Jello Pool Party

This week' OTB was a Jello pool party.

As with the pasta party, Yarden quickly figured out that she was sitting in a pool of food and began to leisurely to eat her surroundings.

(* Not all of the OTB activities are food related, in fact only two out of about 30 have been - but they do make for ridiculous photos. If you are interested in seeing other activities, there are tons of OTB photos here.)

Happy Birthday to Joey Ramone, Malcolm X, and Yarden.

Dear Distant Future Yarden:

We know that you were secretly walking at daycare, but we appreciate that you waited to do it in front of us until all grandparents and your Uncle Liam arrived. It's probably for the best because it is entirely possible that you will be photographed every second of the next few days. I just hope Slightly Future Yarden doesn't get cold feet. I'm not glad that you learned how to hide things from me after that time I busted you holding your own bottle at daycare, but I am/was making fewer surprise visits for the last couple of weeks so maybe I'm partly to blame too.

Anyway, I hope that your (next) piano concert goes well. You've probably come a long way since "Itsty Bitsy Spider" and I'm very proud of you. And I hope that you've gotten that second black belt in karate, a second Golden Glove, had a nice weekend on the Moon, and that you're coming over this weekend to do laundry.

Love,

Dad

Happy Birthday Yarden

Today is the one year anniversary of the last day that Seamus and I spent in the labor room at Cedars Sinai.
Me hooked up to god knows how many monitors - drugged, scared & blogging.
Seamus crammed uncomfortably into a variety of hospital chairs - stone sober, scared & blogging.

For hours, then days, we waited knowing the ending, but not knowing whether we were minutes or hours from the magical moment we were waiting for.

At some point, whether pushed, pulled or forcibly extracted, Yarden was coming and in that instant two would become three. We were going to have a daughter. We were going to suddenly go from being a couple to a family. We were going to be Yarden's parents, meaning that kids would someday call the house and greet me as Yarden's mom. An not soon enough, Seamus and I were going to be handed a tiny, phenomenal, sleepy, cuddly thing to love & feed & financially support & teach & be legally reponsible for for at least 18 years.

No way of thinking about the impending, seismic change made it any less surreal.

It was an amazing time.

And then, in a blog entry appropriately entitled "AT LAST" on May 19th 2008:
Yarden Fenway Hurley was born at 1:57 PM via c-section.
She is gorgeous at 7 pounds and 21 inches.
Well it's one year later, and this beautiful thing:
has morphed into this beautiful thing:
And is weighing in at a whopping 20.6 pounds (40th percentile) and 30 inches (75th percentile)
Yarden's birthday started with an early 5 am wakeup and we were joined in bed by a demanding, heavy lidded nursey baby who seemed baffled by her hyper alert parents and ths strange birthday song they kept singing.

We tried to give her a "Birth-Quake", but she seemed disinterested.
I guess that was just a baby thing.
Now she's a toddler.

We spent some time in the backyard which is slowly becoming an "Outdoor Entertainment Space" thanks to Brent Green, fantastic neighbor & lansdcape architect extraordinaire. More on that later.

Then it was off to Dr. Shaheedy for her one year exam.
Her first exam:
Today's:
She still seemed suspicious of the doctor.
And with good reason.
But a bottle makes it mostly all better.
I briefly got Yarden to wear her birthday crown.
But mostly she wanted Mommy to hold it.

After that, she went to school.

What did she do at school?
I don't know.

I don't know because today, for the first time since she was born, nobody tracked what she ate, drank, peed & pooped.
Nobody even wrote down when she napped and for how long.
Because she is now a year old & the deal is, starting at one year, no more reports from school.
I miss them already.

Here is your moment of zen.



And two other AWESOME things that happened today, both of which esem like great tributes o Yarden' birthday.
The trees in our yard got planted and IndustryMamas, the group that my friend Lisa and I started to support moms working in the entertainment industry launched TODAY. We've been live for just a few hours and we already have 35 members.