Randomness

It's nine thirty (or so). Caroline (finally) went down. I"m paying the consequences of gallavanting about this weekend with my family, I suppose. Bedtimes are nice, but what good are they if you can't break the routine once in a while?!?!
I think I'm recovering from this weekend, too. I just got run ragged. We did get some good pictures, but I filled the memory card on the camera, so there aren't as many pictures as there could have been.
The Chil-e Fest was a huge bust. The only activity that went off was the parade. It was a lot of fun. The weather had a part, I'm sure - but they really need to figure out how to get people downtown (well, besides building a Target).
The Red Wings games were fun. I learned some things. For instance: if you are a woman that has a wedding ring on and show up at a baseball game with a small child, you are automatically assumed to be a players wife. Even when you explain that you are not a players wife, but a player's sister (and that's a stretch) - it is still assumed that you are a player's wife. I couldn't convince some of them otherwise. Someday I may be able to use this to my advantage.

But for now - I'm posting this and hitting the hay.

Have a good night.

And from the weekend prior: Caroline enjoyed her first boatride...boy, do I wish she was asleep like that right now.

First Trip to Fenway

We were fortunate enough to get four tickets (did I mention for free?!?!) to the Red Sox vs. Royals game this past Monday. Since we had the extra ticket (Caroline just learned how to sit, but at Fenway she needs her own seat - sheesh) and couldn't find a baby sitter on that short of notice, we packed ourselves and our friend Shawn up and went to the game. We had a great time. We lasted until the middle of the eighth inning (had to hear "Sweet Caroline") and had relatively smooth sailing, especially considering it was 96 degrees with 80% humidity. The worst thing Caroline tried to do was to grab the food that belonged to the man sitting behind us (all she got was catsup, though). He was really good natured about it. The only really tenuous moment came when Doug Mirabelli his his three run home run to pull the Sox within one. The place got so loud so fast that Caroline got scared and started to cry. Once she realized that people were happy, it didn't take too long for her to come around to her normal self.

We did realize that "Friendly Fenway" isn't so friendly to families. And I'm not even talking about the obnoxious Red Sox fans with foul mouths. There aren't facilities to change diapers in most of the bathrooms. There is a "family" bathroom (with two toilets) for the whole bleacher section and a customer service area behind home plate, but if you're on either side of the grandstands you're pretty much left out to dry. I realize that even these are HUGE improvements over what used to be there, but still. I suppose you notice these things more with a baby. Luckily, I asked one of the EMTs in the the First Aide section where I could go and he guided me into the triage area for fans who are injured (which was air conditioned and had the game on television with sound piped in) and let me change her there and told us we could hang out as long as we wanted. I thought that was great (and certianly didn't mind the 10 minutes in the air conditioning)...

Even if we didn't get home until almost midnight, Caroline slept on the bus and in the car and seems no worse for the wear. Couldn't say the same for the both of us going to work on 5 hours sleep the next day. It will be a long time before we get to go again, but we had a great time.

Mom and Pat had a great time at the game yesterday, too. Great to see you guys!

From Baby Jail...

Our little convict...

Friday Fix

Caption: "You're killing me, Smalls!" (and extra points for anyone that can name the movie that it's from)...

This is really a picture (courtesy of Caroline's Grammy and Grampy) from last week. I've tried multiple times to post it, but every time I try to sit at the computer I fall asleep.
You think my body is trying to tell me something?
It has been an eventful week. Caroline has her first ear infection and we were able to see first hand just how far a baby can spit amoxicillin (about a foot straight up in the air, in case you were wondering). Jim then caught the bug (and this was after his parents had it) and now I have it. Oh - and the cat has an ingrown claw, so we have to give her amoxicillin, too. Why on earth they would give a cat (or a baby for that matter) bubble gum flavored antibiotics, I just don't know. I think God was prepping us with using our medicinal dosing skills on Caroline so we would be prepared to try to give it to the seven pound squirmy monkey that is our cat! The baby spits the drugs farther, but uses her claws much less. So it's kind of a draw as to which one is worse to administer to.
Okay - need to go be productive before the temperature gets to 95 degrees!

Have a great day!

Zulus Waive Bye-Bye To Chairman Mauer...

With our struggling team this year and so many injuries and, to coin a phrase, "sucking time" for many of our regulars plus with the emergence of C Mike Napoli, we felt that the Chairman had to be used as trade bait to prepare for next year and try to move up in the standings...so, with a goodbye to the Chairman, we say hello to fellow Twinkie (and $10 keeper for next year) SS Jason Bartlett, former Royal-turned-Yankee OF Aaron Gueil, who takes that place of Terrance Long (good riddance), and Jays P Justin Speier, who takes the place of now-traded Eddie Guardado.

Great New Baseball Graphs Website

And, they have copy/paste code to add their searchhbar to your webpages - so I did! Unfortunately, it's too big to fit on our sidebar (it'll push all the posts to the bottom and make it look ugly) so it's on the footer of the page - so scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to it. Nifty stuff...

Boynton Park [update]

Tonite, as a "super quick getaway", we drive up to Boynton Park, which is pretty close. We had to run fast, 'cause the mosquitos were out in force starting about 7 PM sharp (despite being fully laden with bug spray).



So we hiked it down the yellow trail and stopped at the waterfall area to grab dinner (pizza and apples).





When Karen had some sort of mutant big-daddy mosquito bite her ankle, that was it - time to go. It was starting to get dark out and the skeeters declared an all-out blitzkrieg.

We were amazed at the number of dogs with thier owners (who cleaned up after them very well, I must say) out there - by my count, we saw about 8 or so - and all well behaved, which was nice. Caroline didn't freak. But what she *did* freak over was the swing that we saw in the clearing next to our car. We strapped her in, and wow, did she love it:



And we used the movie feature of our digi camera, which actually does a decent job -


[update: the video is fixed (it takes time for blip.tv to turn the .mov html tags into a flash player) but you can still download the original movie here]

Links To Worcester CitySquare Development Work

Two links here - first is to the official City of Worcester page for the effort [here] and then the private developer's webpage for it here - this one does have some interactive displays showing what is being proposed. In general, the ginormous outlet mall is going to be wiped away and in its place will be street-level retail along with residential and some medical. The new side streets will replace what was essentially obliterated when the mall was plunked down in the first place (or so I assume).

Happy Birthday Satchel (maybe) And Other

Wit and wisdom from a guy who colorfully changed his age depending on who asked the question. And maybe Happy 100th birthday:

"Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

I also discovered this blog while looking through the sitemeter hits (on the top left of the blog) - an aggregator of sorts for culinary things that some chef out there put together: click here.

Also, we've been visited by Australia, Britain, Portugal, Mexico and India in the past week - pretty cool!

I Got To Hang With Daddy Yesterday

Yes, I had Daddy all to myself yesterday - no work for him, Mommy was at her work and Grammy, Grampy, Nana and Papi were all doing other things...I think he was happy because I picked out his retro-swingin-60's-gogo-skirt onesie for me to wear...I was being coy, so he had to take a couple of pictures to get this one:



See what I mean!




Since Daddy had a lot things to do, I slept 2 and a half hours in the morning so he could get his work done...he didn't wake me up when he vaccuumed or used the hammer and drill to put up the baby food rack in the downstairs part of the house or anything! It was nice because I got to fall asleep in his arms twice in the morning. I like doing that now.

Then Mommy came home for lunch so we all ate lunch together.

Once Mommy left Daddy tried to do all the laundry - but I wanted to play and play and play, so he could only get my load of baby laundry done. Right before Mommy came home for the day, I taught Daddy another new trick. We made a video of it for Mommy when I was getting sleepy that night - you can see it here:

A Pre-emptive Fix...

Dad - just do you don't call and ask me to wake up Caroline so you can hear her laugh...Here is your pre-emptive fix! =-)

Good thing I'm your favorite daughter so I can tell you things like that!

Love you.

Wednesday...

Yup - this is all I have to do on my day off.
Blog.
Yeah, right.
I figured I was entitled to do something enjoyable after vacuuming, washing the kitchen floor, sorting through old clothes, doing laundry, changing the bed, doing a general pickup and (oh, yeah) taking care of Caroline. I'm fortunate enough that she's taking a really long afternoon nap - so I get to have some "Me time".
I was sorting through the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, which I do every so often to keep up on current events out there and came across some really interesting stuff. We usually try to keep what's on the blog in the "things of little consquence" category, but this was really touching. Katie and her family are pretty amazing. She is higher level than the majority of the people that I worked with at the Fernald Center and the story about her (and by my experiences at Fernald) confirms my belief that everyone (no matter what cognitive level) is capable of love.
On a happier note: there was also a great story about an 89 year old gentleman still playing softball in the senior league at McAvoy Park. He thinks like I do about the game - it's all about having fun!!! He sounds like a really hot ticket.

Caroline update: She has been able to get on her hands and knees a couple of times and crawling appears to be imminent. The first of her teeth poked through yesterday and even though all the books say that "teething doesn't hurt". I think they're full of it and gave in and gave her some Tylenol. She was much better after that.

Monday...

Courtesty of Grammy and Grampy. Thanks for the great pics!

Moviestar!

Add your own captions to these pics from Karen's cousin's wedding this past weekend up in up-upstate NY:

*THE* Cookie Monster Post

We've been posting a lot about how Caroline loves cookie monster (like here, here, here, and here. Oh, here and here, too). Well, we were stuck looking for family before Karen's cousin's wedding, and I JUST HAD to listen to cookie monster sing his opus, "Cookie Starts With 'C'"[mp3]. This led to a rather short web search, which led me to this page of related cookie monster links. On the page is a youtube link to a whole treasure trove of old school Sesame Street videos. Including, natch, cookie monster and his opus. Also listed are his spoof of Shaft, stealing cupcakes from Ernie, stealing Ernie's pillow, a great spoof of the legend of Casey MacFee, and cookie monster's true calling, as Alastair Cooke's counterpart in Monsterpiece Theatre.

And you think we didn't like cookie either ;o)

Here's the video link for the C is for Cookie vid: