Good things

While we await test results and referral processing, instead, some of the things that are totally awesome right now:

• the fact that Jolly spends nearly every car ride holding RJ's hand. It makes me so happy. Adjacent carseat installation for the win!
  
• Jolly's new 3T shirts and sweaters wardrobe, courtesy of Target, specifically the Circo brand and the clearance section. Something so cute about little boys in a Jolly Rodger motif sweater, especially when it's a little boy named Jolly.
  
• Mountains of clean laundry courtesy of Ephiny.
  
• Jolly's singing "Ring around the rosie!" with all the exuberance one would expect for a song about avoiding the plague. This might be the very first song that he's actually willing to sing. (Previously he would just insert a word or two into songs that we were singing, but then would demur, "Mummy sing it.")
  
• RJ's return to his normal sleeping schedule (aka 11 to 6, give or take half an hour on either end).
  
• Family trip to Ikea yesterday. Do so love the nursing and diaper changing rooms, and the bright funky kids things aesthetics, the new Ikea Family membership program, and the fact that Jolly could hardly be torn away from the demo play kitchen (which is exactly the Christmas gift we were going there to pick up, happily -- thanks, Poppy and Mimi!).
  
• Anticipation of Ikea furniture assembly!
  
• Anticipation of planning out Ikea shelving for our double garage to transform it into a warehouse store type ambiance rather than big piles of boxes. We currently have boxes of diapers in sizes N, 1-2, 2, 3, 4 and 5, so we're not far off the warehouse store. We're rehoming the N, 1-2 and 2 size diapers soon, though.
  
• Size 3 diapers for RJ. Going up a size even though he wasn't at the end of the size 2 diaper size range prevented so many blowouts!
  
• The fact that I can eat soft-serve ice cream such as those available at Ikea again without fear of listeria harming RJ!
  
• Ephiny and RJ rocking their Swedish sweaters, and Jolly eating lingonberries, combine with today's Very Unusual Snow and our usual Ikea-heavy furnishings to make me feel pleasantly like I've taken a holiday to Sweden.
  
• Back to pre-RJ-pregnancy weight! About 10 more lbs to go until I'm at my happy pre-previous-pregnancies weight, but still, making progress... and hey, I'm currently at what I weighed as a sophomore in high school, and how many people can say that?
  
• Also, this article makes me feel like a super-special snowflake for having lost a third of my one-time body mass and having largely kept it off for... five years now?
  
• RJ has TWO whorls on the back of his head, not just one, so it looks a bit like Starry Night. I had a dream about discovering that this was also common on other people but that I'd just never noticed. He also has a very very obvious "part" to his hair where it grows.
  
  • "Some people have two or more whorls; [...] Schwarzburg (1927) found 5.4 percent of Germans to have double whorls. Wunderlich and Heerema (1975) found double whorls in 1.5 percent of white newborns, while Ucheya and Igweh (2005) found double whorls in 2 percent of Nigerian men." - from http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythhairwhorl.html
• RJ now capable of more noises than his starting "Uh-röööööööööö" leading to greatly increased conversational flexibility.
  
• RJ now capable of holding his head without any bobblehead action, greatly increasing possibilities for holding his enormous bulk up.
  
• Jolly saves his great episodes of whininess and acting out for Ephiny. We thought it might be the timing of when she arrives in the evening (6 pm) but this weekend has eliminated that hypothesis because she gets whiny tantrums during the day also! I suppose this isn't really a "good thing" but you know, if he's going to be whiny with one of his parents only, it's convenient for it to be the parent who is not the primary caregiver during the day when the child:adult ratio is 2:1.
  
• Jolly is so excited about eating. I love watching him eat. It's so fun and gratifying to feed him.
  
• RJ is mesmerized by eating, especially now that he can sit up more independently in our laps during meals. He's made his first grabbing attempts at foods and plates on the table, so I suspect we will once again be working hard to wait with solids until the 4 month mark, rather than virtuously making it to the 6 month mark that is advised by the breastfeeding lobby. (When Jolly was 4 months we just gave up on prying the food he grabbed off our plates back out of his tightly clenched determined fists.) I hope RJ accepts purees though because we just got an awesome grinder/strainer attachment for our pink Kitchenaid mixer and I'm excited to use it. Also, I bet Jolly will LOVE helping to feed his baby brother.
  
• Milo, our second cat, is totally the perfect cat for our household. He and Priscilla are frenemies who entertain each other with their ongoing stalking, and Priscilla's nightly lamentation of "I'm so aloooone" has ended at last. He puts up with a remarkable amount of jumping and spazzing from Jolly, and is so very patient, as well as being as high-energy as our toddler and liking to play with him. All in all, I say this whole "get second cat when baby is less than 2 months old" mission ended up being a big success, crazy though it seemed at the time.
  
• Jolly is so bossy and rule-abiding. I love it. He spends a lot of time disciplining Milo when he (Milo) jumps onto counters and tables, and discusses at great length where Milo may and may not go. ("This table is for eating. Milo can't go on there. He's naughty. We can teach him for that! This table is NOT for eating. Milo can go there!") Priscilla even got in on it by using Jolly's Big Stool to get onto the counters one time. I was sort of thrilled for her because she has hip displasia and only one good eye, and previously the lack of agility and depth perception had prevented that level of exciting vantage points. I'm glad she at a stately age of 9 is finally able to do her teen rebellion of naughty getting onto counters.
  
• Woodstove! On a snowy day! So cozy!