Monthly Archive for September, 2004

Merry Has Returned!

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 30, 2004
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I haven’t posted about it, but I’ve talked to several of you over the phone and mentioned that our kitty, Merry, had gone missing for about a week. I thought he was gone for good, and was hoping that someone had just taken him in, and that he was getting food somewhere else, rather than becoming food for all of the coyotes out here!

It was so sad because every time Lindsay and I return home form running errands, Merry would greet us as we got out of the car, and rub on my legs as I unbuckled Lindsay, then we’d sit with him on the front steps for a few minutes and give him some lovin’. Well, this past week, every time we’d get out of the car, poor Lindsay would twist around in my arms, looking down on the ground for Merry. He was no where to be seen, and she was so dissapointed!

Finally, two nights ago, Lindsay and I were playing in the living room and Merry showed up out on the deck! Lindsay was SO excited! She squealed and turbo-crawled over to the sliding glass doors, started banging her hands on them, and Merry playfully batted at her hands through the glass! They were so happy to see each other. I’m convinced he came back for her.

So I think my suspicions were correct, and he’s simply found another place to eat as well as here, so we don’t see him as much. As long as he comes back every once in a while to play with Lindsay, that’s fine, because she absolutely loves him.

Nasty Pointed Teeth…….

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 29, 2004
in Lindsay
. 2 Comments

We have a tooth! I repeat…….we - have - a - tooth!

Dear God has it been a long week! Lindsay has been so fussy and clingy these past few days, and now I know why! I have been feeling her gums all week thinking, “Oh, she just must be teething”, and I’ve felt nothing new. I felt again this morning when she woke up grumpy, which isn’t like her at all, and as usual….nothing.

We went to our first Mommy-And-Me class this afternoon, which was a lot of fun, but near the end of the two hour class, Lindsay started crying. Not just whining, but full on crying, like someone was twisting her arm or something. She started pulling on her lower jaw, so I once again, for old time’s sake, stuck my finger in her mouth. Lo and behold! A tooth!

Ok, so not a full-on “leave it under your pillow and get a buck” kind of tooth, but definitely the makings of one! It is the sharpest little point you’ve ever felt within the soft squishiness of the human mouth! It’s her bottom right/middle tooth if that makes any sense at all. ;)

I watched her in the baby mirror the whole way home this evening (except for the few moments I put my eyes back on the road for safety’s sake) and she was having a ball exploring this new invader in her mouth. She looked like she was repeatedly trying to push it out with her tongue, and when she’d catch me watching her and teasing her, she’d stop doing it, and just smile sheepishly! It cracked me up!

The munchkin is now a grumpy, drooly mess, guaranteed to soak your carpets as she perfects her “turbo-crawl”, and to leave snail trails all over your tables and chairs as she practices pulling up to standing so as to reach the much higher up and obviously tastier furniture.

So now my little pirana is just that. Nipples everywhere are shrieking in horror.

More Pictures

Published
by
barneyb
on September 29, 2004
in Photos
. 2 Comments

I added two new batches of pictures. The first is the September 2004 gallery, with various pictures from the course of the month. The second is a batch of pictures that Heather took when she went to the park on 9/12 with some of her playgroup friends from the MOMS club. Finally, I bumped the July gallery down to the list of old galleries.

It’s fixed

Published
by
barneyb
on September 24, 2004
in Meta
. 2 Comments

I fixed the site, so everything should again work as expected. Turns out when I installed BlueDragon 6.1, it stole the *.jsp mapping away from Tomcat. However, since the edition of BlueDragon I have (the free edition) doesn’t support JSP, it just started throwing 403 errors. Changed the Apache config so that BlueDragon wasn’t listening for JSP requests any more, and it all went back to normal.

Site Issues

Published
by
barneyb
on September 22, 2004
in Meta
. 1 Comment

As you all are probably aware, the site’s been having a lot of issues lately. I’m not sure what the deal is, but I’m trying to figure it out. Until I do, please just bear with me. Currently, it seems that any templates that are called directly (there’s a filename at the end of the URL, rather than a slash) seem to be throwing errors. Most notably, that includes all the full-size picture pages.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Whoa! We’re Back Up!

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 22, 2004
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Some of you may have noticed that the site has been a little angry lately. I was in Portland, and Barney was in D.C. when we learned that no one could get to our site, so we couldn’t do much about it until this week. But here we are….back up and running. Hopefully nothing else will go wrong!

I’m finally catching up on my email and the other sites I like to read daily….it’s amazing how much you can miss even only being away from home for a few days!

Lindsay and I had a wonderful time in Portland with Auntie Chloe and Uncle Patrick. She absolutely loved being lifted out of bed every morning by her auntie, changed, and then brought into my room, grinning from ear to ear, ready for her “breakfast in bed”. ;) I learned after the first morning we were there, that Chloe had taken this “job” of getting Lindsay out of bed in the morning, upon herself. As I stumbled out of my room, I rounded the corner and almost made it Lindsay’s door, when Chloe came shooting out of her bedroom across the hall and said, “Don’t even think about it” as she rushed in to get the munchkin before I could get to her. From then on, I just waited for Chloe to deposit Lindsay in my bed each morning. It was pretty nice really.

We’ll probably head back down around the end of October because my mom will be returning to Portland around then, and we also have to do our yearly corn maze and pick out our pumpkins at the pumpkin patch. It should be fun getting to share the experience with Lindsay this year.

Ok, I hear the girlie waking up from her nap, so I’ll update more later.

She’s Gone…

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 13, 2004
in Heather
. 0 Comments

My heart is breaking tonight. How can one little girl that I never even knew have touched my life so closely…..so deeply? I suppose it’s a hurt you can only truly empathize with or imagine, once you’ve become a mother yourself.

I haven’t written about Allie on my site before, but I now feel compelled to because this is my only outlet to speak about her. I’ve been following Allison Scott’s story for a couple of months now, through the ups and downs, silently praying and cheering her on in her fight for her life. Somehow this little angel crept under my skin and, even though I never met her, I loved her.

Allie was about the same age as Lindsay….perhaps that’s why her story has affected me so much….it hits really close to home, and I realize that it just as easily could have been my little girl battling for her life.

Allie was born a healthy, sweet, happy baby, but, around four months of age, after a week long fever, her pediatricians sent her to specialists and she was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. She went on and off of every medication they know of to try to fight it, but tonight, it was a fight she lost. She passed on at 11:05pm ET, and is no longer in pain, but I can’t even fathom the anguish her parents are feeling right now. They luckily have a very positive, faith driven outlook on Allie’s life and her purpose on this earth, but these things really shake my faith to the core and leave me angry, hopeless, and wondering if there really is any bigger picture, anyone “driving the car” so to speak. Why would these two loving, wonderful parents loose such a precious child, and have to go through all of this torment, when there are parents out there every day who abuse and neglect their children??? I just don’t understand.

I don’t know. I’m exhausted. I better go to bed. Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day. If you’d like to read about Allie’s life, please visit her family’s web site, and please, if you have the means…..donate or run in a sponsored race to help find a cure for this terrible disease. It could just as easily be someone you love who has to fight for their life next. Let’s do everything we can to see that fewer people have to go through what sweet Allie and her family has gone through. And please keep the Scotts in your thoughts and prayers.

Happy 8 Months Lindsay!

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 10, 2004
in Lindsay
. 1 Comment

I’ve decided to take a page from one of my favorite websites and start writing “birthday letters” to Lindsay. Each birthday (or “month anniversary” until she reaches an age where I’m no longer counting her age in months….keep in mind, that could be 16 or 17….) I’ll write directly to Lindsay rather than the general blog-reading public, so that she’ll have some personal notes from her mommy to her, to mark each special anniversary of the day she was born. This will inevitably make her roll her eyes with disgust when she’s a teenager, but I don’t care ….moms have the right to do this mushy stuff. ;)

8 months….wow.

I really can’t believe it’s already been that long! The day I brought you home from the hospital, I couldn’t have imagined all of the things you’d be doing by now. It seems like every day you do something new and amazing that makes my jaw drop in shock, and then makes me laugh out loud because I can’t believe you just did that at eight months of age! You crack me up on a daily basis, and I thank you for that. I’ve never met anyone quite as entertaining as you my dear.

Today you did two new things that shocked me….not really just because you did them, because they’re small things in the big scheme of life, but because I think back to seven months ago, when you just laid there all day long, and I couldn’t imagine you doing anything of your own volition! Today you figured out clapping, and digging the snacks out of the diaper bag.

I started clapping at you this week: every time you would pick up one of your snacks off of your tray and put it in your mouth all by yourself I would applaud you. Tonight, every time your daddy or I would give you a piece of our bread at dinner, you would carefully put it in your mouth and then clap your adorable little hands together over and over again in celebration while looking back and forth between your daddy and I, smiling and gumming up your bread like all get out. I don’t think this will ever get old. There we’ll be when you’re 16, sitting at the dinner table, me clapping wildly as you put a forkful of pasta in your mouth, and you looking at me like you have no idea how I got you past the age of two.

While at Costco today, I sat you in the cart and put the diaper bag next to you. You must have been watching me take the little blue lid off of your snack container, because, once I had decided you’d had enough snacks and put the lid back on, you knew exactly what to do. You twisted your little torso around, reached into the bag and, I kid you not, pulled the lid off of the container with one hand, and reached into it and grabbed a few treats with the other! Another jaw dropping moment for mommy, let me tell you! No matter how deep I buried that container in there or how many toys and burp cloths I piled on top of it, you managed to worm your little arm in right to it!

I finally had to relocate the diaper bag into the lower part of the cart, and let you attempt to destroy the paper bag holding my prescriptions instead. This was a tough moment for you. I could tell you wanted to tell me off for the whole snack removal thing, but man, there was that paper bag I gave you just sitting there, begging to be ripped, crinkled, smacked into the cart handle and drooled upon. You took the smart route and went for the paper bag distraction. I love you for that, and for everything else that you do. ;) You’re the cutest, sweetest, smartest, most entertaining baby I’ve ever met, and I’m so glad I get to witness your antics for the rest of my life.

Happy 8 months Lindsay.

SHE’S CRAWLING!!!!

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 7, 2004
in Lindsay
. 2 Comments

Lindsay and I were at the park today, sitting on our blanket and playing with all of her playgroup buddies, and she was doing her backwards crawling as usual, when something remarkable happened!

She crawled forward!

One of her little friends had some fruitsnacks, and I thought nothing of the fact that Lindsay was staring her down with a look that said she not only wanted Olivia to share a fruitsnack with her, but that she wanted to rip the bag out of her hands and scarf them all down at once. I thought nothing of this because, well, no matter how much she wanted them, there was no way she could get them because she only knows how to go backwards. Well, lets just say that Lindsay’s a little food motivated, because, by god, she was going to have those fruit snacks! The little piglet started doing the cutest robotic-looking crawl, all the way across our blanket, onto Olivia’s blanket, and reached up for the bag! I was stunned! Her going forwards was so foreign to me that it reminded me of those little toy dogs that you see on display when you walk past a toy store at the mall. The ones that crawl forward all awkward and jerky, and then sit back on their heels and bark into the air. That’s exactly what Lindsay looked like! She crawled on over there as if she had been doing it for weeks, and then plopped herself onto her butt and grabbed the snacks! I was so impressed.

After playgroup, we had to immediately go show daddy our new trick. We walked into his office, I set her down on the floor, whipped out a container of cheerios, and she once again did her little robot crawl over to get the snacks! Barney laughed and thought it was really cool, as did I, and Lindsay sat happily eating her reward.

One thing though….when we got home and I tried to get her to crawl over to me….it wasn’t quite the same. There I sat, smiling wildly, clapping my hands and motioning her over to me, and all she would do is go a foot and then start to whine at me, as if I wasn’t enough of a reward for her crawling efforts! She’ll do it for a fruit snack or cheerio, but just to get to momma???? No way. Ah well, I guess this will make the teenage years of ambivalence toward momma less of a shock. ;)
Time to go buy some baby gates. ;)

Little Crab Baby

Published
by
hmboisvert
on September 2, 2004
in Lindsay
. 2 Comments

Lindsay has almost mastered her “pincer grasp” or as I like to call it, her “crab claws”. She seems to get utter fulfillment in the fact that she is now so independant…..that she can feed herself…..with her own little hands……lifting things and inserting them in her mouth…..without making a mess…..and without the need for mommy.

“Who needs that woman anyway right? Oh, except for maybe first thing in the morning when I’m really really hungry and demand the boob immediately upon being lifted from the crib. Oh, and maybe also at night right before bed time to fill my tummy up with delicious warm milk that soothes me to sleep. But other than that….I totally don’t need her anymore.”

She seems to be growing right before my very eyes, like I can actually witness each hair getting longer with each passing moment, and it seems only a matter of days before I’ll be explaining her fist period to her, and that cigarettes are SO not cool, and that she should wait until she gets married before having sex (even though most people don’t) ;) (But she should!!!) ;)
It’s so cliche when people tell you to remember every little moment with her, especially at this age, because it passes so quickly.

But they’re absolutely right. I already miss my little baby. :)