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.
I turned M. loose on the keyboard over the weekend. Below are the results, as recorded in TextEdit. What I enjoy most is she somehow found the right key combo to get into my clipboard memory and find bits of something I posted in the comments section of an NBA blog regarding a recent Pacers-Heat game. She also managed to get into the foreign character palate somehow. I’m not even sure how to do that.
Always interesting what we find in our backyard after a big storm. Normally, lots of small branches and limbs, with the occasional large limb down. All part of the joys of living on a wooded lot. Today, I was out back blowing all the leaves that came down back into the woods. I reached the far corner of the lawn and found a roughly 12 foot long limb lying on the ground.
Kansas 40 Nebraska 15 I said it wouldn’t happen in my lifetime, only semi-facetiously. I saw a 17-point lead turn into a 59-23 loss. I saw a coach take the guy who had been running all over the vaunted Nebraska defense the entire day off the field when attempting a two-point conversion that would have won the game. Most of all, I saw a lot of 40+ point poundings that were equal testament to Nebraska’s run of excellence and Kansas' run of futility in football.
Yesterday morning, M. woke up at 5:00. Yuck. I went in and got her untangled from her blanket, found her binky, and tried to make her comfortable. I went back to bed, but could never go back to sleep. S. got up around 6:30 to prepare for work. I got up shortly after to get M. ready to go over to her grandparents' for the day. They left just after 7:00 and I spent the next 30 minutes reading e-mail and the web.
M. spent the morning at her grandparents' house today. When I arrived to pick her up, she was just waking from a nap. After a few minutes cuddling with Grammy to shake the cobwebs, she hopped down onto the floor, started grunting and pointing around the corner, and then took off towards my father-in-law’s office. “You’ve got to see this,” he said. I followed her into the office and found her sitting in front of an old, electric typewriter.
I had put this list of M.’s latest tricks and treats together over the weekend, expecting to post it Monday. I haven’t edited for dating, so if anything is odd about tenses etc, my apologies. One addition, we were at the grocery store Tuesday and put her on the mechanical horse for the first time. A penny buys about a minute of ride time. She loved it! Laughed, screamed, smiled. She was so entertaining that some random woman came over, gave us a penny, and said, “She’s having too much fun to stop.
In recent weeks, I’ve been eating a lot of meals on my own. Changing a lot of diapers by myself. Spending a lot of evenings alone in the basement with the TV on, the laptop open, or a book in my lap. Read after the jump to find out the cause for all these oddities. No, S. hasn’t left me. Rather, like our two friends named Jennifer in Kansas City who also had children in July 2004, we are expecting our second child in May 2006.