Strike a pose

I was so excited to get a backdrop set for my birthday. We ordered a pretty inexpensive stand from Amazon and it came with a black and a white backdrop. Kinda funny to have big 9x15 sheets for such a little baby! Hopefully they repel drool and other unpleasantries :-)

Baby Mozart

Caution: TMI!

I had the nastiest mommy experience the other day. I vividly remember an old email between me and my friend Naomi where we were talking about poop. I told her about how Audrey was wearing a sleeper and crapped all down her leg. The leg was filled with it! I literally took it outside and had to hose it down, then washed it by itself using the "sanitary cycle". When we bought that washing machine the salesperson told us it comes in handy with kids and she was right. Anyway, Naomi responded something like "just wait till it get's in your eye or your mouth". I thought about that and laughed for days, maybe weeks. It was one of those things that I found humorous and scary at the same time. When I told Chris he didn't know if we should believe her. I figured, hell yeah we should believe her. Another kid I know, sweet little Molly, took off her diaper and spread crap all over the wall, her crib, and herself, so why couldn't another mom get crap in her mouth? I've heard poop stories from too many moms not to believe it. No, Audrey didn't crap in my mouth, but she did vomit in my eye. I know I shouldn't be sharing this with the world (or the 6 people that read our blog), but this was defintely an experience for me. Audrey and I were sitting in my bed watching the Ghost Whisperer. She didn't find it very intriguing, so I was lifting her up in the air to make her laugh and distract her so I could finish the show. There's a Mother's Day picture of me holding her up like that. She loves it. She smiles and giggles everytime I lift her. I don't throw her like some people do with their babies (that freaks me out, so don't do that to my baby!), but after going up a few times I was holding her there and we were having a tender moment smiling at each other and it happened. It went straight into my open eye. Not a little dribble either. It filled the freakin eye socket. I half screamed, half laughed and Chris came running up from downstairs. He saw me holding a towel over my eye and he very casually said: "She puked in your eye, huh?". Sadly, this game is now over. At least until the reflux goes away. This is your official warning....don't lift Audrey into the air unless you want to join the club. Not a fun club to be in, but I must admit I feel like I earned some kind of mommy badge. Sorry, no pics for this post. Maybe next time.

Teething

Audrey's first tooth (lower middle right) poked through on Mother's Day and another one (lower middle left) poked through last Saturday. She was really cranky for a few days before and after the first one, but has been fine since. We used Orajel once and Tylenol a few times. It seemed to help a little. She doesn't like the cold teethers or the mesh thingy filled with frozen fruit. She prefers to just stick her fingers in her mouth or chew on a few choice items- plastic links, rubber Sophie the Giraffe, foam block, pacifier, the padding that covers the strap on her high chair, the rubber teddy bear on the walker, mommy's finger (ick!).

Diet Coke?

Bad daddy!

7 months old in the rocking chair

When she turned 7 months, Audrey weighed 17 pounds. She just moved up to a size 3 diaper.

We used to just use these foam blocks that my mom gave us for pictures, but now Audrey plays with them. Well, she chews on them or holds one and waves it around in the air. They're the perfect size for her little hands and when she hits herself in the head it doesn't hurt. Why she smacks herself in the head with her toys I do not know.

Ka-boom

Earlier this week, our home laptop stopped booting. I'm still looking into the root cause, but it appears that the hard drive is either slowly failing altogether, or has some isolated bad sectors. We've only had our laptop for 2 years, and it's had minor glitches from day one (It's an Acer, if you're wondering).

At any rate, this is (or was) our only home computer, so Amber will not be checking e-mail until I get it back up again (and the blog posts will probably slow down also).

Of course, we hadn't backed up anything. Usually I backup to CD every year on my birthday in August. But Audrey was born this past October and is only 7 months old, so none of our pictures of her were backed up anywhere!

Fortunately, it looks so far like I'm going to be able to recover everything. How easy it will be to reconstruct the computer is another problem. I guess we'll see.

So, if you're reading this, take this opportunity to think about how you'd feel if your computer went down. How often do you backup? Do you know how to recover? None of the Microsoft-supplied solutions like System Restore have helped at all in our case. Most failures happen like ours--isolated bad sectors, but sometimes, the drive electronics go down, which is far worse. I'm told average life expectancy for hard drives these days can be as low as 5 years. After our machine is back up I'm certainly going to revisit our backup process and probably invest in an external hard drive. I know there are other solutions like mozy that we may also look into.

Incidentally, while I'm recovering Audrey's pictures off our old drive, it's interesting to do some statistics:

• She just turned 7 months old, and we have a total of 18.9 GB of content just of her
  • This includes 141 movies--though most of the movies are still on our handicam and aren't reflected in this number
    
  • This includes 4,912 pictures! Of course this excludes pictures we've had taken professionally of her, which thankfully are stored on DVD.
• That's 3.15 GB of content per month
  
• If we continue to catalogue Audrey's life at this rate, assuming a lifetime of 80 years, that's 3,024 GB, 4,320 CDs, or 644 DVDs worth of information
  

Trigo-what?

I haven't posted in awhile, so I'm going to shake things up a little with some geekiness. Here goes.

Amber bought some pictures she wants to hang along our staircase. Here's a little sketch. I've labeled generally where she wants the pictures in blue.

I hate home improvement, so I left this exercise largely to her. She carefully measured the width of each of the frames and the dimension of the staircase (her measurement is shown above in red). After doing some arithmetic, she figured out where she wanted to hang each picture so they'd be centered. We started hanging the pictures following her math.

After the first picture was hung, something occurred to me. I hadn't really been paying attention to what she'd been measuring or her calculations, so I asked:

Chris:	"Did you use trigonometry to figure this out?"
Amber:	"Trigo-what?"
	<dramatic pause>
Chris:	"If you didn't use trigonometry this isn't going to work"
	<pause while Amber looks at the wall and envisions the rest of the pictures being hung according to her math>
Amber:	"This isn't going to work"

Here's the reason: she measured the dimension of the staircase on an angle, but measured the width of the frames not on a angle. So you can't just subtract these numbers. You either have to remeasure some of the dimensions or you have to use trigonometry to make them compatible.


Thus, to calculate the compatible value, a, we'd need to measure the angle above and multiple by it's cosine.

So, higher math does actually come up in real life! Albeit rarely.

To get even nerdier, you can break out some elementary vector calculus. Model the dimension of the staircase as the vector s with

In this case, the length a above is the projection of s along the abscissa basis vector i.


Ah! I knew I took two and half years of calculus in college for something. I just didn't think it would be for interior design.

(The formulas above are written with LaTeX using an online formula editor.)

My First Mother's Day

I had a great Mother's Day! I guess it started yesterday. Audrey and I went to lunch with some Flickr friends, then that evening I went to see "Ghost of Girlfriends Past" with Christy and her mom. Chris and I never went to the movies all that much, but I really miss them now that I so rarely get to see one. This morning Chris snuck out of bed and went to buy breakfast tacos from Jardin Corona. After breakfast I slept in and turned off the monitor. Later in the day we went shopping at the mall and I got some opal earrings (Audrey's birthstone) to go with the necklace Chris got me last year for mother's day and we had dinner at Johnny Carino's. That evening I made him watch Desperate Housewives with me. hee.hee.

Audrey has been a real grump for the last few weeks. She's just constantly whimpering and we just can't keep her happy. Well, today we found out why. Her first tooth is coming in! We tried to get a picture, but it's hard to see. It's a bottom front tooth, a little to her right.

She was actually pretty cheery until we tried to get her to open her mouth. She didn't like that one bit!

Chris bought me flowers, a card, 3 bottles of red wine, a cake, and an US Weekly magazine. I canceled my subscription when I was pregnant and switched to baby magazines, but I still miss it.

Chris decided to personalize the cake even more by letting Audrey put her footprint it! It's at the very top.

Another Mother's day present was that I did't have to take care of Audrey at all today. No diapers, no bottles, no feeding solids, no fussy baby. I just got to sit back with my wine and watch him do the dirty work.

Nap Time

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Another addition to the tacky holiday pictures. Oh, what will we think of for June?

More fun in the exersaucer