Various Nathan quotes:
"ARGGGH! I always lose when I play sky soccer'" (what?)
(during the reading of The Passion at church's Good Friday service) "They cut off his WHAT!?"
"No, no, no!" (about a million times a day...)
....
Adam had Nathan each had check-ups at the doctor a few weeks ago. Nathan was 35 pounds, which as I recall is the same he weighed about a year ago. Evidently he's just spent the last year stretching out vertically. Adam went from the 9 pounds he weighed 2 1/2 weeks before that to 10 pounds 11 ounces at that visit, then 12 1/2 pounds at his visit yesterday. Evidently we at least are feeding him enough.
...
Nathan never really minded his immunizations. He would occasionally get slightly grumpy the day after, and that was about it. Adam, it turns out, minds. He explained this to me last night for about 90 minutes straight, at the top of his lungs. He eventually fell asleep, and for the next several hours would wake only to moan pitiably before falling back to sleep. That's something, I guess.
...
Because we don't have enough going on in our lives (new baby, no more daycare, about to start going back to work and school, new 2-afternoon-a-week preschool for Nathan), we're also having our kitchen remodeled. The first two weeks of work were entirely outside. The last couple of weeks have been more interesting, as we no longer really have a kitchen. Or an outside wall to speak of, which makes downstairs cold. (Since our thermostat is downstairs, this means that upstairs is really warm.) Yesterday they knocked down another wall inside, which basically means that we can't be downstairs at all right now. So here we are, in our big house, living in ... our master bedroom (aka dining room, aka play room).
...
Nathan demonstrated to us why we shouldn't play downstairs in the construction zone by getting a splinter in the ball of his foot over the weekend. Meredith and I spent about an hour trying to get it out with tweezers. This is, not surprisingly, difficult when the patient in question is kicking as though his immortal soul depended on keeping away from the tweezers. We eventually gave up -- two parents is not enough to restrain that kid enough to pull it out. Meredith even took him to our doctor yesterday, who said that they can't pull splinters out of kids, and if it doesn't come out on its own in a few days, we'll have to take him to Children's Hospital. This feels slightly ridiculous, but the real problem is that Nathan is compensating for the splinter by turning his foot so that he walks on the side of his foot -- in other words, he's basically recreating the original club position of his foot. Having spent 3+ years correcting that, it's physically painful for me to watch him walk like that.
...
In the historic tradition of the church, Adam got baptized on Easter Sunday. Even more exciting was that Adam's birthmother made it up from Oregon for the service. We also got to meet her grandparents, who live nearby.
...
I had to buy stamps today to mail some bills. The United States Postal Service, continuing to demonstrate its commitment to excellence, decided that April 15 seemed like a fine day to be doing some remodeling in Kirkland, including removing two of their stamp machines, leaving only one -- which was being taken offline for repairs as I was there. This was, in fact, my first visit to the Kirkland post office ever where I saw this particular machine working even a little bit, so I was relieved to see that it was going to be shut down as soon as possible. I mean, hey, who visits a post office on April 15?
...
And, lastly, let me just say: Go Vols. Meredith said she'd been looking forward to seeing Stanford and Tennessee in the women's college basketball championship for ten years. Alas for her, Tennessee continued its dominance over Stanford. To be fair, much of the credit for this goes to Stanford, who clearly entered the game convinced that they'd lose. The defining moment of the game, for me, was when UT's Candace Parker took a shot at the basket -- and immediately, all of the Stanford players started going the other way, sure that it would go in. In fact, it didn't, but the really easy offensive rebound (since no one from Stanford was around to go for it) did go in. What's that they say about self-fulfilling prophecies? As a result of our bet, Meredith now gets to listen to 'Rocky Top' as the ringtone on her cell phone anytime I call for the next month. Ah, the sweet sound of victory...
Yesterday, out of the blue, Nathan asks: "Daddy, how did Adam come out of Mama J's breasts when he was born?"
Meredith noticed this morning that Nathan's splinter was starting to look infected. Since our pediatrician, for reasons passing understanding, can't remove it, she called Children's Hospital as instructed. They evidently thought that this sounded as stupid as we did, but eventually set up an appointment for 6:45 PM at the after-hours clinic in Bellevue. Why after hours? Because during normal hours, your regular doctor could do this ... except that ... bah.
With three people restraining Nathan (doctor, Meredith, and me), the doctor was able to get the splinter out. It no doubt helped that she was probably a lot better at this in general than I was anyway. The splinter was somewhat longer than we'd expected. And she took a sample of the pus that came out, commenting, "looks like Staph."
Oh yay.
So we got antibiotics. Nathan reacted to getting to take that about the same way he did do the splinter removal itself. I thought I might kill him when he managed to spit a mouthful of antibiotic into my eye. Twice a day for ten days. Only nineteen doses to go.
With Adam waking up at 5:15 AM yesterday, then waking me up for feedings last night from 3-3:30, 5-5:30, then again at 7, then this evening dealing with the splinter ... it's been a long day.
I got in my car this morning to hear on the radio: "I wanna know / Have you ever seen the rain?"
Yes. Yes, I have.
Yeah, snow. I drove home through a hailstorm Friday night, and we watched it snow this morning. Last weekend it was 77 degrees, sunny, and clear. Good times.
...
Levi told me I had to watch this episode of South Park. That show continues to be pure genius. Cartman, as inner-city teacher: “Just before the last Super Bowl, Bill Belichick gathered his football players and said let’s win this one for real… Just this one time.. Let’s not cheat. You know what happened? They lost.”
...
Nathan continues to take his antibiotic, smuggled into a big cup of V-8 juice now. I tried it last night and he looked up at me and said, "this kind of taste like medicine." And then continued to drink it. After this morning's dose, he asked me point blank if it had medicine, so I told him it did. Then he got mad. But at least he's getting it into him. Tomorrow we need to track down the lab result to make sure he doesn't have some weird antibiotic-resistant form of Staph.
...
Our kitchen remodel continues. Some subcontractor was here on Friday hanging drywall. This was exciting except for the part where they didn't bother cleaning up at all, so it's been pretty fun walking through the 1/4" deep pile of drywall dust in the kitchen floor. And admiring the dust all over the piano, since they didn't bother sheeting off the area where they were working. Oh well. The contractor has been great about cleaning up at the end of the day, but he wasn't here when they were doing this.
Yesterday, Nathan explained to me that he had a girlfriend. An imaginary girlfriend. Her name is Actua (pronounced like Actual, but without the L). I got to meet her this morning when Nathan invited Actua into bed with us.
Today, Meredith sent me this IM:
btw, nathan asked me today if you had a girlfriend too
when i told him that i was your girlfriend, he replied, "maybe he have two girlfriends."