October 2008
october 30 2008 11:07 pdt david and judy have been staying with us for the past few days, as the pictures at right illustrate. we've been taking advantage of the extra hands to focus on getting stuff done- p has been to the dentist and the doctor and the salon, i've been spending 12-hour days at school working on the long-term stuff that i can get out of the way now. tomorrow is their last day with us, but we're going to try to go out to dinner tonight if the little bundle of joy cooperates.
last week david and i finished applying much to the front yard, just in time for the first hard rains of the season. the tomato vines are almost done- no more flowers, and the green fruits are beginning to spoil before they ripen. pretty soon it will be time to rip it all out and throw it on the compost pile.
days are very short now, and shadows are long even at noon. the planter boxes in the backyard are still in full sun at noontime, but the little porch awning is beginning to shade them in the mornings and afternoons, and it won't be long before the roof is enough to shade them out completely.
time to start looking at seed catalogs for next spring.
october 21 2008 17:10 pdt a date for the record: on friday 10/17, grandma sandy gave little d his first nighttime bottle, and he slept for seven hours. of course, we woke up every two or three hours to make sure he was still breathing, so it's not like we all slept for seven hours, but it's a step in the right direction.
october 6 2008 22:51 pdt everyone says that having a child is a life-changing event. i freely admit that i had no way of knowing what they might mean until after the fact. and during the first few days, some changes were pretty obvious- the crying, the diapers, the carseats, the extra travel preparation.
but this week (he'll be 3 weeks old on wednesday!) some of the more subtle changes have started to become apparent. for one, our sleep patterns are totally fubared. it used to be that i would go to bed around midnight or one, set the alarm for seven, hit the snooze once or twice, and wake up around eight or so. and i wouldn't have to work to stay up late- i just wasn't tired. now, my sense of time is telescoping in confusing ways. we still get to sleep for eight hours every day, but that eight hours is broken into 2.5 hour chunks, with 45-to-90 minute interruptions in between.
i have no idea what time of day it is, ever, and my sense of time passing is totally distorted. sometimes if he's sleeping on my lap, sometimes an hour seems like three, and i can't believe that it's only 11 AM and i still have an hour to get ready for school. other times, he wakes up crying from an afternoon nap and i just don't know where the last two hours went. i generally come home from school around six. the last two nights, i've looked at the clock at 8:30 and been shocked that it's not four hours later.
today at four thirty in the afternoon, i had that jangly sense that i sometimes get after pulling an all-nighter-- but i slept at least six hours last night. this is going to be lots of fun come time for final exams.
october 3 2008 17:12 pdt and the rain has finally started. all day yesterday, all day today, and the forecast is for rain all day tomorrow and sunday as well. the plants and the lawn could use a good soaking, so i'm not complaining- glad that i had a chance to dig up the rest of the front yard last weekend before things got too wet. with any luck, it will clear up again for a few days at the end of next week and i'll be able to get the tulips planted and everything nicely mulched in place before it gets too much colder.
october 3 2008 14:28 pdt september went pretty fast. between the end of TEP and the beginning of school i didn't take much time to update this little vanity project. but the big news now of course is that we had the baby- well, P really did all the hard work, i was just a cheerleader- but anyhow, baby was born and everyone is healthy and happy. everyone except the cat, who is jealous and a bit unsure what to think about the new monkey we brought home with us.
now that i have a good excuse to take photos, i'll be posting them here a bit more frequently.
