My kooky kid

Backstory: Dave and I were just on the Franklin and Marshall College website and learned that one of the students - a kid named PJ - had been shot and critically injured during a robbery on campus. I, of course, frantically navigated my cell phone address book to Danny's number and hit the green button.

Danny: Hullo?

Ann: Hey, it's Ann. How's it going?

Danny: I'm eating dinner.

Ann: Dad and I heard there was shooting on campus. I just wanted to call and see if you were okay.

Danny (non-chalantly): Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't get shot.

~Fine~

Working, etc.

So I'm sitting here at the j.o.b eating my enormous alleged fruit salad (more of a grape salad, really). I'm stuck here for another 40 minutes, and then I get to go home to my jammies and tea and laptop.

The fruit salad thing is kind of funny. Every Friday, the j.o.b orders lunch for everybody. I always order a large fruit salad. So does Oscar. Every week, we get one HUGE fruit salad and another one that's half the size. But we're ordering the same thing! We've started taking turns with the huge one. Today is my day. Mmm.

Work has been kind of stressful. I've had a lot going on, and I've been getting into a bit of a pissing contest with this other programmer I know. We're supposed to make my code and his code play nice together, but our approaches are completely different. I don't mind saying, "I can't do it that way. I don't now how." But apparently, he minds. Because he's not saying it. Even though I'm pretty sure it would be true for him too.

Last night, Max, Dave and I watched the first episode of season 2 of LOST. WOAH! God, that's a good show. It surprises me every time. We're going to try to watch the whole second season before season 3 starts in a couple of weeks. It's kind of a fun family thing.

My other favorite show is Eureka, which we don't get to watch with Max because it comes on at 9 on Tuesdays and, according to our totally f'ed up custody schedule, that's when he's supposed to be back at his mom's. But anyway, Dave and I always watch it. It rocks.

Well, there's the annual TV review. LOST and Eureka. That's about it. I'm even bored with Miles lately. I just can't get into it. All the better.

So home, jammies, tea, guitar and the laptop. I'll try to knock out a few more things before the end of the week, but I'm not stressing because it's Friday and if people try to call me on Friday afternoon, I can safely ignore them until Monday. It's all good.

My belly is stretching

I can feel my belly stretching. It's a little freaky.

We had a busy weekend. Guitar on Saturday, then we went to lunch and to see The Covenant. It was pretty good, but a little slow.

Sunday, I drove my parents to the airport for their two week Canadian train adventure (pack me!), and then worked the rest of the day. Dave and I had planned to go to the National Zoo to see all the baby animals (elephant, giraffe, three tiger cubs and a one-year-old panda), but it will have to wait a couple more weeks because duty calls.

My sister called to talk about my mom's birthday and I got inexplicably pissed off. It's probably just hormones, but I might want to reflect on that just to be sure. I'm still not at all sure why I reacted the way I did.

Oh, and it took me 2 1/2 hours to get to work this morning. Normally a 1 hour commute. Traffic sucked.

Sigh.

Cute kid, in a TomKat kind of way

Far be it from me to comment on the relative beauty of anybody's baby (lest my words come back to haunt me and I'm cursed with an ugly one), but don't you think Suri's a little...weird looking?

Maybe it's just this picture:

I think it's all the hair. It doesn't look natural. Is it a baby toupee? Is it Loreal? I just can't help but feel like babies with jet black hair are only acceptable in Anime films.

Okay, this just feels wrong.

Cute kid, in a TomKat kind of way.

Finally, baby pic

I have been so slow about getting this up. Sorry! My mother is dying a slow, agonizing death waiting for the latest pic. This ultrasound image is almost 4 weeks old.


Now, you're probably wondering what the heck that is. So I made up this little diagram for you:

Got it? Good.

Incidentally, I am the queen of stick-people drawing.

Even four weeks ago, the spud was starting to look like an actual baby, with kicking parts and everything! I still can't feel anything, but I heard the heartbeat on a doppler monitor today at my checkup. The doctor said, "Sometimes it's kind of hard to hear this early..." But when she put the wand on my belly, it went "Ch-chunk ch-chunk ch-chunk" just as pretty as you please.

Two weeks til blood work, 6 weeks till our "big" ultrasound. Hopefully squish won't be shy and we'll get to tell what the sex is!!

Oh lord

I just realized how totally, disgustingly dirty my house is.

I mean, just now.

That patina around the edges of the stairs? That's dust. Thick, gray dust. In fact, the dust is so evenly distributed on every surface of my house that I can no longer tell whether or not things are dusty.

The other day, my sister asked, "When are Mom and I going to come over and get your house together? We need to do that before the baby gets here."

I said, "My house isn't that bad!" And I meant it.

But today, I tested her accusation. No, it's not that bad. It's much, much worse.

Max switched bedrooms when Danny left for college. Now, my kids are not bedroom kids. I was a bedroom kid. I spent 90% of my time at home in my room. My kids don't do that. They go in there to change their clothes and sleep. So moving rooms was not a big drama. Except now, Max's old room is going to be the nursery, and he still had a bunch of stuff in there, strewn around. Today, I asked him to clean it out...decide what's trash, decide what he can give away, decide what to keep. He did a fantastic job (with a little help from Dave). I followed behind with a swiffer cloth and the vacuum cleaner. Now, the room is (clean and) nearly empty, and that feels good.

So anyway, I basically cleaned the crap out of the upstairs today. Straightened up, thorough dusting & vacuuming. I'll continue on over the next few weeks and complete my big fall cleaning, but the thing that bothers me is this: how did it get this way?

Oh yeah, I never clean.

Sigh.

Making progress

I'm making hella good progress on stuff.

I've completed or ditched all the sites where people have been actively yelling at me. I've got two where people are almost yelling at me - those are going to get my attention this weekend. Then, maybe I'll get to live on top of the wave instead of behind it - at least for a little while.

It feels good to be finishing stuff. It occurs to me but I have nothing but a foggy recollection of anything that's happened in the past 3 months. Baby brain. The good news is that, with the onset of my second trimester, I really don't care! Endorphins abound, apparently. In retrospect, I am shocked at how little I was able to accomplish, but hopefully I'm past that now (at least until the baby gets here!).

No news on the j.o.b. at NASA. The position is open for another week, so I don't expect to hear anything until after that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll get an interview, but we'll see.

Anyway, that's my rather quotidien news for September 1. (September? Woah!)

Sunday, it's off to Danny's school to take him the fridge (required by my losing the one he was supposed to take). It'll be fun to see his room and meet his new friends at F&M.

Good luck, Jen, with the wedding. You'll be great.

Happy Labor Day.