Daddy Duty

So, as of this past Monday, I am on daddy leave from school. Beth has been back at work for a week and a half. This at home adventure is going to be MUCH tougher than working every day. I'm loading up more photos soon and I'm going to try and write every day. We'll see how it goes...

Wow ... Some Unintended Consequences

SO, our schedule change has made it very difficult to keep up with this blog. SO sorry about that.

In an effort to help me keep coherent in the classroom, we moved Mo to our guest room/office so I can sleep through the night. What this has meant is that I am rarely able to use the home computer compared to how I used to utilize it. I am currently uploading a boatload of new photos and I will post a handful when that process is done.

Gram is settling into 1st grade, I am getting to know my students, fall is here, our house heater doesn't work reliably, I am tutoring two nights a week, the baseball playoffs are here, and on and on and on. Life has been busy. Oh yeah, we also watched all of Ken Burns' National Parks video and Gram was really hooked. He watched about 30 miuntes each night and is developing a list of parks he needs to go to now. Top of his list is Death Valley due to the name and the cracked mudflats that he saw.

Mo is terrific during the day (other than sundown) but she is still struggling with sleeping through the night. She actually had a stretch of about 6 hours one night and she has been able to fall asleep more efficiently when she does wake up, but Beth ends up away from our bed most of the night.

Photos in a few minutes.

New Schedules for All

Well, another grandma week has come and gone so we are on our own again as a foursome here. We were treated to great meals, help with organizing, fun stories for Gram and an extra lap for Mo. Gram started 1st grade and I started another year of teaching (my 23rd!)

Gram's school is a block away from mine so we walk together in the mornings (which I'll be able to do about half the time) and I can get him in the afternoon and bring him by school to visit the girls there.

It's almost midnight now and Beth and I are each up trying to convince Mo to sleep. I chaperoned a dance and came home expecting to find everyone asleep and Gram was the only one lucky enough to be snoozing.

Gram and I are off to Yankee Stadium tomorrow!

more soon...

Catching Up

I'll start again with Mo picture and a comparable Gram picture It's crazy to me how much they look alike at this stage.

I started work again this past Monday but, although with the way this summer unfolded, the main difference is that I am leaving the house every morning instead of writing emails and making phone calls routinely. Mo's sleeping is starting to stabilize a bit. Unfortunately, stable means waking up every three hours or so at night. Beth told me to sleep in our guest room Monday night, so I got the first uninterrupted night of sleep I've had since my mom left. She slept with Mo one night while we passed out and slept until the morning.

Summer appears to have ended here, we've had morning temperatures in the 50s a couple of times this week. I hope we have a long fall instead of marching right into a winter like we did last year. In 2008 it snowed before Halloween and snowed off and on until the middle of April. We don't need another season like that. Gram got a postcard from his first grade teacher in the mail yesterday. We are in countdown mode now until he starts elementary school.

Mad Men (...and a mad woman)

So, our heat wave has resumed after a few moderate days and Beth, Mo, and I have been a little stir crazy staying in one of the few air conditioned rooms in the house. Beth has caught the Mad Men fever from reading about the new season and she has been watching old episodes through our On Demand service. Meanwhile, Mo continues to make me regret talking about how peaceful she seemed the day after she was born. She has long stretches of the day where she is observant and kind of calm, but boy does she have a temper already. Tonight she passed out from the effort of screaming at me after dinner. She has had a few outings lately like visiting church and the mall on Sunday. Her normal response to such adventures is to sleep. Perhaps a 3 AM car ride is the answer to some of our late night troubles...

Quick quiz - One of the photos above is of Gram, the other is Mo. Can you guess which is which?

Heat

It's our dog day of the summer. The first over 90 degree day this summer. A nice hot, muggy one at that. When we walked outside together today sometime after noon, Jim commented that today reminded him of being in Florida. I reminded him that walking out of our house in Lake Worth in August usually felt like you were opening a hot oven rather than just the front door. This was not that. Later today when our downstairs a/c unit blew a fuse (our only a/c unit downstairs) and we retreated to an upstairs bedroom for some a/c relief, I was reminded of what it was like living through the series of hurricanes we lived through in 2004 and 2005, when we lost power for 7-15 days at a time. While the air conditioned rooms remain comfortable, leaving them to walk through the rest of the house is a definite shock. Maureen is handling the "heat wave" fairly well. Gram took little notice of it. He was more interested in watching some of the programs on "Hurricane Week" on the weather channel. Tonight, the program was about 2004's Hurricane Ivan. Memories!
Oh yeah, Mo just had her followup appointment and she has gained a pound since birth. That's my girl!

A New Adventure Begins

Today Gram and I took grandma to the airport and now we get to start figuring out our lives here as a four person family. No one to lean on now, so we get to take care of Mo and each other. So far, she has been up at 3:30 every morning and last night she was up from about 2 until 6 AM. Below is the first photo (I think) of the four of us together.