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.