1. Quit my job in California
2. Got a new job in Indiana
3. Moved to Indiana
4. Moved back in w/ my parents
5. Celebrated the holidays in Indiana with family
6. Looked for a house
7. Bought a house
8. Moved into a house
9. Sold a car
10. Bought two cars

Needless to say, we’ve been rather busy and the server that I run the blog on has been offline for a rather long time, but I’m back baby!  I’ll try to get some pictures and stuff up when I can for posterity’s sake, but you can check my facebook profile out as I update it more often.

-Chris

Well, I’m migrating all our photos on our photoalbum site to Flickr. It will take something like 4 days to complete, but it will be nice to have that whole thing offloaded!

This picture was the latest upload when I checked it this morning and it is definitely one of my favorite pics. Jaime cracks me up…

Here’s the URL: www.flickr.com/…

New photos will be appearing regularly over the next couple days, oh boy!

So, I HIGHLY recommend Go Fish for all you parents out there, and even for those of you who don’t have kids yet but like good Christian music. To find out more about these guys, or to order some of their CDs, here is their web site.

Emma absolutely loved the show. She danced her little heart out and clapped along with the songs. It was so cute. I tell you, she has the music in her. She loves to boogie. It’s the sweetest thing.

That’s all for now. More later.

Always remember: The rhythm IS going to get you … sooner or later.

Anyway, funny story. I gave Emma a bath on Monday evening, and then Chris and I put her to bed. We left her room, shut her door and came back out into the living room, expecting to see Norbert curled up in my chair like he normally is. Nope. Then we expected to find him curled up on our bed in front of my pillow (his other favorite spot). Nope again. We looked all over the place for that crazy mutt, but he was nowhere to be found. We figured we shut him in Emma’s room, so I opened up her door and looked in, but he wasn’t there.

Turned out he had gotten himself shut in the bathroom where I had given Emma a bath. He had been hanging out with us in there, and I guess I had shut him in there when I carried Emma out. Poor thing, he hadn’t made any noise being shut in there in the dark. He probably thought he was in trouble. Chris let him out and gave him a dog treat to try to make up for it. He doesn’t seem any worse for the wear. Silly puppy.

Chris, Emma and I will be visiting Indiana Oct. 10-17. There’s a Heacock family get-together on that Saturday, and the annual Martinsville Fall Foliage Festival parade on Sunday that we’ll get to attend. I think Emma will really like the parade.

We’re planning on taking Emma to the San Diego Zoo soon. I think we should probably wait until it’s not as scorching outside, but I want to go fairly soon. I think she’ll love seeing all the animals.

Emma’s into waving at people (anyone and everyone) these days, which is the cutest thing. She says “hi” sometimes, but she says “bye” a lot. It’s so funny. We were leaving Johnny Rockets (where we ate lunch) Monday, and she waved at one of the waiters and said “byeee.” He turned around and smiled and waved back. So cute. She’s also into blowing kisses and making the kissy smack noise. Again at Johnny Rockets Monday our favorite waiter stopped by to say hello to us. He turned and walked away, and Emma blew him a kiss to his back. She loves him. It was so sweet.

That’s all for now. More later.

Always remember: Nobody puts Baby in a corner.

The past few days have been full of bumps, bruises and scrapes around the Heacock household. For Emma and me, specifically. Allow me to explain.

It all started on Thursday when Emma and I were taking Norbert outside. Norbert was out doing his business when some girls walked by, distracting him and making him bark. At the same time, Emma wanted to be walking around, so I had put her down. I looked away from her for two seconds to tell Norbert to stop barking, and when I looked back she had stepped down one of the two small steps from our porch. I was telling her to be careful and reaching for her when she lost her balance and fell down the remaining step, hitting the side of her face on the concrete sidewalk. The result was a few minor scrapes on her forehead and by her left eye.

THEN, on Friday, Emma was wearing a cute little dress. We were on our way to the car to go to Wal-Mart. When we got out on the porch, Emma, remembering yesterday’s mishap, held my hand as she gingerly went down the steps. Once we got out to the asphalt, though, she dropped her hand and just stood still. I walked forward a few steps and asked her to follow. She smiled and took off running. She only made it a few steps when she fell down, hands and knees first, on the blacktop. She scraped her left knee.

THEN, later on Friday, Emma and I were playing in the third bedroom. She was sitting on my desk chair while I was spinning her. She tried to reach out and put something on my desk, and she reached too far and fell, head first, to the floor. It scared her more than anything.

I felt horrible about each of these incidents. I know things like this happen with toddlers, but I still felt bad, like it was my fault. My guilt was nearly erased by two MORE incidents on Saturday. This time, though, I was the one on the receiving end of the bruises.

I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but Emma and I were playing on Saturday morning, and she head-butted me in the mouth, giving me a nice fat lip. It went away after a while. Then, in the afternoon, she and I were playing on the floor. She was sitting on my lap, facing away from me, and I hugged her. We fell over as I was tickling her when her head reared back. She hit me right on that bone just above the outside of my left eye with the hard part of the back of her head. It swelled, and today I have a pretty nice shiner.

Ah, the life of a mom and a toddler.

I cannot believe that it is February already. January was simply a blur. With a kid being born on New Year’s day, you really don’t get that “Here comes 2006!” mentality. It’s all about the baby and when you finally poke your head up to see what’s happened in the world, it’s February! shish

Anyway… there’s been some cool stuff going down in my perimeter…

First

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAIME!

I know that it is belated here on the blog, but the world should know. There are pictures of her cake on the photo site (photoalbum.theh…). We had a nice day, and my gift to Jaime was letting her order herself some stuff on Old Navy. I realize that this is, by all accounts, a rather lame gift. What you don’t understand is, she loves to shop, and she hasn’t gone clothes shopping for her normal self in months due to Emma’s residence.

All in all, she got some stuff that she really wanted/needed/fancied and that’s what matters to me.

Also, I’ve overhauled the above linked photoalbum site as well. I was many, many, MANY versions in arrears on that system. I brought it up to the latest spec and threw a new look & feel on there to boot. The latest version has some nice additions. My favorites are the “last pictures uploaded” and “last albums changed” areas near the top. It makes it easy to see what has changed “at-a-glance”. Previously, you had to navigate a category to see if there were any new albums/photos. Well, NO MORE OF THAT!

Check it out and let me know if you have any feedback.

You also might have noticed, but only if you’re a WoW geek, that I redid the addons page to make it MUCH easier to use. I broke apart the active/inactive addons into two lists, and made both lists sortable to find what you are looking for easier. As I mentioned before, hardly a day goes by without a change or ten :-) on that page. Also, if you see, or don’t see, an addon that you have suggestions about, please comment and let me know. I have worked hard to be able to account for what every single one of those addons is doing to my interface, so if you have questions, I might have answers… :-P

Speaking of wow geekiness, check THIS out: [Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros] or [Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood] or even [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] or perhaps [Ashbringer]. Whoops, almost forgot [The Twin Blades of Azzinoth]!!

Yeah, I found a WordPress plugin that auto-links all WoW Items in line. So nerdy…

So here’s some cool news. We found out recently that two sets of our friends are adopting children. Moreover, they are both adopting from Guatemala! The weird thing is, these two sets of friends don’t know each other AT ALL, but made decisions to adopt at just about the exact same time. They both feel God pulling them very strongly to do it and do it this year!! We are so happy for them and, as you might have guessed, are wanting to support them however we can. If you would like to help financially, let me know and I will put you in touch with them for that purpose.

At the least, I know they covet your prayers over this whole process. Foreign adoption is a trying ordeal, and we hope that is goes as smooth as possible. We plan to adopt in the future as well, so we’ll be taking notes the whole time. :-)

That’s enough for now. I’ll holla later. ;-)

-Chris

She was great. She ate about an hour before we left, and slept / soothed herself the whole time. She enjoyed the music and such, or at least it didn’t bother her enough to fuss. We even had time to grab some Hardee’s for lunch and bring it home before she woke up with some hunger.

All in all, it was great to get another taste of the real world. It’s always good to see those folks that were praying for you the whole time, and give them the chance to see the fruits of those prayers. Obviously, everyone found her adorable and oooohed and aaaahed for several minutes as they stopped by our pew. Definitely a good time.

We had a nice afternoon, and are getting prepared for my heading back to work next week. Jaime’s got things squared away and I’m excited for her to realize it this week. Keep on praying as we take another step toward normalcy. :-)

Also, maybe you haven’t heard, but the Colts lost…again… :-|

Jaime and I were watching the game and saying, “This looks familiar”. Sure enough, a stellar season followed by a horrid performance in the playoffs. They almost pulled it out with a lucky fumble at the last minute. The Vanderjagt kicks what was perhaps the worst field goal I’ve ever seen. It was about 100 yards right and had about the same chance to split the uprights as if he’d used a bat.

So, bummer of a day for the Colts, but a good day for the Heacocks…

I’m sure I’ll have some good posts going forward as we get underway with a working stiff leaving every day. Stay tuned and I’ll catch you later…

-mrw

Also, I posted some more pics on the photoalbum (photoalbum.theh…). We got some shots of the bath, so you can see for yourself how much fun we had. Jaime did a great job of protecting Emma’s modesty, so I didn’t have to blur any baby bits out of the pictures. :-)

Finally, I thought I’d post the Q&A that we had with our doctor on Friday for your perusal. Maybe someone’s had similar questions and here’s what our doctor said. Comment if you’ve heard otherwise, or have any good followups….

Q: When can we begin to cut her nails instead of filing? Tips or tricks?

A: You can cut her nails as soon as you need to, but you should be careful not to get her skin in there with the clippers. Scissors might be helpful if clippers are too tricky to see the detail of her nails.

Q: How often should we bathe; when can we use a baby bath instead of the sponge bath?

A: (Her cord fell off at about day 6) If her cord is healed, which it is, you could start immersion bathing whenever you want. You shouldn???t need to bathe any more than every other day.

Q: Should we begin a feeding schedule now?

A: No. It would be best to let her tell you when it???s time to feed. She might be on a natural schedule anyway. Trying to force her to times will be frustrating for her and you. After a couple more weeks, you can ???nudge??? her to different times, but a schedule needs to make itself.

Q: She has started to choke while feeding. We read that this is normal due to an aggressive letdown, is there anything we could do in the short term?

A: Totally normal and she will learn how to breathe while eating as she grows. Nothing to do but wait???

Q: When we can use soap and/or lotion on her whole body?

A: Everywhere but the face. Her face might be effected by clogs if you use lotion, but the rest of her body is completely soap/lotion ready. Just remember to use a mild soap. Baby magic or the like???

Q: How long should we breastfeed before introducing a bottle?

A: This really depends. There is no set start/end date, just decide what you want to do and do it. It might be easier for her to take a bottle at some point if you start it earlier, rather than later.

Q: When should Jaime start pumping?

A: See above answer…

Q: When should we move to formula?

A: When Jaime starts back to work, plan a couple of weeks in advance to start weaning her off breast milk and onto formula. That should make the transition much easier than a rapid cutover.

Q: Should we expect her to be more and more alert? If so, should we just hold her until she falls asleep? She???s not very ???interactive???.

A: There???s no need to hold her every minute she???s awake. Be sure that you have time to bond, but you can absolutely put her in her crib, or in a bouncy seat. It will help her to learn to self soothe without the constant contact of mom and/or dad.

Q: Any warnings/concerns about taking her out of the house? Errands? Visits? Restaurants?

A: Being flu season, you should be wary of taking her somewhere where many people will be touching/holding her. Unless it???s zero degrees or something, she should be fine to go outside for small amounts of time. I wouldn???t take her to an outdoor sporting event in the winter if you can avoid it. Breastfeeding goes a long way in illness prevention, so she???s tougher than you think. However, I wouldn’t take her to visit people at a workplace until she’s a month old.

Q: Best way to burp?

A: Your burping style (milkshake -or- patting her back while she???s sitting and leaning forward) is totally fine. Some babies will burp once and be good, some babies will never burp until they spit up. You might burp for 20 minutes to no avail, then you set her down and she spits. All of it will become more regular as she grows, so just burp her however you can and bide your time.

There you go!!

-mrw

It’s been a fun couple of weeks, and we got to take Emma to the doctor today to see if we’d screwed her up.

The doctor’s exact words were “She’s perfect.”, so I guess we’re in the clear!!

I head back to work on Monday, so please pray for the big change as Jaime will be solo during the day, and I will be worried the whole time. :-) In all seriousness, Jaime is an awesome mom, and I don’t worry about her doing a great job, I just worry because I’m a natural “fixer” and I have a hard time taking my hands off of a situation…

So, pray for us as we go back to our almost normal lives.

We’re going to go to Church this Sunday, which should be a really fun time!! We were gonna go last week, but Saturday was pretty rough and we didn’t want to take her just to have to calm her the whole time. Now we’re starting to get the hang of it a bit, and we’re ready to give Church a go.

I’ve been posting pictures as much as I can, but we have been more focused on spending time with her than taking snapshots. More will come though as we get more settled and she really starts growing.

Speaking of growing, she weighed in at 8lb. 5oz. today!! That’s 1lb. 5oz. more than her weight when she was released from the hospital. She’s really feeding well, and Jaime’s nothing short of a pro at breastfeeding. We’re going to start pumping a bit soon, then I’ll be able to bottle feed her and give Jaime a break.

We had a nice laundry list of questions for the doc today, and he patiently answered them all. He’s such an awesome doctor. If you live on the northside and are looking for a great doctor, I highly suggest Dr. William Wunder. He runs a family practice, and has been like a good friend before/since the delivery. He actually stopped by our room to share a story about double deliveries he had to do last night. He also noted that both of them added together were easier than ours. :-)

So, we’re still trucking and she’s still growing. Keep on praying for us and if you would like to come visit, just let me know. If you need my contact info, shoot me an email from the contact tab.

Now, on to the mundane business of free time….

I’ve been playing only a bit of World of Warcraft, and usually in short spurts. It’s still fun and it’s a nice stress reliever to focus my brain on something else.

When I first started, a buddy from work, Don, brought me up to speed about the power of addons within the User Interface (UI) of the game. Basically, you can load some little tools that are written by various people to aid you in certain tasks within the game. They help you to overcome many of the annoyances of the game that you find from the start, but some add functionality that the game simply doesn’t include out of the box.

I started with a packaged collection from Insomniax (www.insomniax.n…). It was really good, but I noticed almost immediately certain things that I didn’t like. After Blizzard (the company that “owns” WoW) released some patches that basically screwed up the addons that had been working. You can think of it like a phone cord plugging into a wall. If the phone company came into your house and replaced all your phone jacks with new, differently shaped phone jacks, your phone service would still be available, but until you replaced your phone cords, you couldn’t use it.

Due to those changes, which broke most of the addons and caused lots of in-game errors related to the UI, I started tinkering with the individual addons, instead of a collection.

I slowly whittled the collection down to the individual addons, and figured out what each one of the did. From there, I was able to remove many of the addons that added to value to my gaming experience, and also added a few that I really love.

Sum total, I now maintain a fully customized addon collection of 90+ addons that all do different things that I really couldn’t live without. :-)

If you click on the WoW addons tab above, you can see the latest collection that I am using. I maintain the versions as I update/test/validate them, and I do that almost weekly.

Anyway, have a great weekend, and I’ll catch up with you all later!!!

Oh, Andy, I got your phone call and email, thanks for the contacts and I’ll ping you next week sometime.

Thanks everyone for your patience!!!!

-Chris

We had a home nurse stop by the house today. Riverview sends a nurse out after a couple of days to answer any additional questions you might have after having the kid home for a couple nights. She was super nice and very very helpful. She layed a bunch of concerns to rest regarding all the little stuff that we have seen. Basically, as a new parent, every little new thing, no matter how minor it may seem, is a concern until someone smarter than you gives you the old “no problem”.

The sum total is that everythings great and getting better. Emma’s gained 2 oz, which means that breastfeeding is going swell. Moreover, Jaime is healing very well and her treatment is definitely helping.

My mom, dad, and sister came up for a visit today. They just loved seeing Emma, and she was in a great, alert mood. She was wide eyed and looking around until they all settled in and Emma slowly nodded to sleep. The family arrived right between feedings at nearly perfect timing, and got to spend a couple solid hours with the little princess. Dad took some pictures of the visit and they are posted to the photoalbum site already (photoalbum.theh…).

We’ve been trying to keep track of Emma feedings/changings etc. It’s helpful when trying to establish a more concrete schedule in the future. To that end, I ran across a handy piece of software called Baby Manager made by Babble Soft (www.babblesoft.…).

We haven’t really used it yet, but it has a pocketPC interface that basically reduces to pushing buttons when you start/stop feeding, and it calucates the duration and logs the details. It does the same thing for diaper changes as well, only without duration. It seems really handy and automatically syncs with the Windows version do you can prepare reports and see what schedule works best for mom/baby.

If your nursing, you should check it out and post some feedback here. Also, if anyone has seen any better software, especially one with a pocketPC interface, let me know!

Have a great weekend!!!

-mrw