JeffJournal

My daughters like to play this fun game. It’s called “let’s confuse the crap out of daddy.” It goes like this:

• Dad’s on the night shift. He’s working down in his office with the baby monitor. Girls are [supposedly] asleep in their crib just down the hall.
• One of the girls will start fussing (for those of you without children, this means “sreaming bloody murder for no apparent reason”).
• Dad rockets out of his chair and down the hall, bashing into (at a minimum) the railing and table, stifling expletives and pain, and gently bursts into the nursery. Right about at this point, the source child stops fussing (for those of you without children, this means “return to peaceful state and pretend that nothing was wrong”)
• By the time daddy gets to the crip, there is zero evidence as to which child was pissed off. Dad is inevitably left standing there scratching his head, usually waiting several minutes to watch and see if either child provides evidence as to which was unhappy.
• Typically, they both sleep peacefully for up to 10 minutes (while daddy is waiting). Hence, daddy exits.
• When the girls are having a good night, they can time the next fuss (read: “Meggadeath performance”) when daddy is only about halfway down the hall back to his office.

This usually repeats 4 or 5 times before one (or both) decide that a) they’re too tired, and therefore go to sleep, or b) they’re too pissed off (for some arbitrary reason) and therefore need some TLC before they’ll go back to sleep.

“If you thought having one baby was hard, try having two. ‘nuff said.”

A major thank you to everyone who has sent us gifts. We haven’t managed to get thank you cards out yet, but rest assurred, we will.

My daughters also make all kinds of noise while they sleep. Grunts, strechy-noises (like the noises you make in the morning when you stretch after waking up), groans, whines, beeps, and mouse noises — squeaks and the like. Lots and lots of squeaks.

I don’t even pretend to understand anything about the Chechen situation.

What I do understand is the horror of the school blast that occurred. I don’t understand what could have been hoped to be gained by killing hundreds of children. Truly, this was their 9/11.

My heart goes out to the families of the wounded and killed.

• Babies come with hats
• Volume of screaming has nothing to do with anything
• Sleep is optional
• When babies do sleep, they can sleep anywhere, anytime, while doing anything
• Poop can be launched horizontally for quite a distance
• The weight of a filled Huggies can be twice that of the baby itself
• A valid exit point for vomit is the nose
• Babies sleep out loud (lots of movement, grunts, squeaks, and stretching)
• Crying is a 3 step proess: 1) scrinch up your face, 2) hyperventilate 6-7 times, 3) wail like Mick Jagger — wail long, wail loud, and wail often. Whatever happens, don’t let anyone tell you to stop, because everyone should hear you sing.
• Exorcist-style vomit is neither unnatural nor uncommon

Blog spam is pissing me off. I got 5 posts yesterday and another 5 today. While I was deleting them, I got confused and accidentally deleted a valid comment. #$%@#$%#@$!!!!! Sorry Andras. :-(

If I keep getting blog spams, I’m going to have to convert this to a you-must-register-before-you-can-post blog. Sorry folks — it’s not like there’s a million people who post to my blog, but I just don’t have the time to keep deleting these spam posts.

#$%#%#!!!!

Big props to Tony H. for pointing me to the MT-Blacklist plugin to my blog system, as well as the MT-Blacklist clearinghouse (ok, I’m shamelessly linking to both because they’re both quite worthy and quite excellent).

Should help a lot in reducing the spam, and has quelled my desire to immediately turn off un-registered comments.

Woot!

We’re open for business:

No software yet — that will come at SC, but the web site is now live and we can start publicly talking about what we’ve been doing for the last 9.5 months.

Woo hoo!

My transformation to the dark side is nearly complete. We’re about to buy… a mini-van.

But it’s actually one friggen’ cool mini-van.

We put a deposit down on a Honda Odessey 2005 about a month ago (they haven’t been released yet — many thanks to eagle-eyed Stuart C. for finding a preview article about the ‘05 Odyssey in a magazine and giving us the tip!). We weren’t expecting it until the end of the month or so. However, our sales guy called this morning and said that due to hurricane Ivan, Honda shipped all the Odesseys out of their Alabama production plant waaaaay early, so our dealer has taken a shipment of 4 already. I went to see it today — woof. Lotsa family-truckster-friendly features. Lots of them. I mean, lots of them!

They don’t want to sell those 4 until some more new ones arrive (they need to have stuff to display in the showroom). Since we already put money down, we’re literally at the top of the waiting list, so it looks like we will be Louisville’s first Odyssey ‘05 (touring edition) owner early- to mid-next week when the next touring edition model arrives at the dealer. Oh yes, it will be mine.

I won’t bother repeating all the details that are on the Honda site mentioned above (google around; there’s lots of speculation and facts available), but suffice it to say that it’s a mini-van that feels like a Acura.

The munchkins will be driven around in style.

One of the most frustating things about parenting newborns is that the only feedback you get is when they cry. The cries are subtly different, but it takes a while to learn them. When you don’t know them, all you hear is crying and it’s very very frustrating to not know why your baby is crying.

We’ve assembled a partial list as to why our children cry:

• I’m hungry
• I’m tired
• I’ve peed all over myself
• I’ve peed all over daddy
• I’ve peed all over mommy
• I’ve peed all over mommy and daddy
• I’ve peed so much that the couch needs to be drained
• I will want a very expensive wedding someday
• So will my sister
• At the same time
• And by the way, we’ll be marrying two boys that you absolutely hate

We’re tired.

Send sleep.

The Irish had a decent game yesterday. They kinda fell apart in the 3rd quarter, but other than that, they’re actually looking like they’re coming together as a team. Keep it up, guys!

The main purpose of this entry is fairly frivolious — I’m testing some new features in MT 3.11, and after digging through a lot of web pages, I finally found the version of MT-Blacklist that works with MT 3.11 (my blog software): 2.01b. For anyone else as mystified as me — and that’s probably most people who don’t follow the intimate details of MT and MT-Blacklist releases — you can (currently) only get 2.01b from the MT 3.1 plugin pack.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m quite happy with both MT 3.11 and MT-Blacklist 2.01b. They’re both great pieces of software! It just took a bit to find out which versions match which, and neither has a strictly consecutive version number scheme.

So let’s see what happens here…

Odyssey update. We decided to get a slightly different model, so the whole “first Odyssey ‘05 owner in Louisville” thing got shifted. Apparently, our minivan was built 2 days ago and will be here in Louisville in about a week.

Woo hoo!

My C* Robin was here for a few days to help out with the twins. As a mother of two herself, it was really great to have her around and hear her take on things. It was fantastic to have her here for a long weekend.

As a “thank you” gift, we got Robin a Tivo. It arrived Thursday night, and they’re apparently already enjoying it thoroughly. They Tivo’ed the ND football game this weekend, for example.

Welcome to the Tivolution, baby!

I finally got around to updating the style here on JJournal — lotsa people complained about the old style (if you had a narrow screen, the calendar on the right wouldn’t display properly). With the new style, it should display correctly for everyone. Well, except the Saturday column is half-clipped for me… ehh… I don’t care ☺.

I also upgraded to MoveableType 3.11. No huge improvements from my perspective, but there’s a few nice little things that I’ll enjoy.