Easy baby
It’s probably best that I not talk about the future. And I know C has had some rough times - this morning she wouldn’t let me put her down, and I started to think I was going to still be wearing slippers when I got to work. But in general, what we have on our hands is a very easy baby.
This morning, after C let me put her in the carseat, she slept for a few hours. Then she ate and played for an hour or so, falling back asleep in time for me to eat lunch. She’s still sleeping now.
When she’s tired, she sleeps. When she’s hungry, she eats. When she’s not eating or sleeping, she’s either playing or hanging out. She smiles and laughs and has never met a stranger.
Easy baby.
Dear C
Life would really be easier if you’d stop turning your head all the way to one side when you eat.
Love,
Dad
Heh
This article didn’t turn out as funny as I thought it would. I thought it said “Microsoft IE patch eliminates extra sleep.”
Finding new music
Because C is much easier in the car whenever we’re listening to music instead of NPR, we’ve been listening to a lot of music in my long commute to work. And I’ve been desperately trying to find some new tunes.
So how do you find new music? I’ve been doing the Pandora thing lately, which is great. But I’ve hit a roadblock: there’s no way to listen to a record. Every music site from Amazon to Pandora itself lets you preview albums - but only in teaser form. And I’m finding that hard to deal with.
I hear one song I like from a particular artist. I don’t want to buy an album based on one song play. What can I do? I can listen to 30 second teasers of varying quality. And from that I have to decide whether to buy an album.
It makes me wish I would feel guilt free in illegally downloading.
What I love about this picture
… other than the cuteness, of course.
I love that this picture of C looking out the car window makes her look less like a 3 1/2 month old baby and more like what she’ll look in another year or two. The hat covers her bald baby head and chins. She looks less like a baby and more like a little person.
A little person I made.
Fighting a losing battle
I hate trackback spam.
Comment spam is obnoxious. As is email spam. But both of those nuisances are easily controllable, if you know what you’re doing.
Trackback spam is another matter. For some reason, the spammers are onto Katie. Every time she posts, she gets up to a dozen trackback spams, some arriving almost as soon as she clicks “publish.”
For the uninitiated, let me tell you about trackbacks. Trackbacks are a Good Thing. Every time a blogger references another blog post with a link, that blog gets notification. You know who is talking about you, but there’s more: trackbacks broaden the conversation. If I post something interesting (ha!), maybe Doug will read it and talk about it. Then AT sees it on Doug’s blog and writes about it. Eventually someone at MCB picks it up, because what I said was so damn brilliant. And every time one of those bloggers reference my post, a link to their blog post shows up in my comments and a link shows up in Doug’s and AT’s comments for the hat tip. Now the conversation is here, there, and everywhere, and you can get from one place to another in comments, almost as if we were all standing in a bar and you were wandering among different groups of chatting friends (except everything said is forever frozen in little cartoon bubbles over our heads).
All of that is fine and dandy. Like I said, trackbacks are a Good Thing. But I can’t seem to stop the spammers. This breed of spammer gets Katie’s original statement from her rss feed. It copies a few words verbatim onto a generically created blog and sends a trackback to Katie. Since trackbacks are acknowledged as a Good Thing, the link shows up unvetted. But they really aren’t part of the conversation. Unlike a good trackback, their link isn’t a way to broaden the conversation. We’re not standing in that bar having drinks with the spammer. These comments are like an unelicited commercials in the middle of a football game. They’re streakers without the fun. We really want them to put their pants back on and get off the field.
And if I can’t find a good way to stop them, I’m going to have to kill trackbacks altogether. I’ve tried two plugins so far, but neither seems to accomplish anything. I’ve run out of ideas, and I’m tired of clicking “delete.”
My mornings
Today I was thirty minutes late to work.
My mornings are fragile. If C is in the right mood at the right time, I can put my pants on. If she’s not, it’s pj’s for me. This morning, Katie got up a little later than she intended; instead of finishing my breakfast, I helped C to hers. I also made the mistake this morning of emptying the dishwasher - something I used to do around 6 every morning … before having a baby.
The thing is I’m already getting up around a quarter till six in the morning, not counting days when I get up at 4 to take my turn with an occasionally fussy baby. On a “good” morning, I’ve been awake for 2 1/2 hours before I get to the office. As my boss said, I’m already tired before I get to work.
I try not to live my life looking forward to Fridays, but it will be nice to get up tomorrow and not spend so much time trying to get somewhere. I prefer being able to spend time with my baby without feeling like she’s slowing me down.
First day of heat
I just turned on the heat for the first time. My officemates downstairs have had their heat on for weeks, so we haven’t needed it upstairs. But this morning it was 64 degrees in here, and my fireplace is just for looks.
So I turned on the heat for the first time, and what happened? The smoke detector went off.
How am I supposed to nap with the smoke detector going off? Sheesh.
Barely here today
E wasn’t feeling particularly well yesterday, and now Katie isn’t feeling great, either. C didn’t sleep as well in the second half of the night as she did in the first, and I’ve been up since 4:45, on her insistence.
I need to figure out what I should be doing right now, but I keep thinking about how great it’d be to go home, light a fire, and take a long nap on the couch.
C went voting
Yesterday was election day, and C had the honor of accompanying me. It was her first ever election, and she was a hit. All of the poll workers fawned over her. It was 6 o’clock and I was the 70th person to vote at that location, but that’s another story. The awesome part was what I overheard one worker saying as we left:
“It’s gonna be fun watching her grow up.”
I love cold mornings
I just had to share. 
But now I have to remember someone else. I’ve long had the habit of not turning on my heat in the car, because I just don’t think about it. And now I have to remember someone else might be cold, and she can’t talk to tell me about it.
But she does have a pretty dern cute winter outfit. I need a picture….
