avablog

Well, I “found” my birthday present this afternoon, after some nudging and coaching from Mark, and boy, was it lovely. 🙂 My friend CM is going to have to tell her husband to get on the ball; she’ll be “green” with envy after seeing the delicious, delightful green purse that Mark got me from Banana Republic. (This is a bag Cindy and I both have been coveting.) Even though I usually don’t like early surprises, this one was excellent. And now I know what bag I’ll take out with me for my birthday dinner. Thank you, honey. I love you, purse or no purse.

With everything else going on, and most of it negative and/or very sad, it seems like a good opportunity to mention that February is the month in which Leah was born, many, many years ago. To look at her, you’d never guess how many years she has under her belt (unless you got a look at her eggs, which are positively ancient).

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When your naked daughter jumps up on your made bed and takes a leak all over your down comforter, grinning devilishly at you all the while. Really, there’s nowhere to go but up after a start like that.

Also, Leah’s paternal grandmother passed away in Houston last night. We’ll be driving to Madison in the morning this afternoon to catch a flight to Chicago, where we’ll then catch a flight to Houston (why not drive to Chicago and catch the flight from there, you ask…?). The services are on Monday.

Microsoft said it had offered to acquire Yahoo in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.

Ugh. PLEASE don’t let this go through. (Yahoo! owns Flickr, in case ya didn’t know.)

If I have to read about one more celebrity pregnancy, I am going to lose it. Up yours, Gwen Stefani–you 38-year-old, ab-obsessed hussy. Up yours, Angelina Jolie–you cheating homewrecker, posing as a saint. Up yours, Brooke Burke–pushing out your fourth damn kid from that bikini-worthy body at age 36! *sigh* Bitter much, Leah? Why, yes, I am, thank you.

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I took a bunch of pictures around the house the evening, including when it was Ava’s story time.

This kid sure does love her stories. Sometimes she likes to take the book when we’re done and read it herself, but she only reads back what she memorized us reading on each page. It’s a neat parlor trick. And speaking of tricks, Leah wanted me to mention that Ava recognizes all her letters and reads them every time she sees them. On posters. On clothing. In books. Everywhere. I don’t have any idea whether Ava is advanced or not, but I’m eagerly awaiting the day she sees an unfamiliar word and spontaneously reads it.

Hi! Look at me! I’m the first parent who’s ever lamented that his child is growing up too fast!

In truth, I do have a sense that Ava’s growing up pretty quickly. This morning I sat and looked out my window as the high school kids parked up all the available real estate on the streets in front of our house. One girl in particular fascinated me. She drove up in a minivan by herself and unloaded a huge backpack and an instrument case. As she grabbed her stuff out of the back seat, she also threw on her hat and scarf. Then she closed up the van and locked the door before she trudged away up the sidewalk. She couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds and wasn’t any taller than Leah is.

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The weatherman (or, as Leah says, “weatherperson“) tells us the temp is going to drop something like 70 degrees by this evening. Seriously. That’s crazy. The threat of 45-mph winds and extreme cold (I even heard the word “blizzard” within the first hour of being at work) have already intimidated the local schools into closing two hours early.

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Thank God for my blog post yesterday, or I’d have no proof that I actually lived through a weekend over the past two days. I hate sitting at my desk on a Monday morning and feeling like yesterday was Friday. But it’s OK. I have my work cut out for me this week, as usual.

And speaking of yesterdays, Ava’s still getting the hang of the whole relativity of time thing. Sometimes when she wakes up in the morning, she refers to last night as “this night,” as in, “I slept all night this night!” We gently correct her. Or she calls yesterday “last day.” Which is kind of correct, technically. It’s fun to explain to her how all this works, and it certainly provides an opportunity to reflect on how English handles these constructions.

Another recent issue has been Valentine’s Day, which Ava started out saying, “Valentime’s Day.” N and M are letters she still stumbles on a bit when she’s pointing them out in her books, so I wanted to make sure she has a good grasp of when each of them is used in real life. I think she has it now.

My mom was set to come over and sit for us last night while we went to dinner with friends. But as we were getting Ava ready, she insisted she wanted to stay overnight at Gramary’s. Leah and I weren’t sure, but Ava was super excited and insisted she would be OK. So we agreed.

Everything was fine, of course. We had a very nice dinner (I enjoyed a tuna feature at Linn Street Cafe that was the best meal I’ve ever had there), and then we came home and watched The Pianist, which neither of us had ever seen. Not a great movie to round out a romantic evening, I tell ya, but ultimately uplifting.

Leah missed Ava and had some trouble getting to sleep, but we actually ended up sleeping until 7:45 this morning, which is unheard of. Turns out Ava and Gramary were out getting breakfast at Hamburg Inn this morning.

I thought I’d also share a shot of Ava I took yesterday while she was trying on one of her mom’s hats:

I’m shooting over her shoulder as she stands looking into the full length mirror on our coat closet door. Is there anyone who reads this blog who doesn’t know about my flickr account by now?

One post on one blog is nothing but a plaintive cry against a lack of inspiration and time.

But two posts on two blogs…

…that’s the start of a meme.

This image caught my eye this morning as I looked at the front page of the Wall Street Journal:

It linked to a story about how successful women are models for how to dress in the business world. Whatever. What struck me was that each of these women has the same leg crossed. Not being a person who considers himself up on the latest issue of Miss Manners, I wondered, is there some sort of rule governing the crossing of legs? Or is it like in kickball, where you kick with the leg opposite your throwing arm (lefties kick righty, righties kick lefty)? I know I’ve seen Leah sit with her legs crossed before, but I can’t recall now how she rolls. Maybe it’s a power thing.

No, wait. She’s hot. No she’s cold. Now she’s hot again. We’re having a bit of a time getting used to radiant heat in this, our first winter in the new house. We also have a programmable thermostat, which is something we never had. But we’re learning what works.

One disappointment for me has been that I’m still sleeping right next to the heating element in our bedroom. My side of the bed is about three feet from a big radiator; when that thing kicks on, I start to feel like a piece of toast in no time (whole wheat). At the old house, the furnace vent was even closer to me as I slept, and it was even worse to have that hot air blowing over me all night. It wasn’t even nice to have the AC blowing on me in the summer. I’m working on some adjustments to the thermostat that’ll hopefully cool things down a bit without making Leah too uncomfortable. For as much as we’re actually awake at home during a weekday (90 minutes in the morning and five hours or so at night), it seems like we should just be able to keep the heat pretty low all day long. Fortunately, Ava seems pretty impervious to the temperature swings in the house, especially when she’s watching her Ruby and Max movies.

All right, so the headline is a bit of a reach here. But I try to make a Marty Feldman reference at least once a month, out of respect.

This is Ava’s “eye thing.” She busts this out every once in a while for no apparent reason. Sometimes she’ll do it as she looks at items in front of her, like at the dinner table, and say, “I see two forks, two ketchups, two plates…” etc. She did it last night, actually. Leah’s not a big fan, but I think it’s hilarious. I welcome your feedback.

Ava and I were hanging out yesterday while I put some new media on our server. At one point, I expressed some frustration at the Apple TV needing to reboot, and Ava — who was on the sofa next to me — put her hand gently on my arm, looked up at me with her big brown eyes, and asked in a quiet voice, “Is the server down?” I had to laugh. At least she’s getting a general sense of our network topography.

So we were watching “Sunshine” last night. Perhaps you’ve seen it. Anyway, it was recommended by a friend. It was OK. But I knew we weren’t in for anything too fantastic when pretty much the opening shot was a ripoff of “Alien.”

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Part of the fun of these blog things is turning your readers on to things you like, right? Well, one of the things I like is Dave Hill’s blog. This guy is hilarious. He’s been around for quite a while in various incarnations, but this whole blogging business really suits his sense of humor and writing style. His recent post on the show Intervention is gold, and classic Dave Hill. If you visit, which I encourage, please check out some of his videos, too. You’ll thank me later.

Hey, it’s been a while, huh?

Taken this morning as Ava cuddled under her hearts blanket (which is getting a bit small for her by now).

The view as I walked into the office this morning:

Not bad.

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Any way you serve ’em up, the end result is still the same: I’ve got some damn old eggs. Yes, that’s right, the result of our UIHC infertility appointment today revealed that we have “unexplained infertility” due to the age of my eggs. At this point, we only have a two-percent chance of getting pregnant each month because of my advanced age (I’ll be 37 next month). Yes, that’s right: a TWO-percent chance. Read that and weep, my fine readers. Actually, I’m the only one around here who seems to be weeping. “But,” I protested to the doctor, “what about all these damn celebrities who are having babies in their late 30s and early 40s?! What about Nicole Kidman, for Christ’s sake?!” The doctor said gently to me, in her very kind way, “Well, you don’t read about how they achieve those pregnancies, do you? Is it even their own eggs that they’re using?” Hmm.

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