Here’s a few videos of rides at Dutch Wonderland.

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Normally he does this downstairs while I straighten up the kitchen and putter around, but it was nice to have him do it upstairs so I could be on the computer.

When they came upstairs (all 3 of them), Nico squealed and ran over to me to show me the doll.  He’s been watching it in progress and was eager to play with it (although he seemed to understand that he had to wait until it was finished).  I asked him what the doll’s name was, and he didn’t even hesitate before telling me it was Didi.  So thank you for your suggestions (Crazy Chester, Kenny, Pat, and Chris were the suggested names), but Nico seems to have named the doll on his own.

Why Didi?  Nico has a friend on our street who is a year older than him, and who he idolizes.  This little boy has a 4 month old baby brother, who Nico also adores.  Their nickname for the baby is Didi, so it’s no surprise that Nico wanted his own Didi to play with.

As for Didi, he’s looking forward to visiting Grandma and Grandpa Degan soon because Grandma has promised to make him some clothes that are more appropriate for summer!

Let me introduce Nico’s new buddy! 

He has really taken to his baby (the same doll his cousin Brady has), but I wanted him to have one that he could do more with.  I like the idea of Waldorf dolls because they don’t have much in the way of facial features, so it’s easy for a kid to pretend that their doll is happy/sleeping/crying or whatever else their imagination tells them the doll is feeling.  But Waldorf dolls are really expensive!  So I made my own. 

I’m not the seamstress my mom is (she made my wedding dress, beading and all, if you remember), but this doll only involved hand-sewing — no machine.  I managed to make a shape that looks very doll-like despite all the improvisation I had to do.  (What’s a running stitch anyway?  Or a crewel needle?  Turns out, it probably doesn’t matter – the doll looks ok.)  Here’s a photo of me attaching the doll’s head.

Next up, we need a name for him.  I keep thinking Charlie, but I don’t know why.  Any ideas? 

Here he is wearing a newborn outfit that Eloisa, Archer, and then Nico all wore.  I would have passed it down to Hudson, but he’s already in 6 month clothes!!!

Nico says hi from the playground:

We have started renovating the basement — bye bye paneling, hello Murphy bed, drywall, and future guest suite!

Here’s the before shot:

Bye bye bar!

The end of day 2:

And finally, here’s a shot of the 3 of us from when my parents were in town — we brought them to the zoo.

Hope you’re having a great summer, and if we can’t get our slideshows up online, I’ll at least try to post single photos more often so you remember what we look like.

Here’s your glimpse of Nico almost in real-time — the most recent photos were just taken on Monday of this week!

In terms of new developments, he started doing sign language last month, which has really opened a lot of doors in terms of communication.  His first 4 signs were nurse (as in milk), water, siren, and helicopter .  Guess that’s what happens when a boy grows up in the city!  Other signs he does include:  banana, yogurt, cat, daddy, more, bye bye, eat, shoe, bird, and, perhaps my favorite is the sign he made up for music.  We hadn’t taught him one for music, but it’s so important to him that he made his own up!  (He bends his elbows so his fists go up and down as if he’s dancing or drumming.) 

His first word is officially “hot.”  He says it consistently for the fireplace and our space heaters.  We don’t know why that particular word was so salient for him — we don’t warn him about hot things (he’s cautious enough on his own) and his babysitter’s go-to word is “careful.”  But he says “hot” any time he is near the fireplace or the space heater. Even more puzzling is that he has decided he is the household “hot” police, so if we stand too close to the fireplace or the space heater (particularly the fireplace), he pulls our pant leg and drags us until we walk far enough away for his comfort.  While this is adorable, it means I can no longer hang out in front of the fireplace to warm up. 

He can also say “daddy” and “bye bye,” but he’s somewhat less consistent with these than he is with “hot.”  And he says “moo,” “hee haw,” and “oof” (for “woof”) when he sees, or we talk about, cows, donkeys, or dogs.  

He likes looking at the family pictures hanging in our stairwell and having us identify family members as he points to them.

He still loves the vacuum cleaner.  He requests that we vacuum periodically and while we vacuum he pushes around his vuvuzela, “vacuuming” with us.  It’s very cute. 

He’s got good stamina.  His babysitter regularly takes him out for walks and he’ll walk 8 blocks or more at a time.  I had him at the zoo yesterday and despite the fact that it was well past naptime, he walked from the farm at the bottom all the way up to the reptile house — straight uphill for probably at least 1/4 of a mile (1/3 of a mile if you trust google pedometer).  People at the zoo are constantly commenting on him and we have determined that it’s because you actually see very few little kids walking around there.  Most kids under 3 or 4 are in strollers — some little ones might be in slings instead.  But most aren’t walking freely.  Nico just toddles along, keeping pace with the grown-ups and thinking nothing of it.  He must really stand out because so many people have a comment to make about him.

He’s finally eating now.  Still not a ton compared to other kids his age, but he can put away more than 1/2 cup of yogurt or oatmeal in a sitting (when he feels like it), so that’s a good start.  He seems to prefer beige foods — oatmeal, yogurt, banana, pear, bread, sometimes cheese.  He won’t touch peas or most green or orange foods.  But he likes pizza and soup (no matter the color) and, of course, chocolate.

And, finally, he’s loving the music class we enrolled him in.  After the first class he started drumming along with beats.  After the second one he started clapping along.  Now he not only requests that we play music, but he actually requests a particular song sometimes by doing the motions associated with it (rocking forward and backward like a horse or wiggling his pointer finger, for example).  Jenny may be right — his future may have music in it!  He certainly loves it right now.

In other news, our bulbs are emerging from the soil so I expect we’ll have spring photos up before we know it.  We are all eager for spring around here!

Enjoy!

We started out with a small dinner party on his actual birthday.  Jenny was visiting from CA and she brought a tradition from her family — we put a bunch of items on a tray and the first one Nico picked up was supposed to tell us something about his future.  Items included a book, castanets (to represent music), money (coin and bill), a pen (red — could symbolize teacher or writer), a spoon (for cooking), a carrot (farming?  vegetarian?  it doesn’t matter – he didn’t pick it), a pig toy (again, not sure what it represented, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t pick it).  We thought this was a Chinese custom, but our friend Sam had also told us about his nephew doing this, and they’re Korean.  And we have a neighbor who’s Chinese and her family has never heard of it.  So we’re thinking maybe this is an LA pan-Asian thing and not so much just a Chinese thing.  (Sam and Jenny are both from LA.)  Nico didn’t even hesitate on his choice and he wasn’t interested in all that much other than the thing he picked.  Can you guess what he picked?  Look at the photos to see if you’re right.

Since his birthday was on a Thursday, we had his parties on the following weekends.  The Saturday right afer his birthday we had a morning party and an evening party.  We had initially planned on the morning one being for kids and the evening one for adults, but we had a mix at both parties and having two different ones made it so we were actually able to visit with everyone at both. 

We wrapped up Nico’s celebrations with a trip to NY the following weekend where Aunt Denise and Uncle Robert hosted his family party.  Almost all the family came from near and far to celebrate with him and he had a great time with his cousins.  Grandma and Grandpa got him a cassata cake which he enjoyed throwing on the floor.  Frank’s slices ensured that the cake designed to feed 40 people disappeared in half that many tummies.  Mmmm!

Please excuse all the close-up shots and the multiple cake shots…4 parties means 4 different opportunities to show him getting cake all over his face (or not…).  Enjoy!

Christmas has been fun so far this year, and it’s not quite over for us yet.  We’ll be celebrating a belated Christmas with my parents and Danny, Morgan, and Brady this weekend.  We began with an early Christmas (combined with first birthday party for Nico) on Long Island.  We spent Christmas itself here in DC, enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with Aunt Lee, Uncle Tommy, Matthew and Carrie.  Then we had Christmas morning to ourselves and enjoyed watching Nico open his presents and play with his new toys.  And we went to Sara, Aron, Salome and Cyrus’s house for Christmas dinner on Christmas Day. 

Photos from all of our Christmas festivities are here.  The next post will be all of Nico’s various birthday parties, so stay tuned.

Here in DC, 1 in 20 residents lives with HIV/AIDS, the highest rate in the country. For nearly 15 years, PreventionWorks has served thousands of injection drug users who battle not just the chronic diseases of addiction, HIV and hepatitis, but hunger, homelessness, mental health challenges, sexual abuse, violence and the stigma and isolation that come with being an addict.  Recovery from addiction can be a life-long road, particularly in a city where drug treatment resources are grossly inadequate.  PreventionWorks helps people to take the best possible care of themselves while they are on that journey by providing harm reduction and prevention materials, health education and screenings, food, support groups, case management, and linkages to medical care, drug treatment and other services.

While our organization has reasonably strong grant funding compared to similar organizations across the country, we struggle at times filling the gaps with unrestricted funds that would help our operation run more smoothly.  For example, recently the generator on the mobile unit broke down, undermining our ability to provide our services.  The mobile unit is the single most critical resource we have, as it facilitates our street-based services and outreach.  Replacing the generator alone will cost $3,500 in precious general operating funds that we currently don’t have.

To help us continue our full services into next year and beyond, we are launching a campaign to raise $10,000 in individual contributions by Thanksgiving.  Can you help?  Whether you can donate $25 or $250, it would be a huge contribution to fighting disease, improving health, and re-instilling dignity for some of the most marginalized people in society.  If you are thinking about a Christmas gift for me, this would be perfect.  Or maybe there is someone else on your Christmas list who would like to receive a gift to PreventionWorks made in their honor.

Please consider helping us reach our goal of raising $10,000 by Thanksgiving.  Contributions to PreventionWorks can be made through D.C.’s Catalogue for Philanthropy.  Or, if you wish, you can send a personal check made payable to PreventionWorks to me, and I’ll deliver it personally.  Thank you in advance for your critical support.

Bonus video of Nico the Bat Boy.  Cape by Grandma D.

Anyway, we traveled up to NY last weekend to celebrate (a bit early) the birthdays of both James and Daniel.  Nico had fun, as always, playing with his cousins.  And he left with some new favorite toys that Daniel and James have outgrown.  Some of his very favorite toys were first loved by Daniel and James (remember Doggie?) — thank you boys for sharing with him!  Some photos from our visit are here.

Unfortunately there are some other birthday celebrations coming up that we’re not going to be able to travel for.  Dana turned 16 last week and she’s having a party this weekend.  And Brady is turning 2 in a few weeks, but for the second year in a row we’re going to miss his party.    We’ll be sure to have a piece of cake from afar so we can feel like a part of the celebration. 

***

As an aside, we are looking into some new software so we can do better slideshows and video shows and hopefully return to putting photos on the blog.  Thanks for sticking with us while this blog has been text-only!  I hope it will be jazzier soon.

He was obviously thrilled with himself — he started laughing hysterically and clapping and became really hyper.  Then he bit my shoulder.  Sigh.  We’re still working on the biting thing…

Next time we’ll try to get a video.  We were too excited to go find the camera.  But it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway – he was too excited to reproduce his achievement last night.

Nico had a great time with both of his great aunts.  And he particularly had fun with Lauren, who had as much fun playing with him as I had playing with her when she was a tiny little girl.  She swung him around, helped him practice walking, read to him, and kept him entertained for hours past bedtime.  He also loved playing with 5-year old Cadel, who has developed tons and tons of patience as a big brother.  He would build towers for Nico, not complain when Nico knocked them down before they were finished, and start over with a new tower (over and over and over).  Quinn is lucky to have such a great big brother!

We thought Nico might start walking before the trip, and when he didn’t, we were sure that he would take his first steps for his Chicago audience.  That didn’t happen, though.  He’s standing alone for longer and longer periods now (sometimes for the whole length of a book as we read to him).  But tonight we think he took his first half-step.  Frank was reading to him and he took one step toward the book, planting his foot before his hand reached the book.  It’s only a matter of days now, we’re pretty sure.   Batten down the hatches, he’s about to move! 

Here’s another link to the Chicago photos, in case you didn’t click that earlier one.

Nico had his 9 month visit this month, complete with vaccines for 5 diseases (diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough, HiB and polio).  I had thought he wouldn’t be able to get them because he still has the sniffles (going on 3 weeks now…), but she thought he’d do fine.  And he did — he had less of a reaction this time than he did last time (no fatigue, redness, or heat at the injection site).  His stats are :  19 1/2 pounds, 29″ long, and 18 1/2″ head circumference.  Back at 7 months he was 18 pounds, 12 ounces, 28 1/2″ long, and had an 18″ head.  So he has definitely plateaued, although really he has outgrown all of the 9 month clothes and is wearing 12 month now, so that 1/2 inch and 12 ounces made a big difference.

We’ve taken advantage of this early fall weather with lots of walking trips to various libraries and parks.  And we had a great visit from Aunt Denise, Uncle Robert, and Daniel and James earlier in the month.  Nico loves watching his cousins!  We also had to say good bye to our good friends Lara and Beth and their daughters Caroline and Cassie.  Beth got a great job out in WA state and they packed up and moved out there last week.  Nico will miss having a secret admirer (Cassie) and we’ll miss the whole family.

Nico has been doing well with eating, but we’re not out of the woods yet.  His latest trick is to eat two or three slices of banana (in small pieces) and then toward the very end, choke and throw up everything he’s eaten.  We’re taking a little break from food until his sinuses clear out, thinking that maybe his throat is just too swollen for all the stress of food.

Here are photos from the first 2 weeks of September.  In the last few photos you can see him enjoying his right to vote.  He was shocked to learn, however, that the members of Congress on our ballot don’t actually have a vote.  Next up, photos of Nico demanding representation!

In terms of Nico’s developments in August…he turned 8 months old, ate some cantaloupe, and started grinding his teeth, which is a sound worse than fingernails on a chalkboard!  He also ate some peaches and rice cereal, but got pretty sick when we gave him egg yolk.  At the very end of the month he actually asked for some food by making up a sign; then he successfully swallowed some banana pieces!  That was a huge step.  (He’s regressed some again, but we’re optimistic that he’ll eat someday.) 

Enjoy the photos!

He turned 8 months old while we were traveling, and we realized that at that point he had been in 12 states already (plus DC, of course).  He did a southeastern loop in early spring, visiting VA, NC, SC, GA, and FL.  Then on this trip we did a northeastern loop, covering MD, DE, NJ, NY, MA, NH, and CT.   At the end of the month, he added PA to the list — those pictures will come soon.

Enjoy this batch of pictures.  Frank has a great video from a couple of weeks ago when we discovered Nico knew how to dance.  He’ll post it soon!

Photos from our trip are here.

Happy summer and enjoy!

This video shows Nico and Frank toward the end of a very long screeching match.  You’ll notice Frank’s clenched hands — he learned this from Nico, not the other way around.   Nico’s noises seem to come from way down deep within and he has to squeeze his hands and tense his muscles to let them out with their full force.  Enjoy!

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There are 7 videos in this playlist. Press the four arrows button at the bottom right of the video window to view in full screen.

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Nico made tremendous leaps and bounds all month long!  Here are some highlights:

• He started the month with 2 teeth and finished it with seven!  4 on the bottom and 3 (plus one about to come in) on the top.  Poor little guy had 4 top teeth pushing and shoving to come in all at the same time, just after 2 had come through on the bottom.  The good news is that there are only 20 total, so he’s getting a lot of the hard work out of the way early on.
• June 8th – Nico had his first babysitter this month.  I had been staying up until 2 or 3 AM writing and then getting up with him around 9 every day and trying to write if he took naps.  But I could see that there was no way I could keep up that pace and also that even with that pace I wouldn’t meet my deadlines.  So I found a babysitter to come for 4 hours a day, two days a week.  I still spent most of the month working until the wee hours, but having her here for 8 hours a week made a huge difference!  And she’s great — she is going to grad school in the fall for speech/language pathology and she knows sign language, so she’s signing with him and spends a lot of time reading to him and teaching him new things.  I haven’t worked up to leaving him alone with her yet, but it’s great to have here there while I work.  An added benefit is that I can just go downstairs if he cries or needs to eat, so I don’t need to pump or anything.  So far it’s really easy and quite a lifesaver for me.
• June 9th – Nico turned 6 months old!
• He makes a ton of sounds now, although it’s way too early for any of them to mean anything.  For a long time “guh” was his main sound.  That was replaced by “buh.”  Those are still his two favorites.  But “dadada” is now a very popular one.  And he says “kuh” “wuh” “yuh” “ha” “fuh” “tuh” “puh” “suh” and “juh.”  Now that he’s got those top teeth, he loves feeling them against his lips so he says a lot of “vuh” and “fuh.” 
• He still won’t eat any food.  At all.  If anything goes in his mouth, he gags and gags and gags until he throws up.  This proved to be a good thing a couple of times when he ended up with paper in his mouth (part of the binding of a board book, part of a paper napkin at a restaurant…).  He gagged and we swept the paper out.  But he really should be eating by now.  We’ll be talking to his pediatrician about this on Friday at his 7 month visit. 
• He crawled backward for the first 2 weeks of June, but couldn’t figure out how to go forward.  On June 14th he crawled forward for the first time.  He still doesn’t go too far, though, even though he can.  He figured out how to sit back up from crawling on June 24th, so now he likes to go a few steps and sit down, go a few steps and sit down.  Mostly, though, he just wants to stand up.  He’ll pull himself to his feet from our legs if we’re sitting on the ground or from anything that’s about 6 inches off the ground.  He climbs up the coffee table and the couch.  And he balances on his own — often just holding on with 1 hand so he can do something with the other one.  He is getting more and more stable every day and we think he’s going to forget about crawling and go straight to walking.  He always has wanted to be vertical… 
• I keep telling him about all the advantages of staying a baby for a while and telling him that the faster he grows up, the sooner he’s going to have to get a job.  But he doesn’t care.  He just pushes those teeth through and tries to stand up and forgets all about being a baby.    It makes me sad — he’s growing up too fast!
• June 14th was a big day for 2 other things too.  He seemed to understand when we said “where’s the cat?”  He’d stop what he was doing and look around until he spotted the cat.  He could care less about “where’s Daddy?” or “where’s Mommy?”  But “where’s the cat?” elicited an immediate reaction without fail, every time.  That day he also showed a real interest in reading.  I was sitting on the floor with him next to a bookshelf and we were reading his all-time favorite book, Pajama Time.  When it was done, he pulled himself over my leg, hung out on his belly on my leg, grabbed a book off the shelf with one hand, and brought the book back with him as he came back to sit on my lap.  An adorable fluke, right?  That’s what I thought until he did it again.  And then a third time.  He was deliberately selecting books and bringing them back to me to read, waiting until the end of the story, and doing it again.  Eventually he was more interested in just pulling the books off the shelf, but he started by wanting me to read to him!
• He is getting much more demonstrative with his love.   He gives real hugs and “kisses” (which are just huge slobbery messes as he puts his wide open mouth against our cheek or chin and holds it there until we are sufficiently soggy).  He’ll often hug my neck, pull back to look at me and smile, and then hug me again.  It melts my heart every time!
• He started having mini temper tantrums this month.  He suddenly gets angry if we take something away from him and cries if we don’t substitute it with something else.  He has also cried if we redirect him from something he wanted to do.  I used to have a hard time picturing him as a toddler having a tantrum (even though I knew it was coming).  Now I can totally picture it — and it scares me!
• My parents came to visit at the end of June, helping with big house projects and watching Nico so I could work.  It was extremely helpful and he had a lot of fun with his Grandma and Grandpa.
• To those of you still reading (and I have been assured that it’s more than just the grandparents who read to the end), thank you for indulging me in sharing these minute details about my little boy and enjoy the photos! 

Stay tuned for photos from our visit to NJ and also for our Memorial Day BBQ photos.

Nico turned 4 months old in April and 5 months old in May.  Does it make me a bad mom to be combining 2/5 of his entire life into one slide show and bullet list?    Here are the highlights from the 2 months (It’s a long list and we figure the grandparents are the only ones who will read the whole thing!):

April

• He sat up unsupported for the first time at 16 1/2 weeks (April 3rd).  Frank sat him up — he didn’t sit himself up — but this was the first time he didn’t topple over.  You may have seen that video — it happened while my parents were in town for the Cherry Blossoms.
• Because he could suddenly sit up, we put together his high chair on Easter.  We expected to keep the high chair in its box until he turned a year old or so, figuring he wouldn’t be able to sit up.  But at 4 months he was arching out of the Bumbo seat and it turned out that he LOVED the high chair.  Actually, he loved it for a full 2 months.  We could put him in there any time we wanted to get anything done in the house.  (Now he’s on to us, though, and he’ll only hang out there while we eat.)
• He started rolling to his side to fall asleep during his naps.
• He had his 4-month visit with the doctor and weighed 16 pounds, 2 ounces.  He was 26 1/4 inches long.  He surprised the doctor by being able to sit up on his own.  (She didn’t believe me when I said he could, so she took him and sat him on the exam table and he stayed.)  He was due for vaccines at his 4 month visit, but Frank was home sick so she wanted to hold off and give them to him when everyone was healthy at home.  
• The doctor shocked me by telling me that he was exhibiting signs of readiness for solid food (sitting up, being interested in food, and maybe a couple of other indicators).  She wanted us to start giving him things like banana, avocado, sweet potato, squash, apple and pear between his 4 month and 6 month visit.
• I wasn’t ready to start him on solid food this early, but because we trust his doctor we gave him a couple of tastes.  You may have seen his introduction to banana in the videos Frank posted a few days ago.  We also gave him some apple in a little mesh bag.  He didn’t really like either.  (It’s gotten worse now — if we try to give him food he gags until he makes himself throw up.)
• I quit one of my 2 jobs and had my last day at work on April 16th.  He came to work with me at my second job for the first time on April 19th.  Of course, every time he came to the 1st job, he slept for 3 of the 4 hours I was there and was perfectly quiet and still the rest of the time.  My first day at the second job?  He found his voice and shrieked in delight for an hour straight — while I was on a conference call.  I’m pretty sure they all thought I was lying when I told them how mellow he had been at the other job.  Fortunately he’s still allowed to go back there.
• I got a job as a grant writer at another local nonprofit, which I can do entirely from home.  I kept the 2nd job, which I do for 10 hours a week — 6 from home and 4 from the office (with Nico).
• I started doing some volunteer work for my midwives, and of course Nico joins me there as well.  He has very little say in how he spends his days, when you think about it…
• He sucked his thumb for the 1st time in April.  (4/19)  He still prefers the pacifier, though — I don’t think the thumb is big enough to satisfy his need for sucking.
• When he was at my office playing on the floor, I looked over to see him grab his pacifier and pop it into his mouth, and then sit there playing and sucking away.  It was pretty cute.  It’s amazing that he can recognize the pacifier — no matter which one we use — and put it in his own mouth the right way.
• He started bringing his feet to his hands in April in classic happy baby pose.
• His first 2 teeth broke through on April 23rd — at 4 1/2 months.  He got the 2 middle bottoms ones first.  (He has since gotten the 2 next to them and his middle top teeth have been on the verge of breaking through for several weeks.)  He didn’t get fussy until the teeth broke through the surface.  Then he was less smiley and definitely visibly in pain for about a week while they kept pushing their way up into his mouth.  Hyland’s teething tablets help, as do Boiron chamomilla 30C tablets (crushed between 2 spoons first) and ice in his little mesh bag.

May

• I got to celebrate my very first Mother’s Day and it was great!  I got breakfast in bed, flowers from the yard, a trip to the Brookside Gardens (even though it suddenly decided to get cold!), and dinner out.
• He had an off-cycle doctor visit at 5 months for the vaccines he had missed in April.  He got his second round of DTaP and his first rounds of HIB and Polio.  She said she didn’t need to see him again until he turned 7 months now.
• He started getting ready to crawl.  I think one of the videos Frank posted was of him on the bed pushing over his feet to land on his tummy.  He tucks one foot, pushes off the other, briefly goes to one knee and then flops on his belly.  As the month progressed, he got better and better at getting himself into position and started doing a plank pose or a mini downward facing dog.  But he hasn’t figured out how to go forward yet — he just goes in reverse or rolls over.
• We went to my parents’ house in NJ and Frank’s parents came to visit as did Uncle Danny, Aunt Morgan, and Cousin Brady.  The boys had a great time together and the grandparents got their fill of the grandkids.  It was a nice weekend.
• He caught a cold and we had to bring him to the doctor for his second sick visit (the first was in the winter when he got RSV).  This time he acted much sicker than he did that time, and the doctor thought it was that his sinuses were putting pressure on those top teeth. When we started treating the teething pain with the homeopathics, he returned to his normal self right away.
• When he babbles, he consistently makes a “guh” sound.  By the end of the month he had added “kuh” “tuh” “fuh” and “puh.” 
• By the end of the month I couldn’t count on Nico being in the same place I had left him.  He spins, moves backward, and rolls and it’s always a game to find out where he’ll be when I come back.  We have installed outlet covers and know that our days of a non-child-proof home are numbered.

I’m still loving being home with him and feel extremely fortunate that I’ve been able to find jobs that are flexible — both in terms of when I get my work done and in terms of bringing Nico with me.  It’s amazing that I can find such joy in being home all day with a boy who can’t say a word to me.  But he makes me laugh all the time and we have a lot of fun at home, going for walks, and meeting up with friends.

There are 9 videos in this playlist.  Press the four arrows button at the bottom right of the video window to view in full screen.

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We got to celebrate a bit with Matthew and Carrie too — they recently got engaged and are planning a November wedding at the foot of a waterfall  in Hawaii.

Photos from the dinner are here.

You can see photos from their visit here.  The magnolias were in full bloom at the garden behind the Smithsonian Castle.

Once in FL, we went to the beach, the baseball stadium to see a Cardinals pre-season game, and the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary.  Nico had 2 sets of grandparents spoiling him and he showed off for Grandma Schipani by rolling over for her for the very first time.

Enjoy the photos.

• Nico’s first night alone with Daddy while Mommy went out with the ladies to celebrate Sara’s birthday
• A trip to FL to see the grandparents (those pictures are coming tomorrow)
• His first vaccine – DTaP #1
• His first board meeting — he came with me to PreventionWorks to discuss important things like fundraising and board development
• His first day at work — he came with me to NYAC and was a perfect angel, sleeping for 3 of the 4 hours I was there every time he came
• His first time sitting up for a few seconds unsupported
• A visit from Aunt Marie and cousins, Tara, Nick and Dana (those pictures are coming in a couple days)

I’m going to post a new slideshow every day this week so you can see them all in bits and pieces rather than being overwhelmed.  Of course, if you want to cheat you can go to our website and see everything there — they’re all up.  Otherwise, enjoy your daily blog posts from us this week!

Today’s slide show is from February.  It’s (thankfully) hard to remember what it was like to be buried under all that snow, now that I’m sitting here in a tank top with the windows open.  Nico, too, is much happier in the warmer weather.

Highlights from February include:

• Lots and lots of snow (did I mention that already?)
• Nico’s first visit to the pediatrician since he was born (for his 2 month visit).  He was 13 pounds, 12 ounces and 24 1/2 inches long.
• Nico’s first serious illness — he got RSV but fought it really well.
• Lots of time spent in the Botanic Gardens, soaking up the humidity to help him breathe easier.
• A visit with Cousin Ruth and her whole family at Cousin Matthew’s house
• Nico discovered his feet when we were at Suzanne’s (sweltering hot) apartment.  It was the first time it had been warm enough for us to have him sit around with no socks on!
• With all the snow, our trash hadn’t been picked up for over 3 weeks.  I was feeling very smug about using cloth diapers since our trash wasn’t really piling up….until our washing machine broke, that is!  Fortunately we got a new one delivered within 24 hours and it works like a charm.  So we were not buried in diapers…just snow.

If you can’t see the videos above, click here.

3 T chopped parsley
3 T chopped ginger
3 T chopped garlic
5 spring onions, chopped
5 shitake mushrooms, chopped
8 c water
salt and pepper (and/or hot pepper flakes) to taste

Boil for 45 minutes.

Strain and drink the broth.

***

Update from a week later — I felt fine the next day.  It must have been the broth!

We’ve gone shopping, taken the bus and the metro, and met Daddy for lunch.

On Tuesday this week, we went to Daddy’s hockey game.

We’ve also had some friends over.

And, of course, we’ve taken lots of close-ups at home.

We’ve put together a little slide show with a whole bunch more close-ups and other photos.  It’s overkill in terms of the number of each kind of picture, but it’s so hard to choose just one of each!  This photo set is really for the grandparents (and anyone else who can’t get enough of Nico).

I haven’t put any up from the hospital — his birth photos are here, you’ve seen a couple of videos, and really, the time we have spent with him at home is so much better.  Plus our camera malfunctioned on the last day there and we lost lots of the pictures we had taken.  In fact, when we got home, Frank jumped out of the car and ran inside to get our other camera while I hopped in the back seat to get Nico ready to come home for the first time.  Good thing we had a second camera!  So anyway, these photos start with Nico’s arrival home and move forward from there.

Nico’s Homecoming

It seemed like he was in the hospital for an eternity, but really it was just a week.  We were thrilled to bring him home on December 15th.  And if you look closely at his face, it looks like he was pretty happy about it too!

Nico’s First Week at Home

We spent most of the week staring at him, but we did manage to take a few photos.

Christmas in DC

I wasn’t feeling up to a car trip and we were worried about exposing Nico and his fragile immune system to a lot of people, so for the first time ever we spent Christmas alone in DC.  We weren’t lonely, though!  We spent the afternoon with Billy and Joe and their brand new (one year old) twins.  (For those of you following their story, the adoption is final and the boys are officially theirs!!!)  Then we enjoyed a scrumptious dinner with Gina, Chip and family.

Nico Meets the Family

Since we couldn’t travel for Christmas, Nico missed out on meeting his aunts, uncles, cousins, and other grandparents.  So everyone convened at my parents’ house in NJ because it’s closer for everyone than driving from NY to DC.  Danny, Morgan and Brady came down from Poughkeepsie.  Marie, Frank, Nick, Dana, Denise, Robert, Daniel and James came from Long Island.  And my mom outdid herself cooking for crowds of baby admirers.  It was a great way to spend New Year’s.  On New Year’s Day the 3 of us left NJ and met Frank’s parents in DC. They stayed with us until the 4th and got to spend a lot of quality time with their newest grandson (and their favorite son).  Earlier than this, Nico’s Great Uncle Tommy and Great Aunt Lee came to visit with Cousin Matthew.  Unfortunately we didn’t get any photos of him with them.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Nick is doing great and we expect that he will be coming home with us tomorrow (Tuesday).  It is really hard to leave him at night and we’re very excited to have him home and untethered from all the machines.  In the past few days we’ve had a few hours where the monitoring leads have come off and we’ve had a wireless baby, and it’s been real nice.  It’s amazing how much you can come to appreciate a small thing like that!

We celebrated all of these great things with friends and family this year.  First we had our 13th Annual Pre-Thanksgiving Feast.  Jeff was here again, keeping his title as the only person to have been at every single Feast.  They are about to move to NH, so next year will be the real test…will he make it back down?  We hope so!  Ed, Genta, their sons, and Sara were all new to Pre-Thanksgiving, and we were glad to have them join us.  Gina and Chip were supposed to be here, but she had her baby a mere 17 hours before the party started.  (Mom and baby Archer are doing well after an extremely short and exciting delivery!)  Charlie and Co. were out with the flu.  And we had a couple of other last minute switcharoos.  But we were very glad that Baby Schipegan held off and did not arrive to cancel the party or turn it into a potluck.  We were also thankful to have Suzanne’s help beforehand — she did a ton from helping move furniture to making the cornbread and several other things to helping with clean-up.  All so I didn’t have to.  Thank you Suzanne!!!  And thank you to the rest of the clean-up crew:  Amy, Katie, Sara, and anyone else I might be missing.  Photos from the Feast are here.

And then, a few days later, we celebrated Thanksgiving with both sets of parents.  I couldn’t travel so we were extra glad that they could all make the trip to come be with us here.  Frank’s parents arrived on Tuesday and spent all of Wednesday getting us organized and rearranging furniture in our bedroom to accommodate the new furniture they brought to us.  We should have had them arrange all the furniture in our house — our room looks fantastic now!  My parents arrived on Thursday afternoon and stayed at a relatively new B&B just up the road.  I’m glad we’ve got a nice option in our neighborhood — just a mile up the road and accessible by the bus.  We ate too much and played a rousing game of Settlers of Catan on Thursday.  Then on Friday we went to the American Indian Museum and had a nice dinner out in Chinatown.  And they all headed out on Saturday.  Photos from their visit are here.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Notice two things — the dusty haze and the gleaming, astroturf-free porch.  Hooray for the astroturf being gone forever!

While they were all doing that, Frank and I were able to focus on the front yard.  You may remember that we’re going for a front yard that has no grass but instead has edible plants (all of the herbs we relocated from the back yard) and flowers.  We posted about it here and here.  It was looking a bit scraggly and we needed some fall/winter color.  So we focused on that while everyone else worked on the steps.  It was great to be able to have both going on simultaneously.  It would otherwise have taken us 3 full days to accomplish the same amount, and when the astroturf was still there, improving the yard didn’t make enough of a difference just like when the front yard was scraggly, removing the astroturf wouldn’t have been as big of an improvement.  However, getting both done at once was wonderful!

Here’s the end result.  We’ve got mums that will keep coming back for fall color, pansies that will provide color all winter long, and lots more bulbs up front for springtime color.

Yesterday we bought a weeping cherry tree on a whim.  We got it half off, so it’s much more mature than what we expected to buy for the front yard.  They were a bit incredulous that we’d be able to get this 300 pound tree (with root ball) home in the Matrix, but it was just fine.  When we got here, a bunch of neighbors came out and helped Frank carry it up the steps and into place.  Even though it was already dark, the weather was gorgeous so he stayed outside and got it planted right away.  We can’t wait to see it blossom in the spring!

We were happy to see that the weeping cherry had not been stolen when we woke up this morning.  It’s pretty heavy, so we should be ok.  But it’s always good when things aren’t stolen.  Unfortunately we can’t say the same for our second rue plant.  Our neighbor cautioned us that rue is very popular (for some reason) and that every time she planted it, it was stolen.  We weren’t that attached to it — it was just something that we relocated from the back yard.  But sure enough, a couple of months after she warned us, one of our rue plants was dug up in the middle of the night.  Well, last night it happened again with the second one.  I think it’s kind of humorous that with all of the plants we consider more valuable (all of the established herbs), this silly little rue is what thieves go for.  But Frank, of course, is livid that someone would come and dig anything out of our yard.  The good thing is that we don’t have any rue left for the taking.  I guess we won’t be buying any more…

Hi, Frank here – I just want to give a word of thanks to our neighbors for helping us get the tree out of the car and up into the yard.  Special thanks go to Mr. McLaughlin, who is not afraid of moving a 300 lb tree around.  The people in the nursery had us pretty scared about killing ourselves, the tree and our car.  But within minutes of our pulling up if front of our house, Mr. McLaughlin was there with a hand truck and his brother.  We pulled the tree our of the car and onto the hand truck, and five of us hoisted the tree and cart into position in the yard.  If it weren’t for Mr. McLaughlin, I fear the tree would still be sticking out the back of the car.

Frank and I were both able to take off from work, so we traveled to Chicago to be with Aunt Nita for the viewing and the funeral.  We took advantage of our time in Chicago to also visit with all of our other family out there — family we hadn’t seen since our last Chicago trip two years ago.  It was a sad occasion to be in Chicago but I have to think that Earl would have been very happy to know that his passing had brought so many family members together.  We also took the train out there, which was an experience in itself.  I would definitely be up for taking the train again, even though it’s an 18 hour ride.  Having a sleeper car made all the difference in the world.

We have some photos with my mom’s side of the family here.  Below is a photo of us as we said goodbye to Aunt Nita.  She’s an amazingly strong woman but we’re sad that she has to use that strength yet again.

This year we went apple picking at an organic apple farm called Liberty View Farm.  They only had one kind of apples and they were kind of ugly, but they were quite delicious.  And they have a farmer’s market and a petting zoo there too.  It was nice to know that they were a farm that didn’t spray — we’ve been looking for a good one for several years now.

May / June

We traveled to Pittsburgh in mid-May to visit the Shar-Bars.  We didn’t take many photos, but we loved seeing their new house and doing all the fun things we always do when we visit PGH.

My parents came to DC for my birthday and helped us paint the trim in the guest room and bathroom.  It’s so nice to have knocked something else off our list of projects to complete!

We traveled to NJ to celebrate a belated Father’s Day with my parents and Danny, Morgan, and Brady.  We played some bocce, had a great dinner, and spent most of our time oohing and aahing over Brady.

Frank and Seda enjoyed making sushi in June and cherry pie in July.  These photos are guaranteed to make your mouth water.

July

We had a 4th of July BBQ on our deck, even though it was little more than a platform at the time.  As usual when we unveil something new, Gina, Chip and Eloisa were here to celebrate with us, along with Sara, Aron and Salome, Eva, Jaime, and Jen.

Eva turned 40 and had a fabulous dinner party for several friends.  (I’m still not sure what we did to deserve a delicious, gourmet meal prepared by the birthday girl herself!)

Tara graduated (and so did her Uncle Frankie) and we traveled to NY to celebrate with her.

We traveled to Sperryville for the weekend with teams Somobright and Hjeltak.  We don’t have pictures of the blackberry picking, but we spent part of one day picking blackberries with the kids and it was great!  The rest of the time we hung out at the cottage and just relaxed and chatted and watched the girls play.

Debbie, Tim, and Gwen came to visit us in DC.  We were very proud of Gwen’s mommy for overcoming her fear of travel without a car seat and letting Gwen ride both the metro *and* the city bus.  Gwen loved both!  We also went to the sad little aquarium in DC.  They have some pretty fish and Gwen seemed to enjoy it.  But it’s dark and small and plus it’s not free.  I’m glad I’ve been once, but I don’t think we’ll go back.

August

Oshapalooza (see below).

We hope to add our completed deck to the August photos.  Mike finished up yesterday but there is still a LOT left for Frank to take care of.  The whole deck needs to be stained/sealed.  Two of three fans need to be installed.  Some sort of screen needs to be devised.  And all of the lattice pieces for the 1st floor railings need to be nailed into place.  It’s looking good, but we’ve still got a way to go before we can take any “after” photos.

I’m going to start the updating process with last weekend’s Osh Fest.  This was the fifth one we’ve hosted and it was great.  We had visitors from LA, Seattle, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh as well as all over the DC region.

It was great to see everybody again and we’re already making plans for next year’s bairam.  The slide show is available here.  Enjoy!

We may not have our mosquito-free sanctuary until the end of mosquito season, but at least pretty soon we will have railings.  We now have a roof over the second story deck and all of the second story deck boards got anchored today.  We hope that this means that our dining room will finally stop leaking every time it rains.  Of course, now we have a new project — repairing all of the water-damaged plaster around the window.  I also fear that our newfound watertightness will mean that there will be no more rain in DC this summer.   I hope that’s not the case.

During the hiatus, Frank filled our gabion walls with some of concrete mountain.  The process went more quickly than we had expected and the result is great!  He has been on the lookout for any free bricks on Freecycle for the past year, and he actually scored several carloads on two separate occasions.  So, the outside of the gabion walls will be brick and the inside is where all the concrete is, as you can sort of see in this picture.

The portion that is submerged underground is completely concrete chunks (9 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet). This photo, from 6/24/09, is of the pit with the empty baskets and Frank dropping the ceremonial first chunk of concrete to start the wall.  It’s a little hard to tell how deep the hole is, but Frank can vouch that it’s 3 feet — he lifted every bit of dirt, clay, and rock out of the pit himself!

We will duplicate this process with the garage wall, thereby hopefully getting rid of most of the concrete that we took out of the backyard as well as the remainder of concrete mountain.  The timing of that will depend on when Frank finds a new job and actually has to be somewhere else during the day.

Mike is very happy to have Frank’s full-time help on the deck.  Frank has been charged with cutting the boards that will be the railings — a long and tedious but instantly gratifying task.  We chose to use a semi-environmentally friendly form of pressure treated wood for the deck boards and the support structures.  This was because we couldn’t get FSC-certified cedar and because we could get FSC-certified pressure treated that also has no arsenic.  However, Mike had a contact that had some Spanish cedar sitting in his garage that he didn’t need.  So we bought his Spanish cedar and Frank is making it custom sized for our railings.  It smells wonderful and looks great!  Once the rest of the deck is stained, we expect that the difference between the two woods won’t be so obvious.

Stay tuned for the Schipegan version of the New Yankee Workshop, starring “Norm” Schipegan.

• 2007 – we purchased the house from the estate of Henrieta Walker.
• 1961 – the house was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Walker.
• 1959 – 1961 – two different owners occupy the house for about one year each.
• 1911 – 1959 – the house is occupied by its original owner, Garner Whiteman, who was a Chemist working for the Department of Agriculture.
• 1911 – The house was built by the developer Harry Wardman as part of a large group of row homes built between 1910 and 1914, and bounded by Spring, 14th, Monroe and Holmead Streets.
• c 1800 – 1910 – The area was a farm, eventually sold by Mr. Holmead to Harry Wardman.

But what about all the time before that?  Forests, Native Americans, Dinosaurs?  I have been thinking about this because I  just finished digging a pit in our back yard nine feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep.  I wondered how long all of that dirt had been there as I cursed the rocks in my path.  There were very clear layers of sediment that I was passing through and we figured they must have been at least thousands of years old.  Here’s a little of what I’ve learned of the history of our back yard.

First, though, an important point about our location, just east of Rock Creek Park.  All the rock in Rock Creek Park is the remains of a giant mountain range.  What is now the Appalacian Mountains was once as big as the Alps, but over millions of years it has eroded to what is there now.  At the eastern edge of this range sits Rock Creek, and the high ridge that the creek follows is the remnaints of the eastern edge of that mountain range.  This is important to our back yard because this mountain range was a natural barrier to the ocean which, at many time in the past, covered our back yard.

In periods where the Earth was cool, water was locked up in glaciers, ocean levels were lower, and our backyard was above sea level.  When the Earth warmed and the oceans rose, we were under water again, and a new layer of sediment was deposited on our backyard.  Every cycle of cool and warm created another layer of gunk for me to dig down into.

• 237 million years ago (mya) – It was a long drive to the beach for us, because we would have had to drive across North Africa to get to the ocean, about where Lybia is now.  Along the way our car may have been stepped on by Traissic period beasts, such as the Placerias.
• 200 mya – 14,000 years ago – North America broke off from Pangea and our backyard drifted northward from near the equator to its present location.  Now that Africa was not there to protect us from rising oceans, our backyard was continually flooded and dried out again, leaving deposits of silt, clay, and microscopic sea creatures.  Rocks from the mountains that are now Rock Creek Park were tumbled along the coast line, made smooth, and dropped in layers to get in my way millions of years later.
• 14,000 – 10,000 years ago - Humans made their first visit to our backyard some time during this period, coming from Asia across the Bering land bridge and quickly spreading throughout N and S America.  - did they hold our first barbeque?  I hope they had vegiburgers.
• 10,000 years ago – c 1650 – I don’t know much about what the Native Americans did in our backyard, if anything.  There were a lot of mosquitoes, even then.  Our backyard sits on fairly high ground overlooking the swamp that is now our nations’s capitol.
• c 1650 – c 1800 – ??? I need to do some more research, I guess.

Our backyard is part of what geologists refer to as the Atlantic Coastal Plane, which extends from NYC down to the Yukatan Pennisula, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Appalacians, or in our case, to that high ridge line just west of Rock Creek.  In some places the sediment deposits are 13,000 feet deep, and I only had to dig three feet.  So I don’t know exactly how old that layer of gray crud is at the bottom of my pit, but each layer I could see correspods to one ice age.  Ice ages come along evey 15,000 years or so, and I saw many, many layers.

Mike laid out the deck boards on Monday so they could dry out and Frank had hoped to get them all stained this week before they were installed.  But, of course, it rained all week.  So, they’ll be stained later.  In the meantime, we can have our meals outside in the back now, with a beautiful view of concrete mountain.  This week the second story should take shape and we may even get some railings!

Other things we planted directly into the garden, like corn and sunflowers and lettuce and spinach and peas.  We didn’t get any peas to speak of, but we think maybe this was because of that one hot week we got in early spring.  We don’t know why we don’t have lettuce and we’ve never had any luck with spinach.  Our corn seems to be behind schedule, as do the sunflowers.  And nothing is taking off in leaps and bounds like we expected.  For some perspective, I looked back for pictures from our first (amazing) garden and am feeling a little more encouraged.  Things were bigger in June than they are currently in our garden, but still smaller than I remembered.

For quick reference, here’s a comparison shot of our garden from June 11, 2007.

This gives me hope that it’s still not too late for us to rescue our garden this year.  Remember, this is how our garden looked on July 11, 2007, just one month later. 

The good news is that our front yard blueberry bush is starting to produce!  We ate 6 delicious blueberries from it yesterday.  We bought another 2 bushes this year that appear to be slightly later bloomers than the one we planted last year, so we should have a pretty steady stream of blueberries for a while.  Mmmm!

Boy Cat heard me upstairs taking pictures and he came running up and got in a bunch of my shots.  He is such a camera hog!

It was great to see them.  We went to a neighborhood BBQ and then played a competitive game of Clue.  Turns out it was Mr. Green with the wrench in the Library.

For those of you that know Bonnie, she’s looking fabulous at about 20 weeks.  See for yourself:

Next weekend Seda will be arriving.  Many of you may remember her — she is the Chechen woman who lived with us a few years ago when we were still in the condo.  She has been studying for her MPA (master’s in public administration) in the US through a Muskie Fellowship since last August.  She has an internship in DC for the summer and will return to her university for her final semester in the fall.  We’re looking forward to seeing her again soon!

The back deck is coming along really well, despite the rain issues.  At the end of last weekend, the entire first floor was framed out.  We didn’t lay the deck boards because we ended up having to go with pressure treated wood and the recommendation was that we let the boards dry out first (ha ha) so we’d be able to avoid using twisted ones.  So, the frame is all bolted together and the deck boards are trying to dry out in our garage.  We will need to stain all of the framing and the deck boards before they go on, but of course this will require a dry day…

You can see a full set of progress photos here.  A couple of highlights are below.

Digging the 5′ deep trenches for retaining walls.

The first floor is all framed out.

At the end of the day on May 31st.

Here’s a side view of the yard with the chives and the thyme in flower (taken on 5/10/09).

The chives are still in full-flower, but the thyme flowers have come and gone.  Also, the sage got some pretty purple flowers that are mostly gone now.  It looks like our lavender will start to flower any day now — it didn’t flower at all last year, so we’re looking forward to the lavender blossoms this year.  Our blueberries (the tall, thin bush in front of the porch) also flowered early this spring.  It looks like we’re going to get quite a crop of blueberries from it very soon!

Here’s the view from the street.

Next up — photos of our garden on top of the garage roof and also the progress on the back deck footings.

So, the day after Frank and Mike finished the concrete work, Frank and I relocated all of the plants that had been uprooted in preparation for the back deck project from the backyard to the front.

This included tons of chives that were about to flower, 2 big thyme plants that have made it through 2 winters, 2 lavender plants, 2 oregano plants, 1 rosemary, 2 sage, and some cilantro, parsley, and green onions.

We spent all day digging up the grass in a 3′ wide stretch and then replanting the herbs.

At the end of the day, we were one step closer to eliminating the grass and having a productive front yard.  Next step…making a mulch pathway to get rid of the remaining grass on the upper part.

The good news is that the feed seems to be fixed now.  So you’ll finally get what you signed up for. 

Frank is busily jackhammering again with the contractor today.  We hope to have another back deck update soon!

Here’s a look at the before:

On Saturday, our contractor, Mike, came over to take a look at the plans and figure out how much he’d charge for the job.  He came back on Wednesday to help Frank with the demolition.  They cleared all of the junk from our first demolition out from under the porch.  Then they emptied off our “white trash porch”.  On Thursday Frank went to work and Mike took down the entire wood structure all by himself.  I didn’t think to get a picture while he was working, but his progress was amazingly fast.  The roof was gone by 11 AM.  The whole second story was gone by 2 or 3 PM.  And the rest was gone, and all the debris cleaned up, by the time Frank got home from work around 6 PM.  Here are photos from the beginning of Friday that show the progress on Thursday:

On Friday, Frank took the day off again and he cleared all the rubble while Mike jackhammered the concrete slab — while it was suspended 4 feet in the air!  We thought, based on the amount of wire mesh that was holding the paved backyard in place, that there would be sufficient wire to help support the structure as he jackhammered it away from the 6 supporting piers.  We were pleased to find that there was rebar wired to the wire mesh, so Mike felt safe enough standing on top while he jackhammered.  At the end of the day, I came home to find this!

Today I had to work again.  When I came home, all of the rubble, including the staircase, was gone.  They were held up a little bit because they found some errors in our drawings.  But they problem solved on their own and determined where the footers needed to be, so they even started digging out the footers.

That 3rd picture is taken from the kitchen door.  It looks like a whole different backyard!  Now we just need to get the inspection scheduled, have the footers inspected, and then Mike will be back to put the deck up.  He doesn’t expect it to take long.  So it looks like we’ll be having Frank’s graduation party on our new back deck!

These same photos and a couple more are on our website.

The flowers in this photo are the ones that we’ve dubbed Brady’s Garden.  We got the bulbs at my sister-in-law’s baby shower and we were putting them in the ground when we got the call that she was in labor.  They are gorgeous!

Photos from the weekend are here.

Here are our first crocuses of the season:

And this is Brady’s garden.  We got a bunch of bulbs at Morgan’s baby shower and we were actually in the middle of planting them outside in a little garden for him when we got the call that she was in labor.  I can’t wait to see what the bulbs turn out to be!  In the meantime, some hardy pansies are looking vibrant now that they’re no longer covered by snow.

Here’s how my kitty cats spent the day:

The weather is supposed to get up into the 60s this weekend, so our snow should melt soon.  But we actually had a decent amount of snow this weekend — worthy of posting a few photos.  We probably got 4 inches, but DC didn’t shut down this time.  Nope, everyone here is too embarrassed that Obama made fun of us for shutting down for an inch of snow earlier this winter, so now we’re probably never going to get shut down unless we get a full-blown midwestern style snowstorm.  (No thanks!)

Here I am, shoveling with the neighbors:

We even had icicles:

Here’s our street — I think it looks lovely with the snow and the blue sky:

Hopefully this is the last of the snow and we’ll be showing garden photos instead really soon!

It all started on Valentine’s Day.  Frank’s sisters, Marie and Denise, came down to DC with their families.  Yep, that’s right — 7 people visiting our tiny little house.  Everyone was worried about there being enough room except for Frank and me.  We know how many people we can pack in to our house.  And there was still room for more, so hopefully next time Tara and Frank A. will join everyone too.    Photos from their visit are here.  We started on Saturday with a BBQ dinner in honor of Robert’s birthday.  It seems we only get to see their friends James and Raylene when Denise and Robert are in town, so we were glad for the excuse to have them over.  On Sunday we all went to the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum out by Dulles Airport.  We had brought Nick there on a previous visit, but he was a good sport about seeing it all again.  And Daniel and James loved the big planes.

After that we headed to Ashburn for a delicious dinner made by cousin Matthew.  As a bonus, his brother Philip was visiting from FL so it was a big cousin reunion.

Monday started off with a game of Trouble and a game of Scrabble and then it was off to a Chinese restaurant for lunch and the American History Museum.  We had fun looking at the newly restored flag that inspired the Star Spangled Banner, the Lincoln exhibit (it was President’s Day weekend), the transportation exhibit, and the kids’ hands-on room.  That night we ate dinner at home and played a couple rousing games of Pictionary.  I feel like I should scan in some of the winning (and losing) drawings, but they’d probably lose something in the translation…  I had forgotten how much fun Pictionary is.  On Tuesday Marie and her kids headed back to Long Island and I went to work.  I believe everyone else went to the zoo, but there are no pictures so I’m not sure.    We had a nice dinner at home on Tuesday night and played some Candyland.  On Wednesday Denise and her family left and Frank got us ready for our cruise while I was at work.

Then, on Thursday morning at 6 AM we left the cold, rainy, yucky weather to go on a cruise!  We almost didn’t make it, though.  Our flight was at 8:30, and we got to the airport by 7 AM so we had a nice relaxing wait for our plane.  We boarded the plane on time and the doors were shut by 8:25.  We taxied to the runway and then sat.  And sat.  And sat.  And sat.  And then the pilot came on to say that the wind had shifted and instead of taking off to the south, we’d be taking off to the north.  But we were too heavy to take off to the north — in DC the flight path rules are very strict and if a plane takes off to the north it has to take off at a steep angle and make an immediate sharp left so it doesn’t go over the White House or the Mall.  So, we were fine for taking off to the south, where it’s a straight shot, but too heavy to go north.  So, it was back to the terminal at around 10:00 AM to offload some weight.  We taxied to the terminal and refueled, but they didn’t unload anything.  And then all of a sudden we were heading back to the runway.  It seems that the wind had shifted again and we could now go south.  But, on our way there, the wind shifted again.  Oh, and it was also raining, so our stopping distance was increased and now we couldn’t take off to the south anymore either.  Agh.  But they “massaged the numbers” (those are the pilot’s words, not mine!) and all of a sudden we were going to be taking off to the north.  Let’s get this straight.  It’s now 11:30 AM.  We’ve been on the plane for 2.5 hours.  No weight has been lost.  We have added fuel.  And we’re taking off to the north, which we weren’t allowed to do 2 hours ago.  Um yeah.  I was not feeling so good about this flight.  But there was nothing I could do but sit and stare at the ceiling and hope we kept going upward.  So that’s what I did, and despite a ton of wind and bumps and lots of sideways motion (which I hate!), we did make it up into the air.  And we landed with plenty of time to get on the ship.

So, after that scary start, we were finally on the cruise ship.  But wait!  More drama!  It seems that in Italy a woman’s official documents all use her maiden name, even if she changed her name when she got married.  So, Frank’s mom’s cousin’s wife has a different official last name than the one we used when we bought her ticket for the cruise.  They weren’t going to let her on the boat!  Frank and I lost track of his family at customs, so we went ahead and boarded assuming all was well.  Then we saw his parents on the boat, but not the cousins!  And the boat was to leave in an hour (at 5 PM).  We did our mandatory lifeboat drill at 4:30 but they still weren’t on the boat.  In fact, Frank and I didn’t know if they had made it at all until we got to dinner at 6 PM.  We were extremely relieved to see them at the dinner table.  It turns out that they were able to call their son in Italy to have him fax over a copy of their marriage license.  Thank goodness he was near their house, had a key, and was able to find it exactly where they told him it would be.  Once the stress had worn off a bit, we were able to laugh at the idea that if our flight had been later and if they hadn’t gotten the marriage certificate, Frank’s parents would have been the only ones on the cruise and we would all have been hanging out in their condo for 4 days without them.

The cruise itself was great (photos are here).  I had never been on a cruise and wasn’t sure if I would love it or hate it.  I think 4 nights is the perfect length of time for a cruise — just enough time to really relax but not so long that you start to go stir crazy.  There were 14 decks on this cruise ship — that’s 14 stories that the passengers use and doesn’t include all of the working levels.  It was enormous!  It had miniature golf, several pools, an ice skating rink, a theatre that was bigger than my high school’s auditorium, a casino, multiple restaurants, and probably lots of things we didn’t ever even see.  The food was delicious (although we ate way too much) and the weather was perfect the whole time.  We had 1 day on land in Cozumel, Mexico.  There we rented jeeps and took a tour of the island.  We saw an old Mayan temple and went snorkeling.  We saw a sea turtle, were close enough to touch a very large barracuda, and saw lots of other fish and some very pretty coral.  All in all, the cruise was a lot of fun and it may become part of our regular mid-winter Florida excursion.

Unfortunately Frank got the flu at some point on the trip, and on Tuesday night he started to get sick.  He spent the remainder of February on the couch under a heap of blankets trying to get rid of his fever.  It finally went away on the first day of March.  But now we know how to spice up February and make it a month we can look forward to rather than a month we dread.  We’ll just make sure Frank loads up on vitamin C.

http://www.frontdoor.com/Buy/Blazing-a-Trail-Urban-Pioneer-Neighborhoods/2231

In case the link above does not work, here is a PDF version of the article.

The idea of Web 2.0 may be a new concept to you — it was to me when our new Executive Director mentioned it to me last summer.  It refers to all of the new technologies available on the internet, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.  It essentially takes the existing internet and makes it more dynamic and enables faster, briefer communication.  However, it’s constantly evolving and new tools are arising all the time.

I went to this interesting conference today called Feminism 2.0.  I also blogged about it for work here.  Sitting in sessions surrounded by women who are contributing authors on 7 or 8 blogs (often in addition to holding down full-time jobs, having partners, and having children), I felt like a complete slacker.  We can hardly manage to update our blog monthly, much less multiple times a day.  But it was really interesting to hear about all of the different blogs that exist, and also to see what all of these blogs mean in the grander scheme of the internet.  For instance, if a blogger can get lots of other bloggers to link to her site and if she also links back to those sites, she increases her standing in the internet rankings.  This might not be news to all, but even more interesting is a map of a small segment of the blogosphere that’s available here (you have to type in a username and password, which are available at that link).  The yellow dots represent some of the more popular feminist blogs.  If you click on a dot, you can see which blogs the blogger links to, and which blogs link to her.  (I think green lines are outgoing links, red are incoming links, and yellow are bidirectional links.)  The tool was even more elaborate than this — he was able to show the position and linkages between these feminist blogs and conservative and liberal blogs, which shows the number of feminist blogs that are able to get their ideas into more mainstream blogs.  Not surprisingly, almost all the links went to and from progressive liberal sites.  He was also able to show which types of blogs (conservative vs. liberal) had the largest share of posts about certain topics — reproductive rights, violence against women, economic justice, etc.  All of these metrics are extremely useful for planning and messaging purposes (although unfortunately not all are available at the link above because they are proprietary).

As I sat at the conference, I thought about the blogs that we link to and the blogs that our friends link to.  And I started to get really interested in ways that my friends who blog regularly can get their ideas heard by wider audiences.  As I said before, this isn’t news to most of you.  But if it is, and if you want more info, let me know and I can share anything else I learned.  In the meantime, I look forward to checking out some of these new blogs.  Who knows…we might have a new blogroll coming soon.

I haven’t totally drunk the Kool-Aid, though.  I still think Twitter is stupid and having people’s “tweets” displayed on a huge screen behind the presenters was extremely distracting and detracted from the presentations.  Either my brain isn’t big enough to process so many stimuli or a bunch of people think they’re engaged in things when really they’re not.  Or maybe a little of each…

The key highlight of this year’s plan is to put most of the vegetable garden up on top of the garage roof.  We hope to transform an otherwise bleak and useless space into something beautiful and useful. 

Last year we more-or-less followed the Square Foot Gardening method, which we find is ideal for an urban garden where space is at a premium.  Actually, according to Mel Bartholomew, SFG’s inventor, it is ideal for any garden because it not only uses far less space than a conventional garden, it uses far fewer resources and requires less maintenance.  This year we plan to follow the SFG method as closely as possible. 

The roof of the garage is about 450 square feet.  In that area we will build eight planter boxes covering a total of about 160 sq ft.  We plan to have four more boxes in the main yard for another 64 sq ft.  This gives a total of about 220 sq ft.  Hopefully we are not making a common rookie-gardener mistake and biting off more than we can chew.  But most of this additional space, closer to the house, will have flowers, not vegetables.  Flowers don’t require nearly as much work as vegetables do.

The boxes will be filled with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost.  There is no actual soil, so the boxes will stay relatively light weight and won’t collapse the garage roof.  Yes, vermiculite and peat moss are non-renewable resources, but the theory is that you use far less of it than you would with a traditional garden and because you reuse this same mix year after year, just adding new compost each time you plant.

Our first step was to draw out our plan on graph paper and plot the location of each plant.  Then we made a calendar of when we should be taking each step.  The SFG book tells you how many plants to put in each square foot: 16 carrots per square, 4 corn, 1 basil, 2 sunflowers, etc.

• This weekend we will be building a seed starting rack with shelves and lights for starting our seeds inside.  A few weeks ago we purchased a whole slew of heirloom seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.
• Each week from now until early April we will be starting different seeds indoors, starting with broccoli and kale this weekend.
• April 10 is the estimated date of the last frost in DC.  We’ll actually start planting some of the hardier plants outside before then.
• Prior to that, by the end of March, we will have to have shored up the garage roof (it has a few rafters that need to be replaced), built some steps from the main yard to the roof (only about 3 feet high), and built at least some of our planter boxes.
• Some of the first plants to go outside will need to be protected by cold frames that will keep them from getting killed by the cold weather.  This is basically just some plastic sheeting on a frame that protects them from the wind and cold air overnight.
• Starting in late March we’ll start planting seeds directly outside, and when the weather starts to warm up by the end of April, we should start to get our first harvests of lettuce and other greens.
• By May and June everything should be growing like gangbusters, and we’ll have our first tomatoes in June.  The corn will be taller than us (or Kristen, anyway) and we’ll have more squash and cucumbers than we can handle.

Of course reality will intrude on our plans soon enough.  Last year we had a very wet spring, which nearly killed all of our tomato plants.  They never really recovered in time to give us more than a few tomatoes each.  Then, atypical even for DC, we had a week of 100 degree days in June, which caused all of our cool-loving lettuce, broccoli and greens to bolt before giving any produce.  The little that remained was mostly eaten by harlequin beetles and slugs.

I’m sure we’ll have many of those same challenges again this year, but at least we won’t be handicapping ourselves by starting everything too late and not planning properly.  Hopefully we won’t get too lost in weeding and squashing bugs and we’ll have time to update the blog with photos and descriptions of our progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8OhpObpXF4

And our photos are here.

And with that, we’re all caught up!  Yay!

Happy New Year everyone!!!

The slide show of 46 (many of which feature their crazy kitties) is on our website here.

Dinner

Brady got a little tired of us taking so many pictures.  First he gave us the finger (though he hasn’t mastered it yet…)

Then he stuck his tongue out at Grandma!

I hope to have all of our December pictures up on the site before 2009 arrives.  In the meantime, enjoy the photos of Pre-Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, and Nick and Dana’s visit to DC.

And here are a couple of photos from our own Christmas at home.

We’ll write more soon.  In the meantime, have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

(Pre-Thanksgiving photos are on their way soon…)

K&F

Here’s a photo of our fall decorations, all of which came from our backyard (including the corn stalks).

The entire city of Washington, DC, is in a good mood. Everyone, all at the same time. A shared mood is not something you experience every day, not with so many people anyway, and it’s not always a good mood. September 12, 2001 was one of those days, but not in a good way.

Keep in mind that Washington is a heavily Democratic city. Obama won 93% of the vote here. Ninety-three percent! In a city of almost half a million people, fewer than 15,000 of them voted for McCain. Walking around town on Wednesday, then, you would be hard pressed to find someone without a little skip in their step from the night before. I bet even the McCain voters were a little bit happy about the result. Nobody stopped to talk about it, really. Everyone still has to do their jobs, driving buses, making lunch, pushing papers. But you can just feel the underlying mood of happiness and anticipation of better times ahead. You know that feeling you get when something really good happens to you all of a sudden, like you just got a big promotion, and you feel so happy inside? Well, everyone here has that feeling right now, and it’s just amazing.

When Obama was declared the winner on Tuesday night, we went outside to celebrate with our neighbors on our street. Our block is pretty diverse – white, black, Latino, gay, straight, young, old, residents of 40 years or just a few months – and everyone was outside, and everyone was excited. There were fireworks from the next block, pots and pans banging, horns honking, and champagne flowing. Everyone was brought together by this incredibly special and amazing event. Kristen had been giving me a hard time on Tuesday night for not being sufficiently excited, but really I had been 99% sure for the past month that Obama would win. So when he actually did win, of course I didn’t need to jump up and down about it. That’s not really my personality anyway. It is this afterglow that has really gotten to me, that has restored my faith in the future.

I’m really looking forward to going to the inauguration in January. I’ve been to the last three, but of course this one will be much different. In 1997 I was fresh out of college and really didn’t care one way or the other about Bill Clinton. I went because it was there to see, waved the little flag that was handed to me and went home. In 2001 there were huge protests and people threw eggs at the presidential motorcade, plus there was an underlying fear that DC would become Texas North, and we would all be forced to wear cowboy hats. 2005 was more of the same, though the freezing cold weather drove us home before the president went by. But this time I don’t think anything could keep us away, and I can’t wait.

DC has it’s problems, but sometimes I think it’s the best place in the world to live.

All of our neighbors ran outside as soon as the electoral count rose over 270.  Everyone was banging on pots and pans, drinking champagne, and hollering.  There were fireworks.  Passing cars were honking.  The solidarity was amazing!

This is what Barack Obama will bring to our country.  This is what we’ve been waiting for.  We can make it until January.  Only 76 more days.

Here’s to eight great years!

I’ll post a picture as soon as I get one.  In the meantime, here are photos from Morgan’s baby shower 3 weeks ago.  Good thing her mom had it early!

Congratulations, Morgan and Danny.  We can’t wait to meet Brady next weekend!

We were all devastated to learn that Dr. Rosenfield had been struck by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) 3 years ago.  He had a long and full career in which he made enormous contributions to the fields of public health and reproductive health.  But it’s always tragic to learn that a great leader is suffering and ultimately that he is mortal.  In June of 2006 I sent an email to friends linking to this article, which had made me cry.  Dr. Rosenfield remained strong and dignified to the end.  He hosted a reception at last year’s APHA conference (American Public Health Association) and though he was immobile in a wheelchair he was engaged with everyone there and seemed pleased to see so many students from my class at the reception.

I will miss knowing that Dr. Rosenfield is out there fighting the good fight with the rest of us.  But I feel very honored to have been trained to follow his lead and to work with others to pick up where he left off.

See tributes from other PopFam members here:  Mandi, Suzanne

kd

Just a little less green in the house!

We were very happy that the end result came out as well as it did. If it hadn’t, we might still be asking ourselves why we spent SO MUCH time on that one project. Way back last summer we had decided to remove the window trim rather than trying to strip it in place or just paint it. This had several benefits. First, stripping the paint from the individual pieces is much easier than trying to get paint out from all the little spaces between the pieces in place. Second, the previous owners had tried to do some repair of the walls around the windows because of damage from water or settling, but they had done a poor job. Removing the trim would allow us to do a proper repair of the walls. And third, the spaces around the windows were very drafty because of the way the “new” windows (I’m guessing they are about 20 years old) were installed in the old openings. Removing the trim would allow us to insulate the old weight pockets and seal up all the cracks that were letting air in.

So here are the steps we took, from start to finish, and very rough estimates of the time spent. Keep in mind that we started this process in July 2007, intending it to be done before we moved in.

Having the city money is truly great, but we still need private donations. It might seem counterintuitive that despite the huge influx of DC funds, the board is still in fundraising mode. But this is very definitely the case. We need private donations for general operating money to cover all of those little (and sometimes big) expenses that arise and aren’t covered by the city grants.

PreventionWorks’ fiscal year ends on September 30th. I’m putting this out here as an appeal to anyone looking for a charity to support. If you make a donation to PreventionWorks, either online or with a check, I will match your donation dollar for dollar. Please just let me know how much you’ve contributed if you are interested in this challenge. I’ll post the total amount raised after September 30th.

Don’t delay — we’ve got less than 2 weeks! And thanks in advance!

I count myself very fortunate that my friend and my roommate shared their stories with me so I’d know what to watch out for. My friend threw up all night and was sicker than she had ever been in her life. My roommate, too, was throwing up during the night. They both ended up with abdominal pain and both ended up with a fever. My story is similar, and I hope it will help someone else recognize the symptoms early so they can have an easy time of it like I did.

I started feeling nauseous around noon on Sunday. We had just had a big Uzbek party the day before, and I was thinking it could have been the greasy food or the vodka that did it to me. But no one else felt sick. I had also had food poisoning a couple of weeks before, so I thought maybe that was it. But again, no one else had any signs and we had all eaten the same food. So, I went on a picnic, where I didn’t eat much, and generally tried to wait out the nausea. Around 5:00, I started to get some pain on my lower right side. It was right around my right ovary, so I thought maybe it was related to ovulation or something. And I had no fever. But I still couldn’t eat and still couldn’t get very comfortable. At around 9 PM, I called a friend, just so I could be distracted from the nausea and hopefully not throw up. (I never did actually throw up.) Around 10:00 PM I got off the phone with her because I was feeling worse and the pain was increasing. I took my temperature and had a very slight fever — just 99.6. But the combination of the three symptoms set me in motion, and Frank and I took off for Georgetown Hospital.

We got there around 11 or 11:30 PM and the place was empty. I wrote “abdominal pain – appendicitis?” on my admit slip and they brought me back immediately. By this time I was having a lot of trouble walking because of the pain on my lower right side. I couldn’t really lift my right leg up, so when they admitted me to a room, Frank had to pick my right leg up onto the bed. When I was immobile, the pain wasn’t too bad. But sitting up, walking, and generally moving was really painful, and I found myself walking doubled over to ease the pain. They gave me an IV with fluids since I hadn’t eaten or drunk much that day and since, if I was going to be getting my appendix out, I wouldn’t be able to eat or drink until after the surgery. They offered IV painkillers but I didn’t want them. They did, however, talk me into an IV antibiotic as a precaution, just in case my appendix ruptured. Strangely enough, the antibiotic actually seemed to help relieve a little bit of the pain. For a minute I thought they had given me the wrong thing — I had asked for the antibiotic but they gave me the painkiller by mistake. Turns out that was not true — they had given me the antibiotic. So, I definitely didn’t need the pain meds. As long as I had Frank to lift my leg up (and, by this point, pick up my hips to move my whole body to the middle of the bed), I was fine.

Frank and I hung out in my ER room and played cards. We got a lot of attention from the ER docs and from the surgeon because it was a really slow night. Around 3:30 AM I had a CT scan done and 10 minutes later the doctors came in to confirm the appendicitis diagnosis. They weren’t able to take it out then and there because there was no anesthesiologist available. So that meant that the surgeon that had been consulting with me wasn’t going to be my surgeon. But they scheduled me for 7:30 AM and assured me that the new doctor would be good too. Frank and I tried to get some rest, and around 5:30 AM I was admitted into a room to wait for surgery.

7:30 came and went with no sign of me going anywhere. The nurses on the floor didn’t seem too interested in getting me out of there, but we pestered them enough that they finally called surgery. Around 10 AM a surgeon came in and said that because I was an “add on,” I needed to wait for an opening in the schedule. He said it could be as soon as noon, but would more likely be 2 PM. I told him that was fine, but that the onset of my symptoms was noon the day before and that we were hitting 24 hours. I also told him that I had no plans to stay in the hospital overnight, so I needed to get in and get out so I could get home. He told me that people don’t generally leave the same day, but I reiterated that I wouldn’t be staying overnight. He left, saying that it would probably be 2 PM, and Frank and I started playing cards again. About 15 minutes later, the nurse came in to tell me that transport was on the way to take me to surgery.

Frank and I went down to the surgery staging area and met a really great team of student doctors and nurses. Everyone seemed to find it funny that I was so excited to get my appendix out. But the excitement was genuine and I wasn’t afraid at all. The surgeon came in to introduce me to the team and have me confirm — with everyone listening — that I was getting my appendix out. Earlier I had joked about writing it on my stomach and he got all serious and said that they are very careful and they make sure everyone understands what is being operated on while the patient is still awake. Then the anesthesiologist gave me some knock-out medicine and explained that I would stay awake and be working with them for a while, but that I wouldn’t remember anything. I didn’t believe her, but it was true! I remember Frank saying good bye and “I love you” as he headed off to the elevator. I couldn’t say anything back and my eyes teared up. A nurse sympathetically put her hand on my shoulder and smiled, and the next thing I knew it was 12:00 and I was waking up in recovery. It’s so strange!

I actually do remember struggling with the team when I was coming out from the anesthesia. I had a breathing tube and I remember that I couldn’t breathe and I panicked. I remember fighting with them and trying to get them to understand that I couldn’t breathe. They wanted me to cough, but I didn’t want to. And that’s all I remember. But my very first thought as I was trying to open my eyes in recovery was that I owed everyone a huge apology. Through half-lidded eyes I was searching for any member of the surgical team, but I didn’t see a single one of them. A nurse saw that I had woken up and she came over. I asked her to apologize for me and then I asked her for some water. She gave me ice chips and I couldn’t eat them fast enough. I was SO THIRSTY!!!

They wheeled me back to my room and Frank was just coming back at the same moment from taking a shower and feeding the kitty cats. I drank over a liter of water and 5 little juice containers, went to the bathroom all on my own, and told them I was ready to go home. A surgeon (not my surgeon) came to check on me around 7:30 or 8 PM and I told him I was ready to go home. He said my surgeon would be happy to see me after his case and I said that if everything had gone according to plan, I didn’t need to see him. I said I’d catch him at the follow-up visit. So, he went away, prepared the discharge instructions, and around 8:30 he came back to let me go home. I had one more dose of IV antibiotic and then I was out of there!

It was around 9:30 PM, so I had been in the hospital for less than 24 hours. And despite the surgery, I was feeling better than when I went in. We stopped at Whole Foods on the way home and Frank loaded up on liquids for my liquid diet — juice, soup, and of course, lots and lots of ice cream. It was so nice to be home and on my own couch (until Little Girl Cat jumped up and landed smack on one of my holes!). We went to bed around 11 or so, and the next morning I was feeling really great.

The recovery was extremely rapid — every morning I felt better than I had the night before, and every night I felt better than I had that morning. The progress was dramatic. Frank and I took a walk up and down the street on Wednesday and then went up and down the street twice on Thursday. Friday we walked several blocks for me to do a restorative yoga class. And I went back to work on Monday. Now it’s exactly 2 weeks later, and I’m almost back to normal. Last week I plateaued a bit, with walking several blocks still very tiring. But now most of the puffiness and swollen belly look is gone and I can walk just as much as I used to. I have my follow-up visit on Wednesday and then I imagine I won’t have to think about any of this again.

Here’s a picture I had Frank take on Wednesday before I took my bandages off. I meant to post it right away to reassure everyone that I was fine, but alas, never did that. So, here it is…a little bit late for reassurance.

]]> http://www.schipani.org/blog/2008/09/02/ode-to-the-appendectomy/feed/ 2 http://www.schipani.org/blog/2008/09/01/congratulations-monica/ http://www.schipani.org/blog/2008/09/01/congratulations-monica/#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:51:41 +0000 Frank http://www.schipani.org/blog/2008/09/01/congratulations-monica/ My friend, Monica, just got a story published on a website called Mamazine.  Check it out — it’s great!