Fuzzymonk

For my beautiful wife, mother of my darling daughter, on her birthday — I gave her Strep!

I think we finally met our big huge deadline at work. This doesn’t mean I am not swamped anymore, it does mean that I shouldn’t be working till 1 am every day. Good news is we pushed hard to make this and when it came time for the important people to decided ‘go or no go’ we got the go. Score one for the good guys. Of course this project is one of three for this partner, but if you screw up the first one you know you are in bad shape. I am sure we still have months of wacky requirements for straight forward functionality.

I did notice yesterday that even though Leah has been sleeping through the night like a champ recently, I am still exhausted. If the baby don’t keep me up work does. For father’s day I want some sleepin’! That and playing frisbee.

I am actually pretty pumped about father’s day. This is my first real one, and I think that is pretty cool. I’d like to bbq and go play in the park, but I did commit to a wushu demo that happens to take place sometime on Sunday. Hopefully it is a normal Chinese school thing around 2ish so we can play later on.

Leah has learned a few more tricks. I don’t know if I bragged on he waving bye bye yet or not, but she can do that. She also points and says ‘that’ when you carry her. She is thrilled if you walk over to ‘that’ for closer inspection.

She showed off her smartness earlier this week when Kelly and I went to Aladdin for dinner. We needed milk, so Kelly ran off to the grocery store and I was supposed to pay the bill and load the little girl in the car. Well, she doesn’t really like the car (who can blame her, you strap her down and abandon her) and didn’t want to get in. Once I opened the door to put her in she pointed and said that to anything that was away from the car. 4 or 5 things, that….that…that…that! I pointed in to the car at her seat and said ‘How bout that one?” She glared at me for a moment. Then turned her head pointed, said that, and smiled. I motioned to the care and she made the saddest face and whimpered a bit. I backed up and pointed to a tree, and she smiled, pointed and said ‘that’. Clearly she didn’t want in the car and was trying to talk me out of it. Unfortunately, I loaded her up and strapped her down anyway. It was a little sad but we survived.

Tonight I am going to dinner with my ladies, and we are going to take our sweet time about it. It will be awesome. Tomorrow I will load my grill into the truck and go be the grillmaster at O-Mei’s open house. Sunday is dad-day, which works out just fine for me. Holla.

Leah’s 9 month checkup was supposed to be last Friday, but on Thursday we took her in for an ear infection. So we have her hopped up on the Amoxicillin and rescheduled her well visit for this week.

Friday night Tom came over and Leah put on her I have an ear infection and 3 new teeth so I am unhappy show. I think it scared the poor father to be. We distracted him with Mario party.

Saturday we skipped swimming lessons because of the aforementioned ear infection.

While Kelly was working hard cooking us some dinner, I took baby girl downstairs for some wall-tv an foof action. Built a little triangle shaped fort out of the couch, giant foof and bench. Leah thought that was crazy fun and worked her cruising skills all around it. Then she did it. Out of the blue. Into the blue. Took her first steps. This qualified, it she started it on her own. She took least three steps, good toddling steps. After step one she was leaning way off to the side and swung back for the second and by the third she was careening out of control and ate it. She ate it into the foof, so that was not a problem. At this point I grabbed the baby and started screaming and running around. On my way up stairs, yelling “Kelly Kelly Kelly!” I became really aware of the fact that Kelly would be disappointed that she wasn’t there for the monumentious event and promptly realized it was too late to not tell her. So I followed through with the news, and Leah performed for her Mama later on with a few steps in the triangle of foof.

Leah didn’t stop there. Sunday Everett came up to visit and we took him to Lost Dog, while at the café, when Leah was in her high chair he reached across the table and said “high five!” Leah looked up at his hand for a second then lifted her’s and pressed her palm into his. The three of us went nuts with cheering and atta-girl’s to the point where I am pretty sure the rest of the patrons thought we were a little nuts. I’d say it was a fair assumption.

To prove it we took Leah to the park off of Prosperity Rd–the one with the nice creek. Everett and I threw a Frisbee while Leah and mom played on the swings. We then wondered down to the creek and the boys climbed on the logs gathering flowers for the baby. The baby ate rocks. Everyone had fun.

Last night Kelly grabbed the baby and came downtown so we could take the baby down for a photo op at the cherry blossoms. While we got a few good pictures, Leah was much more interested in looking at all the crazy things that go on in the city. There were little kids everywhere they were the most interesting thing ever. I was impressed with her attention span. And she was happy the entire time.

Pictures to follow.

Last weekend Leah had the most fun being a dinosaur. She would get up on her knees stick her arms out in front and growl, roar and otherwise make dino-sounds. For added effect she would grab the animals from her Noah’s Ark set and wave them around with an occasional slobbery biting. It was the cutest thing ever. She practiced it for a few days and perfected her impression. But as soon as she did she moved on to the ‘D’ sounds. As much as I like words she can say that start with D, I miss the dino-baby.

I shouldn’t complain because she is saying dada with regularity. In fact Kelly brought her in to say goodbye to me this morning and she looked right at me and said dada. I know she doesn’t associate that word with me yet–but she will, and that is good enough for me. She does ramble on and on telling us stories with many of the words starting with her favorite new sound. Some sample words include: Da Do Dyoi Duh and Doh.

She tells the best stories.

Kelly keeps asking me when I am going to go back to wushu, adding ‘it’s been two months’ for effect. While I am sure there is no way I would have let 2 months go by with no training, I think she does have a point. I need to get back for the exercise if anything. I have been feeling inflexible recently–which I am going to blame on work more than not wushu. Something about marathon coding that’ll make your hip flexors tight. Stupid western chairs.

We did it, we stood in lines and paid WAY too much, but we got pictures of the baby with Santa. The picture was snapped half a second too early, because this was the start of the smile–she had a big ol grin right after this. Well, I don’t mind if I am the one who gets the good pictures of my daughter.

I’m back in weird Austin. Worked a long, long day–but in the end it appeared to be successful. We’ll see how things pay off for the company. Good experience and visibility either way.

Our trip has been a exercise in starving our selves of food and sleep then gorging on massive meals and hitting the caffeine. There has been way too much tex mex. Even the Italian was tex mex–I ordered some pasta filled with spinach and they brought me Italian enchiladas. Seriously, if you were more than 5 feet away you couldn’t tell.

Austin does win over DC in the bum polite contest. They come up and feign usefulness and when they finally get to asking for hand outs they are nice and say thanks anyway if you turn them down. Not quite what I get out side of metro center. However, I feel less safe here. Maybe they are a little too nice.

There are many stories to be told, but we are getting on a plan tomorrow for the S-dizzle, and I still have work that I need to do tonight so I am out.

In closing, wushu is a man’s man sport. And thanks to the 2006 China Nats I have proof:

I miss my ladies.

Ok, last week we were about to go insane, things are much better now.

We think Leah hit a growth spurt over two weeks ago and with the teething symptoms everything was thrown out of wack. We actually had her sleeping through the night and that slipped away from us. Mostly her dad’s fault because during her growth spurt I was feeding her in the middle of the night (hey, she was really hungry) and then she began to expect that. Well, things sort of snowballed and she got all out of wack, which threw Kelly off. Add in a little workin’ mama hell and you (well, me, the unsuspecting yet well intentioned dad) had a situation on his hands.

So enter thanks giving week, Thankfully we had a few extra days off work and some extra resources (grandparents everywhere) and things are under much better control.

We are going to be much stricter about her eat and nap schedule, and I think that is a big step. Now that we have been doing that for 3 (count ‘em 3) days she seems to take to it nicely. Then the big problem, the reason we even care about a schedule, the sleep. It’s not bed time, or putting the baby down–it is sleep training.

I love training. Unfortunately, as past experience shows me, it normally lacks fun at the time of training. This is the most funless training ever.

We did a bunch of research, bought some condescending yet informative books and read everything the internet had to say about sleeping babies. The internet says alot of conflicting things about sleeping babies.

Deciding to do the Ferber method (which is what our baby wise book appears to endorse) we let her CIO for a few naps, and attempt a down-for-the-night with limited success.

Yesterday I started second guessing out tactics, as Ferber says to wait till 6 months. Which was prolly just my excuse because listening to my daughter cry is hands down the worst thing ever conceived of ever. And I don’t like it.

Tonight we tried to sooth her a little more when we put her down. The problem was she would wake up once she hit the crib and be happy and awake. I didn’t expect that. She was supposed to be tired and sleepy but crying. Nah, she was just as happy as could be. We knew she was tired before we brought her up (glazed over and constantly rubbing her eyes), but looked pretty alert in her crib. Since she wasn’t crying, and we wouldn’t be rewarding her for crying–we picked her up and continued to walk her. That, of all things, made her fuss. But we made progress and were able to get her to go to sleep with active soothing (however, in her crib). That lasted 45 minutes. Kelly put her foot down and we agreed that we would try to just leave her for 10 minutes.

So far so good, she has been out for another 45 min now and I am about to turn in. I am still a little nervous that the monitor will go off any second, but will be optimistic for a full night.

If you got this far you may have a problem.

CIO sucks, and I don’t like it.

Long weekend, full of kettle bells and cirque. Both were good and I am glad I spent the money to go to them — but I hardly feel refreshed this monday.

That was until I looked at pictures of the baby.

Go Terps!

Mom and Grandma make Leah happy. It’s true.

I heart daddy!

Have a poor recap of my Vegas trip. Don’t let the poor recap fool you, the trip was great it’s just my writing that stinks.

Last weekend I went to Vegas, for Todd’s 30th birthday. Now, since he is the same age as me, he didn’t turn 30 this year. But we went anyway. Marilee tells me that’s cause he couldn’t make it for his actual 30th. Close enough.

I got to travel with Beej, and we roomed with Johnny. We did like we were supposed to and all met up so we could surprised Todd at a bar in the Paris, but his brother rolled in and ruined the surprise. He also got Tod toasty, while not quite as fun made for a decent consolation prize.

We hung out for a while until Todd was dragging and the three of us returned to the frontier and a few games. We had no idea this was going to be the best run of the trip, and should have stopped then, but we had fun and were up nicely. Not bad for the high rollers like us that slap down a twenty and ask for it all in dollar chips. Surprised we didn’t get comped a room.

We were still on east coast time so we woke up the Eshler’s and headed their way for breakfast. Hung out for the afternoon had a fancy dinner and Beej and I headed off to see Ka. Qiu Dong hooked us up and we were able to watch from the light booth, which was crazy fun. We got treated all special and were able to go back stage and meet up with Xing Xing. He gave us the grand tour and we got to poke around behind the stage. I was pretty pumped when Jen came up and said “hi.” I didn’t want to harass her on the job (im sure they get more than enough of that), but it was great fun watching Beej’s reaction when cirque people knew me. I think the best part of the tour was realizing I woudn’t trade my job/house/baby for that gig I wanted so badly a few years ago. Sure I would have much better abs, but I am glad that them French Canadians shot me down.

After the show Beej went to meet up with the gang and I grabbed a second dinner with DX. Apparently china town in Vegas is 3 strip malls with a dozen Zu Zai Nai Cha shops. I stuffed my self and we chatted about cirque and a baby then he dropped me back at the strip. I found out Todd ate something bad and wasn’t feelign too well and somehow it was 1am (3am east coast). So they had headed back to the room and crashed.

Sleeping is nice. I like sleep.

Next morning we headed back to Paris for the breakfast buffet. We timed it perfectly. It’s $13 for breakfast, $18 for lunch; and changes over at 11 am. We got in about quarter till, so we got both for the cheaper price. I think I had a half dozen plates of food. I still crave the crepes they made us. And the breakfast hummus. And the prime rib. And the flan.

Our flight home wasn’t till 11, so we had the rest of the day to chill. We hung out in Todd’s room, felt bad and left him to sleep. For some reason Johnny wanted to see the Luxor. So we walked all the way almost there. Stopped and shook our fists at him and headed back to find Beej. With nothing better to do we wondered around looking for some cheap tables to play. I played for 2 or 3 hours and broke dead even. Johnny and Marilee tried their luck. We watched a leprechaun poor apple liqueur directly into peoples mouths.

We had a tasty tex-mex dinner and jumped on our all-night flight. Tex-mex isn’t the best choice of preflight eating, but I won’t go into that here.

Red eye flights are not nice. I do not like them.