Antarctic Elephant

According to Rachel, there is a white elephant who lives in Antarctica. Its main predators are polar bears, but the polar bears do not eat the elephant because they are not carnivores. They are messy eaters. Instead of eating meat, they eat snowflakes and mud. The mud turns them brown and then they lick themselves clean with a white tongue but the brown gets all over the tongue and can't be wiped off. Then the polar bear will get a wipe, grab it in its teeth, put it on its tongue and leave it on its tongue until all the brown and snowflake goo is gone. (If you're wondering, snowflake goo is something that comes out of snowflakes.)

Rachel is funny

On the day before Anna was born, Rachel and I decided to make cupcakes. Since we were out of the little cupcake papers, I asked Rachel and Ben to go to the store for them.

Rachel was riding in the cart, and she spotted the cupcake papers before Ben did. "There they are!" "Where?" said Ben. "Right there, next to the [whatever it was]" answered Rachel. "Where?" repeated Ben. After a couple rounds of this, Rachel got annoyed and responded, "Oh, just let me out of here and I'll show you where they are!"
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Rachel is often silly when I get her dressed in the morning. She likes to goof off, and usually she just makes me laugh. She has recently named her feet. One is called Foot and the other is called Foot-ah! (emphasis on the "ah") She gets very indignant if I forget which one is which.
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Bathtime = silly time at our house. Recent discussions have involved the asparagus in the bathtub. Neither one of us knows where this comes from, but Rachel is adamant that Anna is too young to know about the asparagus.

Chana bat Binyamin v'Rachel

Anna's naming was today. Amusingly, she slept through it while big sister Rachel was fussy and whiny, mostly due to hunger. (Hey, if you don't eat enough breakfast or snack, then yes, you are going to be hungry halfway through an almost 3 hour service!)

We've been asked a lot about how we chose Anna's name, and who she is named after. In Judaism it is common to name children for deceased relatives. Rachel is named after my grandmother (although she went by Reita, her first name was Raechel - not a typo, that's how she spelled it!). Rachel's middle name, Eve, has a slightly more practical reason behind it. When Ben and I got married, I took the Hebrew name Rachel as a way of honouring my grandmother. It never occurred to either of us that we might want to use the name for a child one day. Rather than have Rachel be "Rachel daughter of Rachel" we chose a biblical middle name and so Rachel's Hebrew name is actually Rachel Chava.

As for Anna's name, she is technically named after my mother's grandmother. There's slightly more to it than that, though. When Rachel was 3 months old, Ben and I started to talk about having a second child. We saw no reason to wait, although we did end up waiting until Rachel was about 6 months old before trying to conceive again. Strangely, this time around we experienced secondary infertility. There was never a cause attached to it, but it took just over 2.5 years before I became pregnant again.

Anna is the Greek derivative of the Hebrew Hannah (Chana). For those of you who are unfamiliar with the biblical Hannah's story, she was infertile for a lengthy period of time. She prayed for a child and eventually conceived. Anna is that child for us.

Anna's middle name, Rose, isn't quite as simple to explain. I don't feel the need to have matching names for children, but I did like that Rachel Eve and Anna Rose were the same in terms of syllables. The Hebrew version of Rose is Shoshana, which I have tried to get Ben to like but obviously haven't succeeded! However, he did like the English version. I will say that Rose has NOTHING to do with Valentine's Day. In fact, much as I didn't want a Valentine's Day baby, I'm glad that we had Anna then because now we can more easily get away from celebrating V-Day!

The moment you've all been waiting for...

Introducing Anna Rose Gitter!



Anna was born on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 10:03am after an approximately 9 hour labour. Since she weighed 9 pounds 5.6 ounces at birth, I'm very happy that she decided to show up a week early! At my 38 week appointment on February 8, my doctor tried stripping my membranes. That got me contractions that peaked at 7-8 minutes apart. I was supposed to have another appointment on the 14th at 10:45am. Instead, I managed to go into labour on my own at about 1am that day!

In keeping with the rest of the pregnancy, my delivery experience with Anna was about as opposite to my experience with Rachel as possible. With Rachel, we got to the hospital and got the tiny little back room for delivery since there were lots of women giving birth that night. With Anna, the nurses were fighting over who would get the first patient to walk in the door since it had been such a quiet night. I ended up with the best birthing room in the hospital! Even though I was in the ward room afterwards, there was a period of time where I had it to myself, and also a period of time where there was just one other person there.

I will say that my dietary experience was just as amusing this time around. Shortly after being moved up to my room, lunch arrived - sweet & sour pork. Oops. We nicely requested kosher meals and thus started the process of being brought sealed kosher meat meals with milk cartons on the side. My last lunch there included a hodgepodge of kosher food items, ranging from (dairy) pudding to beef. We suspect that they just looked for kosher labelling and didn't worry about whether or not there were any other restrictions. Oh well.

Rachel enjoyed visiting us in the hospital, although I suspect that her favourite part was going to the patient lounge to get packages of bread and crackers! She also appreciated getting to share the "special juice" on my meal trays.

We came home on Friday February 15th and have been settling in ever since. Anna prefers to be held 24/7. She is not content to be set down anywhere for more than a minute or two, although she finally crashed about 20 minutes ago which is why I finally have time to sit down and blog! Anna is currently sleeping in our bed at night - Ben loves it, and it's very cute to see the two of them together. I'm still sleeping in the recliner because it hurts too much to get up from the bed if I lie down. If my physical issues haven't resolved themselves by the end of this coming week, I apparently get to go for x-rays. I have a feeling that I will be headed in that direction given how long this has been going on.

And the phone came back...

...17 hours after it went out. I wonder how much Rogers will compensate us for that. I guess we'll find out soon enough!

Roger, Roger? Oh wait, the groundhogs have taken over.

We've been experiencing a number of dropped calls lately so once again Ben got on the phone with Rogers to insist that someone come out to replace the modem. Surprisingly, he was told that not only would a $20 credit be placed on our account, but someone would come out tonight (on a Sunday!) between 5-8pm to look at the modem.

At 4:55pm, the Rogers technician called to say he'd be right there. He decided to replace the modem since he thought that was possibly the cause of our problems. He went ahead and did this, but apparently there is a problem on our account that needs to be taken care of in their computer system so we currently have no phone service. Supposedly we will have a phone back within 10-24 hours.

Let's just say that Ben has plans to call Rogers tomorrow and demand serious compensation given that he will be out for most of the day tomorrow leaving me with no way to reach him if I go into labour. (To be fair, I could use our American cell phone in a pinch but that is so not the point.)

And that $20 credit? Well, I'll believe it IF I see it.

Almost-4-year-olds are funny

This morning Rachel told Ben in shul that she had to go potty. I was telling her this afternoon that I was proud of her for telling Daddy and going to the bathroom. Her response? "I didn't pee on my shul seat!" Oy.

This afternoon Rachel and Ben went to see the Backyardigans. Other than an exploding volcano, Rachel really enjoyed the show. She was very excited about her "souvenir", a blue light-up wand with a star on it.

Later this evening we were talking about getting things ready for the baby. Rachel knew that we had bought a Dumbo sleeper, so she was asking if the baby could wear it after coming home from the hospital. I made the comment that it wasn't newborn size, so it might have to wait a while. This precipitated a comment from Rachel about when the baby would be "oldborn".

Busy girl

"Mom, I don't have time to potty!" This is what Rachel told me the other day while sitting on the couch looking at a book. She tried that line again this morning while getting ready to go to pre-school. Nice try, kid!

Tomorrow Rachel and Ben are going to go see the Backyardigans. She's rather excited about it, and I'm looking forward to a nice long period of quiet time for myself!

Ok, I'm lazy.

I'm too lazy to set my blog to private right now so I haven't done it yet and who knows if I'll ever get around to it!

Oh wait. Perhaps I'm not lazy. Perhaps I'm just 38 weeks pregnant and done with everything! I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow and I am both dreading and looking forward to it. There are a few things it would be nice to have done before the baby gets here, but all the basics are set up and ready to go.

Rachel keeps asking when our baby will come out. I keep telling her that I wish I knew! She was sad tonight because I didn't go into her room to say goodnight. I physically just didn't have it in me to get down by her bed... so she contented herself with hugs and kisses and a promise that I'd sneak into her room later and kiss & hug her goodnight.

Here's hoping that we all sleep through the night tonight. Rachel was up 3 times between midnight and 1am yesterday due to "lost" elephants the first two times, and just feeling awake by the 3rd time. She consented to "read" in her room at 1am. I sneaked back in around 3 to turn off her lamp since she'd fallen asleep flat on her face with the book open on her pillow. Then at 4am I woke up to find Ben heading for the hallway. I asked him what he was doing and he told me that some water had spilled and he needed to find a towel to clean it up. He does this occasionally. I convinced him that he was asleep and it was time to go back to bed! Mind you, if he was foreshadowing my water breaking, that'd be fine by me! After all, one night about 5 years ago, Ben sat bolt upright in bed and started talking about "3 a.m.! Midwest!" and lo and behold, we ended up in Kansas for two years.

While we're at it....

Since people keep asking...

This was taken last Sunday, so 36.5 weeks. I had Ben take pictures tonight, but I refuse to post them.

My New Best Friend

Random Rachel-isms

Said at dinner out last night: "Look! We got a boring light for good luck!"
(Most of the lights near our table were fun colours like red, blue and green. Then Rachel looked up and spotted an ordinary light on the ceiling. She likes fancy lights apparently.)

We recently picked up some new activity books for Rachel. She was telling me how to spell elephant and elephants, so I started asking her different words to spell. When I asked her to spell cat, she told me that she couldn't, but she could spell it backwards. She proceeded to do so, announcing "T-A-C!" quite cheerfully.

Rachel is still in her 5-point harness car seat and will be for hopefully quite some time yet. She has never made any effort to get out of the seat on her own, nor is she interested in learning how to do up the buckles. This is fine by me! We like to tease her when we arrive somewhere by saying, "Time to free the captive!" Rachel often responds, "I'm the captive! I'm the captive!" She thinks this is hilarious.

Yesterday we had some friends over and the kids were tossing soft balls around inside. I tossed one at Rachel and it bonked off of her head. She thought this was great and spent the next few minutes repeatedly saying "Hit me in the head, Mommy! I want you to hit me in the head again!" Let's just hope that one doesn't come out in public...