WARNING- wear a facemask before viewing!

Yesterday E went to visit a prospective daycare, which happens to be located 2 blocks away, is run by a nice Chinese lady, and they have an opening in September.  To be honest, our chances of getting e into a daycare is pretty slim due to the high demand, but then this one came out of nowhere, and seems to fit our criteria almost perfectly… Hmmm, strange forces are at work here…

As the meeting was 6, it threw off our schedule a bit.  e’s solid feeding was pretty tough, and we needed multiple wet paper towels to clean her, and the feeding area up.  In between, we had to finish making our dinner and wolf it down quickly as we wanted to get a Superstore run in.

I think our minds were preoccupied with a lot of things- looking for a house, leaving e at a daycare, E returning to work, calling daycare references, etc. 

 As we drove into the parking lot, we automatically went through our routine- I put on the ergo carrier without the shoulder straps, E gets baby and transfers her over… very similar to the Emporer Penguins and their egg transfer.  E puts baby into the carrier facing me, and as I lean back to slide the shoulder straps on, the waist belt pops open and e drops to the pavement…

It was one of those moments where things happen so fast you’re in disbelief.  E wheels around and yells something, and all I notice after the pop is that I can’t feel e’s weight against me.  E is the first to get to e, and by this time baby is screaming.  Her nose is scraped up pretty good, and there’s a welt on her forehead.  This is the worst feeling in the world…

We quickly assess what’s happening.  It’s a good thing she’s crying loudly…. as it means she didn’t lose consciousness and likely no concussion.  Limbs are ok, no blood coming from inside nose and a tiny bit from her lip.  Nothing to indicate we need to call 911 or turn myself into the bad parent police.

We rush her home and ran a warm bath.  She calmed down in the car, so that’s another good sign.  As I was taking her diaper shirt off, the poor thing was sniffling… and I remember it’s that stuffy feeling when you get bonked on the nose by a football.  If her nose was broken, there would be a lot more swelling, blood, and tears… so I was pretty sure it wasn’t broken.  In her bath, she was acting normally, splashing around playing with her ducks, and we didn’t see any more bruises or scrapes.  I held her for awhile until she was ready for sleep, then stayed in her room until she fell asleep. 

The ergo carrier has a plastic common buckle, like you see on most backpacks, that closes at your waist at your back.  When I closed it, I must not have pushed fully… so that the carrier stayed on my waist, but would not hold any weight.  Furthermore, the ergo has an extra safety feature- a piece of fabric that you slide the male end of the buckle through, so if it accidently disengages, the fabric would catch it.

The problem is that when I wear it, i have to pull the strap through the piece of fabric, and you can bypass the safety feature when buckling up again.  Plus the fact that the buckle is behind you, and you can’t visually see it close.  So big safety lesson learned- slide the buckle through the safety catch, and listen/feel the snap.   I shudder to think what might have happened if she landed differently.

We both had a sleepness night thinking of what happened, and the other lesson I’ve learned is to put all distractions aside when handling baby.  All that other stuff can be discussed after baby goes to sleep. 

The good news is that e is back to her normal self today.  She won’t get any dates this weekend, but I’m fine with that.  🙂    I don’t think E and I have been this scared before, and so when I gave her a hug today, it had extra meaning…

So Jennifer introduced E and I to facebook.  Now E has probably doubled her time in front of the computer. 😉

I have to say that facebook came as a bit of a surprise to me in terms of how quickly it’s grown in popularity.  They say that communities are being created by these services- LinkedIN, Blogs, MSN Messenger, YouTube… and this one seems here to stay.  I almost use E as a litmus test, if she’s into it, then it’s easy to use and will have a high adoption rate.  I think she’s posting all her pictures on it.

I still prefer to blog- and will continue to post photos here… as long as I don’t use up Lester’s bandwidth.  🙂

So my niece, Erica’s 1st cousin arrived on Mother’s day! 

Going to visit Elaine and Gord in the birthing suite brought back a lot of memories, and a reminder of how difficult, yet rewarding it is to bring a baby into this world.  It also reminded us of the first few days and weeks… those were certainly some challenging days, hard to imagine that anyone can survive them… but everyone gets through it. 

It also reminded us that as new parents there are a couple of requests- keep the hospital visits very short, and for the first few weeks/month at home, call before you visit, keep the visits short, and bring a home cooked meal 🙂

So who does Lauren look like?  Hard to tell at this stage, but Gord says she’s more like Ernie than Bert.  😐  Anyways, congratulations!  It was a tough delivery, but everyone is healthy and safe! 

Erica is 9 months tomorrow, and is about 18lbs, 5oz.  That’s triple her birth weight.  We have one more swim lesson to go.  Last lesson, we dunked her head under about 10 times, and each time she closed her eyes and mouth. Good girl!  However she still stuck her tongue out to taste the pool water.  🙁

We’re thinking of signing up for another set of lessons, not that we’ll learn anything new as it’s fairly repetitious, but because it’s nice to get out on a Saturday AM, and she really likes to kick and swim.  The side effect is when we give her a bath- we really get a splashfest!

Erica’s now 8 months old, and has 6 swim lessons under her diaper.  There’s a game similar to “Ring around the rosie” where you pick an animal or fish, and you go with your baby into the middle of the circle.  The others then swim around you singing “there’s a (duck, marlin, shark, etc) in the middle and she can’t get out… what is she going to do?”  At that point you say “bubbles!” and submerge your baby under to escape the ring.  Clever.

When it was Erica’s turn, Evonne said “she’s a Tilapia!”  Teresa looked puzzled… obviously it was a new one for her.  🙂

So life at 8 months… wow, 2/3 of the way to a year.  She’s still doing raspberries, more complex babbling “mah-mah, bah-bah”, and her manual dexterity is really improving- grabbing and reaching for objects with accuracy.  She can pretty much sit up and stay stable without too much worry, although we bought some foam pieces to lay on our rug from Toy’s R us.  It’s like 4 giant puzzle pieces that fit together.  It’s great because she can spit up, and it’s easy to wipe up. 

As for culinary exposure- yams, chicken, potato, peas, spinach, applies, pears, blueberries, and congee.  

I’m hungry now… 

So today is the 17th, and that marks 6 months.  It has gone by so fast.  We brought her into the docs on Thurs for her shots- 3 of them.  Same drill, but did she ever let us know it hurt.   

Like before, we have her Tylenol before, and brought her with us to finish our errands.  With the other shots before, she didn’t seem to have any lasting issues with them.  We noticed she looked a bit tired more tired than usual, but still gave us big smiles every morning, and was eating fine. 

Same thing this morning- about 36 hours after the shots.  I got up, changed and fed her at about 8am.  She woke up again around 10am, and was fussing a bit… E felt that she was on the warm side.  When I touched her forehead, I knew it was way too hot.  We quickly got out the thermometer and it came back 102.7!!

As soon as she was fully awake, we could tell she was feeling crappy- you could just hear it in her voice.  Right away we gave her the Tylenol and gave her a cold compress.  Within an hour, it was back down to under 100. 

Not too many things are scarier than when your kid runs an unexpected high fever, and is crying because of it.  This really was our first experience with her being sick, so e and I were both concerned and stressed.  We called the BC Nurse line to get some information, and it turns out that a “mild” fever is common with the immunizations.  However if the fever is above 103, go see a Doc.  If the fever doesn’t come down with Tylenol, and hangs around the 102-103 mark for more than 4 hours, go see a Doc.  If your kid has convulsions, or has trouble breathing…. well, no kidding.

Having the fever at 102.7 was of obvious concern to us. 

Later on, her temp dropped to 99, so we figured she was ok.  Around 10pm, we went up to get her, and it was the same thing- hot forehead, red cheeks, and a constant cry.  We checked the temp, and it was back up to 102.7- in goes the Tylenol and out comes the cold compress.  I have her in my lap while she is crying and I can just feel the heat coming off her forehead.  Again, it’s a bit of a fire drill as we anxiously wait for the temp to come down.  Thankfully, within the hour it drops to 100.9. 

We made another call to the nurseline, and they advised us to keep her hydrated and keep the Tylenol going every 4 hours.

This is her 10th immunization shot in 6 months.  It seems like a lot of shots, and even though we understand it’s for her own good, it’s still not easy, especially when she’s in obvious discomfort.  But we learned that a fever can happen 48 hours from the shots.  We’ll just have to watch her closely… unfortunately E is also coming down with a cold at the same time.  🙁

With Halloween just a couple of days away, most TV movie channels have been playing a steady rotation of horror/thriller movies.

As E and I are both movie fans, this got us thinking as to what we would include in our top 10.  As an aside, I think this is an interesting exercise that everyone should go through because it may give some insight about yourself.

The bigger question is what scares us, and why?  Are there any common themes (supernatural, evil monsters, evil people, nature, aliens with fangs or worse)?  Another thing to look at is when the movie was made.  For our list, most of the movies were from our childhood, when I think our imaginations are most vivid.  Later in adult life, it takes an exceptional movie to give us a good scare.

The horror movies I most dislike is where the protagonist does something really stupid (trips while running in the forest, floods the car while trying to start it, goes into the basement to investigate “the noise”, etc).  To me, it’s just a cheap way to generate suspense. 

Anyways, onto our list!

1. The Exorcist-  The perfect horror movie, especially if you come from a religious background, and are 8 years old.  It made me sleep with a flashlight and cross under my pillow… It has a great story, freakishly scary music and sound effects, horrifying visual effects, perfect casting, and there’s not a single dull moment.   
2. The Omen- I remember watching this in grade 6, and going to school and asking my friends to look for 666 under my hair.  More sinister than the Exorcist, but just as fun!  The Omen II was a pretty good follow-up, but the rest are forgettable.
3. Alien- I couldn’t eat crab for weeks after watching the face hugger do its work.  Honorable mention to Aliens, which I personally liked as much as the original.  The rest were just a travesty.
4. The Shining- Remember the river of blood coming out of the stairwell?  Remember the wallpaper?  Everytime I walk into an old apt building with that wallpaper, I think “RedRUM!”
5. Jaws- Wow, we talked about this movie for weeks at school.  In my mind, another perfect movie because it’s right on the line of plausibility. 
6. The Sixth Sense- Yep, even as an adult, this one got me.  There’s no evil bad guy here, but it’s more about our fear of death and the unknown.
7. The Silence of the Lambs- Outstanding story, casting, and acting.  Scary on many levels, mostly because the evil here is a very sinister and depraved serial killer.  I’m sure Chianti sales went way up after this movie.
8. Salem’s Lot- Gotta have a movie about Vampires here… Again, I remember this from my childhood, and man did it ever creep me out.  Crucifix around the neck and everything.  I think the creepiest scene was having the boy vampire tapping on his friends second floor bedroom window in the dead of night asking to be let in.  EEeeyaaarrgh get away!!
9. The Thing- Cool visual effects (for the time), fiendish alien… 
10. Texas Chainsaw Massacre- Freaky, freaky, freaky…

Honorable mention- Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dawn of the Dead (and most Zombie flicks), Arachnophobia, Dead Calm, Dead Again, Psycho.

These days, there’s a lot of so-so, formula horror flicks that rely on special effects for thrills.  For me, it seems like the 70’s and 80’s produced the most chilling horror movies.  In any case, it’s a genre that’s great fun to watch with friends and family.  Everybody loves a good scare!  🙂 

we’re moving our Blog from MySpace to BlogSpot. Part of it is the UI, part of it is difficulty in linking and anonymous comments… and the other part is I don’t want to be a beta tester for Microsoft.

What I’ll do is move all the old posts from MySpace and retire the other site.

In the future I might look at other options. Lester’s put the idea in my head of leasing my very own domain name and hosting the site for me… but that’s a future project.

Or there’s the web space that comes with our shaw account. For that you use MS Frontpage and ftp up your changes.

2003- I’ve been seeing a few emails about Mars being extremely close to Earth this August 27th, so much that it appears as large as the moon… and having got into astronomy awhile ago, this sounded pretty impossible. It is… http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_mars_encounter.htm

However with our 6″ Dobsonian from Skywatcher, we can get pretty good views of Saturn and Jupiter… and that’s with all the light and atmospheric pollution from the city! It’s pretty surreal to see Saturn’s ring with your own eyes, and you can clearly see 4 or Jupiter’s moons. The 90mm Maksutov (also from Skywatcher) isn’t bad either, it’s much more portable and you can almost get as much detail as the much larger Dob.

Haven’t tracked down Mercury, Venus, or Mars yet, but will get to it one clear night. 🙂

A year ago, we had Telus as our landline and mobile provider. We were paying almost $80/month for communication.

Then we switched to a combo package from Sprint, and that dropped our cost to $66/month. Sprint Canada then was bought out by Rogers, so our landline was switched to Rogers and wireless to Fido.

Hmm, $66/month… seemed kinda high for the amount of use we get out of it.

So now that E is on mat leave, we decided to see if we can save $$ by switching the mobile to Pay-As-You go and the landline to Vonage/Skype.

For the mobile, as long as we keep our minutes to around 100 min a month, our cost ends up being $15/month at .15 minute. The main thing is to remind e that the mobile isn’t for prolonged conversations, but there is an option to switch to a different evening and weekend rate for .01 a minute, but it’s like .40 minute regular time. Good thing is that there’s no additional system access fee.

For the “landline” we’re trying a combination of Vonage and Skype. Vonage leverages our Shaw hi-speed and we pay $20/month for 500 minutes anywhere in North America. I will say that the transition to Vonage from Rogers was ok, but there are some gotchas and limitations to be aware of.

First, you need an adaptor that plugs into your Router. The adapter comes free, and you can use your existing phones. The limitation is that you cannot use the existing phone wiring and jacks. The adapter comes with a single jack in the back, and you can plug in any phone. If you need multiple phones, you need a splitter (cheap $5 part) that allows you to connect multiple phones. All this is pretty useless if you just have regular phones, but what we ended up doing was using cordless phones. We plugged both bases into the adaptor, and have one handset upstairs, one handset downstairs. It’s a bit of a hassle remembering to recharge, but there are other cordless phones with mulitiple handsets and bases that use just one jack.

If you don’t have a router, you can buy a combo router/adapter made by Linksys I believe.

Second, if you goto vonage.ca and sign up for everything, they will charge you $10 for S/H, and $40 activation fee. If you CALL vonage to do the same thing, they automatically waive the activation fee. We did everything over the web like good citizens, and called back to complain about this double standard. They credited us the $40. On another note, their customer service is… just ok. Response time on the weekend was acceptable, and they did help, but I think there’s definitely room for improvement.

Third, Rogers called back to try and save the account. They offered a $30/month rate good for a year. After explaining that it’s still more expensive than Vonage, and what happens after the year, and why didn’t they offer this rate to begin with… well they didn’t have a good answer. They tried to compare their VOIP Rogers Home phone solution, which is like $50/month after the promo ends- you get this feature and that, dedicated line for reliability and voice quality. Their solution makes use of your existing phones and wiring, but they need to drill and install a box somewhere to tap into the lines. Anyways, the Home phone solution might make sense if you call Long distance regularly, but with Skype and Phone cards, it’s pretty cheap.

Back to Vonage. Their voice quality was a bit shaky the first call we made, kinda like a cell phone in spotty coverage, but it’s been pretty solid since. The adapter has status lights to let you know what’s going on. I had to reset the device once, and it’s been good ever since. Voice quality isn’t bad. Kinda like a cell phone in regular coverage. So far, so good.

For the case where we’re running out of minutes or need to call somewhere other than North America, we also signed up for a Skype account. “derekandevonne. lau” We tried it with our Logitech speakers and microphone, and it was ok. Just a bit weird listening to someone talk over your speakers. I found a wireless handset that connects via USB AND regular phone line. It’s a VTech, and sells at Futureshop for $99. The nice thing is that it works with Vonage or Skype. If I want to make a call via Skype, I enter the number and hit a specific button. If I want to make a call via Vonage, same thing only I hit a different button. I had a couple of 50 min+ conf calls to Bangalore that I used Skype for, and it was good enough and reliable enough that I forgot I was using skype. No echo or dropped words. Skype Out is free until the end of the year, but it’s been good enough that I’ll pay for the service. Charges for long distance are very cheap.

The only gripe is the USB software that allows the phone to connect to the Skype client. It sometimes “loses” connection, so that if Skype is running on your computer, your handset which is connected via USB, may not be aware that it’s up and running. There’s a utility that can be run to check status, and it will detect that something has lost connection. It doesn’t happen that often, and a reboot will quickly set things right.