Happy Birthday Jordan!

Today was Jordan's first birthday! It was a good party (though we lost the footage of the cake and candles being blown out!). Here's my favorite picture from the party and a few videos of Jordan enjoying her daddy's chocolate cake.



Jordan begins eating her cake and demonstrates her ability to use utensils (sort of).


Now she's getting into it. This cake and ice cream thing may be ok.


Baby is displeased! Baby smash!

Book Review

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was the first book from Michael Chabon that I've read. Overall I enjoyed the story and the setting though sometimes the Yiddish slang and terminology was briefly confusing. Though everything was explained in an appendix I think I would have preferred to have them footnoted when they were introduced. Though the story was good it didn't really grab me like I was hoping it would.


View all my reviews.

New Jordan Videos

Here are a couple of new videos of Jordan. First, the most significant, her first few steps!



And next, an epic struggle!

Random Stuff

I have to say that I love my new iPhone! I must be geekier than I thought because I thought the whole iPhone thing was ridiculous when they first came out. Who really wants to stand in line for hours for a silly phone? Yet, there we were... It's like having a mini laptop that just happens to make and receive phone calls. Awesome!

I seem to be driving my boss crazy though when I Google something from my phone. I guess it's still a little too new.

Jordan's been teething again. She now has three teeth on the top and three on the bottom. She's got another one coming in on the top now. Brett thinks that she's having trouble learning to walk because she's a little lopsided in the mouth.

I just had a massage that was very relaxing, yet I feel energized. I had planned on taking a nap afterward, but just can't seem to sleep. I'm always told to "drink lots of water" after my massages. Do they tell everyone that? I was also told that I'm probably having back pain because my "glutes" are too tight. Hmmmm. Litterally a pain in the ass. What could be causing that?

Jordan turns one in just a couple of weeks. How did that year go by so fast? I'm guessing that sleep deprivation may have contributed to my missing much of the last year. I'm really just hoping that it's not because I'm getting old.

I guess that's enough random stuff for one day.

iPhone is my phone

I'm posting this from our new iPhone mainly just to prove to myself that I can. It's not quite as simple as using a laptop, but it sure is snazzy!

Home Sweet Daycare

We had quite a weekend getting ready for a change in our routine and I think we mostly pulled it together in time. Starting yesterday the nice grandmotherly lady that we've been contracting to watch Jordan and Lucy had to move from Lucy's parents house to our house. They're trying to frantically finish renovations so that they can finally sell their house and skedaddle off to Nevada and I guess the girls weren't helping. Over the weekend we had to "OMG FINISH BABY PROOFING" from the living room to the kitchen, install baby gates, put down the play rug, clean clean and clean some more, replace the cheapo toilet seat that broke, vacuum up the mouse turds from the newly discovered ex-hiding places that we found, put the last few boxes away and re-activate our Vonage account since Celfa doesn't have a cell phone. I finally went to bed around 1 A.M. Monday morning after doing the last load of dishes.

The upside is that our house is now clean and baby proofed and Celfa cleaned our coutertops and stove while she was watching the babies. She can stay.

Mission Accomplished

Megan wanted to "cut and run" in typical liberal fashion and call in some fancy exterminator to take care of our "mouse problem". Well let me tell you, 3 weeks and $4 dollars later and I'm saying "Problem solved!". It was brutal at times but freedom doesn't come without sacrifice. I tried reasoning with them, I tried to turn them away from a life of villainy and pooping on my counter tops but at some point you have to have a more pro-active approach to dealing with assaults on your home and that time finally came.

I think for me the final straw was finding that the dog food, which we keep ON TOP OF THE REFRIGERATOR,
had been violated and yes, there was mouse feces there too now. I spent a $1.25 on some old school Tom and Jerry style traps and set 4 of them up in the house. The first night all four traps were either sprung or had their bait removed. The mastermind mouse, a huge beast of a rodent, was caught on the second night. I think this spooked the rest because that day we caught two more in the "catch and release" trap. Instead of dropping them off across the street though, I took them to a park across town. I didn't want to see them again. After that day it was a series of check trap, re-bait and throw out traps that had caught something. We caught a mouse a day for a week solid. Finally I think its over, we're on day 3 now without tripping a trap or having the bait stolen so I'm happy. Now we just have to clean up all of the poop they left behind and try and plug the holes that they entered our house from in the first place (which is icky and full of spiderwebs and gross stuff so I'm procrastinating).