Baby Notes From March

Posted on by Jordan

Well, there was a time when I worried that having a child would dominate the blog.

As it turns out, having a child dominates my time, making doing anything on the blog kind of hard. I do have plenty of time to reflect on things that might be interesting… and then talk myself out of posting them…

I have a few observations I wanted to remember someday, so I will share here.

  • Hannah, in this phase at least, cries just like people sometimes write it “whaaa whaaa whaaa” I never thought about a baby putting the ‘W’ on there, but she really does. It kind of drives home the infant part of her I suppose
  • Turning down the lights at night may not make Hannah sleepy, but it really knocks me out… so far she has always fallen asleep first though 🙂
  • I realized how soothing music can be for me, and wanted to sing to Hannah as part of our bedtime ritual, and quickly discovered that I cannot remember any “bedtime” songs.
  • She doesn’t seem to mind that we repeat the same three or four songs over and over
  • Those songs are basically all hymns, but they are the only kind of song I can pull off without some music or something to follow
  • My vocal cords really aren’t up to the task of singing as much as Hannah would like. I suppose I will build some endurance, or maybe she will learn to be content with just one pass through dad’s entire repertoire.

I suspect these things may not be as profound a year from now, but it’s something, and I enjoy taking a minute to reflect. We talk to parents with kids nearing two and they can’t seem to remember a single detail from the “not yet crawling” phase, so I guess there is a never ending stream of new experiences awaiting us in the days ahead.

-Jordan

 

Do Your Backups Work?

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a few posts ago (we won’t talk about time between posts) that I was setting up a cloud backup solution.

I also still run local backups to a Windows Home Server setup.

A week or so ago, Heather mentioned that some of the pictures were missing from her laptop. I started looking, and discovered to my horror, that all the pictures were missing. 30+ gigs of pictures, carefully sorted and edited, all gone.

I still haven’t been able to determine what happened. The is no evidence that the drive failed, and I can’t quite imagine a drive failing with such precision that only the pictures, and yet all the pictures vanished overnight.

Whatever the cause, my first priority was to see what could be done to restore the pictures. I have a process in place that is suppose to use Microsoft’s SyncToy to replicate all the pictures from the laptop to a shared space on the server and then onto my desktop. However, the scheduling has been broken on the laptop for some time, and I had neglected to fix it*.

This would be my first attempt at restoring files from a Windows Home Server backup. Kind of surprising given that I have had the server running for the entire time we have been married. The restoration options are surprisingly good. I was expecting to have to blindly pick a nightly backup and overwrite the entire laptop with said image. While that is an option, they provide a file browser that lets you examine files in each nightly image. From there you can copy the files to an arbitrary location (even a different computer!) rather than simply restoring them to the location they were backed up from.

This let me recover a few key items, and place them on my desktop, letting Heather work with them while I ran some tests in search of the root cause of these issues.

Failing to find a root issue, I opted to restore the entire pictures collection and move on. It isn’t a fast operation given the sheer size of the collection, and was a nice reminder as to why I keep an Ethernet cable plugged into the router and coiled in the closet… at least I didn’t have to work at wireless speeds… and it still took a long time.

Even having taken a long time, it was remarkable how painless the restoration was compared to what I was dreading. I managed to have 100% of the files recovered within a few hours of discovering the problem. I would conclude this post with a hearty endorsement of Windows Home Server, but Microsoft discontinued the product at the end of last year, so… I guess it’s nice to know it still works.

-Jordan

 

*Suddenly that seems more serious, although I fear it would have simply synchronized the deletion of pictures through the pipeline rather than restoring the missing pictures. At this point I am afraid to turn it back on until I understand why the pictures vanished in the first place.

Bedtime

Posted on by Jordan

As Hannah’s eighth week draws to a close a few patterns are starting to emerge. I think about these a lot, given that it is my job to put her to sleep each night.

I have thought about this enough to provide a helpful chart of the bedtime process:

bedtime

Sometimes we skip that initial “Upset” blip, but almost never do we skip the “end of the world” cry before passing out.

On a very positive note, she has slept through the night for the past three nights. We hope this is the start of a trend, but it’s too early to know for sure.

On a final note, waking up is really cute right now:

 

-Jordan

Gear “Wins”

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so maybe someday I will find myself detailing the pros and cons of a diaper bag. Today is not that day.

What I do want to talk about are a few items I owned pre-baby that have proven very useful with an infant in the house.

First up, a tablet computer. Now it’s a bit of a stretch to say this was a pre-baby item, because I used the impending birth of our daughter as the excuse I gave myself to justify spending all my post-gift buying allowance on a single item. I purchased a Nexus7 from Google. I don’t know how I would feel about the tablet if Hannah hadn’t arrived about a week after it did. Without a child in the mix I don’t find surfing, or playing little time waster games all that engaging when I have a real computer 20ft away.

That all changes when you have a baby in one arm. The tablet is wonderful for keeping up with light reading online, or doing real basic e-mail etc. The N7 is light enough to easily work one handed, although you need a second hand to do much interaction. I haven’t had much time with an IPad, but I think in this use case, the smaller tablet is probably more useful, simply for the one-handed option. Little time waster games or random online reading make it a lot easier to wait that extra five minutes to make sure Hannah is really asleep before trying to lay her down at night.

The second device that has come in handy is my Kindle. I wasn’t using it a lot early on, in part because I was so sleep deprived I was afraid my retention would be so poor as to make the reading completely useless. I don’t know if that really would have been true, but whatever the case I am not so sleepy now and have really enjoyed reading books again.

The place where the kindle shines, much like the N7 is one handed operation. The kindle is truly a one handed device, where the N7 only kind of is, and a book really isn’t when it comes time to turn the page. One of the other advantages the kindle has over the N7 is being a more paper-like screen so I can light the room with a soft lamp instead of blasting myself in the face with a bright screen. This may sound trivial, but it’s hard to peek down and see if Hannah’s eyes are close when your eyes aren’t actually adjusted to the rooms ambient light.

I suspect this may be the least interesting aspect of a new baby for anyone reading this… but so far I haven’t distilled much else down to an idea for a post yet. 🙂

-Jordan

A Day In The Life

Posted on by Jordan

This will probably be a short post, and perhaps not the most profound, but a post nonetheless.

I have pondered what to cover here and what would be so utterly mundane as to be annoying to read. After much more thinking than typing(holding a baby kind of enforces that) I have come to the realization that blogs are inherently filled with naval gazing, and the fact that my stated purpose for the blog is to have a record of life as it happens.

Our daughter is six weeks old. Our days all run something like this: up at six, but Heather has already been up once about 3am to feed Hannah, but now we are both up. I take Hannah and work on breakfast as best I can one handed (getting pretty good at it) while Heather showers and gets ready for the day. I go to work, Heather does whatever Hannah will let her get done.

At noon most days I am able to come home (something we are very grateful for) but it’s less of an extra dose of family time and more a chance to change a diaper and give “mom” a short break.

In the evening, I am primarily responsible for Hannah, with perhaps a small hand-off to run down to the gym. It turns out the 6 to 9 block of time is her most active, although not particular interactive yet, time of day. We play to the extent she can, and maybe read, all of that eventually leading up to bed time.

It has been my job to put her to bed, which consists of trying to convince a 6-week old that being wrapped up like a mummy and laid in a basket is not only ok, it’s the ideal time to sleep! Some nights this is easy, some nights it can take hours, but so far she has eventually conceded the point, if only from fatigue.

( actual swaddled baby not pictured)

Stay tuned for more posts detailing the exciting new changes Hannah has brought to our household! 🙂

-Jordan

 

 

Cloud Backup

Posted on by Jordan

After having brought Hannah home, and taking a few pictures to prove it, I started to worry, as I am sure many new parents have… “Are my backups good enough?” “Should I be doing offsite backups?” “How am I going to be able to accommodate the sheer volume of digital media being produced here?”

As luck would have it, I happened to be catching up on my Security Now podcasts, and a solution was mentioned that sounded ideal.

CloudBerry is a program that manages archives on a number of 3rd party storage solutions, and allows you to compress and encrypt data before shipping it off to be saved. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, except they have good support for Amazon Glacier.

Glacier is a very low-cost backup option, that was designed with backup in mind, meaning they don’t really expect you to need the data, and you agree that you could be waiting a few hours after your request before they give you access.

Being low-cost was key for our situation, as we have discovered that the appearance of a new baby in our lives sucks up *all* projecting time. That means the “delete extra photos so the backups aren’t huge” project will not be getting done any time soon.

I haven’t actually completed a backup yet… pushing 50+ gigs up to the cloud over our feeble internet connection takes some time, but I am very excited to have found something that appears to meet our needs and won’t cost a small fortune to accommodate the dismaying magnitude of disk space consumed by photos within our network.

-Jordan

Where The Plan Broke Down

Posted on by Jordan

Now that things have settled down to a somewhat predictable, if very different than before, life with a baby in the house, I thought I would take a minute to go over some parts of my “go to the hospital” plan that didn’t work so well, and maybe a few that did.

Before that I suppose I should give a quick rundown of events leading up to the birth of Hannah. Tuesday December 18th, Heather and I both went to work as normal. About 4:30 that afternoon, she called me to ask that I come straight to her office and take her to the hospital. This meant that we simply asked Heather’s mom, Pam, to pick up the bags we had packed for this very event. It also meant that the first of a few mistaken assumptions on my part were exposed.

Assumption one: I will be the one to pickup the bags. We had attached a list to the bags, detailing daily use items such as a toothbrush that would need to be added at the last minute. The list only contained items for Heather, because I only needed a couple extra things added. Namely, toothbrush, deodorant, kindle, nexus tablet, charger for all three devices.

Assumption two: Because I would be picking up the bags, I could pull on the sweatshirt that wouldn’t fit in the backpack. Warm clothing for me has the unfortunate habit of taking up an enormous amount of space in a bag, so I decided to just wear the clothing at least until we got to our room.

Packed items that I overdid:

Granola bars: A few of these were nice, given that Pam and I were acting as backup nurses basically all night, and couldn’t really leave the room. What we didn’t need were two entire boxes of bars.

Distraction items for Heather: We had movies, music, massage lotion, books… you name it, we had it. None of it got used during labor. Heather did watch a movie or two in the postpartum room.

Distraction items for Jordan: I had made a point of loading up my kindle with a bunch of books, and had queued up a nice backlog of interesting articles on my RSS feed. The reality was that pre Hannah I needed to be attentive to Heather (even when she didn’t need anything per say, she just wanted to feel like she wasn’t going through things alone). Post Hannah I was too tired to think about pleasure reading.

Vending machine money: This seemed like a great idea, but I already had granola bars, and if I had time to go down the hall to a vending area I had time to hit up the cafeteria and get real food.

Unexpected wins:

My tablet. I purchased A Nexus 7, expecting to read and maybe play a few games on it while at the hospital. What I ended up using it for was for communication. E-mail, Facebook and Skype all worked surprising well, and were a much greater priority than I expected them to be.

A blanket. Yes, the nurses brought plenty of blankets into our room… or they probably would have been plenty if the “cot for dad” built into the wall wasn’t built into “floor to ceiling windows on 3 sides” alcove, and Hannah didn’t come right before a blizzard. The blanket was theoretically for Heather I think… I can’t actually remember what I packed it for. Given that I didn’t have a sweatshirt, a nice soft fleece style blanket was a lifesaver.

I think that covers the majority of the adjustments / reflections I had regarding the items we packed for the hospital.

-Jordan

Hannah

Posted on by Jordan

Posting may be a little sporadic, as some big changes have come to the Nelson household.

At 3:39 am, December 19th Hannah Gabrielle Nelson arrived, all 9lbs 10 oz of her.

As you can see, Heather has already found time to do some posed photography with her, to great result!

 

I am starting to think will never sleep again, but perhaps I am overreacting. Whatever the case, posting may be less consistent here, and may end up being nearly all infant news 🙂

-Jordan

Movember

Posted on by Jordan

I really don’t know who’s idea it was, but there is this idea that November is mens health awareness month, so people should grow mustaches to raise awareness.

My guess is it was a clever way to give legitimacy to “no-shave November”

Whatever the case may be, my coworkers thought a contest was in order. Not content with just a mustache contest, each participant had to agree to grow the style he drew from a hat of styles.

A day or two into this contest, I had the idea that I would take a picture every day, and then make some sort of animation of the results.

Two problems arose out of that. One, I forgot to take the picture several days, and two, making the animation turns out to be a huge headache. I will throw the sad results of my attempt at the end of the post.

Not so sad were the contest results, where I won both the overall, and “participants only” voting with this:

I split the prize for winning with Heather, mostly because she felt she was suffering more for this contest than I was 🙂

-Jordan

(and as promised, the .gif)

 

Practice Run

Posted on by Jordan

What did we do this weekend?

As always, that is the easiest question to spin into a blog topic. Had the weekend gone as planned, there wouldn’t have been a lot to say, other than that our friends from church had a nice baby shower for Heather, and that we don’t really have anything else on the calendar until the baby gets here.

As it happened, Heather wasn’t feeling great Saturday morning, but figured she could power through a little discomfort if she just laid down for a few minutes. An hour later, she threw up, and we thought maybe that was going to be the turning point to her feeling better, so she composed herself and headed to the shower.

When she got home several hours later, I learned that she had thrown up three or four more times, and was feeling much worse. Given that every day of pregnancy is uncharted for us, and she didn’t seem to be getting better, I contacted our doctor. Her advice was to take Heather in to the hospital “just so they can check on her”

We grabbed a few things and headed out the door. Once at the hospital I don’t actually know how much time they spent thinking about her symptoms before deciding to send her to the maternity area as I was parking the car. On the bright side, Heathers mom had been a guest at the shower, and was able to accompany us to the hospital, so I didn’t have to abandon Heather while finding a place to legally leave our vehicle.

I made it inside just in time to accompany Heather down to the maturity area, where they immediately hooked up monitors for her vitals and the baby, followed by an IV running at what the nurse described as a quick pace. Once all of that was in place the nurse told us they had been seeing a lot of the flu that  weekend, and that Heather should be fine once she got hydrated.

Four hours and two liters of IV fluid later, the nurse recommended that we spend the night, because Heather was still dehydrated. This meant that I needed to take Heather’s mom back to our place, and pickup a few overnight items for myself and Heather.

Once back in the hospital room, I discovered a few things: First, that the cot the nurse had so helpfully provided wasn’t very comfortable, Second that I was too tired to really care, and finally, that the monitor tracking our child somehow got turned up making the dominant sound in the room her heartbeat.

It was an interesting experience. I hope it’s the last time I ever fall asleep listening to her heartbeat, but at the same time it was rather reassuring.

By morning, Heather was feeling much better, and the doctor came in to look her over and gave us the all-clear to head home. We decided it was a good practice run for our “real” trip to the hospital coming up soon, given that we now know exactly where we need to go, and what items we should have brought (or a few more anyway).

 

-Jordan