Happy third birthday to you...

Happy 1/3 year old birthday Jason.

-J

A Lesson in Umlaut

For the record and just so everyone knows, this is your lesson in typing an umlaut e (ë).

Alt + 0235(on keypad) = ë

Have fun and may the umlaut be with you.

--Bonny

Happy half a birthday to you...

Happy 1/2 year old birthday Zoe. If I ever get to go home, I'll give you your present.

-J

Little Nerds

I believe it...

baby math

-J

Fit to be tied.

So, Zoë hates to be strapped down. She doesn't like her rocking chair. She doesn't like her car seat. In fact, while you're feeding her, when she realizes that she's strapped into the high chair, she’ll stop eating and start pulling at the straps.

So, today, after church, we were driving, and Zoë starts throwing a fit. We can't figure out why. She's pulling at her car seat straps, but she knows that those straps have to be on in the car. She’s gotten used to them. We come to a stop, so I look back to try and calm her down; and then I see it.

Zoë is pushing with all her might to break free. You see, the overall type straps on her denim dress were trapping her. She had no idea why mom and dad had felt the need to put two sets of straps on her. She'd been good in the car. She didn't need to be doubly restrained. And, she was fighting with all her might to rid herself of these evil second straps.

When Bonny was dropping me off at work, I tried to hook the overall straps to the car seat straps, so she would view them as one. I suppose we’ll have to wait for a comment from Bonny to see how well that worked.

-J

How Bonny does math???

Tell me I'm wrong.

Busy Day

Yesterday was pretty busy. We got a call Thursday evening letting us know that Reka's sister was getting transferred to Florida. Since Reka lives with her, Reka is also moving. They wanted to see Zoë again before they moved, on the 17^th.

Well, the agency was having an orientation session families wanting to adopt. They figured we could come up and tell our story at that, and meet with Reka and Rhonda. So, I begged off work, and we headed up there. (Incidentally, I shouldn’t have to beg to get my off Friday off.)

Everything went really cool. There was a birthmother and another adoptive couple who also spoke at the orientation. I was probably nervous and rambling, but people focused on the kids anyhow. We just hung out at the agency for a while, because Rhonda didn’t get off work till five.

Then, we met, unsupervised, with Reka and Rhonda, at a McDonald’s. (That’s right. I used four commas.) I was nervous, like I always am, but it was unwarranted. The meeting went really well; even better than last time. We managed to get the kids to nap in between orientation and the meeting. So, they were much less cranky and much more alert.

Oh, Zoë officially crawled last night. I may have to take a break from overtime one of these weekends and help Bonny do a major cleaning of the house. We’ll probably have to get one of these baby fences this weekend.

I’ve been told that I’m not given enough updates on Jason. :) Well, he’s doing stuff. It’s just harder to put into words. He’s beginning to understand that he has control over those little hands that show up every so often. He’s begun gripping toys, but not really playing with them (at least not on purpose). I think we may start him on baby cereal soon. That may mean we can start to wean him off of formula.

Oh, I don’t know who all knew about our planned trip to Northwest Arkansas. But it has been postponed because of me not getting to work on Friday. I just realized I can’t do it in two weeks either. So, we may be trying for just a one week postponement. We’ll see.

-J

Inch worm, Inch worm, How do you go?

...One inch, Two inch, Three inch Fo'

Anyone else remember that song?

Anyhow, the point is, Zoë started standing on her hands and knees a while back. Recently, she started standing on her hands and feet, which normally ended up in a human triangle that got top heavy rather fast, so she'd just topple over. Then she started getting on her hands and knees and rocking forward and back; you know, like kids do before they start to crawl.

And YESTERDAY ! ! !

No, she didn’t start crawling. She started inch worming. She gets up on her hands and knees. Then she pushes with her legs and just kinda lets her body fall forward. Then she gets back up and does it again. It looks something like this.



So, being the cruel parents we are, we took the toy she had just worked so hard to get to and put it across the room; to see how far she’d go.

“Forget that!!!”

Well, she can’t talk, but that’s what she thought. “I like the rattle and all, but 10 feet away. I have a ball just two feet away. I’m getting that.”

Again, we’re cruel. So, we take the ball away and put the rattle 2 feet away. She inches about a foot and a half, then we move it two feet away.

She made it about four feet, before she found something on the floor (that naturally, we had no idea was there) and tried to eat it.

Isn’t that the way it goes. Bonny may have to spend the day vacuuming.

-Justin

P.S. As soon as I legally can, I’ll post a movie of this.

Sheesh, I need to see my kids...

That said; I'm happy to announce that I should be getting exempt overtime soon. No, that doesn't mean I can stop working overtime. But it does mean I can work it during the week, so I should get my weekends back to be with my family.

The other thing I need to do is, stop drinking caffeine. That way, we can all go to bed around 9 or 10pm. As can be seen by the following graph, it didn't work out so well last time I tried to quit. From left to right, it is the hours since I started my caffeine fast. I stopped on January 9th. On the 16th, I had one 12oz can of Dr Pepper as a reward for not going nuts at a birthmother meeting. That would be the first blip on the radar. Addict that I am, I then convinced myself that it would be okay to have one can a week, and I had one on Saturday. Then on Monday I said. "Hey, it's a new week." And I was never clean again.

Now the halflife of caffeine in the human body is six hours. So, the crash at the end is what would happen if I stopped drinking caffeine this very second. (We'll see.) The last of it would be out of my system about noon on the 5th.


[[click to enlarge]]

Bleh, I'm such an addict.