Baby August  was born on August 31, 2008 at 2:21 a.m. He was 9 pounds, 12 ounces and 21 inches long.

Yes, we make giganto babies in my family!

Things are going pretty well so far. Augie is a great eater and he caught on much more quickly to nursing than Wyatt did. We’ve all been adjusting to being a family of four. Wyatt is having a little bit of a hard time, but over all he seems pretty happy to be a big brother. I think he would just prefer that Augie didn’t take so much of Mom and Dad’s attention.

My maternity leave began today.

I suppose if you want to get technical, it officially began on Saturday, the first day after my last day of work. But Saturday felt like a regular Saturday and it took a weekday to make me realize I’m really and truly off work for awhile. When you add in that Wyatt is on his preschool vacation and that Zach is working his booty off trying to rack up contract hours, I got a real taste of what life would be like if I was a full-time stay-at-home mom.

So here’s how it went:

8:00 am: We all got up at the same time which was odd, because usually one of us gets up with Wyatt and the other sleeps a little longer.

8:15 am: Zach fixes Wyatt a bun and some fruit for breakfast, then makes eggs and toast for us while I drink tea, read the comics and do a sudoku.

8:55 am: I read my email and realize that on a normal day, I would be rushing out the door right now to get to work only a little bit late.

9:00 - 10:20 am: Various play and getting ready for the day activities.

10:20 - 10:30 am: Drive to the park for playgroup. Wyatt shouts at me the whole time, telling me that I’m going the wrong way and that he won’t get to play with Little Rachel because I’m going to get us lost and everyone will go home before we even get there. I’ve got the GPS and I’m pretty confident that I’m going to the right place, but the three-year-old in the back seat actually manages to shake my confidence in my typically great sense of direction. I also try to ignore him repeatedly telling me, “I am right and you are wrong.” but I fail and start to argue with him. Sigh.

10:30 am: When we arrive at the playground, we are the first ones there. Wyatt says “I told you we are at the wrong park!” several times but is soon distracted by the slide.  Soon afterward, the other parents start arriving and I am vindicated.  I chat with the other parents about sleep, leaving the house with a newborn, sleep, weight loss and more sleep while the kids play. I feel my focus shifting from my stressful web development job to parenting and greatly enjoy it.

12:30 pm: Leave the park and head to Costco. On Zach’s advice, I buy Wyatt a slice of pizza and a lemonade when we first arrive and he happily sits in the cart eating his lunch and trying various samples as we do our shopping. I buy an insane amount of stuff in preparation for the impending arrival of a newborn, including diapers and wipes for the new baby. One more thing to cross off my pre-baby to-do list.

2:00 pm: Back at home, Zach laughs out loud at the amount of stuff I bought, but I assure him that you really need a 60-pack of taquitos when you have a tiny baby in the house (easy to eat one-handed and we can send them in Wyatt’s lunch).

2:30 pm: Zach and Wyatt build a blanket fort while I sit on the couch with my feet up and give advice on how best to ensure the structural integrity of their house.

3:00 - 4:00 pm: Wyatt and I participate in various relaxational activities while Zach does more programming.

4:00 pm: Wyatt and I decide we want to have a nap and lay down on the bed with a pile of books to read. Despite several attempts by Wyatt to steal my pillow (”Mama! You have to share!”), I manage to hang on to it, but neither of us fall asleep. Still, we enjoy reading about Frances and her adventures.

5:00 pm: Wyatt and I make banana bread, then do puzzles and have a blueberry snack at the kitchen table.

6:00 pm: I clean off the top of my dresser, my nesting activity of the day. Because you really need to have a clean dresser when you have a new baby in the house.

6:30 - 8:00 pm: Zach and Wyatt go to the gym. I finish cleaning off my dresser, start this blog post and make dinner.

8:00 pm: We all eat dinner. Wyatt is super good at the table, but we’re running late for bed time.

8:30 - 9:30 pm: Clean the kitchen and start the dishwasher. Bath, jammies, tooth brushing, “hot tea” and stories.

10:00 pm: Wyatt is finally asleep. Time for Generation Kill and a foot rub from my dearest.

All in all a good day. I think I could use a few more of these before the baby comes, though.

My latest craft project was to make a bunch of swaddling blankets for the new baby. When Wyatt was teeny-tiny, the only way he would sleep was if he was being held, and even then he never slept more than three hours at a time.  I’m all for attachment parenting and co-sleeping, but sitting up in bed all night holding a baby is not exactly conducive to getting a good night’s sleep. Swaddling saved me from going insane. The very first time I swaddled Wyatt properly, he slept for five hours straight in his co-sleeper which meant that I slept for five hours straight lying down in bed. When I woke up, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was the most sleep I’d had in a month. I was so energized, I felt like I could run a marathon.

Hmmmm…OK…maybe not a marathon.

I felt like I could walk around the block.

Anyway, I wanted to be sure we had a good supply of swaddling blankets for the new baby, so the other day I went over to the new fabric store by our house and I bought three 42 inch squares of flannel. I know I could have just washed the fabric and used the blankets without doing anything to them, but I wanted a finished edge to keep the cloth from fraying.

I didn’t do anything complicated at all to finish up the edges. I just finger folded each edge over by a quarter of an inch and stitched along all four sides. Then I folded each edge over again and did another pass over them with the sewing machine. Easy peasy.

We walked over to the store with the wagon to get a few groceries, but Wyatt started acting a little bored almost even before we left our front yard.

To distract him, I handed him my point and shoot and asked him if he could take pictures of things as we walked along. His first assignment? Take a picture of something blue:

Take a picture of something red:

Take a picture of something purple:

Take a picture of some garbage:

I did not instruct him to take a picture of my booty, but that’s one of the hazards of handing your child a camera when you’re pulling him in the wagon. Of course, a normal person wouldn’t have posted this picture on the internet….

When looking at the photos I take of Wyatt’s bento lunches, several people have commented that they must take a lot of time to prepare and others have asked where I find the extra time in the morning to put his lunches together. The truth is, making a bento box usually doesn’t take much longer than putting a “regular” lunch together. Because Wyatt takes a cold lunch to school, I don’t need to do any cooking, so for me, 90% of what I do to put together a bento revolves around the equipment. Other parents put food into baggies. I put food into boxes and cups. I try to make them attractive as well by varying colors and textures (which I would be doing anyway), adding cute accessories here and there (equipment again), and occasionally cutting food into shapes (the other 10% of the work).

Take this lunch for example:

I start off with the typical ingredients for a PB&J. (The picture shows almond butter which I grabbed by mistake, but I actually used peanut butter.)

I make the sandwich. I bet this looks pretty much like what every other parent is doing to prepare their kid’s lunch on a Thursday morning.

This is where we get fancy. After the sandwich is prepped, Wyatt picks out a cookie cutter and cuts the sandwich into a shape. Or sometimes I do it. Or sometimes he does one shape and I do the other. But the gist of things is that I cut the sandwich and put it in the bento box. This process probably takes about twice as long as putting a sandwich in a baggie. But really, how long does that take?

You’ll notice that there are a bunch of scraps leftover after cutting. So what do I do with those? With very few exceptions, someone eats them right then and there. If it’s a sandwich leftover, it’s usually me or Wyatt eating the scraps. If it’s cheese, it’s usually my husband.

Next, I put together some kind of fruit or, more rarely, a veggie for the lunch. I forgot to take a picture of the prep for this little cup, but basically, I cut half a banana into slices, put the slices into the baking cup and sprinkled a few dried blueberries on top. Most of the time, Wyatt won’t eat a whole piece of fruit, so that’s why I always cut his fruit up. He also can’t figure out how to open a banana or an orange by himself yet so that’s another reason I cut stuff up. When I cut his fruit, I either put it in a cup or put it right in his bento box.

He wasn’t in the mood for cheese on this day, so instead I sent him with yogurt. His yogurt cups won’t fit into his lunch box, plus he can’t open them on his own, so I decant the yogurt into a baking cup as well. This involves opening the yogurt and spooning it into the cup.

Here are the results of my labor.

Now I put everything in the bento box. I was doing some of this work as I went along. I do try to arrange the box a bit so it will be pretty. Some of the things I do include:

• Varying the color of the baking cups I use. I try not to use two of the same color in one box, for example. I also don’t put a yellow cup in a yellow bento box, or a blue one in a blue box.
• I don’t put two things of the same color together. For example, instead of putting red cherry tomatoes next to a cup of red strawberries, I would try to put them next to cubes of yellow cheddar cheese.
• I also look for little details I can add to make the lunch prettier. This was actually a pretty pale lunch — white bananas, white bread, very light pink yogurt — so I tried to jazz it up a bit by adding blueberries to the banana for contrast and putting the strawberry food divider on the yogurt. The food divider also helps keep the yogurt from spilling onto the other foods.

Finally, I look for empty places in the lunch box and fill them in. Empty spots can cause the contents of the lunch to move around while it’s being transported and stuff can spill or get mixed together which isn’t particularly appetizing when you open the box up to eat. Here there were a few empty spots around the sandwiches, so I stuffed a couple of grapes in there. Other “packing materials” I use include crackers, dried fruits, grape tomatoes and cubes of cheese. These items tend to be colorful as well, so they bump up the pretty factor in addition to stabilizing things.

And here’s the beauty shot!

Obviously, this is a completely unnecessary and time-consuming step, but taking photos and sharing them on Flickr is something I enjoy. Other people spend a spare five minutes in the morning reading the funnies, checking email or savoring a cup of coffee. I spend them taking photos of food. And Twittering. But that’s another story all together…

Wyatt and I made a couple of lacing cards this morning as we were putting together lunches and eating breakfast. I drew the pictures, he colored them and then I cut them out and punched the holes in them. I thought they were pretty cute, but he was only marginally interested in them.

I really try not to push my crafty pursuits on him when he’s not interested, but I have to admit that it can get a little frustrating when I come up with something that I think will be a really fun activity for him and he’s lukewarm on it. I wonder if all crafty moms have this problem, or if it’s his age or if I come up with really lame activities.