tribute

Here is a plea from P: please comment on my blog.

P checks it out everyday, and is always disappointed that no one leaves any comments. I know you all are out there reading. Please, so my husband doesn't think I'm lying about my having some readers, just post something once in a while. See where it says "comments" on the bottom-right of each post? Yep, that's it. You don't even have to give your name.

And on that note, I am off for the night to do some serious puzzles with baby-j. I leave you with the greatest song in the world from the greatest band in the world, Tenacious D. An oldie but a goodie.

man of letters

I’ve realized in the past week that I am officially addicted to caffeine, at least in the morning.

I have also realized that a counter-attack of three Advil is too much for me to handle. That’s twice now I’ve gone from super-headachey to super-woozy. Note to self: gradually back off caffeine. And Advil.

In other news, baby-j knows his letters! On the long drive back from Michigan, we went to a restaurant; its name was printed in large letters on the wall. Baby-j looked up, and proudly announced “S. A. L. S. I. T. A. S.” It’s a fun word to say, or at least it must be for me and P, since we like to randomly exclaim Salsitas! anytime baby-j works on spelling out letters.

I didn’t plan on referring to Everyone Poops yet again, but the cover provides more good spelling practice for baby-j:

(from left to right...) "E. V. E. R. Y. O. N. E. (and then, moving down and going right to left on the second line...) S. P. O. O. P."

By now, you have probably concluded (correctly) that my toilet-training strategy (if it can be called that) consists of peppering conversation with the word "poop" as much as possible. I’ve been encouraging baby-j to wave “bye bye” to the contents of his diaper when we flush them down the toilet. “Bye bye poose!” he calls as he waves. Not sure if he gets the connection, though, since he seems to be using “bye bye poose” when bidding farewell to people, too.

some updates

1: Yes, I am still a vegetarian. Even made some “sloppy janes” for dinner tonight. Ah, how I adore vegetarian meals that require quotation marks.

2: After 2 years, I finally took a shower without baby-j being asleep or in the care of someone else. (It helps that we’re back in an apartment and thus on one highly-child-proofed floor.) baby-j decided to celebrate the event by briefly getting up from reading his book to throw a few plastic balls at me in the shower, all the while laughing hysterically. Then he was back to absorbing the subtext of Everyone Poops.

3: I am getting new glasses. Once they come in, they will look like this. Also, when I look at the price listed on this Web site, I realize that I love the eyepeople at Costco and their cheap deals on glasses.

4: P is still working on his show in NYC all week. He wrote and directed it. And so, I submit to you that my hubby is awesome. I mean, that’s not the only reason, but still, he is awesome.

teaspoon

Today I attended the devastating funeral of a colleague who passed away Sunday after an illness. I can’t really write more about this than that; I’m rather numb.

And so to pull me out of this gray day, I’ve been sending cute pictures of baby-j to friends around the world--or at least, around the country. I’d been intending to compile the summer photos anyway.

Here’s a little sampling of some baby-j video from up North. This one usually cheers me up:

Teaspoon

sunday sunday

This is my South Park avatar, created here if you're looking for a way to waste 15 minutes of time.

Other things I did today:

--Watched my father assemble a tricycle for baby-j. It looks great, and it only took him 5 hours to put it together. (My engineer father is a pretty meticulous sort of guy when he's focused on something.)

--Got baby-j down for a nap and did a few hours solid work writing/organizing thoughts. I've found solace in the ABD Survival Guide, and this article that I read today talks about getting a little bit done each day, and then rewarding yourself with a treat (e.g., reading the Times over coffee or checking email). Perhaps blogging should be my post-writing reward. This might mean I never write here nor there, though.

--Read Everyone Poops to baby-j 17 times. The kid just can't get enough of it. His pronunciation of the title is "one poose, one poose," so every now and then he'll point up to the book chanting "one poose, one poose."

All in all, it's been a good Sunday.

two-year-old in da house

Yesterday was baby-j’s actual birthday; today we’re celebrating.

I assume that many parents engage in some sort of yearly recollection of the moment when they first met their children. As with last year, I’ve thought quite a bit in these last few days about the hours (and days) surrounding baby-j’s birth.

I went into labor with baby-j on a Monday night at 9pm, and he was born on Wednesday at about 1:30am. He kept us waiting a while. Those hours seem more traumatic in retrospect than they actually were at the time. I’m not sure if it makes much sense, but I recall being so excited that I was actually going to meet this baby and find out what he or she looked like, that the hours didn’t seem long.

After the birth, I breastfed him for the first time, and then after a while the nurses took him away so we could each get some much-needed sleep. (Had I known a bit more, I would have insisted that he sleep in the same room with me. Well, next time… if there is one.)

The thing was this, though: I couldn’t really sleep. I woke up about 3 hours later, lying there in the quiet dark, thinking, I have a baby! I want to see my baby. When can I see the baby? When will the nurses come back? I thought these same four things in a row over and over and over again. Then--and I had never considered being amazed by this--I thought, I am a mom. How cool is that?

August 17, 2005 remains the best day of my life. Now maybe that says something about the quality of the other days, but there you go.

boring finger saga part 2

I went to the orthopedist this morning, after two weeks of being in the splint for my poor finger. I love the technology now: the clinic forwarded my X-rays via CD-ROM to the orthopedist. In the exam room, he popped the CD in the computer and we took a look together.

We pulled up the first image. It looked pretty normal. Then the second, then the third. I was straining at the screen to see where the chip fracture was on the bone. I was just starting to think that doctors must have far better eyes than I...

It turns out that it wasn’t fractured after all: according to the local orthopedist, it’s probably a sprain, or some sort of weird tendon twist.

And yet, I have a paper from the emergency clinic that says I have a bone fracture based on these same X-rays.

The best part? It turns out that putting my middle finger in a splint was actually detrimental to my recovery. Now the middle finger is just “buddy taped” to the index finger so the stronger one can help it along. Though I could bend my finger before the splint, the muscles have atrophied as a result of it, and it’s extremely painful to bend the middle finger. So now I need to work on getting it to move; if it’s not moving freely in 3 weeks, I have to start physical therapy.

Having originally said it was probably a sprain, P has been good about trying to not say "I told you so." Actually, that’s not true. He’s been good about figuring out ways to express the meaning I told you so without saying the actual phrase. Some examples: I thought so; You know, I am a doctor; and—my personal favorite—I’m really not going to say I told you so.

back from the lake

We got back last night after two days of driving: I forgot how long a trip it is! It was fairly uneventful, though, as baby-j was pretty good in the car. He even took a few naps each day.

We had such a great time during our two weeks of vacation time: swimming, chasing baby-j, camp-firing, etc. There were some awful sleepless nights of teething near the end there (the two-year molars?), but other than that, it will be a vacation sorely missed.

So now back to real life and preparing for fall. P goes in on Thursday and will hopefully get set up in his new office then. I'm happy for him, and we're both happy for some additional space for all his books. :) Now that we've unpacked here, I plan to sort through the mess that is our office so I can continue dissertation work.

And for those who haven't heard the sad-yet-ultimately-boring-tale, I apparently fractured my finger during the move at the end of June--over 6 weeks ago now. The pain started to worsen over vacation, so I visited a clinic while we were away. Their X-rays confirmed that I have a bone fracture. Too bad that this is on my right middle finger, which I am now supposed to keep elevated and in a splint. I was stopped by a stranger at a restaurant last week who asked (jokingly) why I was flipping him off all during my meal. Nice.

The splint, unfortunately, is starting to smell a little strange, which should not be surprising, since it's been on the beach and the lake for the past 10 days. Mmm. I am looking forward to Friday, when a local doctor will look at it. I'm hopeful that it won't need surgery or some kind of nasty re-setting.

It's becoming a yearly thing, these injuries. But though my typing has significantly slowed as a result of my middle finger, I think I prefer this to the Spider Bite Incident of Oh-Six.