Juliane and Rice Cereal

Two things have made my life significantly easier and better over the past week. One is the arrival of Marty's cousin, Juliane, from Germany. She arrived late Wednesday night and by Thursday morning, she and Josie were already best of friends.

She is great with both Benjamin and Josie.

She is mature, confident and really just fun to be around. The kids, Juliane and I took the bus downtown. We had fun seeing the sights and of course, she wanted to see where the first Starbucks was.

If she is going to really fit into the family, we figured we should get used to our walk down to Alki and Pegasus right away.


It was late and we were tired so we took the bus back home.

The other thing that has changed my life over the past few days was introducing rice cereal to Benjamin's daily routine. He had been really fussy and not sleeping well for the past 7 weeks or so and believe me, 7 weeks seems like an eternity when you are only getting 5-6 hours of very interrupted sleep a night and then loooong very unproductive days with a fussy baby. The Dr. suggested rice cereal as a way to keep down his projectile spit-ups. Turns out, he was hungry for more than breast milk and formula. Since starting him on the rice cereal he is sleeping 6 or 7 hours stretches at night (11-13 hours total) and taking 1-2.5 hour naps! I know that by writing this and making it public it curses the whole thing and he will be back to waking every 3 hours tonight.. Let's hope not, though :)

This is what Fritzy thinks of the rice cereal.