL's first birthday. It's hard to keep it small when so many people are coming from so far away.

I still don't quite know what I want to do for the party, but if I don't start planning something soon, S's mom is going to start planning it herself. I wouldn't mind a little help, but I'd rather maintain some creative control over the thing, so I should at least come up with a theme, and probably some limitations on how crazy we're going to let people get.

The New York Times ran an article this week on babies and consumerism. It talked about how some parents, partially driven by the economy and partially driven by social and environmental concerns, are trying to scale back the scope of their spending on small children. Parts of the article had me shaking my head (really? People used to buy $400 toys for infants, and they're just now realizing that maybe it's not necessary?) but other parts of it had me looking around our house and trying to objectively analyze what we've spent on LL.

We haven't bought very many toys, but mainly that's because everybody else has bought so much stuff for him already. And I like to think that we're doing a good job of collecting mainly toys with "staying power," like blocks and books and stuffed animals, that he'll be able to play with for many many years. But when the article mentioned the statistic that, on average, kids in the US receive 70 new toys every year, I first laughed, because that is an absurdly high number, and then I turned to LL's toy box and thought, "Hmmmm...." Yep, there are a lot of toys in there. I don't think it's 70, but it might come kinda close. And sure, he definitely got more new toys this year than he will probably ever receive again, because he was starting out at zero. But still... that's an awful lot of toys for a twenty-pound munchkin who can be entertained for a good long time with a sheet of newspaper and a plastic cup.

So, yeah, we're going to have to figure out how to rein in the grandparents a bit when it comes to spending money on LL. And we might have to start figuring out a strategy for Chanukah and Christmas as well. It's awesome that LL is so lucky and so loved, but a little discretion should go a long way towards teaching him some responsible habits, starting right now.