Category: life

I have nothing clever to say at this time

You know, I hate it when I go a long time without really posting. I feel this sort of weird pressure that whatever I post after a lull should somehow sparkle. Be…worthwhile. So I end up thinking a lot about posts I’d like to write, things I’ve been composing in my head for ages. But by the end of the day, when I have a chance to sit down, I’m just tired. I don’t feel like I have sufficient time and energy to write something that I want to write. I might get part way through a draft of a post, and then give up and go to bed. So, once again, I’m writing something utterly dull.

go fly a kite

Yesterday we decided to go fly a kite. (Well, we decided on Saturday, really. You can’t be too spontaneous about this sort of thing, especially if you don’t yet have a kite in your possession.)

Predictions were for a fairly breezy day, just right for kite-flying. We got ourselves out of the house early-ish, and headed over to the open space by the dam (where we sometimes go for walks).

It turned out that the location and conditions were pretty great for kite-flying. This was the first time that either John or I had successfully flown a kite. (Well, I only remember one attempt from my childhood, but I don’t think my sister or I had much idea what we were doing.) In spite of our lack of experience, we managed quite well, and we all enjoyed the time outside in the fresh spring air.

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I meant to post these photos last night, but couldn’t stay awake due to another mysterious fever. Have I mentioned that I also have poison ivy due to some poorly thought-out yard work last weekend? Somebody shoot me now.

for crying out loud

You know what? I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in well over a year. At 19 months, Theo still does not sleep through the night.

I could probably count the number of times on one hand that I have gotten a stretch of sleep that is longer than 4 hours. (Theo does sleep longer stretches than that, often from about 8:30 to about 2:30. If I could bring myself to go to bed at 8:30, I could probably get a 6-hour stretch…) Mostly, I go to bed too late, wanting to have time unfettered to get on my laptop and tend to other things. As a result, I rarely get to bed before 1 or 2.

Theo is still sleeping in our room, in a portable crib. At least for the first part of the night. After he wakes up in the night, I take him to bed with me. I don’t typically sleep all that well after that. 6:15, when the alarm clock goes off, comes all too soon.

What this means is that I am not getting enough sleep, and not nearly enough deep sleep. As a result, I have felt like I have developed a cognitive impairment. I have trouble focusing. My memory is leaky. My head is foggy. This does not lend itself well to making progress towards a PhD.

Something’s got to change.

I really didn’t expect Theo to still be sleeping in our room at this age. I think Phoebe started sleeping in her own room around 6 months old. When we were getting ready for Theo’s arrival, we got Phoebe a toddler bed so that the crib would be available. The plan was to move Theo in there, into Phoebe’s room, once he started sleeping well at night. (No sense in waking Phoebe in the night, right?)

So…that hasn’t happened.

It amazes me how different Phoebe and Theo are with respect to their sleeping patterns. Phoebe started sleeping through the night really early. Too early, even. We had to wake her to feed her in the night her first few months. It was a relief when she was gaining weight steadily enough that the pediatrician gave us the go-ahead to let her keep sleeping.

And then there’s the whole sleep training business. With Phoebe, she used to fight us at bedtime. It got to the point, maybe around 7 months, where we would be spending over an hour rocking her and singing to her to put her to sleep, and she’d spend most of that time crying, not wanting to go to bed. It made it easy for us to decide to try some “cry it out” sleep training. She was already crying anyway, and we were exhausted.

With Theo, we could put him down in his crib, and one of us would just need to sit near him a few minutes and he’d be asleep. There didn’t seem to be much urgency to change things, and things were so calm and quiet, with nobody crying. Now that he’s older, it’s a bit more variable, and sometimes he needs someone to sit with him longer to fall asleep.

But he still wakes up.

We even gave sleep training a brief go. 3 exhausting nights, with one angry baby screaming for over an hour. And no real progress. I think we’ve missed the optimal window for that.

I think that maybe if he’s out of our room, he’ll sleep better. Maybe having Phoebe in there will help him fall asleep without one of us needing to sit with him. On the other hand, he may just disrupt Phoebe’s sleep.

We’ve come really close to moving him out of our room several times. But somehow I always find reasons to put off the transition. (I hate transitions! I’m tired enough as it is, thankyouverymuch.) There were some practical concerns, too, though. Like needing to move the crib away from the lamp. Now the furniture is finally rearranged. And once we figure out a secure way to cover the outlet that is within easy reach of the crib (he pulls out the little plug things), I think I will be out of excuses. Theo will be moving in with Phoebe.

I just wish I knew how all of this was going to work out.

Theo, still not sleeping in the crib.

no foolin’

Here are a few assorted bits of things that are going on with me:

  • I’ve had a temperature over 101 for most of the day.
  • As such, I’ve been pretty incoherent.
  • The sun finally came out today after days of rain.
  • We’ve had various rivers running through our yard.
  • We haven’t had flooding in our basement due to the rain
  • Though we have had some due to our dishwasher.
  • I’ve finally gone over to the dark side an joined Twitter.
  • (As threatened one year ago today.)
  • This time I’m not kidding.
  • I still plan to treat it all as a big joke.


Why, yes, that is a banana in my pocket.

talking tomatoes

We’re in the kitchen eating breakfast. Phoebe gets up to use the bathroom.

Phoebe: Don’t eat all the pear while I’m gone!
Me: I won’t. What if I eat all the oatmeal?
Phoebe: Don’t eat all the oatmeal! I want some.
Me: What if I eat all the sassafrass?
Phoebe: I don’t think we have any sassafrass.
Me: What if I eat all the… tomatillos?
Phoebe: I don’t think he would like that.
Me: [?] Tomatillo is a kind of tomato.
Phoebe: …that they eat in Spain?
Me: Does it sound like a Spanish word to you?
Phoebe: Yes.
Me: You’re right. It is a Spanish word.
Phoebe: Then they must be in Spain!
Me: I’m not actually sure. You know, there are other places in the world where they speak Spanish.
Phoebe: Tomatoes don’t speak!


Phoebe enjoys her breakfast with pears, oatmeal and reference-resolution adventures.

disconnected thoughts

Things have been a bit crazy over the past few weeks, and it’s a little hard to know where to jump in to start blogging again. So I guess I’ll just offer my disconnected thoughts.

I see that it’s been almost 3 full weeks since I posted anything beyond Just Posts stuff.

3 weeks ago we had a full but fun weekend. Fun up to a point…

John was finally able to take a day off from work after many weeks of working long crazy hours 7 days a week. That Sunday, we spent a family day together, hitting the Boston Children’s Museum, and then dinner at a really great little restaurant in Cambridge with a play area for kids and really good food. At dinner, John and I enjoyed the food and conversation while Phoebe and Theo played happily a few feet away. Theo seemed not too interested in food, so I called him over to try to get him to eat. I pulled him on my lap and offered a bite of fruit. At which point he started throwing up.

That was the point at which the weekend stopped being fun.

We had a long drive home with a very sick Theo and a very disturbed Phoebe.

Theo was quite sick for a couple of days, and was barely able to keep anything down. I was getting worried we’d need to get medical intervention to keep him hydrated. I’m quite sure he lost a lot of weight. He was so miserable that I could barely put him down for about 48 hours. We didn’t want to leave him alone when he was sleeping because we were worried about him choking.

Phoebe got sick, too. Not quite as sick as Theo, but quite miserable, nonetheless. Especially on that Monday. Which was her 4th birthday.

It was a long week. John and I both got the virus to varying degrees. I lucked out by only having 48 hours of fever and mild nausea. (Though I guess that makes the 5th time I’ve been sick so far in 2010. The year is clearly off to a rollicking good start.)

Once everyone was more or less recovered, it was time to get the house ready for Phoebe’s birthday party. We’d been living in steadily increasing levels of chaos for the past year, and if we were going to have a party at home, we were going to need to relocate parts of the house that had long since become buried under piles of things. My mother came from California for week-long visit, and she helped a huge amount to get the house sorted out. Together, we found that we did, indeed, still have kitchen counters. They were approximately where I’d last remembered seeing them.

We had Phoebe’s party last Saturday. My mother left Tuesday. Her visit was lots of fun, but considering that we were working almost non-stop with cleaning, party prep, party, and post-party clean-up, it was pretty exhausting. She’s probably still recovering from her “vacation.”

The last couple of days I’ve just been feeling tired and pretty run down. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been eating leftover cupcakes and cookies daily.

I may manage to post something about the party. (Can anyone guess what theme Phoebe chose?)

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My feed reader is overflowing, and I’m strangely at peace with that. I’ve been reading posts here and there, in a haphazard way. Even when I have read posts, I’ve been really bad about commenting. Again.

There’s part of me that knows that in order to really move forward with my degree, I need to find more time. And really the only time I have to “spare” is the couple of hours each night that I tend to spend online. So it’s probably good to start disconnecting from that time sink.

But I just can’t bear to pull the plug on my blog.

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In other news, Holly and I are super close to getting the Best of 2009 Just Posts up for voting. We actually have all the finalists chosen, and had hoped to put up the post tonight. (Friday night, that is. I see it’s now technically Saturday.) Hopefully the final kinks in our voting procedures will get worked out tomorrow (or today, seeing as it’s after midnight).

setting the machinery in motion

So, yeah. About that “deadline” we set for March 1st…didn’t quite make it.

Holly and I are still working out the kinks in the machinery of readying our 2009 Just Posts finalists for voting. The process is fairly laborious and complex. We’re sorting posts into categories, and fine-tuning our rankings based on reviewer scores and comments, plus our own scores and comments. We are then passing this data through a bayesian algorithm to map the data onto a multidimensional target, which we are modelling out of styrofoam, aluminum foil and chewing gum. Our elaborate system of gears, levers, pulleys and springs will then lob sporks and chopsticks at the target. We will analyze the configuration of utensils to determine the optimal set of posts. Unfortunately, we’ve run into a bit of a roadblock due to some disagreement over how best to use the trained gerbils.¹

So, it will be…a few more days.

While you wait, please study the following instructional video:


(It’s OKGO and their new video for This Too Shall Pass.)

¹ I’ll also be pretty busy with a few other things. My mother is arriving tonight for a week-long visit, for one thing.²

² I’m hoping that she can help carve some of the styrofoam and chew some of the gum. Or at least help us tally the sporks. (I’m afraid she won’t be much help as a gerbil handler.)

heart of scone

We’ve been going through another hectic stretch, mostly due to John working crazy hours again. My own hours have been pretty well filled by taking care of kiddos and work, plus not quite enough sleep. On Sunday, though, I got to sleep in a couple of extra hours. John was still up working when Phoebe and Theo woke up, so he wrangled them and got them a bite to eat while I slept until after 9. It was a wonderful Valentine’s Day present–even better than chocolate.¹ (Now if only I hadn’t been up till 3 trying to get a little quality time with my laptop…)

We haven’t really done much for Valentine’s Day in the past, as I am a cynical cold-hearted type who scorns all forms of romance and sentimentality, with an aversion to heart-shaped things and the color pink. However, having the wee ones around, with their spirits as yet untarnished by such cynicism has changed me a bit. In spite of its brittle candy exterior, my chocolaty heart has melted somewhat towards the heart-shaped rosy-colored trappings of Valentine’s Day. A festive heart-oriented activity was in order.

In keeping with my enthusiasm for baked goods, I thought making pink heart-shaped scones would fit the bill. We used the blueberry scone recipe, but used frozen raspberries instead of blueberries to get the scones festively pink. (They ended up more purple and red than pink, and we all agreed that we like the blueberry ones better, but they were still tasty enough for us to gobble them down in short order.)


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¹Though John did also get me some chocolate.