Bath Time Antics

Nicole really likes bath time. Our normal routine is to get her a fresh diaper, head to the bathroom and let the tub fill while we strip her down. She’ll always help out with the undressing part (lifting her legs out of her pants, pulling the shirt off from over her head, etc.) if it helps get her in the water faster. Once she’s in the tub she’ll hold her hand under the faucet to feel the water pounding down and splash around with her toys and water books.

Two things have evolved lately-
1) sitting in the tub she’ll now bend over and put her nose in the water. She used to suck water up which lead to coughing spells, but now she just dunks her face in lightly and comes up quite proud of herself.

2) Last night I closed the gate to the stairs and let her roam while I walked to her room to get the diaper. When I came back to the bathroom, a whole 30 seconds later, she was gone! That little bugger somehow climbed into the bathtub by herself! I pulled her out and watched as she tried again – raising up on her tip toes and swinging her left knee well over waist-level and onto the tub ledge while pushing up with her arms. Guess we won’t be leaving her to her own demise any more. Good thing I hadn’t started the water yet!

Weekend of 9/27/08

This weekend was blissfully unscheduled. I did make a to-do list but it included items like “write a thank you note to mom and dad” and “go to church”. We hit all but 3 of the 16 items which was pretty darn good.

I'm reading a new trilogy from Nora Roberts and I finished up book two, Black Rose, and started in on Red Lily. As always, I really enjoy her style of writing and this week I found myself going to bed sometimes more than an hour later than Jim because I was so engrossed in the novel. This Garden Trilogy has had several points that I find myself laughing out loud or just beaming because I'm excited about what’s transpiring in the book. Unfortunately Red Lily is turning a little bit hookier than the other two books so far (there’s a ghost involved) but the “real life” portion is great.

My good friend, Bill, was a neighbor when I was growing up. Medically he's not doing so hot.... He’s on the verge of being bed-ridden and has to stop in the kitchen to catch his breath (and he’s on full-time oxygen!) on his way from the family room to the bathroom 20 feet away. His wife drives me crazy. Mary doesn’t make the time to take him to the doctor, buy the food that he’s required to eat, or even come home when she says she will to help with dinner. Seriously, how selfish. As a result I had to go grocery shopping for him, which I didn’t mind at all, and bring the food and Nicole over for a visit last night. The good news was that Nicole was on her best behavior. She pet the dog, sat on Bill’s lap, showed him all her signs and body parts when asked, and gave him 3 kisses before we left. It was one of those times where I thanked her profusely for being so good all the way home.

We watched about an hour and a half of the debates on Friday. I thought it was a pretty good match up from what I saw – Obama presented himself very well confidence-wise and got some good points in. He said “John is exactly right” frequently enough that I thought it was kind of weird. I thought McCain harped too much on spending in the beginning but presented his policies well when he got to them. Honestly, I got bored after about an hour fifteen because it was all on foreign policy. I thought the moderator was terrible.

Quick Pics

Here's a before and after with my hair. Sorry the second shot is so dark....

Nicole was awful giggly last night - here's a quick shot of her having some fun.

I took some cute video of her helping me sort clothes after the mother's sale, but I must have misfiled it as I now can't find it...

Who's Foolin' Who?

Sometimes I get caught staring at people. This always embarrasses me as old school manners still resonate that staring isn’t polite.

My normal response after getting caught: look the other way for a bit, then back the original direction for a bit. That way I try to appear that I'm not staring, I'm simply looking around … for extended periods of time…

Those Clever Democrats!

Barack Obama’s campaign is doing some smart marketing. As previously mentioned, I'm not registered with either campaign and have never been active in campaigning so perhaps this is common and I'm just new to it.

Here was my first “that’s really cool” moment:

I put a red arrow on his “ad” if you didn’t see it right away. It’s a nice reminder for residents and offers a link to register to vote if you haven’t already done so. And I like the picture they picked – very “hey, neighbor, just helping out.”

Second thing I saw recently was front page news in Jim’s Spencerville Journal (weekly hometown newspaper). The second barn in Ohio that’s part of the Barns for Obama campaign went up in their town. What a neat idea!

Last – I was looking for a link to add so I could check out more on the Barns for Obama effort and the first link Yahoo! brought up was democrats.org. I thought it was just some homemade thing when I saw the link to their blog “Kicking Ass” and left. It took me a minute to catch what the name meant and then I laughed out loud – how clever! Anyway, they have a nice video about the first Ohio barn that was painted.

Weekend of 9-21-0/8

1. First I'd like to encourage you to read Tom S's Blog - the last two posts are political in nature and have some really great content (and are non-partisan written).
2. Friday night we headed to my parents again for the evening. With the power outage Nicole has seen her grandparents nearly every night this week – Tuesday for lunch, Wednesday for dinner, Thursday at the softball game, Friday for dinner, Saturday for computer access and then Sunday for babysitting. That’s a lot of grandma.
3. Saturday morning I lobbed off about 5 inches of my hair. I did take a before picture but I was too busy with my final ice skating lesson, a 2 year-old birthday party, and then a housewarming party that the “after” picture was never gotten to. Of course it’ll never look as good as it did on Saturday again…. I’ll work on a pic tonight. When I told Jim I was going to cut a lot off his reply was "Why would you want to do something like that?". So male. I had to laugh at Dave P's response when he noticed - his opinion was written all over his face which got him chided by Carole. I don't mind though. :) As you can expect, I got a lot of positive feedback from the women I saw (comes with the territory).
4. We got power on as of about 8:00pm when we came home from bowling last night. In general, the outage was about a 10% inconvenience to our life but for the most part no big deal. Not that we weren’t thrilled to have it on and immediately do 2 loads of laundry and run the dishwasher…. Going grocery shopping will be FUN tonight as we basically completely wiped out our refrigerator and freezer of all but some unopened Parmesan cheese and baking soda. We’re checking with the insurance to see if we have any food spoilage coverage.
5. I have all but 4 midterm exams graded and the others will be a snap tonight.
6. Over the last 2 weeks Nicole has increasingly started putting 2-word sentences together. “Hi Dada”, “Hi Doggy”, and “Bye Mama” are pretty frequent. I'm pleased though as she gets that they go together, correctly uses them, and only knows how to say about 8 total words, so putting 2 together seems pretty good to me (then again, what parent doesn’t say their kid is “so smart”). The sitters claims she said “mama here” on Friday right before I walked in the door (she saw me out of the glass storm door) but I’ve never heard her say “here” before so that seems like a bit of a stretch….

The Storm's not Over

We’re nearing the start of day 6 with no power. Presently There are about 150,000 people, like me, with no power. Here are some recent articles from the Cincinnati Enquirer with information on how we’re all getting along:

1. A man brought in a [fake] machine gun and threatened the Duke Energy workers that he wasn’t leaving until they brought power back on at his house.

2. Here’s a lovely article with the heading “People are Losing It”.

3. The one that really irks me is instructions on how people can get replacement food stamps for spoiled food. People qualify for an ENTIRE MONTHS allotment of food stamps even though they’ve only been out of power for 5 days. That’s up to $1500. Jim and I estimate that we will throw out about $60 in food (and that’s getting rid of a lot). How in God’s name does the county/state justify that for people?!?! Do they not expect that they’ll be flooded with people requesting the absolute full amount for the month, not just the portion that they actually lost? I absolutely HATE the welfare system and how it’s run. It makes me want to go into politics and change it.

Trudging On

Still alive, still in the dark. The electric company, according to the news, has about 60% of the city up now and expects to be at 90% by Saturday. I’ve been told that since we’re a new neighborhood and therefore likely on a new transformer we’ll be at the end of the list. The old transformers are full of people and businesses and will be tended to first. Honestly, I can’t argue that logic and am not put out by the inconvenience. I’ve gone to my parents today and yesterday to dry my hair for work and they were gracious enough to have us over for dinner as eating out is getting o-l-d (especially just coming off of a vacation where that’s all we did).

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Nicole
I did talk to Lindsay (my SIL) about more signs to teach Nicole. Nic accurately uses (on her own and when prompted) milk, more, please, thank you, and all done. I wanted to start using again (as in “lets’ do it again”) and good (as in “this is good”, “you’re being so good”, etc.), and verify that I’ve been using the right sign for potty. I was disappointed to learn that “good” is the same sign as “thank you” but from your top lip and not your chin- a bit too close for a 14 month old to grasp, I think. Likewise, as Nicole will sometimes do “please” two-handed so “bath” has been a challenge to differentiate. I saw the sign for potty in a magazine but Lindsay said “toilet” is more common and now I'm disappointed that I’ve been working on the wrong thing with her for 6 weeks. I will probably forgo the “toilet” sign Linds showed me and keep being consistant with what I have been doing. The one shining star is “do it again” which is physically different than anything else we’ve been working on.

Nicole is also repeating words. I've tried to catch her on video saying a few but she gets distracted by the camera so I haven’t been successful. Her cutest ones are “duck” and “turtle” which she says in two very distinct syllables.

I went to a Mother’s Exchange on Saturday morning at 7:30am. Some of those moms were crazy possessive of their finds to the point of being a bit ridiculous. I did pick up a red and white Radio Flyer (yes, the old fashioned kind!!) tricycle for her next birthday. She already adores it, climbs all over it, and pushes it around the hardwood floors. Won’t she be sad when it goes to the basement for the next 10 months? I picked up about $55 in outfits (all winter) for her as well. She has several 18-mo, hand-me-down pairs of jeans from friends/family but her Buddha belly often makes the fly awful tight even though the legs are the right length. Ah well….

Out of Touch, but not on purpose

MIA is an understatement lately. On Sunday Hurricane Ike came through Cincinnati. We had wind speeds up to 70MPH and over 90% of the city lost power. They’ve recovered about 40% now but my home and work are both still dark. It’s been a blend of peaceful (lots of reading which is a favorite pastime so I don’t mind a bit!) with several inconveniences (ie we’ll have to pitch nearly all of the refrigerator contents, more than once I’ve wished I could use the computer, etc.). Thank God we have hot water for showers (a luxury my parents don’t have. Then again, they're missing a big chunk of their roof - it blew off and is down to the plywood).

Not sure if I’ll be going into work or not tomorrow. The electric company’s first priority is businesses but that hasn’t been going too well. We waited 50 minutes for gas yesterday and I waited another 25 this afternoon for the other car. Stations just aren’t up and running yet so people flock to the limited choices that are operating.

I’ll try to take some pictures of some of the estimated “tens of thousands” of trees that were knocked over (many over a foot in diameter had their whole root systems lifted straight out of the ground) and the stress that our power and phone lines are under as a result of limbs resting on them. It’s quite a sight.

Helping your Vote

Here’s a pretty cool website that lets you review statements made by candidates without knowing who said what. Then you vote for the statement you most agree with. At the end it tallies your votes and helps you learn whose views you’re most in line with.

http://abcnews.go.com/politics/MatchoMatic/fullpage?id=5542139

There are cute little phrases at the bottom of the questions too if you take the time to look at them.

Below are my results - check out the chart on the far left to see the issues and how I voted! No surprise that I slightly sided with Obama on "hot topics" (gay marriage, abortion...).

Idiots

One of the lead Yahoo! videos today was a 911 call from an 11 year old boy who was turning his mother in for drunk driving. To hear that and the other examples they gave during the 2:30 story broke my heart. It’s so unfair for kids to have to be parents, and, as the story says, for the final outcome to be even worse- the families are often broken apart as a result.

Why can’t adults be adults?


http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9674393

GOP Reflections

I am not a registered voter with either party. I attempt to stay open-minded and ultimately vote for the best candidate. I will admit, however, that my voting tends to trend Republican due to my beliefs on welfare, affirmative action, taxes, and international affairs (military spending).

So, as promised, here’s my take-aways from the GOP convention:

1) I want to watch Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. I haven’t seen more than a few minutes at a time of him speaking and I hear that he’s phenomenal. I’d like to see if his speaking skills marry up with equally good content when he has the opportunity to be thorough.

2) McCain is genuinely a nice person. I was really moved by his POW experience and his decision to honor the “first in first out” policy, even when he had the chance to leave early. Choosing 4 more years of torture and not letting that break your American spirit is absolutely amazing.

3) Lisa’s right, Palin IS hot. And how frickin’ cute was Piper licking her hand to fix Trig’s hair?

4) McCain has a better policy on corporate taxation when it comes to off-shore production. Obama’s plan is to penalize businesses who send jobs overseas with higher taxes. While “spanking” companies seems justified, I think that this will actually hurt the American people. If a company has to incur additional expense they’re not just going to eat it, they’ll pass it on. And when they do, who do you think will be ultimately paying that additional cost? The consumer (us!!). We will all end up paying more for the things we buy via two rounds of taxation – once on behalf of the companies who were originally taxed and then again via a sales tax.

I feel very strongly that McCain’s plan is better – incentivize companies to keep jobs in America by LOWERING corporate taxes. If companies are paying less to do business here they have more reason to keep jobs here. They also have less reason to raise prices on the goods they sell. With this combo the economy should do better – people will pay a fair price for the items they buy and they’ll have the income (JOBS) to have money to spend in the first place.

5) The war still needs a lot of attention. Obama has, from what I’ve heard, a good plan for gradually pulling out of the war. I’ve also read online that his plan is very similar to Bush’s plan (which seems strange). I have not heard the specifics on McCain’s Iraq strategy. I need to research this a lot more to better understand it.

6) I also need to do more research on socialized medicine. I did not like paying a 12% sales tax rate while in Canada (part of their financial resource to pay for their nation-wide healthcare), but I don’t fully understand the implications on how something like this would affect company-sponsored health insurance plans. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad?

7) Both candidates talk a lot about cleaning up Washington. I'm now more skeptical of our representatives in general. How bad is it really? I hope they both follow-through on this campaign promise.

Toronto Vacation in Pictures

Downtown Toronto. Just out of view to the left is the Blue Jay's Stadium.

CN Tower - it was frickin' huge! It was the second stop (first was the zoo) on our City Pass. We went to the look out tower where there was a glass level, an outdoor level, and a glass bottom floor to walk on and look down from. We also watched a 20 minute IMAX movie about the making of the tower that was very cool.

Nic looking out over the city from the CN Tower


Mom, Me, Nicole & Jim standing next to the Stanley Cup at the Hockey Hall of Fame



And why are her legs so chunky?? Grandpa loved feeding her strawberry milkshakes and justifying that because it was Breyers ice cream (all natural) it was really health food.


See, even the Canucks' bugs love the Bengals! The world's largest butterfly atrium - 2300 butterflies!


On our way to watch class 6 rapids at Niagara Falls




This is what class 6 rapids look like. There is no such thing as a class 7!! Some idiot tried to cross in a canoe; he died. The first man to swim the English Channel tried to swim across this pass; they found him four days later downstream.

Our family ready to board the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls. I'd been before but Jim hadn't. We bought $40 passes that got us the boat ride, butterfly conservatory, behind the falls tour, and the rapid walk. Overall a good value.

The view at the top of the Canadian side of the horseshoe falls. Over 130 MILLION gallons of water go over the edge a minute. This accounts for 20% of the worlds fresh water source. That's Dad talking in the background. The second set of water you see is the American side.

Interesting fact: Only one person has gone over the falls unintentionally and survived. A boy who went afloat in only a life vest and his bathing suit was taken over the falls when his boat crashed. The Maid of the Mist picked him up at the bottom.

Sad fact: the day before we got there someone committed suicide over the falls. People saw him but they hadn't found his body yet.

Casa Loma. $3M to build in the early 1900's, owners only lived there for 9 years before they could no longer afford it. $150K/year in taxes back then was the reason that the owner, Sir Henry, gave that he had to leave. That's Jim in white and Nicole in pink in the front.

The backyard of Casa Loma. It is now run as a tourist attraction by the Kiwanis.

Nicole petting a stuffed raccoon at the Science Center.

The absolute largest fossil collection I've ever seen!

Nicole was ALL ABOUT books on this trip. This ABC one was read to her by all of us at least 2 dozen times each!

McCain

I watched the GOP Convention while I was in Toronto and my mom made a comment to me about the pork barrel spending in government and who’s guilty. It was something I hadn’t given too much thought to until she said it so I did some research this morning from what I believe to be a reputable source, The Citizens Against Government Waste. Here are the results:

Obama: 52 for a total of $89,784,790
McCain: 0 for $0

HOLY SHIT.

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On a side note, in light of Jenny’s brush with fame, I saw McCain’s bus parked at the hotel next door to my office. He’s speaking up north today so I'm assuming this is where he crashed for the night. Didn’t see him, but I did deliver a handwritten note to the bus driver to give to him/Palin.

Day 4 of vacation

Yesterday was jam-packed but was probably the least amount of walking we’ve done thanks to the all-day subway pass. We caught the Casa Loma, Chinatown for lunch, Royal Ontario Museum, and eventually a Blue Jays game (cleanest stadium ever!).

Some off-the-track notes about Toronto:
1. There are a lot of highways, they’re all at least 4 lanes (some as many as 8!) and they make excellent use of express lanes, ala Chicago. Seeing how efficient their highways are makes me more critical of Cincinnati’s and their lame excuse of an “update”/widening effort.

2. We’re staying at a Renaissance Inn (Marriott) by the airport. It was $100/day LESS than downtown and we’re saving on the $30/day parking fee the other Renaissance Inn charged. It’s particularly nice – indoor pool, full complimentary breakfast, weekday happy hours (that we’ve yet to catch), and incredibly friendly staff. Our suite is 2 rooms connected by a common area with sitting space and kitchen. Works out very well!

3. Nicole’s positives: she’s really cute (granted I’m biased, but I’m told so by strangers like 5X/day) and she’s super friendly. She started “talking” to this little girl in McDonald’s yesterday and hugged her by the time we left. Ladies wave to her and nudge their guys to look at her too. Some random woman videoed her at Niagra because she was waving and calling "hello". Jim commented, correctly I think, that we need to enjoy this period now while she’s little because it won’t be long and she’s just another kid that no one pays attention to.

4. Nicole’s negatives: she’s in a SUPER clingy phase but only with me. If I’m out of her sight at breakfast, for example, she’s throwing an obnoxious fit. She was getting antsy at the baseball game and I asked Jim to take her up to the main deck to walk around. He described her attitude as “ballistic” the entire time: “People were staring and not in a good way.” Result – I’m carrying/walking with/pushing her around most of Toronto myself without assistance. I don’t want public scenes so we work on the separation anxiety in the privacy of our hotel room.

5. Toronto is really really large – 2.5M. There are an absolute TON of downtown living places and grocery stores, museums, malls, etc. right downtown. Perhaps we should quit expecting (and being consequently disappointed) that people know where things are when we ask for directions.

Blogger

I’m on vacation so I took the time to do something I don’t have time for in the “real world” – researching new cool functions on Blogger. Turns out one that I’m interested in, Google Gadgets, I don’t even have access to. Perhaps it’s because my layout is from like 2005 or something but it’s all HTML, right? Why should that matter? Confused…. Intrigued…. Frustrated.

vacation

Day 1: The zoo. this is probably the largest zoo I've ever been to. We only saw half and that took 4 hours. Thing of note: the biggest grizzly bear ever. This thing was a downright monstrosity! When we got home we walked down to Jack Astor's for dinner and then took Nicole swimming that night. 2/3 on the boardgame front and then off to bed.

Day 2: Nicole again wakes up at 6:30am. HELLO - sleep in child! A nice complimentary hotel breakfast, Nic nap, and some H-O-R-S-E and we head over to Tim Horton's (they're frickin' everywhere) for lunch which was below par. This afternoon we caught the CN tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame (waaaayyyy too much information in general, much less for mediocre hockey fans), and then briefly up to the Easton Mall. Dad fed Nicole a strawberry milkshake which she could not get enough of.

We think we might head the hour and a half to Niagara Falls tomorrow as Jim's never seen it and we're so close.

Have a good week at WORK, friends! ha!