Well, today was wicked hard. Kara was absolutely exhausted from last night. Even though Katherine slept really well, Kara did not, she was up half the night freaking out that Katherine wouldn't sleep at all. So I had the baby for most of the day, and Kara slept a long time this afternoon. Kara woke up totally on the wrong side of the bed this afternoon too. And she was out of sync with Katherine's schedule. So this evening, Kara is pretty worried that we biffed it, because Katherine started screaming around 10:30 or so, right after her bath. Tonight is night two of the crib, and it was really rough. Katherine was so worked up and screaming she wouldn't nurse, and we wanted her to because she hadn't eaten in a long time, and we wanted her to nurse before bed. But that didn't really happen, and then it took over a half hour of the same routine as yesterday. We traded off going in every five minutes to try to calm her down. She finally fell asleep right around 11, and she's still down now, although I'm hearing some little cooing noises in the monitor. I expect her to wake up shortly, though, because I think she's going to be hungry. Then, maybe she'll stay down the rest of the day.

A Katherine blog:

We were supposed to kick her out of bed on Thursday night, but Kara was pretty freaked out by that, and looking for an excuse to procrastinate. So I gave it to her. I didn't really want to start on Thursday, because then if she had a bad night, I'd be completely wiped out for work. So we started last night. Here's the deal.

We've had Katherine in bed with us. We really felt that we needed to get her into her crib for many reasons. The only way to do this is to put her in the crib, and let her cry herself to sleep. You see, she doesn't really know how to go to sleep. She always has Kara, or I, or some other external influence to calm her. So last night, when she started to get sleepy (it was actually pretty early - around 10:30 or so), we put her in the crib, turned on the baby monitor, and waited it out. Here's what we did.

She cried immediately upon Kara leaving the room. Every five minutes, one of us would go in and comfort her, get her to stop crying, give her the binky, and leave. For the first half hour, she pretty much wailed. Then, Kara went in, and she was quiet after Kara left for about 8 or 9 minutes. Then she cried again, and I went in, and voila! She went down! So it took about 45 minutes on the first night. But that's not the really stunning thing.

The really stunning thing is that she slept for the entire night. Kara had to get up once to nurse her at around 5:30 or so, and then we woke her up at 8:30, and she kept herself asleep for the entire time.

This is huge, so huge. Of course, she could scream her head off tomorrow, but for now, the signs are really really good.

I've got to run now, because I'm watching her, and she's really happy this morning, and smiling and in a playful mood. And so I'm going to go play with her.

OK, a friend of mine, Kim Davidson, who's in the band Main Attraction has given me further information about the Grammy's.

Album of the year is for a collection of music--ya, know... an album...

Record of the year is like Recording of the year, a single song, but the award is for the artist.

Song of the year is for a single song as well, but the award is for the songwriter.

Hmm. Artist versus songwriter is a new angle I handn't considered. OK, so the matter is now officially closed. None of us except Kim has any idea what this is all about, we just like to fawn over the pretty people at the ceremony.

Anyone watch the Grammy's last night? Were you annoyed at the diatribe against downloading music? I though awards shows weren't supposed to be policital? Are you confused by the categories? How about this.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? won the "Album of the Year" category. That's great. It's a great soundtrack, and a fine movie too.

So then, U2 wins for "Record of the Year"

So what's the difference between Record of the Year and Album of the Year?

According to the Recording Academy, the Record of the Year is a awarded for a commercially released single, or track from a current year's album. So according to the Recording Academy, a RECORD is actually a SONG.

However, Alicia Key's won the Song of the Year award for Fallin'. So what's the difference between the Record of the Year that's actually a song, and the Song of the Year?

According to the Recording Academy, "A song is eligible if it was first released or if it first achieved prominence during the Eligibility Year."

So a Song of the Year can actually be a song from a previous year.

Confused yet? Me too.

I'm not making this up, though. If you don't believe me, check the official site of the Grammys.

Can I tell you all how cool rain-sensing variable intermittent windshield wipers are? They are very, very cool. So we bought this new car, right, and it's not like a Mercedes or anything, it's a Volkswagen, you know? But it has all the amenities you could imagine. Programmable heated seats. Pollen filters. And rain-sensing variable intermittent windshield wipers. So I've heard of these before, and I've thought, oh, cool. Probably, the wipers move depending on how fast the car is going and stuff. That is not what happens. The wipers actually have some algorithm that appears to be related to how much moisture is wiped off the windshield each time they wipe, and depending on what it finds, it adjusts the interval between wipes.

The result is simply amazing. In rain or snow conditions when you it's not coming down enough to actually turn the wipers on, they come on at exactly the right moment. I mean, you never have to jack with anything. Just when you think, gee, I should make the wipers move, they wipe! It's totally awesome. And it's not like they move with an obvious pattern. Sometimes, it's a long time between wipes, sometimes, it's really short. They just know. God, I love German engineering.

Some bad news today. Piggie has a heart murmer. It doesn't sound terrible, and he doesn't do anything particularly challenging, kitty-cardiac-wise, but it's still sad. But we're told that we should wait until next fall or winter and have another exam, and then they'll compare the two and tell us what our options are. Obviously, it's not a life threatening sort of deal, but Piggins has a special place in our hearts, particularly with respect to mom. Oh, and his teeth are clean, though. Maggie on the other hand has terrible teeth, super terrible kitty breath, and is overweight, but she'll probably live until 100. Go figure.

Well, I'm making site updates again, but I'm not happy about it. I ended up upgrading my web software to the publish-anywhere version of Trellix Web. We actually sold the rights to this software to a company known as GlobalScape, and the product is now called CuteSite, or something like that. Anyway, at least I'm back in business.

It is extremely rare that I actually recommend or post another web site for casual viewing pleasure, but this site is so freakin' funny I just couldn't resist.

Katherine's new stats, since I can't publish right now are these:

Height: 24.5 inches
Weight: 11 pounds, 12 ounces
Head circumference: 15 1/4 inches

For head and weight, she's in the 50% percentile. Completely average and normal. For height, she's in the 95%, or, very tall. So for right now, she's tall and skinny.
That explains why she's not fitting some of her 3-6 month clothes when she's only 2 1/2 months old !!! My god, it's ridiculous. We only had some of the infant (0-3) clothes on her, like, once before she outgrew them. And the 3-6 stuff, well, her legs are too long. There's enough space in the mid-section, and upper body, but in the smaller clothes she can't straighten her legs. (Of course, she doesn't wear these anymore).

Tonight was vomit night, courtesy of Katherine Louise. I was trying to keep her up because she was awake quite a bit today with Kara, and I was playing with her, and I got projectile spit on twice. The first was bad enough that I had to change my shirt. The second, I just wiped away and moved on. I guess as a parent, you get pretty used to being covered in kid goo. She's just starting to really produce on the goo front, so it only gets worse from here. If you don't like bodily fluid stories, please do not read any more of this. Her particular form of goo, at this point, since she's still nursing, looks rather a lot like liquidy cottage cheese. It doesn't smell that bad, well, not if it comes up soon after it goes down. It smells more vomitous the longer it's down there. OK Dave, are you done? No, believe me, if you've lived it, you know there's so much more. But I'll go easy on you. I'm pretty used to her sudden evacuations of things upon me, and actually, I'm not even really that grossed out by it anymore, although if she were spitting up just after birth what she's spitting up now, I'd have been pretty upset back then. She worked us up gradually. It's just the tactile sensation of cleaning up that makes me go, "eck". We moved her up from an every third day bath schedule to every other day, but now we're seriously contemplating an every day schedule, because she gets pretty stinky by the end of the day. She's been in a pattern of spitting up a lot, though, probably because she's not burping very well at the moment. Bottle feeding is much better, I don't know why. She burps effectively and relatively cleanly.

She had some shots on Friday. Four, to be exact. It's also possible that she's got a mild reaction to them.

Ah, if only I could publish the site. I have some cute bath pictures.

Site publishing is still down, so please bear with me. I contacted a buddy of mine who works on DellHost to try to get the inside track, but I haven't heard yet. Typically, in this type of situation, those responsible are in the weeds working the problem, so I didn't really expect a quick response.

I found some time to take some neat pictures over the last week, so I'm a bit frustrated that I can't publish. I checked today, and it looks like the publish services are back up, but I have my site stored on Trellix at home, so ironically, even though I'm here at Trellix World Headquarters, I have to go home to publish.

At any rate, I got some great new Katherine pictures. My portrait photography is coming along, I'd say. I can pretty much get great pictures, it's just a matter of whether or not she'll cooperate by smiling or generally looking cute. As the latest pictures will show, sometimes she doesn't cooperate, and spits up or turns away.

On the other hand, I started fooling around with low-light photography, and I'm into rewards already. I got some really nice shots in Winchester center last week - I'll put one up on the home page real soon. I also found a great place to take pictures of Boston - route 2 in Arlington between route 60 and Park Avenue. There's a footbridge that crosses the highway, and if you walk to the Arlington side of the footbridge, there is a break in the fence that allows you to get an unobstructed shot of all of downtown Boston with traffic in the foreground.

Normally I'm not a big proponent of traffic shots, but when you are taking low-light pictures, they become really cool, because the headlights and tail lights leave light trails, but the cars themselves are not visible.

And that's what I was doing. I was taking pictures with exposure times between 10 seconds and 70 seconds. It's pretty damn cool. I'll have to put up a Dave picture gallery at some point.

Last but not least, this story of waking up.

I woke up this morning around 7 AM, and Katherine was lodged in my armpit. She wasn't in danger or anything, but it's pretty trippy, really. We have a king size bed, and she'll start in the middle between us, with a few feet (feet) between her and us on either side. But then, she some how mudges and scudges over to one of us. It's usually Kara. It's really funny and freaky at the same time, because I don't know how she does it. She can't roll over, and she can crawl or anything close to that. She can basically only lie on her back and wave her arms and legs around. But then, this morning I woke up and she was in full contact from my armpit to my waist.

It is really nice, though, for her to express herself that way. It's like waking up with a little endorsement of primal emotion.

It is also, however, time to get her out of our bed, which will be the project for this coming weekend. I don't know how you all feel about the kid in bed thing, but if you read my blogs a few months ago, you'll know that it was unavoidable at the time, and moving her out is now just as unavoidable, although it's going to be hard on Kara. She's just not learning the right behaviour doing it this way.

I can't publish site updates right now, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow to see the new Katherine gallery. There's some great stuff in there.

Can you imagine what this Ryne Sanborn kid is going to put on his resume?

"Oh yeah, and at the 19th Winter Olympics, I was the child of light"

"Huh, what did that mean? Well, I represented the spirit of all of mankind, and my message to the world was that none of life's storms can darken the human spirit once lit by the fire within."

Oh, OK.