Digging Up The Daylilies

I left my office on May 1st with crampy contractions. I walked back in this morning after 12 weeks away. How'd it go? Pretty well.

This morning's home routine went very well. Danny had a good substantial feeding at 6:15 and a nibble at 8:15. Over breakfast I pumped a whopping 7 oz (my left side is an amazing producer. I may need a dairy cow shirt.). I headed out the door at 8:35 pushing a stroller but no kid. I had my pump and the big diaper bag so Drew wouldn't have to schlep it later.
Everybody was really happy to see me. I dove back in right away and I think we may well be on track to do our first concentrated turnover of apartments on Friday. I took a pump break at 10:45 and got Danny a good 5 oz for tomorrow. In the meantime Drew tells me that Danny required a whole lot of attention; he got about 30 minutes of work done all morning. And apparently my body had the right idea, as he ate all the milk I left.
Drew brought Danny over to me at 11:45. Danny was a sweet sociable kid. He did get a little fussy around 1:30 when he was full and dry. Katelyn, my boss's daughter and my maternity replacement, took Danny on a short walk for subs. The kiddo conked out. :) He was good the rest of the afternoon until about 3:15. At that point we were out of diapers and Danny was once again overtired. So I started to wrap up my work; we got out of the office around 3:40. We walked to the post office and then home, making it home by just before 4:30. At that point we were both hot and tired. We changed our clothes and crashed in our favorite nursing glider. Drew grilled dinner so I didn't have much to do.

Tomorrow I plan to take more diapers, which should allow us to stay longer. I also need to work out how to get Danny in motion when he gets bored and overtired. I may just need to rock the stroller or wrap him and sway. I'm not sure how to make that work with my desk job, but we'll get there eventually.

I almost posted this to Facebook before deciding it's not for polite company.( A tale of baby poop )

As a child my favorite thing to do when visiting my Auntie Helen was to play tourist. She lived at the seaside but instead of taking a little plastic bucket and spade to the beach we took the kitchen mop bucket and a trowel. :)

Today I played tourist in my own town. John, Drew's (and by extension my) college roommate is in town for two days. Yesterday I showed him State Street and we sat at the Terrace and watched the lake. Today we went to the zoo, the Veteran's Museum, and the State Historical Society Museum. We had a really good time and it cost us maybe $10 plus lunch and a coffee break.

I was surprised at how much there is to see at the Vilas Zoo. We only saw half of it before we had to leave to meet Drew for lunch. The primate house was really interesting as was the Tropical Rain Forest House. There was this African bird that I swear looked like MC Hammer. It has a black plume that's sort of rectangular that it could puff up on the top of its head.

After dropping our inkjet printer off at the Computer Science department we met Drew for lunch at Ian's Pizza. This is our favorite pizza place in the whole world. Why? Best pizza. They always have several veggie options and lots of really unusual toppings. Drew and John both had a slice of beef taco pizza and a slice of macaroni & cheese pizza. I had spinach & feta and a penne pasta pizza.

I may never go to the Veteran's Museum again but I'm glad I went with John. John was in the Army Reserve and deployed to Iraq in 2003. There was a special exhibit on the current war which gave him lots of artifacts to explain to me. Then we went through the rest of the museum where I saw things that I knew the names of but had no idea what they looked like. All the classic (post-1850) armaments for example, which my guy friends seem to know about instinctively. Now I've seen a Tommy gun, a Winchester rifle, an AK-47, and a claymore mine. It'll help when we're playing more modern role playing games.

At the Historical Society Museum we went to the Odd Wisconsin exhibit. It was a lot of fun but the part that made the biggest impression on us was the very end. After tracing the history of unusual things in the state they showed a kitchen and living room circa 1992. We stood in front of the living room trying to see what videos, Nintendo games, and CDs they had. It looked very very generic and very very familiar. For the record they had a tape of Ghost, and Pac-man, Super Mario Brothers, and Duck Hunt for the Nintendo.

Baby Danny was born at 10:01 this morning after a very fast labor. I woke up to mild contractions at 5:15, my water broke at 6:30 and by 7:30 I was at the hospital. There was a lot of meconium but he has had no trouble from it (it just took a couple of shampoos to wash his hair).

Danny is 8lbs 8.5 oz and 19 inches long and of course an adorable baby. He started nursing like a champ right away and now has the hang of it!

Pictures at Facebook and more to come as soon as Drew comes back to the hospital.

What I should be doing this evening:
1) Packing up Passover dishes and unpacking the regular ones
2) Packing my hospital bag

What I am doing:
Crashing in front of the TV.

I am so tired and crampy that I just have no energy to stand up and do this stuff.

The last couple of weeks Drew and I have been making an effort to have a nice dinner on Friday night. This week we weren't sure what we'd eat, but he asked me to make challah anyway. So Thursday night after dinner I started the challah. My current favorite recipe is the Czernowitzer Challah from A Blessing of Bread. It's very easy to mix up -- no power tools required. Unfortunately it starts with a 2+ hour rise, and it was pushing 8pm when I finally got it going. My Thursday night Facebook status was "Waiting for the challah to rise so I can go to bed". Eventually I gave up and just threw the bowl in the fridge overnight.

Friday morning the dough had risen nicely but I was a little concerned about it over-rising through the day. Neither of us had time to wait for the dough to warm and bake, though, so we went for it. Drew shaped the challah while I was in the shower -- a 4 strand braid that looks complicated but is as easy as a 3 strand. He covered it with a damp tea towel and put it in the booze cellar for the day. When I got home at 5:15 the dough was in nice shape -- not over-risen at all! I put my egg wash on and baked it.

And here's how it turned out!

From Blog photos

From Blog photos

Beautiful, easy, and it fit into my usual schedule! I am a very happy camper.

I've just made my second batch of laundry soap. The last batch lasted 7 months and I made this one with the remaining ingredients -- how's that for economical? :)
Today's version was inspired by my new copy of The Naturally Clean Home (Karyn Siegel-Maier). Since I have a front-loading washing machine, hard water, and usually wash in cold water, I thought I'd better stick to the gel method commonly available on the internet. So I used the ingredients in the book and the method from the internet. Which ended up going as follows:

Ingredients

• 1 cup grated soap (I use Zote brand -- in the future I'll look for something less scented)
• 1 cup washing soda
• 1/2 cup borax
• 10-15 drops essential oil
• A whole lot of water!
• 3-5 gallon container

1. Heat 6 cups of water, then dissolve the grated soap into it.
2. Once dissolved, turn off the heat and add the washing soda and borax, stirring until those are dissolved.
3. Put 4 cups of hot water into your storage container
4. Add the soap mixture to the water and mix.
5. Add another 1 gallon plus 6 cups (that's 22 cups) of cool water to the mixture. Stir to combine.
6. At this point the soap is cool enough to add 10-15 drops of the essential oil of your choice. I used lavender.
7. Let sit 24 hours to gel. Or you could pour it into old laundry bottles and then let it sit to gel.

This stuff is a little sludgy, like thick egg drop soup. I use 1/4 cup of soap per load and put vinegar into the fabric softener cup of my washing machine. It works well for us! I have seen notes that say not to use this formulation for cloth diapers since the soap (rather than detergent) can negatively impact the absorbency of the diapers. So we will just be using this for household laundry once the baby comes.

I'm listening to Talk of the Nation right now and they're polling people about their favorite Christmas specials. Mine are the 1964 Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and A Muppet Family Christmas. Rudolph has the fabulous details of the elf who wants to be a dentist and the Abominable Snowman who makes sno-cones (who got a cameo in Monsters Inc). The Muppet one is a cross-over of Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and Muppets. The Swedish Chef is in charge of cooking dinner and wants to serve up Big Bird. Priceless.

What's your favorite TV Christmas special and what makes it so special?

and in French. morganlf posted about OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies last weekend and tonight we watched it. Halfway through, I was emailing my Dad saying "You have GOT to see this movie!". It's a parody of early Bond and it's done really really well.

I just read this in the NY Times. So so so cool! Google, through Google Trends, is tracking the flu season. They've checked their data against the Centers for Disease Control for the  last 4 flu seasons and found that they're 2 weeks ahead of the CDC. This is apparently just a data processing issue -- Google can collect and process the data much faster because they're not working from the same sources.