It has become clear that Katherine is a very active baby. She spent the whole day fussing and squirming, and I realize now that this is not a localized event, this is just the way she's developing. Today she damn near wore Kara and I out. She slept very little, and when she wasn't sleeping, she was stretching, squirming, and generally exploring her growing strength.

Oh, I must digress to tell you the stove story. I cooked a pizza for dinner tonight. It was a marvelous pizza. I used a new blend of cheese that had mozzerella, provelone, reggiano parmesan, romano, and a bit of cheddar. I used my big pizza stone and so forth. Towards the end of the cooking, for some reason, I noticed the "lock" arm on the stove, and I thought, huh. Why not lock the stove? It will probably seal the door and make for a better pizza. MISTAKE. One locked, it was unopenable. The arm, which I have never used before, immediately jammed and broke, and I was left with a done pizza in the oven at 450º with no way to get it out. I tried sticking stuff in the latch, but when I shone a flashlight into the latch hole, I could see that the arm of the lock was completely bent out of shape. So there I was, with no way to get the pizza out. 20 minutes, and a lot of elbow grease with a crowbar later, I got the door open. The top over is pretty much ruined, because I had to break the latch to get the door open. I'm feeling pretty stupid about it, but it's even more stupid that there is a lock arm on my stove that has a failure mode the prevents the over door from opening.

I never liked that stove anyway. At least I have another one.

Anyway, after I got the pizza out, there were black specs all over it from shit that fell off the oven as I forced the door open. So while Kara went out to pick up Chinese food, I played with Katherine.

After five minutes of sitting with her, I gave up, and put her down on the floor in the living room, where she immediately squirmed all over the place, tried to turn over, pumped her legs up in the air, and generally was totally active. Finally, she got a bit cranky, and sensing she needed food, I brought her back into the kitchen and fed her.

But it's like this all the time. I have to admit, I am unprepared for it. Gone are the days when you could sit and hold her, and she'd be a cute little baby. Now, she's squirming, drooling, blowing spit bubbles, and generally all over the place every waking moment.

Oh, and I had another KLO puke experience this morning. This is really becoming an all too common affair. I had her up on my stomach in bed this morning (Kara brought her in at 8isk), and she let out a huge spit up. It went all over me, all over the sheets. There's nothing worse than being underneath a baby that is spitting up milk. Well, actually, I guess there is. Being in front of a baby that is projectile pooping is worse, but that's only happened to me once.

I have some suggestions for the scoring of figure skating competitions, because the ISU world championships in Nagano further convinced me that the sport has pretty major drawbacks.

Rule #1: Drop the country affiliations for judges. Why do we really care what country a judge is from? I think the fact that the judges country is so prominently displayed creates an air of unfairness. Many judges feel compelled, for whatever reason, to vote higher for the contensants from their countries.

Rule #2: Drop the ordinal system of scoring. There is very little play in the numbers when it comes to judging the best contestants in a match. If a skater's performance is without technical blunder, you are basically limited to 5.6 to 6.0. If the first skater is a ringer, s/he is unlikely to get the score they deserve because the judges have to leave room for other skaters. Instead, I'd propose that the score be based on mathematical sums. Each skater is score one to ten in 1/10 increments. A major deduction would be like a half point off instead of 2/10 of a point. This creates more room to rank. Then, the score from each part of the competition is added and weighted with the percentage the part represents (short program is 30%, etc.) At the end, the highest score wins, period.

Rule #3: Change the rules to encourage more artistic and technical display. Why can't you do a back flip in competition? Unless a skater really has strong artistic presence, it just looks like the same 10 moves over and over again.

Rule #4: Create a sub-panel of judges that award manditory point deductions based on technical merit. After the skater is done, they'd review things like two-foot landings, falls, etc, and dock the score appropriately.

OK, I know this will never fly, but it would seem to be a better place than we are at now. God help me if Katherine decides to become a figure skater.

By the way, I was playing with Katherine this morning, and she's not going to go a long time before rolling over again. She was trying as hard as she could to do it again. It's only a matter of time. She got herself all the way onto one side, but then couldn't seal the deal.

OK, I actually scanned the photos for the gallery, but I'm too tired to finish. I'm off to bed, and I'll post the gallery over the weekend. Stay tuned...

OK, so this party I went to was held at the Elk lodge in Chelmsford, or should I say, the The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. It lead me to wonder what it is that the Elks actually do. Their web site just says the usual stuff - they are a large fraternal order with lots of men and women involved, and that you have to petition for membership, and that you must believe in God. Beyond that, I have not a clue, so if you know, drop me an E-mail and tell me.

It turns out we had another first tonight - we had an old friend babysit, and we went to the customer appreciation party for The Main Attraction. It was pretty cool, especially since we know Kim Davidson pretty well. She's a regular blog reader too. (Hi Kim!).

Anyway, I was in a funky mood, and Kara was freaked out about being away from Katherine, so it was a little tense. But we were with some other friends, and I got a few stiff drinks into Kara, and we ended up having a pretty good time. I was just getting loosened up and enjoying myself and poof, we had to go.

Katherine had a pretty good night for her first night without mommie and daddy. Apparently there were some times when Danon couldn't stop her from crying, but she was OK in her swing, and Danon managed to put her down without incident, which is pretty cool. OK, so we've passed that barrier, and as Danon said, we can do this again. But from what I can gather, it will take some time (and a bunch more tries) before Kara is able to really relax.

OK, I was going to put up gallery three tonight, but I don't have time. I blew most of my time getting two night photographs (including the home page one) scanned and ready to go. I should get to the gallery over the weekend.

A big milestone just occurred. Kara just called me very excited that Katherine just rolled over. She rolled from her back to her stomach (which is harder than the other way around, I think). Kara didn't see it, she turned away for a second, and looked back, and Katherine was on her stomach looking completely surprised.

Now she ain't going to stay where we put her, which is the downside of all this. We've hit another level of parental watchfulness.

Now, the sources I've read say that some children will start rolling over in glee because, well, they can, and others won't do it again for months. I bet that Katherine will be in the former group, since we've been aware of her attempts for some time, particularly when she's on the changing table, and has the raised side for leverage. This event, however, occured on the floor with nothing to lever against, so it's the real deal.

I supposed it seems stupid to wax over, but there's a long time between this first and the last first, which was, I think, laughing. At first, the firsts came all together. First cry, first vomit, first poop, first really, really bad smelly poop, first smile, first bottle feed. Actually, now that I think about it, the last first was probably first all night in the crib, and I guess that was only two or three weeks ago. Well, what do I know.

Well, something happened last night, but I don't know what. I remember waking in the middle of the night, hearing baby cries, and finding Kara gone, and the cries coming over the baby monitor. Then, I remember waking up again, and the little snowflake was in bed with us again, as she was when I got up this morning. I have learned, however, that it is extremely dangerous for me, personally, to disturb their sleep like this (I almost got killed the last time by shutting my dresser drawer too loudly), so I slinked out of the room, and will have to find out what happened this evening.

Katherine has this toy. It's like a little kiddie console, and it has a steering wheel and spinning light and so forth that hang above her head. It also has a big foot pedal, and it plays silly kid music with blinking lights whenever Katherine moves certain parts of it.

I play with her and this toy a fair amount. Sometimes I have an ulterior motive. It is very good at getting her to poop if she hasn't pooped in awhile. She can really pop the poop out. It will deflect in her diaper, and either run up her back or front and soil her clothes. When she gets overdue, I like to provoke a poop when possible, because she sometimes just needs to squirm a bit.

Yesterday, though, she had the last laugh on me. After playing (and pooping), I held her on my stomach, and she was all curled up like a crescent moon with her head and feet way up in the air. I was lying on my back on the floor. And she looks down at me, turns her head to the right, blurp, a big plop of half-digested milk comes out. Then she immediately turns her head to the left, blurp again. Then starts smiling at me.

And I am covered with kiddie puke on both the left and right side of my chest, and some spilled over back on the to carpet. It's a nice carpet. A very nice carpet. Thank god for stainmaster.

And usually, I don't hold her up in the air over me after feeding for exactly that reason. But she hadn't eaten recently yesterday, so I thought I was OK.

There is probably a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

I got more really great pictures of Katherine from the developer's today. We took them on Saturday. I also got some nice night pictures of the Boston skyline. It'll probably take me a few days before I can do the scanning and so forth, but expect to see another Katherine gallery soon.

Speaking of Katherine, last night was our worst crib night every. She woke up and was basically unconsolable until 2AM, when Kara finally threw in the towel and took her into bed with us. She put her back in the crib around 6AM. Well, that's what she tells me. I have some hazy memories of the whole thing. The best is when she took Katherine downstair to the basement around 1 or so. I remember waking up, and saying something like, "do you need any help." And all I can recall is that she said something like, "don't even offer that up unless you're really serious", and walked out of the room. I was asleep even before the last of those words cleared her lips.

Tonight was better, although Katherine was really, really cranky before bed. She cried a lot, but she was really over-exhausted. She woke up twice this evening, but seems to have settled in nicely.

A note about eating. Katherine is eating more and more in a stretch. At the start of bottle feeding, we usually got two ounces or so in her. Now, she'll eat up to five in a setting. She has not had any problems taking the bottle, it's been really nice.

There is hope in sight. It looks like bad movie reviews will start up again in April.

I have not been blogging because I have had two crisis in my life, one personal, and one professional. I won't really go into the professional one except to say that I worked day and night for almost a week getting some problems fixed. The personal one is this - just after I got those problems mostly under control, Kara burned her pointer and middle fingers on steam from a disk in the microwave. The burns were pretty bad - 2nd degree, and after consulting with the nurse hotline, we had to go to the hospital.

I will dig a little deeper on this topic because a few interesting things happened. The first was that we got incorrect information from medical professionals twice. The first, on the nurse line, where they told us to wrap the wound with a washcloth, stick it in a bag of ice, and come to the ER. In the ER, the triage nurse said, "oh, no, you never put a burn on ice." Then, the ER doctor proceded to give Kara a topical that turns out not to be OK for nursing mothers, even though he knew she was nursing, and Katherine was in her stroller in the ER room. Arg.

An old friend of mine likes to say he's the only person he knows that removed his own optic nerve (hi K!). He had a bungee cord snap out of place and lodge itself in his eye. Through that experience, I now understand that bungee cords can be really dangerous objects. Oddly enough, K also has had burns. But this is about my K, Kara. We learned through Kara that if you put Saran wrap over a disk, and put the dish into the microwave, the steam under the wrap can get superheated. When she pulled the wrap away, a vent immediately burned her, right through the skin, the pad on the finger tip, and so forth.

At the hospital, she was in pain so excruciating she actually compared it to childbirth, which as you recall, was only 13 weeks ago, so I can't image how bad it must have hurt. Then, the doctor performed a little trick called "debriding". In this trick, you put some saline solution on sterile gauze, and then you run the gauze back and forth over the burn site until you've rubbed off all the shriveled, burned skin. Ouch ouch ouch!

Then, they gave her serious pain drugs, wrapped the sucker up, and sent us off. But it still took over four hours. I had to feed Katherine twice, change her two or three time, all in the hospital ER.

But this time, one finger is doing much better, but one finger is still pretty bad. However, we both were totally amazed by a new piece of medical technology, tubular gauze. It's a long story. Ask me if you really care.