Hey, I’m on spring break! I’m thinking about loading up the cooler later and heading to a local tanning salon, popping open a few cold ones, and yelling at women to flash me. Yes, I’m almost 35, married, and about to become the father of a second daughter. But a guy can have some fun, right? Actually, we’re taking a little trip next weekend to visit some friends who moved to Michigan last summer.
We took M. to the Children’s Museum for the first time today. She had a great time, for the most part. Her favorite part was riding on the carrousel. Unfortunately, she spent the next hour saying, “Nay-nay?” which is her way of saying she’d really like to go find those fun horses again than play in the sand. I’ve got some good pics that I’ll try to get posted tomorrow.
One frustrating thing about having a kid is how things just disappear. Most of the time, it isn’t anything important. Often we’ll be short a sippy cup for a day or two until a very stinky one rolls out from under a couch or a pile of toys. You just hope your kid didn’t attempt to drink any of the curdled milk. We’ve been missing one of our baby monitor receivers for two days, though.
Tuesdays at 9:00 are channel flipping time in our house. I generally run the remote, so we spend most of the following hour watching Scrubs on NBC. Is it just me, or since they started airing the new episodes in back-to-back fashion, isn’t the first episode always much funnier than the second? Anyway, during commercials on Scrubs, we flip over to TBS and watch Sex and the City reruns. Or, as I tell my wife, “Now you can laugh for awhile.
Saturday, as I was waiting for the Mrs. to get ready so we could make a trip to the mall, I sat down and spent 20 thoroughly enjoyable minutes watching the classic 80s flick “Wargames.” Matthew Broderick. Ally Sheedy. A talking computer. Global Thermonuclear War. You know how it goes. Anyway, it gave me a thought. There should be a channel that plays nothing but 80s movies. “Wargames,” “Caddyshack,” “Fast Times,” “Better Off Dead,” “Real Genius,” “Fletch,” “Sixteen Candles,” etc.
Corporate radio sucks. We all know that, whether we give in and listen to it or whether we refuse to subject our ears to playlists created through marketing and payola. I’ve sung their praises of woxy.com many times, and I know a few of you have checked out their programming. There is no better source for cutting-edge alternative rock on the Internet. Woxy is now in need of your help. Check out their site, read their story, and if you can, contribute.
OK, I found another thing I like about the Olympics. I love how the support teams for male skiers yell at them before they start each race. “Come on Daron! Let’s go buddy! Come on D! Let’s go D. Rahlves!” Makes me laugh every time.
M. has reached the point where she’s beginning to mimic all the things S. and I do. We better start watching our language! Over the weekend, we got dinner at a noodle place. While M. was working on her spirals and cheese, I was woofing down some spicy pasta. As I spun my fork to curl my pasta onto it, M. twirled her fork in circles too. When I stopped to eat, she stopped and watched.
I’ve decided the Winter Olympics kind of suck. Not the events themselves, but the coverage we’re getting here in the States. I realize by making that statement I’m offering the most obvious and repeated opinion possible, but it’s true. The fundamental problem with the Winter Olympics are that there are so many fewer events than in the Summer Olympics it is difficult to fill all the TV hours. Thus, as NBC tries to save all the marquee events for prime time, we’re left with watching all kinds of crap during the day.
I watched almost no Olympic coverage this weekend and I didn’t pull my thoughts on Quin Snyder’s resignation into a reasonable scope. Hope to work on those a little Monday night, when I’ve got a basketball game to watch. The weekend was passed putting some serious time into my readings for the coming week, thinking about my two papers (I’ve got them outlined mentally, but nothing on paper yet), and the rest of the time we listened to M.
The last 48 hours have more-or-less been total wastes for me. I’ve got some things done in the evenings, but days have been totally shot. This is the one week of the month that S. works regular people hours (8-4 the last three days) so I was home alone with M. on Thursday and Friday. No big deal; she’s getting older and more independent and I felt like I could still get some things done for all my assignments that are due next week even in her presence.
Monday night, 1:00 AM. I’ve been tossing and turning for close to two hours. M. starts crying. I let her go for a couple minutes to make sure she isn’t going to put herself back to sleep. When I finally go to her room, as soon as I walk through the door, she rolls over, stops crying, and says in the saddest voice she can muster up, “Binky.” I dig it out from the rolled up corner of her blanket and pop it into her mouth.
We’ve taken all we can take and we can’t take anymore. Wednesday we started to wean M. off of her binky. The binky is now reserved for her crib and for car trips. As soon as she gets up in the morning or from a nap, we drop it into the crib, say bye-bye, give it a wave, and walk away. We’ve had some success since she loves to wave and say bye-bye.
The long-delayed M. update is below the jump, complete with 18 month stats. M. had her 18 month check-up this morning. I was at class, but heard that for the first time ever, she protested her shots. In the past, she cried for 15-30 seconds, then was back to normal. Apparently there was a mini-meltdown this morning. Her measurements were: 25 lbs, 15 oz (remains in the 75th %) 31 3/4 inches (Up to the 50th % from 25th) Head circumference went down from 105th to 90th %.
A lengthy M. update is coming after her 18-month check-up Monday. To tide you over, a quick update on how the Little Sister is developing in S.’s belly. Well, that’s overstating things slightly, as I can’t really speak to her development. I can vouch for the fact that momma’s belly pops out faster on the second pregnancy that the first. About two weeks ago, Wham!, we had a belly. Looking back to our pictures from M.
What did my wife get for her 34th birthday? A Toyota Sienna. Our minivan, which wasn’t supposed to arrive for 2-3 weeks was miraculously delivered to the dealer today. We went in this evening, waded through the paperwork and the last few moments of sales-speak, and drove home in our lovely new vehicle. Any coolness we had managed to cling to is surely gone now. I’ll take some pics tomorrow. Mock at your own peril.
Today was my first day of class for the spring semester at Bloomington. It was a lovely, typically Indiana winter day: cold, breezy, nothing but grey in the skies. I spent 45 minutes looking for a parking place (I was trying to avoid getting a campus parking pass by taking the chance of finding a spot on side streets and humping it to campus on foot) before I gave up and went to a parking garage downtown.
We have just one nightstand, and it’s on S’s side of the bed. Thus, our alarm clock is on that side, too. With my horrible eye sight, even if I squint, I can’t see what time it is the moment I remove my contacts/glasses. That makes for an interesting game this time of year, when the sun doesn’t rise until around 8:00 AM, at the moment M. starts letting us know she’s ready to get out of bed.
This is the one time of the year when I wish that I listened to whatever the radio mainstream is. Not because I find anything particularly attractive about the mainstream, but rather because I miss the way radio sounded during the holidays when I was a kid. As a Top 40 radio listener, I kept the radio on approximately 23 hours a day during Christmas break. The stations would play all the best music of the year, generally culminating in countdowns of the top 50, 75, or 100 songs of the year as New Year’s Eve got closer.
I took a trip down to Bloomington today to get my bearings in advance of the spring semester. Two of my sisters-in-law who attended IU went down with me to help me find the places I needed to find. Parking is truly a hassle at IU, and I may just skip the whole parking pass thing and attempt to find spots in residential neighborhoods near campus. That could be a pain, but the nearest parking lot to the building my classes are in is almost two miles away.
Last night (Tuesday night) was the worst night we’ve had with M. in a long, long time. So Wednesday was a bit of a struggle, with S. working and me trying to stay awake all day. To make matters worse, M. is going through a phase of not taking any naps all day, thus no down time for daddy. Sometime around 4:00, with her distracted by toys, a sippy cup, and one of her shows, I laid back and closed my eyes in an attempt to take a quick nap.
Between 7-8" in our driveway. Hours of shoveling fun. Remind me why I didn’t buy a snowblower when I still had a job.
A little sister. We had our sonogram today and confirmed what we both thought: we’re having another girl. Everything looked great: heart and other organs, brain development, bone structure. S. is only at 16 weeks, so there’s obviously a long, long time for us to continue to hope and pray all goes well, but we’re excited to see all has developed as scheduled so far. She was showing about two days later than expected, so realistically mid-late May is still the targeted date for Girl Fetus #2 to make her appearance.
As an undergrad, I was lucky if my papers went through a draft and a half before I turned them in. Now, I spend hours editing, rearranging, and basically picking apart everything I write for school. I had finished, more or less, my paper by 11:00-ish today. At 2:00 I was still running through it, searching for the occasional awkward phrase or word. When I finally decided I was done, I wanted to read through it one more time, from start to finish, to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything.
We put our tree up Saturday, a very good looking Fraser Fur. The best part was M’s reaction. She had been staring out the window at the lit tree in our neighbors' yard for a week saying, “Tree! Tree!” so I knew she’d be excited about a tree of her own. Before we put the lights on, we laid them on the floor, plugged them in, and checked for burnt out bulbs.
We went to the mall today to do some Christmas shopping. We were hanging out in Pottery Barn Kids, letting M. enjoy the rocking horse and terrier and then turned her loose on the table where they had a roll of paper and crayons. She’s just started scribbling and isn’t always sure what to do. Sometimes she goes nuts, other times she looks at you like you’re nuts when you give her the tools to doodle.
Kansas football beats Nebraska for the first time in 36 years. Kansas basketball starts 2-3 for the first time in 32 years. Seems like a fair trade to me. I’m not going to go jumping off of any ledges just yet. The future is still bright, I maintain. It’s the present that is going to be rocky. Stealing from TV and movies: “Patience, Grasshopper.” “We’ll get there, Pop. We’ll get there.
It’s snowing. The iTunes playlists have been adjusted to pull in Christmas music. We’ve placed a holiday wreath and doormat at the front door. Our tree will probably be purchased over the weekend. The calendar reads December 1. ‘Tis officially the holiday season. And yes, to the people at Fox News, I am referring to it as the holidays. For the second straight day M. was awake before 5:00 today. Not good times.
It was a strange day for us, so I didn’t have time to get a pre-Thanksgiving message out for most to see. Our power went off for two hours this morning, so M. and I sat around watching the snow fall until S. got home, then we headed out to get breakfast. When we got home, the cold I’ve been fighting grabbed hold of me and I took a nice three hour nap.
Leaving a restaurant after having dinner on November 16 to the sounds of tornado sirens blaring. Odder still is the temperature dropping from the mid-60s to a wind-chill of 18 over the course of 10 hours. All of Indianapolis will have a hacking cough within three days.