Two milestones
I think Zoe has achieved mobility. (It's the beginning of the end!) She isn't crawling yet, but she is doing this backwards scooting thing. We were at her grandmother's yesterday, and I noticed she moved a little bit while we were playing on the floor. Later that night, we were playing some more at home. She moved 2-3 feet a few times, off her play blanket. So far, only going backwards. She is trying to get onto her knees but hasn't figured it out yet. She's also sleeping horribly at night. I think the two things might be related.
I've also finished my book revisions. The book was 535 pages. It's now 379. I'm going to start submitting again after Christmas and see if I get any good feedback. Either way, I'm beyond ready to start on my next project. I have the beginning of one novella and ideas for two more. It was interesting, when I finished entering all the revisions this last time, I typed "The End" on the last page. I'd never before had that impulse, so maybe I really am done. God, I hope so.
Monday
Friday
A book meme
Via the Split Infinitive. The rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but didn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand.
1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : A Novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values
I seem to have a hard time getting through Dostoyevsky (but somehow I know how to spell his name). And I didn't strike through any books. It takes quite a bit for me to hate a story.
Via the Split Infinitive. The rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but didn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand.
1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : A Novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values
I seem to have a hard time getting through Dostoyevsky (but somehow I know how to spell his name). And I didn't strike through any books. It takes quite a bit for me to hate a story.
More Zoe
Zoe’s daycare teachers say she really loves books and will spend long periods flipping through them on her own. Hmmm … wonder where she got that from?
She is a drooling monkey and will sit around making funny faces like sticking her tongue out, “spitting,” and just generally doing weird things with her mouth, which I think are all due to her teething. But no teeth have broken through yet!
I think she’s starting to understand “jokes.” I was making funny faces and noises at her last night and she kept giggling.
She’s eating green beans and other veggies, in addition to oatmeal cereal. We’re trying to give her the green stuff before the sweet things. Our pediatrician (and others) have said that once you get them going on the sweet stuff, it’s hard to get them to eat the greens.
Last week, Zoe and I shared two classic mother-daughter moments. I was taking her to daycare and I was wearing a dress that shows some cleavage (this becomes important later in the story). I’d fed her, made her bottles for the day, dressed her, loaded everything in the car, and grabbed my jacket. I was in the process of putting on her sweater to walk out the door when she started having a coughing fit. She made the sound every mother dreads, that chocking noise that sounds like a cat hacking up a hair ball, and then she puked … straight down my dress. From the outside, you could barely tell. Inside my dress, I had warm spit up sliding down my stomach. Of course, I had to change my outfit.
A day or two later, she was having a bath. I’d just soaped up her head when she got her telltale red face. She started grunting; I freaked and lifted her out of the water where I found a couple of presents. Nate said, “this bath is over,” and I guess he dried her hair with the shampoo on it (because I didn't hear any water running) while I took care of the water and poop disposal.
And those, my friends, are the moments that no one can prepare you for as a parent.
Zoe’s daycare teachers say she really loves books and will spend long periods flipping through them on her own. Hmmm … wonder where she got that from?
She is a drooling monkey and will sit around making funny faces like sticking her tongue out, “spitting,” and just generally doing weird things with her mouth, which I think are all due to her teething. But no teeth have broken through yet!
I think she’s starting to understand “jokes.” I was making funny faces and noises at her last night and she kept giggling.
She’s eating green beans and other veggies, in addition to oatmeal cereal. We’re trying to give her the green stuff before the sweet things. Our pediatrician (and others) have said that once you get them going on the sweet stuff, it’s hard to get them to eat the greens.
Last week, Zoe and I shared two classic mother-daughter moments. I was taking her to daycare and I was wearing a dress that shows some cleavage (this becomes important later in the story). I’d fed her, made her bottles for the day, dressed her, loaded everything in the car, and grabbed my jacket. I was in the process of putting on her sweater to walk out the door when she started having a coughing fit. She made the sound every mother dreads, that chocking noise that sounds like a cat hacking up a hair ball, and then she puked … straight down my dress. From the outside, you could barely tell. Inside my dress, I had warm spit up sliding down my stomach. Of course, I had to change my outfit.
A day or two later, she was having a bath. I’d just soaped up her head when she got her telltale red face. She started grunting; I freaked and lifted her out of the water where I found a couple of presents. Nate said, “this bath is over,” and I guess he dried her hair with the shampoo on it (because I didn't hear any water running) while I took care of the water and poop disposal.
And those, my friends, are the moments that no one can prepare you for as a parent.
Monday
Moment of synchronicity?
I was reading Spike's most recent entry about working a benefit, her son's birthday, and watching an Austin musician play with her son onstage:
"But the real, true highlight of the show was The Shelley King Band. How I missed hearing this woman sing up until this point is beyond me, but I count that as a major oversight and complete loss. Holy Mother she is fantastic, and a great songwriter, with a million references to the weather that escaped being cliché and put me right in the moment, right there on her porch watching the rain come down.
Best of all, though, was that when Shelley plays, her three year old, Clark, stands beside her with a little guitar and a tiny mic stand. Wait til I post the pictures. Clark knows every word to every song and he stands there and sings and it is beyond a riot.
...
Just watching Clark would've been enough but there was an added bonus. As it happens, when Henry was three, we used to go see Don Walser play every week at Jovita's. And Henry had an itty-bitty guitar with no strings. And he'd go and stand right next to Don Walser and "strum" and it was the cutest thing. So watching Clark, as the now 6' 1" Henry sat behind me, grinning at the sight, just thrilled me."
Reading the entry gave me the strong urge (always present, but sometimes more suppressed/repressed than at other times) to move back to Austin. I had this image of living life with Zoe in Austin. She loves music and dancing--the first time I felt her move in the womb was during a live show at Trinity Pub and right now she seems to really like Stevie Ray Vaughn--and I just had this image of her growing up with music as a natural part of life, in restaurants and coffee shops and everywhere.
I followed the link to the musician's Myspace page and heard "Call of My Heart," which is about being called home.
I think I stress Nate out when I talk about Austin. We both have had our moments of wanting to move back, and moments of feeling more-or-less content with where we are. We like our house, have good jobs, etc. The road blocks have always been the same. We haven't had much luck finding jobs in Austin. When we were younger, we might have just taken the chance and moved there. But now we have responsibilities--the mortgage, the need for medical insurance for Zoe, etc. A move to Austin hasn't come together for us but the desire remains. I'm not sure what that means. Perhaps that it's not the right time?
I was reading Spike's most recent entry about working a benefit, her son's birthday, and watching an Austin musician play with her son onstage:
"But the real, true highlight of the show was The Shelley King Band. How I missed hearing this woman sing up until this point is beyond me, but I count that as a major oversight and complete loss. Holy Mother she is fantastic, and a great songwriter, with a million references to the weather that escaped being cliché and put me right in the moment, right there on her porch watching the rain come down.
Best of all, though, was that when Shelley plays, her three year old, Clark, stands beside her with a little guitar and a tiny mic stand. Wait til I post the pictures. Clark knows every word to every song and he stands there and sings and it is beyond a riot.
...
Just watching Clark would've been enough but there was an added bonus. As it happens, when Henry was three, we used to go see Don Walser play every week at Jovita's. And Henry had an itty-bitty guitar with no strings. And he'd go and stand right next to Don Walser and "strum" and it was the cutest thing. So watching Clark, as the now 6' 1" Henry sat behind me, grinning at the sight, just thrilled me."
Reading the entry gave me the strong urge (always present, but sometimes more suppressed/repressed than at other times) to move back to Austin. I had this image of living life with Zoe in Austin. She loves music and dancing--the first time I felt her move in the womb was during a live show at Trinity Pub and right now she seems to really like Stevie Ray Vaughn--and I just had this image of her growing up with music as a natural part of life, in restaurants and coffee shops and everywhere.
I followed the link to the musician's Myspace page and heard "Call of My Heart," which is about being called home.
I think I stress Nate out when I talk about Austin. We both have had our moments of wanting to move back, and moments of feeling more-or-less content with where we are. We like our house, have good jobs, etc. The road blocks have always been the same. We haven't had much luck finding jobs in Austin. When we were younger, we might have just taken the chance and moved there. But now we have responsibilities--the mortgage, the need for medical insurance for Zoe, etc. A move to Austin hasn't come together for us but the desire remains. I'm not sure what that means. Perhaps that it's not the right time?