Temptation resisted

I saw these at Whole Foods and did not buy one. Wow, what temptation.

notes and updates

Hello faithful blog readers-you three know who you are!

What is new? The school year is beginning to look like it might settle down into a predictable pattern. I might even know what I am teaching a day or two before I teach it. That would be good considering I am only teaching half time this year.

Rose continues to grow and amaze us every day. I think many first time parents discover this joy, but it has not diminished over the many years humans have had children. Today, she finally took to a food--carrots. We have tried rice cereal, bananas, and other foods, but it was carrots that started her slurping greedily rather than pushing the offending substance out of her mouth.

Last week, Reena broke her ankle pretty badly, and that has led to a ripple of changes in both our lives. I have taken the opportunity to restructure my life to include a few priorities that I wanted to focus on. Each evening (for a few days, let's see how long this lasts) I have stretched, written in my journal, and then read before sleep. It is a pattern I want to cultivate in my life.

nuff for now.
ciao.

Full Night's Sleep

I think last night was the first full night's sleep. We've had stretches from midnight to 5 or 5:30, but this was a full 11 to 6. Rose also now grabs both legs with her hands.


The itzbeen is a wonderful tool. The glowing orange buttons have symbols for diaper change, feeding, sleep, and anything you want. The oval button above the readout turns on a flashlight. There is a right/left slider for keeping track of which side a child was nursed. As you can see, Rose went 9 hours between feedings and 8.5 between diaper changes. This is about how long she slept.

Dancing and Doing

I was in a groove before heading off to Philly, and upon returning, I have found my groove still in place. I worked on getting my desk set up, straightening out the house for cleaners tomorrow (yay), and I even went contra dancing tonight. Even better, I found the New England crowd to be welcoming. This is a first and a big incentive to return and dance again.

Pot Rack

We purchased this thing over a year ago, it was majorly delayed in shipping (something about bad weather in China), and then it just sat on my table amidst piles of jobs to do. Well, today I did it. I hung the pot rack even though the placement of joists was masked by the use of thin wood strips used to space the ceiling from the joists. I spent way too much time on it, but I am very happy with the results. Now all I have to do is patch about 20 or so drill holes in the ceiling.

Insomnia

Having taken care of the baby each night at the 3:30 feeding, I am not wide awake at this time. We switched off to give each other a bit of a break for sleeping, but I can't sleep. Been awake since 12ish. Bleh. I'll be on again around 5:30. I'll need to nap sometime today.

The Band and The Baby

So it seems that the baby is a great fan of The Band. I put on Kingdom Come (a live album) and she just went to town in her little floor exercise setup kicking and swinging arms to the music. Who knew that a Bostonian by birth would love Southern Rock from such an early age?

new togs

I was shopping for new shorts and other summer gear. I try to balance environmentally/socially responsibly created new clothes with going to thrift stores and giving clothing continued life. The latter is much friendlier to the wallet, but recently I have been trying to help the demand for new clothing from good sources grow.

One of my favorite companies is going out of business. Check out Nau to see a model of a very good clothing company that didn't make it. Also, there are some excellent deals on the inventory that they are trying to sell off.

On Time and Sleep and other fancy things

With the new baby in house for over a month, I am learning the new perspective on time and sleep that each new parent learns. The many warnings of, "Say goodbye to sleep" and "Go see lots of movies now" are warnings communicated in simple terms.

Granted, Reena and I are both home full time, and that is a huge precondition to my new perspective. A full-time parent, whether single or unsupported, has a Herculean task. However, I have found that my sleep hours have decreased a bit, but the most interesting thing is my notion of time and sleep have radically changed. They are no longer tied to the rising and setting of the sun, but now they revolve around the sleep cycle of the baby. Reena and I trade off the night with one of us staying up until 3:30 or so and the other waking with the dawn chorus. Rose is beginning to catch 3 to 4 hours of sleep at a time, so this doesn't necessarily mean that the responsible party has to be up during that whole time--it just means it fairly often.

Thus, I am getting about 5 hours of sleep each night--an amount that would not work for teaching full time but is seeming to suffice for parenting an infant. Yes, this parenting gig is much less work than teaching full time, so far. This will get even more doable now that the New York trip is over (I took my class to New York for three days and two nights last week), the yearbook is done (I can't even describe the frustration that inDesign has been giving me), final reports are written, and the year-end DVD is authored and produced. Then it will just be my normal projects patiently waiting their turn to be done. Baby has certainly ratcheted the pace of getting projects back a further notch.

Next up during or after all of this is new material on the freedmanriles website with Rose. I have the structure down. Now I just have to build it.

Mountains to Move

As I get closer to the day the baby is born, it feels like there are mountains to move. Some, I am sure, are not needed, yet I construct them and am forced to move them. They, along with the important things, will be left behind when my priorities and time are reapportioned. I would love to see now from the future to know which mountains to move. Instead, I just shove ineffectually at all of them simultaneously. There are so many mountains to move.

A photo from the family vacation in Cornwall when I was in 6th grade. The scan is more grainy than the photo, but I still love this shot.

Digitized Photos

I recently sent my old negatives to Scancafe to have them digitized. They just came back, and now I have access to all of the photos I have taken (minus a few b&w rolls that were part of high school photo class and yearbook class). The photos stretch from my 110 camera back in 1982(?) until I transitioned to getting my negatives returned with a cd of the images. The cds are not as good quality scans, but they'll do.

As I began to explore these images, all 4 dvds of them, I happened upon this photo of the spiral stair within The Monument in London. This column commemorates the Great Fire of London. Clearly this photo shows my fascination with things helical, so I ported it to my store and stuck it on several items to see how it would look.

Two Facets

Last weekend and this one upcoming, my newly formed reading response group met, and the participants shared writing. I loved being able to get back into my story and have revisions to make.

Today, my Redsox/Cards tickets arrived in the mail. Wow! Another kind of excitement.

Cards Tix!

Red Sox tickets went on sale Saturday. I was at a conference and drove back to town that day. I forgot that it was the day to buy tickets until a party-goer downstairs reminded me. I quickly went up stairs only to be greeted by the interminable window of too busy. I finally got through that and then had to deal with the interminable too busy Red Sox window. Eventually I ended up with pairs of tickets for two games and a single for the other. I will see the Cards when they come to Boston. I'll be wearing the right color...

facebook

found facebook. Nuff said.

Lots of changes at work.

Lots of work at work.