A long night tonight

I had a reheasal tonight. Kim Davidson and I spent about two and a half hours playing through and working the kinks out of four songs for the gig we're doing in a few weeks. Man, my fingers are sore again. I've been playing a lot lately, but two and a half hours was enough to stress the old calous pads out a little bit.

Katherine was really sweet going to be tonight. Her nap schedule didn't line up very well, and she ended up waking up at 2 in the afternoon, so Kara kept her up all evening. So when I got home, she was dog tired. Kara had book club tonight, so she ran off to that while I gave Katherine a bath and put her down. Kim showed up shortly afterwards for the practice. Anyway, she was so tired she couldn't figure out where on her lovie the ears were. When she finally got it oriented right, she promptly stuck one in her mouth, and fell asleep with her hand up in the air. It was really cute. There she is, lying spread eagle on her back, with her head turned to the right, and her left hand in the air. And then, after about 5 seconds, her left hand dropped like it was made of lead. That was pretty funny. Kids are interesting in that way. They just tire themselves to exhaustion, and fall asleep in the wierdest positions.

Spinning, spinning, in circles, circles

Katherine has a new an interesting behaviour. She'll be sitting on the floor somewhere, and she'll spin herself around with her feet. She tends to always do this in a counter-clockwise motion. I'm not sure why. So she'll just stick her feet out, and push her body around, so that she is sitting up the whole time, but moving around in a circle. It's really very cute.

Speaking of cute, she continues to garner attention whenever we're out. Kara went to the mall yesterday, and got stopped a bunch of times by people who wanted to look at her. We went out to eat last night at our favorite local Chinese restaurant, and it was hard to even have a conversation. The staff just hovered over our table, played with the baby, and our waitress even picked her up out of her seat when we were done and held her for awhile. It really does kinda get annoying after awhile. I remember walking out of the restaurant, and saying to Kara, "we'll have to do take-out for awhile".

I guess I shouldn't complain, and I don't mean to sound whiney. I'm really happy and proud to have a cute baby. But there are drawbacks....

The Gig, Man

So I got my acoustic guitar back from the shop yesterday, and I've been furiously catching up on practicing. It sounds just unbelievably awesome through my amplifier. I have a Roland Jazz Chorus amp, and it makes this acoustic sound so sweet. I'm really excited. A little reverb, a little treble, and I'm in heaven. But tonight, I just broke a string, which is a bad sign. I have a very bad habit of breaking strings for two reasons: I love to play blues, and I have to bend the G string to really do it, and I just can't lay off, and also, on the acoustic guitar (unlike an electric guitar), the G string is wound, not bare wire, and trust me on this, it's a lot easier to break on account of that. It's probably something about the winding causing friction and stress that makes the core snap. Anyway, it's really a drag when it happens, because then you are faced with a choice - you can either replace the G string, or all the strings. I usually replace them all, but the strings I'm using now are really expensive. They're Elixir strings, and one of the reasons I use them is because they have a special coating that allows them to sound really great even after a lot of use, thereby theoretically costing less over time. The problem is, when I break them after 3 hours of playing, I'm not saving anything at all, I'm losing bigtime. Oh well, rock on.

Baby Proofing the House

Today was baby proofing day. You see, we have stairs, cabinets with household chemicals in them, nails that stick up out of the floorboards, and other hazzards for a small crawling child. And boy, does she crawl. She can really move now, and in just a few seconds, if you don't pay attention to her, she can be in a different room pulling on a power cord, or playing with a fan, or something else suitably dangerous. So Kara went off to a festival in Glouchester (pronounced, Gloss-tah, for you out-of-towners), and I stayed at home and baby proofed. I put up gates at the top and bottom of the stairway, which actually wasn't too bad. I also put cabinet latches on all the kitchen cabinets with generally dangerous things in them. And then, I had to deal with the TV room to sun room steps. There are two steps leading down from the TV room into the sun room. But the opening is almost 9 feet long. There is a large amoire with our TV and stuff in it, and a brass railing between the two rooms, but none of that stops Katherine from crawling through and encountering about about a foot and a half drop onto a tile floor. Kara and I weren't that fond of the railing, so I removed it. Then I installed a free standing post out of 4x4 to form a frame for gates on both sides. You can't get a gate that's 9 feet long. Well, Baby's R Us had one, but it was out of stock. And also, I have my doubts as to how sturdy it really would be. I was really worried about putting in a free standing post, but I found a mounting kit, and it really went in rock solid. Then I installed a cloth pressure gate on the wide side, and a swinging baby gate on the short side. Oh, I also hammered in all the stuck up nails with a nail punch. And that pretty much did it for my day. I mean, it took all day long to get that done. However, we are now just three or four things away from not having to worry about Katherine roaming around. I mean, we'll clearly still have to keep an eye on her, but she won't be able to kill herself. But we do have some cabinets that need to be fixed, a shaky side table, and the fire poker stuff to deal with.

Any why worry about the stairs? When we were in Maine, Katherine spent a lot of time trying to get up the six inch rise from the screen porch to the living room. Shortly after arriving home, she mastered a faster version of that. She can now scamper up the stairs with pretty serious speed. If you had told me two weeks ago that she'd be climbing stairs, I would have told you to buzz off. Not now. I've seen it with my own two eyes.

And she crawls in a really funny way. I think it's called a crab walk. When she gets excited, she uses the bottom of her foot, not her knee, to propel forward. This gives her a ton of leverage on the floor, and she really moves.

*sigh*. It's funny, we went over to my Dad's house for dinner tonight, and it became obvious that even though we are still working on the baby proofing, we've clearly been doing it implicitly for awhile. His house it totally not baby proofed. I mean, it was fine, but he has cactus plants, and wine bottles on the floor, and magazines (which she loves to eat) in baskets, and all kinds of other stuff. There is almost no place she cannot get into trouble. We kept a close eye on her, and moved some things around. I mean, it certainly won't stop us from going there, you just really have to be on the ball.