Birthday parties and viruses - taken in stride

Priya started the week of her birthday with an ear infection, progressed to a cold and cough, and graduated with a classic case of Roseola. That was Tish's diagnosis the day before the rashes broke out. Who needs to go to the hospital when you have a 24-hour nurse on standby! For those interested, here's Priya, probably looking her worst. The good part is that the rash doesn't itch. Poor baby.

This past weekend we were in Michigan where Priya got to enjoy two birthday parties. Like Addy, Priya liked the cake, but didn't go all crazy with it. It may be that she was running a 102 fever, or probably more so that she is a fairly clean eater. I had to finally take her hand and smoosh it in the cake.




Yesterday we had the opportunity of another family day. I had some work downtown, so at the last minute we all decided to pile in the van and head out. The girls did some window shopping while I got done. Then we headed out to the Millenium Park, where I had my first look at the finished Bean. Looks pretty cool. We had a minor 'famous person' run-in when we saw Linda Yu from ABC 7.

Happy Birthday Priya!!

It is amazing how one year has flown by. I can remember just yesterday Tish calling me at work to let me know that we had to go to the hospital that evening. The similarities between that day and today are also remarkable. Priya’s 0’th birthday started out with her having trouble breathing. Her 1’st birthday is marked by her having a cold and fever for the last few days – and trouble breathing. That’s it. This stops here. No more. Here’s to healthy birthdays!

She is an amazing little girl. Though she isn’t feeling well, she has maintained a great attitude, and continues to be a little rascal. That is something I pray stays with her for the rest of her life. We love her so much.

Day in the park

Tish and Priya spent a day at the park with Sherry and her girls. It turns out that she didn't much care for swings. I suspect that will change.

Unbelievable!!

I simply can't believe this. When I had first made this post, I had thought it was a foregone conclusion that Jill Carroll would not survive her kidnapping. Tish called me this morning with the news that, wonder of wonders, Jill Carroll had been set free. Amazing. I am so happy and relieved for her. It also seems like that she came through this fairly unscathed.

Right now I am sitting at the bus terminal at O'Hare airport. Without a car, I am relegated to finding creative ways of getting around. I missed the bus by five minutes, so now I have to wait around for an hour before the next one gets here. Thanks to my iPod and wirless access, I can at least while the time away. The really sucky part is that I won't get to see Priya till tomorrow evening now. Aaargh. The torture.

I pulled up this interesting statistic on my Google videos. Take a look at the picture:

See that? The most popular videos that I host are the short clips from Buenos Aires. I should dig up more stuff from Argentina!

Almost there

Greetings from Minneapolis. I've been here for a few days already. The trip is going well, but not too exciting. So far I've eaten at a Red Lobster and a local steak house. Fun stuff.

This whole video thing with Google needs some rethinking in my part. It's incredibly easy for people to see the videos once they are online - all you need is a Flash player. But it takes so doggone long for Google to verify and approve the videos. There are some other sites out there that will host videos, and I might investigate them sometime. In the meantime, Google it is.

The first video is of Priya coming to a standing position by herself. It's the first time she did it, and we were lucky to get it on video. She can stand in place now for sometime, but steps are still a challenge.

The next video is of her waking up in the morning. She has taken to sleeping in this strange position with her butt up in the air. Doesn't look too comfortable, but seems like she likes it. I wish I was this chirpy when I wake up in the morning.

Family Day

This past weekend we went to the Chicago Flower and Garden Show at Navy Pier. We had first gone there a couple of years ago, and had really liked it. So I took a day off on Friday, and we decided to make a family day out of it. We had a really good time, and Priya thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her favorite time was at the end when we sat by the vast carpetted area outside the exhibition hall. Priya was crawling all around, going up to people and letting out her characteristics squacks. It was so cute, and everyone loved her.






Here's a short video of Priya enjoying herself.

This past Sunday Priya took her first official step. Now let's not get too excited because she hasn't shown any interest in repeating the feat. But at least both Tish and I were there to witness it. The funny thing is that earlier in the day I caught her playing with her walker. I grabbed my phone and shot a video of it. In the first attempt (unfortunately not on film), she had walked all the way across the breadth of the basement. Here you see her stumbling a bit, but still - the mechanics are all there.

A Hiatus

I know I have been a little quiet lately. Not a lot has been going on, so there's not a lot to say. I still don't have my car back after more than two weeks. Don't ask me for a referral. Last night I spent some time video-conferencing with David Swart on his new iMac. He has the sexiest legs I have ever seen. Hehe.

I bought my tickets for my trip to Germany in May. To be honest, the only reason why I am excited about going is to refill my dwindling number of German wine bottles. I love to share my collection of Franken wine with friends - especially the spätlese (late season grapes) kind.

I will be heading out to Minneapolis for a week at the end of the month. Fun. The best time to visit Minnesotta is early fall. Upper-state Minnesotta has probably one of the best midwestern foliage after the north-east.

Ok. Now some pictures.

Priya with Grandma Reay

Hangin' out with papa

Her favorite thing is to reach into drawers and pull out things

Not quite ready to climb up on the bed

One of my favorite bath pics

Not Quite Ready For Primetime

These are some pictures our friend Sherry took with Priya and her daughter Skyler. Notice both have the same outfits. Sherry ended up using the wrong flash setting, so all you see is the foreground. Also, Priya wasn't having her best of days. Still, I think the pictures turned out interesting...

Light entertainment fare

Fridays... Yea.. We love Fridays. In the immortal words of Loverboy, we're "working for the weekend"! More bad news on the car - it's gonna take more time, and it's gonna cost more. Great. Break out the credit cards.

Ok. I found some short clips that I took with the camera when we were in Argentina. Street life is so fun over there. Move over Drew Lachey. Enjoy.

Priya's Adventures in Rolling

This is a video that I took over three weeks I think. We had been trying for a while to get Priya to roll over. As you can see, she hated being on her stomach - so much for belly time. So since she didn't like being face down, it was challenging for her to learn how to start rolling over. As first time parents, we were kinda freaked out that she wasn't learning quickly enough how to roll over. Now that she is almost ready to walk, we look back at this video and long for the days of limited mobility! The last 15 seconds of this video are more than worth the three minute viewing time!

Encouragements and Discouragements

This has been a fairly challenging week for me. I realized again just how poorly I deal with stress and the unknown. Common human conditions both - just the response differs.

• Coming home last Friday, my car suddenly started shuddering in the middle of the road. I lost most power and the Check Engine light blinked like crazy. To make a very long story short, the engine is damaged, and the repairs are in the thousands of dollars. So much for tax refunds, huh.
• Until Thursday I didn't know what the cost was going to be. I found myself obsessing over how much money I was going to spend, and how it was going to be tough, and so on. I finally decided that money was supposed to be my servant, and not my master. To prove that out, I decided to abuse my servant - by going and spending some money. I had been promising to get Tish a pink Razr forever. I finally did. And I got myself a new phone too. So here are our new phones. The thing I like about my phone is that it has WiFi built in. So even though the screen is small, it's cool to check out email, and 'surf' the web.

• I spent yesterday staring at this machine in the little town of Morris, IL.

The end result was a stack of sheets perfectly lined up. Look at the registration marks on the right side.

• I added more memory to my home PC. I now have a grand total of 1.5 GB. Circuit City was selling 512MB memory modules for $24.99. For fifty bucks I couldn't resist adding in a gig more of memory. Smokin...
• Michelle beat me to it (as usual? - hehe), but here's a video that I wanted to play during Priya's dedication (during lunch), but totally forgot about. So now, here for your viewing pleasure, is Priya...

Some brief updates

• My taxes are done for the year. I mean, not only did I file them, I also got all the refunds. So the federal government and the states of Illinois and Indiana are happy with what I showed them. And I now know what having a child does in regards to tax liability. A child under 17 is useful in two ways (at least as far as taxes go). They get claimed as a dependent (makes sense), but you also get a $1,000 tax credit for each one (take the total federal taxes that you owe, and deduct $1,000 from it).
• Within the span of a week (the time from my last post to this one), Priya is pulling herself up and actually liking it. OK. We all know Addy will be doing sprints in a week, but hey - we all have to proud of our own kids, right? :-)
• I wish I had a secret blog that no one knew about. There are some things I am wanting to rant and rave about, but I can't. Hence the great irony of writing blogs. You are supposed to be able to say whatever you want, but most times hold back because of the people that pass through - this makes it no different than real life.
• A friend of ours wanted to play scrabble this weekend. In thinking about it, I realized I haven't played that game in 15 years. We used to play it as a family. I don't think even now 'distactic' has been accepted as a word.
• We have recently been hooked on 24. I can't believe we let four seasons go by without ever watching it.
• A priest was walking in the woods when he came upon a bear. The priest fell to his knees and cried out, "Lord, please let this bear be a Christian bear." The bear looked at the priest, and then fell to his knees. He looked up to heaven, folded his paws and exclaimed, "Lord, thank you for this meal I am about to receive!"
  

Priya at 10 months

Studio Pictures at 10 months

Grilled cheese sandwich. Mmm...

Priya being... well... Priya

She can stand up, but hasn't really shown much interest in doing it by herself.

OK. We do feed her - it just doesn't show too well.

She loves having teeth - biter biscuits don't stand a chance.

She can't wait for winter to be over.

Word Cloud

TS had an interesting post on word cloud. This is an image that's generated through all the words in your blog - it picks up the most frequent ones and makes them a bigger font, etc. OK. So why is Michelle's name so big? Must be the thousands of comments she puts in. Haha. I think I need to talk about Tish more often. Priya did pretty well, but guess who's the biggest... Yep. Me! You can get your own cloud here.