autumn_walk_2

autumn_walk_2
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Your leaves turning yet?

Man Fleas

alpFLEAS0001
Originally uploaded by vitriolicviolin

Ah, this made my evening...

Garden Visit

dayatbeal_2
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

We finally took an afternoon off last weekend.

A Total Lazy Cross Post of Everything

...because I can't separate the threads of baby versus non-baby material in all that's gone on in the past month + since we moved, plus I have very (even more-) limited time.  That also means that this will likely be a disorganized post, or more so than usual.

 

So we moved into University housing, which initially was a bit scary.  Tiny, dark, smelly as heck, and the carpet (the Grease Mat) so nasty we couldn't put Limelet on the floor even for a minute.  Yep, you bet that was a pain.  We ended up spreading old bedsheets on the livingroom floor just to be able set him down.  Since he had just begun crawling, it was a matter of trying to constantly corral him on the rumpled, rapidly dirtying sheets.

 

What we wanted to do was get everything off the floor and shampoo the heck out of the carpet. Over and over.  And over.  However, this took about a week and a half to accomplish. 

 

Backing up a bit: on the day we moved in, I walked into the livingroom where the moving guys had been stacking our boxes to find that the tiny room was COMPLETELY filled with boxes up to the ceiling, with only a little path through to the kitchen and to the sofa.  When we were packing and building up to the move, we had thought that once we moved, we could finally relax a bit because we could unpack at our leisure. 

 

HA!  It actually ended up more stressful and urgent even than the packing, because we had to hurry to get that enormous pile of boxes unpacked and sorted out enough to shampoo the carpet before we could do much of anything else. And since the place was so tiny, unpacking was like an incredibly complex puzzle. A two-bedroom four-dimensional Tetris.  In 90-something-degree heat.

 

It took over a week (was it ten days?) of solid work to get things to a level at which we could even think of shampooing the rug, so it's a good thing we chose a move-in date that was a bit before my internship started.  (I wouldn't even have known where my work clothes were, had we not done that.)

 

Once we got the shampooing done and had covered the Grease Mat with a series of area rugs, there was a mutual deflation of stress.  Thank goodness!  

 

Since then we have been gradually fixing this or that situation in the house, like adding babyproofing  and unpacking my work clothes, for example. Just this past Saturday I finally got my laptop set up, which tells you how much there has been to do.  Normally I wouldn't think of going over a month without a proper desk setup, but it was just quite a bit lower on my urgency list than...well, than a month's worth of other stuff, I guess.

 

So TheLimey has been staying home and caring for our Limelet, a transition which has for the most part gone way faster than either of us thought.  True, the first week or so there were a few meltdowns (and I'm not saying they weren't mine!), delayed naps, lost sleep, and hassles pumping milk and transporting it and using it--all that sort of thing, but we've all gradually begun to find a new rhythm.

 

For one thing, I stopped coming home for lunch.  Limelet's pediatrician had suggested it as a transition device, and it seemed like a good idea.  But in practice, it ended up making Limelet have to say goodbye to me just 15 or 20 minutes after I'd gotten home, and then he was often upset for the entire afternoon.  Now that I'm staying away he stays happier all day, and when I come home at night his delight in seeing me is not shattered by my immediately leaving.  Not to mention it was a huge pain in the butt for me to use thirty or forty minutes of my lunch hour just driving back and forth and parking.  By the time I'd nursed him I often wouldn't even have time to eat something myself.

 

We also have switched from using a bottle for serving the expressed milk, to just putting it in his sippy cup before naptimes.  He likes the bottle primarily as a toy, so it more distracts him from sleeping than puts him to sleep. 

 

Since it's been so @#$%& hot every single frikkin' day since we moved, there have been Sleep Issues.  Particularly at night.  Turns out that about the only way to get Limelet to sleep on a hot night is for one of us to take him out on the nearby swings and swing him to sleep.  If it's me doing it, he also nurses.  (Luckily it's usually dark anyway.) 

 

I've been worried that he'll become addicted to falling asleep on the swing, but on the three cooler nights we've had, he's fallen asleep inside, so I hope that we can get back to normal when the weather breaks. I'm not going to be swimging him to sleep in February, I'll tell you that much!  It makes me think that we should just replace our bed with a hujambous hammock.

 

Daytimes--from what I hear--TheLimey and Limelet hang out outside under a shady tree, even napping there at the appropriate naptime.  (Probably cooler than inside the apartment, anyway.)  They've been exploring campus while I'm gone, so that's nice.  It's such a gorgeous campus, too. There's also a grocery store and some other conveniences within easy walking distance, so sometimes they go there during the daytimes.

 

Limelet is learning about Other People now that we're not isolated in snowbound Tinytown USA.  We have neighbors galore, as well as some after-hours activities with my fellow interns.  One of the other interns has a baby who is jsut a couple weeks younger than Limelet, so we all get together and the two of them parallel-play, and sometimes try to grab each other's hair or eyes. 

 

Limelet has always just loved having (most) people talk to him and pay attention to him (though there are a few people who sent him into fits of terror, but we won't discuss that here and now), however he's always been afraid of having others hold him.  But just yesterday he finally allowed our nextdoor neighbor, a Chinese grad student named Kim, to carry him back from the launderette (as TheLimey calls it) and play with him, with Daddy close at hand of course. 

 

We are going to try getting him exposed to being taken care of by others so we can have a babysitter at some point.  Possibly the non-mother interns would take care of the two babies sometime while the parents have some time off.  For us it would be our first time alone together since his birth!

 

I've also met some other mothers in the apartment complex (Or "Baby Alley" as I like to call it.)  Across from us is a Filipino couple with a tiny 4-month-old girl, and living above us is (I think) a West African family with a 6-month-old girl and I think two older children, but I haven't really met them yet.  TheLimey has found a couple weekly games of pickup football (real football, I mean, not Meatball; comprised, so he says, of the United Nations) in a couple locations on campus, so I feel happy about that.  Now he can get to know some men-friends.

 

My office at work has high ceilings and windows up to the top, facing East, so that's going to be great for the long northern winter. There are three other interns: two are Korean international students and one is White and from California. We're all women this year. I'm happy to be somewhere that has good coworkers.  And the site has an especial emphasis on multicultural issues, as I guess it would have to for me to fit in there. 

 

I am somewhat surprised to find myself at the more-CBT end of the treatment continuum compared to others here. We have arguments about evidence-based treatments, with me on the side of research.  So funny, as my Feminist orientation places me on the flakier end of many locations. I am co-facilitating an anxiety group with the center's big CBT guy.  I've invented a treatment called "Accidental Exposure Therapy," which consists of running around doing random things until something makes you anxious.  (Just a joke, of course.)

 

Of course every workplace has its paperwork/computer/etc. system that takes a while to learn, currently I'm taking more time doing those things than I want to.  Theoretically I could see all my clients, attend all our meetings, eat lunch, AND get my paperwork done--all within the 9-5 model, but for now that's been a little bit of a stretch. I feel certain that I'll be able to do it relatively soon, though.

 

I have a campus bus pass that I've used a few times. I think I will use it more as winter comes on.  For now my time is so tight in the morning that I don't have the extra 20 minutes to take it, but I hope to start doing so regularly.  If it weren't for the baby care aspect, it would actually be a lot easier to take the bus.

 

Downtown has changed somewhat since I lived here, but other than the destruction of locally owne businesses by chains such as Starbuck's and Barnes & Noble, most of the changes are either nice or neutral.  The downtown is really nice to walk around in at lunchtime.  I saw an Indian restaurant nearby and can't wait to try it sometime.  Perhaps when Limelet gets his babysitting experience the two of us can go.  Together!  What a thought.

 

My "baby weight" has almost gone, but I'm definitely shaped differently now.  I'm still experiencing a few other unpleasant physical sequelae, but we won't go into those for now.  I'm happy to be able to be outside and walking around again, I'll tell you that  much.  I even went for a (short) jog the othe rmorning, with the actual jogging stroller and baby in it.  I plan to incorporate more jogging if possible, once we get our mornings ironed out better (which is somewhat dependent on getting our nighttimes ironed out.)

 

Limelet's first birthday: next week Tuesday.  Wow, no longer infant, officially toddler!

 

Too see the photographic documentation of what we've been doing on weekends, look here.
 

 

For Labor Day

Yeah, it's late for labor Day.  But you gotta love Jack Lessenberry. 

 

(No, really--I insist.  You must LAHF HEEM.)

 

I especially like the discussion of Ehrenreich's assertion that the working poor are the philanthropists of society.

 

Hope this link works via email blog...

 

http://jackshow.blogs.com/jack/2007/09/essay-working-p.html

A Brief Divertissement

I can find our honeymoon photos by searching like this, but all our wedding and honeymoon photos have disappeared otherwise.  Even the set.  Other old ones have disappeared, too.

 

Is it because I didn't upgrade to "Pro" when my initial free account ran out?  Is it a bug?  I hope it's a bug.

 

I only discovered it when I tried to find the Detroit Science Center photo the schmap people were asking me about using in their schmap.

 

 

Too much work to post about it.  At internship and also home.

 

 

 

beal_5

beal_5
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

A brief moment of respite. The internship is great, but it's really time-intense right now during training. As opposed to later, when we've been assured there will be a ton of work and we'll be BIH ZEE.

I'm definitely experiencing role conflict as I attempt to juggle sequential three-hour seminars with pumping milk and racing home to nurse on the lunch hour. The second I leave home I have to buckle down to work, and the second I get out of the car at home I have to buckle down to baby work. So I'm pretty darn exhausted, what with not having slept five hours in a row at any point in the past eleven months.

Today we got a bunch of brochures and information about self-care, yoga classes on campus, etc. etc. (along with the information that we'll be extremely busy later). I'm trying to figure out exactly when I'll do any self-care, since my lunch hour is not available and even my bathroom break times are taken up with pumping milk. Evenings and weekends are when I relieve Dad from baby care duties.

Limelet and Limey seem to be making the caretaker transition well, though the new arrangement is hard on them in some ways, too. The large trees are a great relief for me. The playground and swimming pool are a relief for Limelet.

I don't know what's a relief for TheLimey. Probably the knowledge that we sold the house last year and missed* the housing crash. He seems to like campus, too. I think he finally went to check out the nearby pub/cafe just now. I'm encouraging him to do stuff like that whenever possible so that my custom child care giver doesn't go insane! As I did last year, trapped by winter in the house.

There is another intern with a baby Limelet's age, and her husband is working in another state, poor thing. She seems to be holding up better than me, bless her little heart. I don't know how!

*I should actually say "avoided", since he was following the whole thing for years on NPR financial programs and knew it was impending. Which means that I knew about it all, too whether I wanted to or not.

By Email

Just trying out the Blogger email feature.  If it works perhaps I can once again toss a post up here from time to time.

 

 

We're Here

Campus is beautiful (and empty).

Found out our location one day before moving. Apartment is teeny tiny but would be liveable--except that it has a really, really, filthy, filthy carpet, despite supposedly having been "cleaned" before we moved in. I mean it's vile. It's like living in someone else's dirty sock. It leaves a grey coating on our feet. It's revolting.

It's sucking up most of our time trying to get everything unpacked and arranged in a hurry so we can rent a carpet shampooer and do it ourselves.

Limelet gets to go on the nearby swings several times a day now. He's addicted! Also, lots of squirrels to amuse him, as well as a cafe/pub within strolling distance for TheLimey.

Honeysuckle

honeysuckle_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The honeysuckle is now blooming its second set of blossoms for the summer, just in time to see us off to our new home in a couple of days. This is my favorite kind of honeysuckle, the old-fashioned kind that smells so sweet and has nectar you can taste hiding in the base of the blossoms. The first year they bloomed twice, I used some from the second set in my wedding bouquet.

I can't believe I lived here for two years! It's a town that feels like everyone is just passing through. Probably due in no small part to the well-traveled highway going right through the downtown, with hardly anything going on more than 20 feet from that highway.

Nevertheless, it's the town where we were married and brought our baby home from the hospital, and where he spent most of his first year of life. Therefore I feel sentimental about the honeysuckle.

I will also miss the library, where Limelet and I spent many a happy Thursday looking at books and movies, nursing semi-secretly, and where he would take a morning nap on a soft blanket in the grass between the lovely volunteer-tended flower gardens out back as birds from the adjacent woodland sang overhead. There was almost never anyone else in the gardens; we made them ours.

We returned the last DVD of Season 2 of Lost today. That'll be the last library trip. I didn't say goodby to the library ladies who always knew where my holds were. I thought that I'd be going there to return those videos myself today, but TheLimey just ran in to drop them off as we were in a hurry.

Goodbye honeysuckle, goodbye library ladies, goodbye library flower gardens.

Go, Us!

Breastfeeding-Friendly Icon
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Happy World Breastfeeding Week!

This post isn't on my mothering blog because people who read that one probably already know about it.

If that "breast crawl" item a few paragraphs down on that link is what I think it is, it's a pretty cool video.

On a completely different note, here's a very misleading link about boobies and babies.

Boxbaby

boxbaby_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Cleared out my office at the department yesterday and turned in my keys, most of which no longer work as their locks were so old they'd already been changed.

We've been packing again today and also some other things that you can see a few of as I've been furtively trying out Chorewars.

Thanks to Argotnaut for hooking me on yet another blasted internet toy! At least now I'm getting some gratification for things I have to do already.


PS: the list of "adventures" completed is far from exhaustive.

Comguads!

comgwats!
Originally uploaded by magpie-moon

In the spirit of my list of nonwords, I had to blog this lovely cake for everyone I know who recently graduated.

It's so wrong, it's right.

Thank you so much, Flick'rer Magpie-Moon.

The Cat and The Bag

Little Pool
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The cat's out of the bag: my husband's given his official two-week notice that he's going to be a stay-at-home dad while I do my internship. Now you may talk about it freely amongst yourselves.

Move: three weeks.
Internship: one month.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to complete the dissertation in small chunks of time on the weekends. I'm making progress but it's maddeningly slow.

This photo makes it look like I'm a Lidy of Leisure, but that's only because you can't see the bags under my eyes so well in that green shade. Limelet loves that pool insanely. I love that I get to sit down.

Sigh....Why The Internet Is So Great

Some dumb@55 recently joined that Freecycle group I started (just to get rid of some big item of junk last year, I really didn't want to be in charge of it and have been trying to find someone else to take over it), and then posted a request for certain favors I won't mention here for fear of [more] spam.

Since new member posts are moderated, I denied the post, and also dumped the guy from the group. No need to accept people who'll send messages like that to 400 local citizens, who'll then complain to me. He immediately attempted to re-sign up, which I denied.

Then he emailed me and said he was going to sign up under another ID. I replied that was fine as long as that ID respected the group rules, to which he responded "nope," and then began signing me up for all kinds of random online stuff. I know this because I started getting a bunch of "confirm your new account!" emails in my inbox right after this exchange.

I hope he can't do any real damage.

Jerk.

* * * *

A few minutes and a brief Google search later...

I see from an online discussion that the selfsame guy is embroiled in a child custody dispute. What a great dad to have!

Happy Independence Day!

sylvan lake fireworks
Originally uploaded by gsgeorge

I'm happy for someone taking nice photos and uploading them ASAP like this, as we are unlikely to see any fireworks ourselves this year.

So, happy Fourth! Thank goodness we got those Brits out of our hair.

Oh, wait...

Amazon Fun

Amazon has some really sucky qualities that I've complained about before, like its horrible, terrible, awful, no-good search engine. (Just give up and search using Google within Amazon.com.)

But I did really love Amazon Prime (discontinued that temporarily as we are saving our dough for more important things right now), love the free shipping on many items, and we do have an Amazon credit card since we use them so much anyway, what with all our book buyin'.

And what wonderful books have I gotten with our recent Amazon "rewards"?

I could have gotten some technical and/or reference books that TheLimey and I need for our respective careers, or even some of the pages and pages of books that we each have on our wish lists, or I could have made up some non-gift-giving to certain relatives (poor things), but instead, I got this, and these, and--my favorite--this.

TheLimey thinks that last thing is too big. He may be right. But I don't care! [sticks fingers in ears] LA LA LA! I can't hear your reasonable doubts! LA LA LA!

Not only will Limelet love it, I want to sit in it myself and drink a margarita. (Just one, so's not to drunken the baby.)

Happy Summer Solstice!

Solstice Lily
Originally uploaded by pfly

Yay--summer! For some people at least, that means a little free time. Not us, but congratulations to those of you for whom it does.

Our current entertainments:

We've been borrowing Lost on DVD from the library (yay libraries!) and watching it (usually in bed with headphones). I'm kind of glad neither of us watched it on TV. We're on disc 5 of Season 1, and so far it's magically delicious. Ha! Disguised sci-fi. Take that, mainstream programming.

We finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy. We loved it, loved it, loved it--except for the end of the very last book. Unfortunately it kind of ruined the memory of the previous nine blissful months of reading the rest of the series to each other. If there's one thing that's worse than a really contrived happy ending, it's a really contrived sad ending. I understand some stories have to end sadly, but this one really seemed forced.

While putting Limelet to sleep, I've been reading a lot of Sheri S. Tepper. Old-school feminist sci-fi stories that grip you from the start and never let you go! She's a bit transparent in her themes in a number of of her works (Beauty, The Fresco), but the stories and characters are really compelling anyway.

Anyway, happy summer.

I've never liked you

I've never liked you skirt detail
Originally uploaded by QueenieVonSugarpants

This skirt cracks me up. If I was up on my sewing, I'd sew something like this. Luckily someone else did it so I don't have to.

But I wouldn't wear it to a workday in my profession...

Librarians

Stumbled across this Flick'r group. I don't know how any librarian could resist joining.