Category: life

rough night

Sorry if you are looking for a list, or even any sort of entertainment. It’s Thursday, and therefore I’m due for a ThThTh list. It’s in progress, but damn those things take a lot longer to put together than you might expect. A list will be up much later today. What follows can be happily ignored by anyone who doesn’t enjoy reading about the crankiness of dealing with a toddler.

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I’m feeling less-than-fully functional today. Phoebe and I had a bad night. I didn’t mention in last night’s post that John had to run off to get a meeting this morning. In California. So he was gone last night, and will be gone tonight. I also think that Phoebe’s been teething. The biting is one clue. She’s also been drooling and sticking her hands and other things in her mouth a lot, which she’s not generally prone to anymore. For whatever reason, she woke up twice last night. Once about half an hour after she went to bed, and then a little after midnight. (As in just when I was going to get to bed.) I just could not get her to settle down.

We talked. I dosed her with Motrin. I held her. I rocked her. I sang to her. But every time I went to put her in her crib, she’d cry again. I tried leaving her, and she screamed and screamed. I went back after a few minutes, and am not pleased with myself that I snapped at her that it was time to stop crying. (I was tired. Sorry. I have a temper.) So then I started right in with the soothing and snuggling and talking, and she seemed to settle. But still objected to going back in her crib.

I asked if she was sad that Daddy wasn’t here, and she said “yeah.” So we called John. (It was only 10:30 or so California time, and John’s ususally up half the night anyhow.) He talked. He soothed.

I put Phoebe in her crib. I sang. I talked about things she likes me to talk about. Then I said it was time to go, just like I do every single night. She usually lets out a sob as I walk out the door, just to pull at my heart strings, but then goes to sleep quietly. But last night, at 2:00, she started screaming. And screaming more. I haven’t left her crying for ages. I don’t even know how long it’s been. (Yes, we did a version of the dreaded Ferberization way back when. Dr. Sears can bite me.) But I thought maybe she’d settle down without me. I went back in after 10 minutes, and got her quiet again. But the screams started in once more. I went back in and she was saying “Mommy room. Mommy room.” “You want to go to Mommy’s room?” I asked. (I swore I’d never talk about myself in the third person, but deictic pronouns are tricky beasts.) She said, “yeah.”

I caved. I brought her to bed with me. I was desperate for sleep. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. She eventually stopped squirming enough to fall asleep. At least, she appeared to be just waking up when she woke me up crying at 6:45.

Now I wonder if this will come back to bite me. She really does sleep best on her own. And she’s generally a good sleeper.

Happily, she went to daycare this morning, and I was able to get a bit more sleep. I am “working” from home today, but haven’t been able to defog my brain sufficiently. I do have a conference call at 3:30, so will need to kick into high gear.

I hope that tonight goes better, because I have to drive the two of us down to New York tomorrow. John’s dad is going back home, after over a year in various hospitals and rehab hospitals. John will be going right to New York from his trip, following his red-eye flight to Newark, rather than going home first, so that he can be there to help. Phoebe and I will go down later in the day. Our eyes may well be red, too.

bagel bits and bites

I really should get to bed. But I’ve been remiss in posting updates on stuff that’s going on. I’m not sure exactly who’s interested, but one of my goals of this here blog has been to record some sort of chronicle of my life. So I give you a bit more info on the ever-expanding bagel of my life, and some details about where all my cream cheese is going.

Things have continued to be pretty busy of late. John has been very busy with various things for work. I’ve been busy with things for work. Did I mention that all 3 abstracts that my research group submitted in the past few months have been accepted to conferences? This is thrilling, but also somewhat daunting. And while I have been heavily involved in the research for each of those three projects, none of them actually touch directly on the research that I need to be doing to work towards my degree. Which means that I’m also needing to keep busy with a fourth major project. And there are other less pressing ongoing projects going on, too. It all keeps me quite busy with the juggling. (And I’m quite clumsy with juggling. I blame gravity.)

And then there is always the ongoing project Phoebe. She is a lot of fun most of the time, but we have also been going through some rather trying times. She is a toddler, you see. And she is testing her limits. Just about every transition in activities, she raises an objection. She doesn’t want to get out of her crib, get into her crib, have her diaper changed, get dressed, get her coat on, go to daycare, leave daycare, get into the bath, get out of the bath. And unfortunately, she has expressed her frustration with such events by means of her teeth on more than one occasion. By that I mean that she has bitten. Sometimes she will bite a toy, but a couple of other times, she has bitten (or started to bite) me. And that really bites. Do you have any idea how sharp those little teeth are? It’s only been a few times, mostly limited to one day. (There was a previous time when she bit my arm while I was out shopping with a friend. Even through my layered winter sleeves, the bite broke the skin and left a bruise.)

On the positive side, Phoebe has been talking up a storm lately, and it is wonderful to finally learn what is going on in that little mind. I’ve been meaning to write a bit about what happened during and since our assessment for early intervention, but I haven’t been finding a lot of time and energy to write. The short version is that she qualified for services based on a 5-month delay in her expressive ablilities. (Her receptive language, on the other hand, was measured at being at least 6 months ahead of her age.) We started having meetings with a speech therapist in January, and also attending a “play group.” But by the time we had our first one-on-one meeting, Phoebe had already started to leap forward in her expressive language. And since then, it’s been pretty amazing to watch. She’s been talking a lot, and producing quite complex multi-word utterances. We’ve had so few meetings that it’s hard to attribute much of the progress to early intervention, but who knows. Perhaps it was just the push she needed. I hope to write more about Phoebe’s language development soon, because it’s so damn cool.

sunshine on a cloudy day?

Here is a little screen shot of the weather widget on my Mac. The top weather summary is for Boston, and the bottom is for our town. Please look closely at the two summaries, especially for the Wednesday column. Notice any differences between the two forecasts?

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Hello?

We live 45 miles from Boston. Admittedly we live in a different county, and in many ways our little semi-rural, one-stoplight town is worlds apart from the hustle and bustle of the cosmopolitain urban center. But dammit, I thought we were generally in the same climate.

Okay, since we are inland, and Boston is on the water, we typically see some differences in amount of precipitation and temperature. I’m used to that. However, it would appear that for tomorrow, as I’ll go into Boston for a meeting after I drop off Phoebe at daycare, I need to dress for snow and cold, and also for balmy sunshine. Maybe I should mail home a postcard from sunny Boston.

Update: Aha! It would appear that Boston is not going to have the Mediterranean temperatures that my widget told me. Well, not Boston, Massachusetts, at least. At some point in the last few days, perhaps sensing that I’m looking forward to Spring, my widget decided on its own that I would like to see what the weather is like in Boston, Georgia. I guess this looks more like what I should expect:

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brrrr

We just got back from a whirlwind trip down to visit John’s parents. John’s sister was visiting them, and John’s mother just had a birthday. Plus, coincidentally, my sister (from California) was in New York city for a couple of days for a trade show. So, a trip down to New York seemed in order.

We left Thursday night, after I got home from a really long day of teaching and meeting and commuting. We didn’t get on the road till about 8:30, which isn’t bad considering I got home at almost 7, and still had to pack and eat dinner. But it did mean an arrival time after midnight.

I then took the train into New York City to meet my sister Friday morning, and join her in checking out some retailers. (Actually, I don’t mean shopping, believe it or not. Though I did buy a bathtub drain stopper and some licorice. I lead a glamorous life like that.) I had a really fun time. This was the first time in years my sister and I just got to hang out together. With no babies or anything. It was rainy and windy and cold, and not really a great day for walking around outside. But walk around outside we did. I also took the opportunity to spend the time on the train reading a book for fun since I wasn’t lugging my laptop. I re-read Sara Caudwell’s The Shortest Way to Hades, one of my favoritistest books in the world.

John is going through a crazy-busy time for work now, and so we decided to come back home Saturday night. (It’s impossible for either of us to get stuff done when visiting John’s mother.) But first, we had the day with John’s sister, visited John’s Dad, then made a trip to my favorite restaurant in the universe. We then went back to John’s parents’ house, packed up, and were on the road by about 9:30 or 10:00.

Phoebe and I got to sleep most of the way home, which was great. Especially since, upon our arrival at home at 1:30 a.m., we found that the house was a nippy 50 degrees (that’s 10 degrees celsius). Our furnace had shut off at some point in the past couple days. We spent the next couple hours doing various things to speed up the warming process: turning on the oven, running space heaters in the bedrooms, and burning cardboard and whatever scrap wood we could find in the fireplace.

It was actually almost festive, with the roaring fire and the scavenging for amazon boxes and clementine crates. Phoebe had fun playing with her crayons while bundled up in a blanket nearish the fire. By 3:30, a space heater had brought Phoebe’s room up to a tolerable 60 degrees or so, and I managed to get her into her crib by 4. (We didn’t want to leave the space heater running in her room, so wanted to get the room warm before we left her in there.)

And I did sleep past 7:00 this morning, and seeing as I have no deadlines this weekend and have even read a book for fun and watched some TV, I now can lump myself in with those categories of people of which I was previously jealous. Hurray!

give up the funk

I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.

The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.

I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.

I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (“The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)

Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.

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(Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)

a few categories of people

Tonight I am feeling envious and/or jealous of the following categories of people:

  1. Those people who ever get to sleep past 7 a.m.
  2. Those who have time to watch TV, watch movies, or read books, especially on weekends.
  3. Those who haven’t committed to revising and submitting conference abstracts due on a Friday night.
  4. Those who don’t have another conference paper revision due the following Monday.
  5. Any individuals who have not insanely committed to presenting a computational linguistics textbook chapter to a group on the Saturday morning of the same weekend as those other deadlines.

Really, it’s all good. But I find myself with strong cravings for mindless entertainment and near-vegetative activites. I thought a little bit of whine might help. Ooo, and maybe some cheese.

big hands I know you’re the one

A couple of nights ago, during part of Phoebe’s pre-bath stalling tactics, Phoebe started to pull coins out of John’s pockets and put them in one of John’s hands. As John will often have pretty substantial loads of change in his pockets, I asked, “Are you going to be able to hold all the coins in one hand?” To which John replied that he had big hands. Followed shortly thereafter by “Big hands I know you’re the one.”

So John and I started singing “Blister in the Sun.” Phoebe dug it. We’d get to the end of the verse, and she’d say “more!” Then we played the various album versions, and we all danced. Rockin’ out in the upstairs bathroom.

(That’s a live 1984 version. If you want to hear the studio version, you can check out one called the Violent Sims, with an animated video. I also came across a video of a guy signing along the with the lyrics in ASL. Ah, the wonders of YouTube.)

catching up (or a cream cheese update)

I’ve wanted to avoid the sort of post that says “sorry I haven’t been posting lately,” but well, um…It would appear that I haven’t been posting much lately. So, um…Sorry?

Things have been busy, and I find myself too tired to write the posts I’ve been meaning/wanting to write. (It has not escaped my attention that I haven’t even posted a “Themed Things” list in 3 weeks.) I mentioned a few months ago that I would be spreading myself a bit thin over the next few months, much like too little cream cheese for too big a bagel.

Well, as often happens, I enthusiastically used a lot of cream cheese up in those early weeks. But the truth is, there is still a lot of bagel to cover. I’ll be co-teaching an 4-week course starting this Tuesday, which will need a healthy amount of cream cheese. Then my group at work is planning to submit at least one abstract (hopefully two) to a conference with a deadline of January 18th, for which we have a lot of work to do, and for which I have committed quite a bit of cream cheese. There are other school- and work-related odds and ends I’ve committed to, which will require dabs and dollops here and there. Holiday travels and activities, while good, ended up taking up more cream cheese than I’d anticipated. Phoebe requires quite a lot of my available cream cheese, as always. So it would appear that blogging is the part of the bagel that has had to go with the thinnest coating of cream cheese, and at times must make do with no cream cheese at all. I’m not yet ready to give up that part of the bagel, but realistically, it may not get a decent layer of cream cheese for a few weeks yet.

There are lots of things I’d like to share, like photos from our trip and other stuff that’s been going on. I also have a few posts I’ve been planning, both of a serious and a frivolous nature.

(Speaking of things of a frivolous nature, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that due to some sort of WordPress change, suddenly a whole list of pages I’d carefully hidden away were exposed right there on my front page index, including a page that consists entirely of the word pants repeated 100 times. My stats indicated that this page was viewed 8 times before I hid the pages away again, and that other related pages were also viewed. If you are among those people who stumbled across those pages, I can only wonder what you thought of them. I mean, beyond the usual, “damn, alejna’s weird.” Or “wow, she really does love pants.”)