Cup Stacking

Posted on by Jordan

So you know the cup stacking thing? You know, this one?

Well, we have been playing a variation  of that around our house, except it takes two players.

Heather or I frantically stack Hannah’s stacking cups, and she flails her her little arms and laughs manically. Well, maybe not manically, but it makes better word picture that way right? 🙂 Whatever the case it’s actually a lot of fun, I just haven’t fully adjusted to the fact that games don’t end on my time anymore.

Hannah has been quite the hand full over the past month. I think she has cut two or three teeth and gone into a weird drama phase over the past week. We don’t really know what the story is there, but as Heather always says “kids are a mystery”

It’s possible she is picking up on how stressed Heather and I are… it’s been a crazy, crazy month (more on that in a future post!) but I didn’t think we were that obvious about it. I suppose a meaningful percentage of her intuition is tuned to perceiving everything she can about mom and dad right now, so I might be selling her short.

Oh, and we took a trip out to Colorado for a few days, dropping her off in Nebraska with my parents. It was a great trip, and she apparently had lots of fun with Grandma and Grandpa, but I suppose a few days away from home plus 14 total hours in the car could, perhaps have contributed to her unrest 🙂

Speaking of that car ride, I don’t know how you are suppose to handle hour six of seven, but Hannah and I used an apple and a hat:

20140217_131437

It seems to have worked ok… she looked better in the hat than I did.

-Jordan

Tubes

Posted on by Jordan

2014 is apparently the year of the ear infection.

Hannah is on her 20th day taking oral antibiotics, and in today’s doctors appointment they said “oh, this looks worse than a week ago!”

We already had the procedure to get tubes for Hannah on the calendar, and I guess there is no question but that it is necessary at this point. We feel so bad for her. She frequently acts like she doesn’t feel good, and I think we can understand why! Everyone tells us the tubes will make a world of difference, so hopefully they are correct.

Hopefully we can get our little explorer back full-time soon!

IMG_1634

-Jordan

Still Winter

Posted on by Jordan

It’s amazing how hard this time of year seems to hit… every year. There isn’t much to look forward to in the days after Christmas and winter has only begun to bare its icy fangs.

So, twice in the past seven days we have gotten a flash snow storm bad enough to choke traffic going to work in the morning. Both times I managed to see an accident on my ONE MILE drive to work. Also, it was several degrees below zero on the way to work… again.

Sorry, I don’t mean to complain, I mean everybody knows it’s going to be cold in the winter. and this isn’t the first nasty winter we have seen in Iowa. That being said, it still surprises me how quickly it gets us down.

Driving home today, I did see one approach to dealing with winter:

Cold_outside

Mind you it was a balmy 5 degrees out by this time. I don’t know if this was an attempt to feel warm by dressing for summer or what.

-Jordan

Workouts 2014 Edition, Or Perhaps A Retrospective

Posted on by Jordan

It has been roughly a year now that I have been doing the “You Are Your Own Gym” workouts, as mentioned in a prior post. I can’t say that I have really been doing the workouts as much as borrowing the lift ideas and doing parts of the workouts. His full program is intense! I find that I cannot push myself that hard and keep doing the workout, sadly.

On the bright side, doing a somewhat relaxed version has allowed me to consistently get three to four workouts in a week. This has been enough to at least let me maintain my weight, and stay in something that resembles “in shape.” I sometimes worried about my joints using this approach, but excepting some muscle soreness, it has been surprisingly easy on my body over the past year.

We had one of those random mid-winter nice days a week or so back, and I thought it would be a great idea to go for a run. It turns out my knees still don’t really like that. I guess it was almost two years ago that I was running regularly, and I wasn’t having too much in the way of knee pain most of the time then. Maybe I would need to work back up to that, because just doing an out of the blue run caused several days worth of pain.

All of that is to say that I am really glad to have found something that is: low impact, practical within the confines of parenting a one-year-old, and something I can keep doing day in and day out.

A year in, and I don’t even slightly resemble the guy on the cover though, so perhaps there is still room for improvement 🙂

 

-Jordan

A New Year

Posted on by Jordan

Hey look, it’s a new year already!

It’s funny how often I think “hey I should work up a post on this,” and (as you may have noticed) how seldom that actually happens.

After lots of reflection on this, I think part of my reluctance is related to my reluctance to over-share about my child. Less because I am worried about those details being a problem as that I cannot help but feeling extra super narcissistic writing up a blog post about the thing she is doing that nearly every child goes through.

On the other hand, I suppose having a personal blog already puts me way over that line so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it.

That being said, I have a few goals for the aforementioned new year:

  1. Write a post a week
  2. Only have a Hannah post about once a month

With those goals in mind, what will I post about… There may be an abundance of cooking post, or maybe a few play-by-plays of the computer repair/upgrade I have planned. Although, if that goes poorly I would be reduced to posting from a phone… might lead to shorter blog posts 🙂

Despite the lack of posts, 2013 was a rather good year for the Nelson household. I don’t know what the proper level of sharing is, but we did manage to produce roughly 20 gigs of new pictures! That has to count for something right?

-Jordan

Fun At Home, Or “Why You Shouldn’t Play Hide And Seek With A Phone”

Posted on by Jordan

Here was the plan for our weekend:

Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.

Let me tell you how things actually went:

2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.

5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish

6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!

6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.

11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.

So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!

You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!

And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂

-Jordan

 

Nine And A Half Months

Posted on by Jordan

Give or take a week, and the Hannah has been breathing air about the same amount of time she was waiting to be born.

It’s really hard to wrap my mind around that. She has gone from being a cute little lump to being quite mobile. Not quite walking, but starting to think about it.

The noteworthy thing that got me to start this post to begin with was I wanted to record this week’s novel thing: Pillows.

I managed to entertain Hannah for a good ten minutes (an eternity in infant time!) by making a pile of pillows, and letting her crawl her way up, over and around them. I don’t imagine the novelty will last long, but we had fun today 🙂

-Jordan

Workouts

Posted on by Jordan

Subtitle: Yes we still do them!

The addition of Hannah into our lives has…. complicated getting work outs in, but Heather and I have managed to sneak in at least a little exercise despite the rather demanding schedule imposed by an infant.

Heather continues to take advantage of the treadmill in our building. I won’t say much beyond that it’s what she has been doing for a long time and covers all the bases of being enjoyable, effective stress control, and producing results.

Last winter I tried using the elliptical trainer as a way to be nicer to my knees. I never felt like I was able to challenge myself enough, and I really don’t like staring into a TV during my workout. I decided to try a more strength training oriented approach this winter. Pre-Hannah I was just doing kind of a random collection of body-weight lifts, and the occasional free-weight session. It worked ok, but I would not consider it a great success.

After the initial craziness of Hannah’s arrival I wanted to take a more structured, and hopefully efficient approach, primarily using the book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I am now a couple of months into the “basic” program, and fairly happy with it. I can’t say that I have really lost weight, but I have gotten stronger, and considering how tricky it is to sneak in workouts some days I will have to be happy with that for now.

Someday it will warm up (not today, May second and it’s been snowing for 14 solid hours!)  and I will incorporate running again, but I do think it’s noteworthy that I am over two months into a challenging workout program and haven’t had to skip a single day for knee problems or other injuries. I haven’t ever had that kind of consistency with running.

I have been really impressed that using minimal equipment, just a big dowel to place across a doorway or span over two stools and lots of different body weight lifts (think push-ups) even two months in I am still finding the workouts challenging! The downside is I probably need a pull-up bar at some point, and I have needed to adjust the occasional workout to remove jumping oriented lifts. Someday we won’t live on the 3rd floor and I can re-introduce those 🙂

-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