Updates

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything except the little parasite who is currently (literally) sucking me dry. He's still good. He still screams when the carrots are gone and he likes sweet potatoes too, just not quite as enthusiastically. We'll try squash here in a day or two. His favorite new game is to lunge forward. I guess that means that sitting up is just around the corner. It's hard to believe how quickly he learns, gets stronger, and grows. He's got a white bump on his lower gum below where his left canine tooth would be, and he's been royally fussy these past few days, so I'm thinking that one might be first.

Today I was even able to lay (lie?) him down in his crib and have him fall asleep. It wasn't nearly as easy as that sounds, but that was the ultimate outcome. In between lying him down and him actually sleeping was about 20 minutes of him "rolling" around in his crib (just back and forth, not over, although he's done that twice on the floor now), about 30 minutes of him screaming in his crib, then about ten minutes of me standing by his crib with my head on the railing and my eyes drowsily blinking as I went "shhhhhh, shhhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhhh..." That quieted him down, eventually _his_ eyes started blinking drowsily, and then he fell asleep!!! And he slept for about 45 minutes, whimpered for a bit, then slept for about 15 minutes more. And the angels sang.

They were also singing because my scale told me this morning that I am officially no longer "overweight" (according to my bmi)!!!! I'm still 20 lbs heavier than this time last year, but I'm no longer officially "overweight!!" I still feel pretty ookie about the way I look, but at least there's progress!

What else? Hrm....so I've found myself feeling a bit directionless lately, mostly because I'm just now getting to the point where I can notice that for the past I don't know how many months, all I've been doing is keeping my head above water. To the point that I've somewhat had that McDonald's commercial moment where I wake up and discover that I'm a soccer mom with three kids in a mini-van. Now that I've gotten over the anxiety caused by that awakening, I'm realizing that I'm in a very different place in life than I was just a little while ago. Relationships are different (and some don't seem to be surviving the transition...but at the same time others have deepened and new ones have formed...), responsibilities are different, priorities are different....but there's been so much change in my life lately that I've been afraid to ask Him what my next steps should be for fear that the answer will require _more_ change.

Or at least that's what I thought I was afraid of. I think the real problem was more that I don't know yet how to deal with His will for _our_ lives. It's not just about me anymore. Gone are the days when He can say "go" and I can get up and do just that. I mean....He could still tell us to go and we would still go, but now it involves changing two people's minds (and eventually AJ's too). And I think my real fear is that He'll tell _me_ something, but not VNB and then I'll have to figure out what to do about that. Except that I know that's just silly and He'd never do that. In fact, ways in which I've hoped that VNB would step up, he's done exactly that on his own without any prompting from me.

But life is different now in ways that I never anticipated (and I'm not just talking about surprises like AJ). It's still good, it's just different...and it's interesting seeing who's come alongside me and who's fallen away.

Working from home has really been good. We've gotten stir-crazy from time to time, but really much less frequently than I would have expected. I've still not quite figured out working, keeping AJ happy, _and_ keeping the house clean, but two out of three (at least most days) isn't so bad, right? I've still got a complex about my bosses thinking it's a good long-term plan, but really, I would say that the company's getting a _really_ good deal out of me this way. Since I'm part-time, they don't have to pay benefits, plus they're getting about as much work from me as they are from people who are on this same project full-time - they just pay me for half as many hours, plus I don't have to worry about getting up, dressing up (in my one pair of work pants and two work shirts that "fit" right now), getting AJ to daycare, getting to work on time, and working while feeling guilty about AJ being in daycare...AND they're not losing an experienced analyst. Logically, I think they come out ahead, even though it means that I'm not in the office all the time. I still worry that at some point someone's not gonna be so cool about it and I'm gonna have to defend my work situation though. It could be interesting as we walk as part of Futron's "Race for the Cure" team with the company president this weekend. :)

Speaking of which....if you want to sponsor us, go to this site. Only sponsor VNB because his company will match whatever he raises, and then my company (whose team we're on) will match whatever he raises...which means that if we do this right, your pledge could be quadrupled. Pretty nifty, huh? :) This is a cause that hits pretty close to home for me. There's been virtually no cancer in my family history (what little we know of was caused by my grandfather's 2nd-hand smoke and even then my grandmother was in her late 70s), but my lumpiness puts me at higher risk, as does the fact that AJ didn't come along until I was 30. Plus, I've known several folks who have been personally touched by this disease. So give early, give often. :)

What else? Hrm....AJ's kinda funny and already reminds me of myself in many ways. My mom loves to remind me of one time that I was down in the dumps when I was about 9 or so. I'd only been playing piano for about a year, but we had this simplified version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" that I was desperate to play. So she found me crying one day and asked what was wrong. There were three things. I don't remember the first one, but the second was that I didn't like Cabbage Patch dolls (they were the big thing at the time, so something _must_ have been wrong with me if I didn't like them), and "I can't even play the Moonlight Sonata!" Oh, life was ending....well...AJ does the same thing. He can reach for and grab onto toys now, but if he can't get them to do what he wants them to do (or if we empty the jar of carrots), he _SCREAMS_ in frustration. With the toys, he usually gets distracted after a minute or two of _SCREAMING_, so life in his Pack 'n Play goes like this - play, play, play, _SCREAM_, play, play, play, _SCREAM_....and so on. And he can't even play the Moonlight Sonata.

Well...that's about it for now. I'll upload the video of AJ eating so that everyone can experience the joy that is carrots.