EJ and The Wanda

EJ and The Wanda
Originally uploaded by n8k99.

Two forces come together at last, in my lap.

Big Developments

I know that The Wanda loves me. She tries to crawl into my lap in the mornings when I am writing my morning pages. She jumps into my lap at night when I am writing on the computer. She rubs against my legs while we are eating at the dinner table. Wanda is a cat who has been won over. She will play games with me whether I have the Catfisher or an old balloon. She is totally hooked on me.

This afternoon, Squeaky and I had to go out for an hour or so and do some things in the neighborhood. After we were done and we were heading back towards the homestead, I suddenly had the urge for sushi. Lucky for me we were near the supermarket. We are so lucky to live in New York City where the local supermarket has a sushi chef. Or had. When we got inside and up to the counter where he is normally located there was nothing but prefab sushi that was on display and his station was vacant.

No worries. There is an inexpensive sushi restuarant just a block away. I was able to order two basic fish rolls for $6. They also came with a bowl of Miso soup and a salad. As my daughter has begun to master the art of reaching out for things and grabbing them, I realized as soon as the first sspoon of soup was travelling over her head that there was going to be difficulty.

The key to my philosophy has been to turn adversity into opportunity. This translates into a very practical approach to things, such as childcare. Rather than fight her while she is in the Baby Björn, I unbuckled the saddle and seated her in my lap in such a manner that I could pour a tiny bit of the broth into her gullet. Smacking her lips afterwards, I dfigured that we were in for a decent little snack of soup.

The last Doctor’s visit, we were encouraged to begin feeding her rice milk and other very western means of baby food. She lives on breast milk, but we have been introducing her to new tastes. Well, we have been doing that for sometime now, but with our doctor’s ‘orders’ we have been really pleased to see that she enjoys cantelope (Rock Melon for the Down Unders), watermelon, grapes, bananas and peaches. We sucked on a nectarine this morning and she just loves the taste of fruit. We very happy that she does.

Once I began to eat my sushi; which is really about the sticky rice, not so much teh raw fish; with my chopsticks, the Little Bug knew, she just knew that those sticks were supposed to go in your mouth. Her little mitt snaked out of my arm fold and snagged a hold of them on the return trip from my mouth. She opened her maw and tried to suck on them. After I wrestled them away from her, I thought about it briefly and then lifted from the lettuce some of the pulpy dressing and popped it into her mouth.

She really liked the dressing. I knew she would, for it was very refreshing and tasty. I spoke to the chef about the dressing and he informed me that he had made it by chopping ginger, apple, carrots, orange and lemon in a blender. He snuck a little mayonnaise in to hold it all together (please don’t tell me I have been eating mayonnaise for all these years in my Ginger-Carrot Dressings.) Both EJ and myself agreed that it was very good, and I continued to feed my baby with chopsticks.

After we got home, we were having some milk on the bed, sll snuggled on the pillows when The Wanda decide that it was time she was formally introduced to the Squeakster. The Little Bug was so surprised that she dropped the bottle and stared. Wanda actually stuck around long enough that Eliza-Jane could rub her belly and her tail! This was a monumental break through in Cat-Baby relations!! EJ was even inspired to sit mostly-up, on her own! Then promptly The Wanda left and The Bug began to rub her eyes and pout just like her mother does when she is exhausted. It really didn’t take very long in the crib before she fell asleep. In fact, she was asleep before I told you about the dressing and the chopsticks.

Balloons

Eliza-Jane loves to play with balloons. As Nathan said: “Who needs expensive toys? She loves this two-week old, almost deflated balloon…” We knew it would be this way.

Archives have been fixed.

It took just a little bit of time to insure that the job was indeed complete, but the archives of this blog are now online and running properly. So, if you want to read any of the old posts from the early days of Squeaky’s life, there is a drop down menu which will transport you to a monthly collection of all the stories. I did debate and look at another method where you can look for a story by a certain title. I camne to the conclusion that it will be too long a list of titles. It will be easier to use the archives by searching a page that includes all the postings from one month.

RSS-Planet newsmap

RSS-Planet newsmap
I start out doing one thing and very soon it turns completely on it’s ear and becomes a project of completely different nature.Like this project for example, it started out as an experiment from an article about using one text document to run everything and next thing I know, I’m back at the desktop/browser question. Which leads me into new directions on the same probelm.

The first inroads I made was with RSS-Planet. Martin Doege coded the idea into reality, now this idea is even more ambitious than the last. It is something that I feel pretty certain that lots of peolee are already working towards this idea. It feels really good to have the idea. The only thing I have to wonder about it if I will be able to come up with the skill set to complete the task. I want to turn the whole concept into a Firefox extension, yet Firefox is programmed in C/C++. I have no idea where to start with those languages, except at the beginning.

Now, we are charging at this task from a completely different directions to connect xplanet/rss planet as a web page for the site. Then perhaps it can get dreamed up to a really big, big, big proportion. For now it is very exciting to get this going and heading off into new areas. It is not complete in anyway shape or form, but it has begun. we are now up to version 1.3

Oh man that steams me!!

The postman must be a vacation this week. Every single day for the entire week our mail has gone downstairs to the Doctor’s office, and the Doctor’s mail has gone to our slot. Today was the only day that was a probelm strictly due to the office being closed all day!! So We did manage to pull one of our magazines out through the slot and carry it inside to read. It was a rag called Babytalk with the subtitle “straight talk for new moms.” I have yet to read one of these magazines cover to cover. I have also yet to read one of these type magazines without getting severely outraged. And today was no exception.

Right now, we are so lucky. It is apparent after reading this article that was full of statistics like:

3/4 of the dads say their wife puts their needs second to the baby’s

75% of the women agree that, at first, “a mother should put her relationship with her baby ahead of that with her husband.”

61% of new fathers say that their baby responds better to Mommy than to them. (But don’t feel too bad for them: 22% of those dads admit that they are relieved because it gets them out of baby duties!)

Naturally, the respondents to the poll were 90% women, and 90% of the men who responded work full time. So this sketches out a terrible view of the rest of the country’s attitude towards childrearing and child care. The statistic which I disagree with the most, and I got a hearty second-that-emotion from Steph, is the baby’s relationship first over the husband.

I have taken some polls and some surveys and know that they get skewed and tilted by the manner in which they are written. But I find it hard to believe that the writers of the poll did not give these women the option to say that the two relationships are different in nature. It really needs to be stated that the relationship between mother and father is dramatically important to the development of a child. In fact this relationship is paramount in importance. Firstly, without any such reltionship between father and mother, these terms would be null and void in individual cases.

In the article, the 61% statistic was backed up by a quote from a father in the midwest who stated “In the begining, especially, the minute my wife would hand our daughter to me, the baby would cry. Then my wife would take her back and she would be fine. It made me wonder, ‘What am I doing wrong? Why does she like her mommy so much better then me?’” Well, Duh! Mom has the Boobs! However, Mom also needs to let you hold her and develop a relationship from the start, you have to hold them when they cry before you can hold them before they settle down.

I just wonder, Did they only get comments from whiney little wusses who are afraid of a baby? It is articles ( and as the other articles in the magazine ran along this party line, I’d extend it to the whole magazine. I will restrain from condemning the entire line of magazines aimed at new mothers/new parents) which go a long, long ways towards continuing the seperation of men from their children. These sorts of ‘common knowledge’ surveys indicate that there is much work to be done to help break the cycle of emotional unavailibility from dear, old Dad. Sorry Pop, I really don’t think that this applies to you, except for that time you didn’t get me a pony.

Again, I can’t help but think of how incredibly lucky we are. We are free from the restraint of society conventions because we have followed our hearts. There seems to be so much pressure on women to be good moms, and now to do it with a career as well, plus they have to subscribe to this magazine lifestyle that can only be superceeded by the lifestyle that is advertised in commercials. It’s all synergetic consummerism. We get the magazine for free, just so that the advertisers can reach the market of new parents.

When I walk around the streets of our neighborhood, I get lots of old ladies who stop and most of them just say “that she is so cute!” I feel no pressure from anybody external to our household, to have the bestestesses of the pre-pre-pre-schools picked out for my daughter. Nor do I get very much unsolicitated advice. Yet, the rumor mill on all the SAHD websites ( and several of the newspaper articles) indicate that this is a common occurance with women and moms. Please if I am completely off base here, someone please let me know. (By the way, I’d like it very much if you leave you comments in teh comments section and not through teh email link, this way we can facilitate a conversation with many different voices.)

$1,000,000,000.00

It would be fun to try to spend it all.

My Day with Squeaky

We wake up in the morning. I write my morning pages and put on a pot of coffee while she plays on the Gyminee mat. Then we have a bottle. Afterwards she helps me check email and IM Mommy. Usually, she gets tired and takes a nap after all that activity. When she wakes up from her morning nap, she usually needs a diaper change. Then we have some more of the bottle before we play together on the swing. Sometimes we go out side at this point. You know just a little walk around the neighborhood to do some errands and what not.

Today while walking around the neighborhood, we ran into two other Dads. They both had strollers with kids in them. We walked over to them and introduced ourselves. Then we hung out with them for an hour and some minutes. It was really quite nice to meet some other Dads in the neighborhood. we look forward to seeing Matt and Pat and the three kids. Pat has a boy named Sean and a four week old little girl. Mat is the father of Luke. Both Dads were lucky to have a day off to be with the kids that was so nice.

After that we headed to the Brooklyn Bridge Park to catch a DJ at sunset and watch a movie (Mr. Robertswith some people from church. It was a really relaxing evening. It did end quite late as we just now arrived home after a hike to our train and a long wait for it to arrive. Now we are all just settling in to the evening; feeding and resting and getting ready for bed. That was my day with Squeaky (& Steph!!)

Living in text files

Living in text files
I spend a lot of time on the web. I find all sorts of ideas while shifting through the information that passes through my eye sockets. This one I saw a week or so ago, I let it slide cause I thought “the system I have is flawless now.” Even as I have been looking at various wikis and other productivity software. then tonight I tried it out. While I was begining to use it, I really don’t have that much that needs to be done; the guys on these pages have like 4000 lines of stuff that needs to be done, but they would have this posting on there at the same time.

Anyways, I thought,”Hey, I’m learning how to hand code HTML why not do this all in HTML so I can save it on my website’s server and then I can have all my important files on any machine.” It’s just a text file but I can read it on the web, I can work off of it, and then I am right back to where we were in the mid-90s. So I made it, I’ll see how it goes and how I use it and if it works out for me or not.

Perhaps, I will add CSS to it as I am also learning that right now.

BTW, WHY Do I write this page?

A Dad and His Blog

So after most of a day of brute force changes to the files that make up my archives, I found the much more elegant inline republisher at Blogger. What that has successfully given me, is the reformatting of all the individual posts. So all the old stories have the same template and appearance. However, the Archive page itself did not go through the process no matter how many times that Blogger told me that it republished those pages, it didn’t. What that means is tomorrow, I’ll craft some new archive pages that the links look for and then amazingly enough, I may be done with this probelm much earlier than I suspected.

Naturally, this work is being done at periods where I do not need to give Eliza-Jane 100% of my attention. She likes to swing for about half an hour, which is right next to the desk and we can chat while we work. She has lots to do in the swing. For one thing, she has to eat the Star Mirror which is mounted on her dashboard. Then the globey thing has to be gripped. She tells me all about it while she is working.

When she takes anap thats when I get all sorts of stuff done. Sweep the floors, wash the dishes, enter code, you name it, if it needs to be done around the house, then it gets done while EJ naps.

This morning while I was checking email and chatting with Steph on the IM, Squeaky sat in my lap and was very helpful. She watched the pointer move around between areas of the screen. When I settled on an email to open, she followed the scrolling page as we read it. then as I typed my conversation with Steph, she had her hands on top of mine. She was very helpful indeed. Next week, I’ll get her to start entering some lines of code while I kick back with my feet on the desk!

We went for a walk around the neighborhood tonight as it was so beautiful outside. There was a hint of Autumn in the air, and I was full of hopeful anticipation. Autumn in New York is my favorite time of the year. I put up with the misery of summer just for the cosmic pay-off of Fall. The temperatures drop and the air gets crisp, oh my , it’s enough to make me get all swooney!! Anyways, Eliza-Jane rode around in her stroller and faught to stay awake the whole time. She is just like her parents, doesn’t want to miss a thing! We have completed the midnight feeding and now I am going to surf around for a little bit before the next feeding.