Sleep

Or not ...

http://jensamom.blogspot.com/2009/03/to-sleep-perchance-to-dream.html

The cutting edge of fashion

A baby as an accessory!

Time

Another thing nobody tells you about having a baby is how little time you'll have.

Now, I know what you're thinking — It should be obvious to anybody that you'll have little to no free time when dealing with an infant.

I knew that. I realized the days of watching uninterrupted TV were over. I realized wandering through hardware or book stores was coming to an end. I knew spontaneous long drives around town on the weekend were kaput.

I'm talking about not having time to do the simplest of things. Like showering, using the bathroom or even flipping through a magazine.

I thought of this because Jen messaged me today with the triumphant news that she's showered. For the past 10 weeks, she's only done that when I've been home to watch Paige. But, somehow, she managed to do it today.

So kudos to Jen, for showering before I get home today. I don't know if I could have pulled off that feat.

Back to work (and blogging)

OK, so I've been a little busy.

Paige's birth and the two weeks I spent at the house totally wrecked my routine. But I'm back at the office now and should get back into the groove soon enough.

One thing I've learned during the past two weeks is people don't really warn you enough about the changes a baby will cause in your life. Sure, they'll say "It'll change your life" and "You won't know what hit you." But they don't go into much detail. For example, nobody warned me about the lack of sleep. More accurately, they didn't warn me about how sleeping in small doses messes up your internal circadian rhythm.

Sleeping in three and four hour doses is no fun at all. Especially when you're a prolific sleeper like me. It's thrown me off to the point I was checking my watch to figure out what day it was. And there were several times when Jen and I were talking and I'd say something happened "yesterday" to which she'd say "No, that was earlier today" or "Scott, that was two days ago."

It's totally worth it, but geez I need a nap.

T-minus 8 hours and counting

As I type this, we're eight hours from checking in the hospital for Jen to be induced and our daughter to be born.

Hopefully by this time Monday night, little (To Be Named Later) will have arrived and all y'all will have gotten photos or met her personally.

Thanks for the support.

And, no, I'm not freaking out yet. Calm and cool. Very Zen.

A baby name we won't be considering

A new father has secretly named his baby girl Sarah McCain Palin after the Republican ticket for president and vice president.

Mark Ciptak of Elizabethton put that name on the documents for the girl's birth certificate, ignoring the name Ava Grace, which he and his wife had picked earlier.

"I don't think she believes me yet," he told the Kingsport Times-News for a story to be published Tuesday. "It's going to take some more convincing."

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=66550&catid=2

Never Again

What'd you do Wednesday night?

I spent two hours in Hell, or as it's known in Fort Smith "The Growing Kids Consignment Sale."

Angie said we just had to attend. There were bargains galore. Strollers that go for $300 new sell for $50. Kids' furniture, clothes, diaper bags, you name it they've got it.

On the plus side, the people running this thing are sticklers about what they accept for the sale. Teeny little stain? Nope, won't accept it. Missing a button? Sorry, no thanks. And, thanks to Angie putting Jen's name on some of her own kids' clothes, we got to go on Wednesday night before it was open to the general public.

On the minus side, it was overwhelming. Here's a photo of the setup from the sale's Web site (yes, it has a Web site) ...




(Click on the photo and you can get a bigger look at it.)

Now if Wednesday was like that photo, I'd have been fine. But imagine a few hundred women, dozens of kids running loose and a sprinkling of men carrying the piles of clothes being bought. And I do mean piles. People were using 50-gallon trash cans as shopping carts and were filling them up.

Naturally, these women were ruthless too. They'd nudge you with the strollers they were buying to get you to move when they wanted to look at something. I had one woman ask me if I was going to buy a diaper bag ... that I was holding in my hands! (We did buy it. Laura Ashley, $10 and in perfect condition.)

Luckily, the next time there's one of these sales I won't be attending. I'll pull a Jason and say "Sorry, but somebody has to stay home with the baby."

I'll miss you most of all, Comfy Chair

When I was a kid, we had a hound dog named Red. One day, he was gone and Mom said Dad had taken him up to the cabin. Our yard, despite being a double lot, was too small for him she said. And at the cabin, he could chase rabbits and have more fun.

I never did see that dog again.

Hopefully, the same won't happen to Comfy Chair.

I loaded her up on the Jeep today for the trip to the cabin.



Once we got there, I put her in a place of honor in the bedroom my branch of the family sleeps in during hunting season. In fact, she's right next to my bunk now.



So after years of dedicated service, countless football games on TV, hours and hours of PlayStation, thousands of meals eaten while sitting on her and lots and lots of naps, she's now retired to the country. Where, hopefully, she'll have several more good years serving as a spot to sit while putting on hunting boots and post-hunt napping.

(And yes, Jennifer is horrified the slip cover was that grungy.)

Age-induced fear

We started softball season this week, and I had a moment where I thought "Damn, is this what it means to get old?"

It wasn't that I was sore the next day or that I couldn't do what I was able to do last year. It fact, it wasn't anything physical at all. Instead, it was all mental.

You see, playing coed softball you get these guys trying to recapture their glory days of high school baseball. They step to the plate and crush the ball. And, occasionally, they'll crush it right back at the pitcher aka me.

I've had close calls before. Jen was there for several of them. Line drives right at my head. Ones that I was just able to get a glove on before being decapitated. I've had guys intentionally try to hit back up the middle when their team was losing. I've taken linedrives off my thigh, whiz between my legs and knock my cap off.

This year, however, it felt different.

Going into the first game of the year, I was worried about getting injured. Hell, I was scared. That was new. That was unexpected.

At first, I thought turning 40 triggered some new "Be careful" mode. Then, I wondered if I wasn't subliminally worried about getting hurt while Jen was pregnant. I couldn't figure it out. So I did what every guy does in that situation, I told myself to quit being a baby and go for it. I can protect myself if another rocket comes at me.

Through three games over two nights, no line drives yet. Only two more months to go.

Meet our daughter

The original plan was to upload video of today's ultrasound. But the tech screwed up the DVD, so we don't have any video.

However, we do have photos.

No, I won't be one of those parents who foist pictures of their kids on everybody. But, hey, it's our first photo of our first child. This was taken right before she started sucking her thumb.



Most importantly, the ultrasound revealed all is right inside the womb. Everything looks normal, which is all we really cared about.

And, NO, we won't be telling you her name. She'll hear her own name before any of y'all do. We have to have some secrets during this process.

I hate the previous owner of our house

With the baby en route, the den is going to go from the man room/PS3 haven to an office and (eventually) playroom. We didn't want the old lousy carpet out there, so I'm going to rip it out and install hardwood flooring out there.

After Thursday night, I decided to get a jump on pulling up the carpet out in the den. Mainly, I wanted to see how difficult it is going to be and check the condition of the old garage floor. It didn't take long for things to get complicated. Why? Because of this ...




Yep, that's right. Parquet flooring underneath the carpet. Flooring that's in pretty good shape.

So now do we just go with that or put hardwood down on top of it?

UPDATE: All the old carpet is gone, as are the two (2) carpet pads that were underneath. What I thought was a wooden floor underneath turned out to be some sort of tile, laid directly on the cement garage floor.

A post I never expected to make

It's July 1. And I'm freaking freezing to death.

It's one of the side effects of Jen's pregnancy. She's hot, and constantly bumping the air down. Not because she's big, but because of the melange of hormones coursing through her body.

In the car, she cranks the air to the coldest setting and puts it on the second-most powerful setting. Normally, when we're in the car, I know to turn the air down after a few minutes because Jen gets cold. It's one of those little things that becomes a habit after 10 years of being with the same person. But now, when I do it out of habit, Jen immediately reaches back over and cranks it back up.

Now that we've got the new 3 1/2 ton air conditioner, we can crank that bad boy down to refrigerator-like levels of cold. Jen just went to bed and asked me to bump the air down. The thermostat read 75 when I walked up to it. So I had to lower it to 73 to get it to kick on.

So here in a few minutes, I'll crawl into bed and pull the comforter up to my neck. It's getting to the point that I've considered pulling my fleece pants and slippers out of the closet.

The joys of Jimmie Jo/Jimmy Joe

Jen puked not long ago, like 30 minutes or so.

This morning sickness is an odd thing. For one, I didn't realize it could happen at night, as you're going to bed. I mean, it's called "morning" sickness. Not "random times of the day" sickness.

Jen has gotten sick three times so far. I think that equals the number of times she puked in all the years prior to that.

Tonight was odd. She's laying on the couch and gets up for bed. When she does, she coughs. And that caused her to get sick.

Luckily, she got to the bathroom in time. Being the concerned husband, I dutifully stayed in the bathroom while she was heaving. Since her hair is too short to need to be held, I got a washcloth and rubbed her back.

Oddly, the sound of her getting sick didn't turn my stomach. Maybe I'm already psychologically adjusting to the future grossness I'll endure as a father.

(BTW, the names on this post are not in the running for actual names of the baby. When Jen and I would see kids acting up at the mall or at restaurants, we used to say "our kid won't do that." Eventually, we started using Jimmie Jo/Jimmy Joe as a way to refer to our future child, since depending on the spelling it can be a girl or boy.)

HVAC and the den

Sorry again for the lack of posts. It's been a busy week. Busier than I expected.

On Tuesday, the guys showed up with our new heat and central units. Our old AC unit was a Chrysler. The company quit making AC units in the mid-1970s, so it was time for a new one.

They also removed the old wall unit heater in the den and installed duct work out to that room. Previously, the man room (aka SK's suite) would be freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer. But, now, with real windows, a wall and duct work it's an actual useable space.

The crew was four guys, one of which was a high-school or early-college age. He got the crappy job of crawling through the attic. As Nash can tell you, our attic is not a fun place to be on a summer day. I felt sorry for the kid.

I've got a new ceiling fan to install this weekend. And I've got to patch the hole where the wall heater was located. In a couple of weeks, the carpet comes up, paint and new flooring follows that.

The heartbeat

Jen and I had a doctor's appointment yesterday.

(Yes, yes, I know she's the one who had the appointment but I plan on attending all of them so I think "we" had it.)

Anyway, we heard the baby's heartbeat for the first time.

Unlike on TVs and movies, it's not easy to find. The nurse kept having to move the sonar thingamajigger trying to locate Jimmy Joe/Jimmie Jo (our unofficial names for him/her). When she finally found it, it was faint. You really had to know what you're hearing to recognize it.

The nurse said the heartbeat was strong and fast (which is normal). She guessed it was around 150 bpm, which according to old wives' tales means the baby is a girl.

So everybody knows, right?

About the news, that is. Y'all know about it now, don't you?

That explains the dearth of posts this month. I've been afraid of spilling the secret.

So now this blog, which was dedicated to my turning 40, has yet another reason to continue for the foreseeable future.