Random Thoughts

I'm at home with LL (still) and jotting down notes during his naps. Another week without being able to go into work. Anyway, this post is going to be really random. Don't even bother looking for a common theme or anything.

There are a lot of icky daycares out there. Like the one where the woman wanted to give my child some bizarre herbal supplement, and I got the sense that she'd start adding it to his bottles (against my wishes, obviously) if we left him there. Or the woman who held LL for 30 seconds, then handed him back to me in a panic the moment he started to fuss a little. Or the woman whose extremely creepy husband and heavy-metal-t-shirt twentysomething son are both also in the house all day. Or the woman who happily told me that she and her two assistants take the 15 kids (including infants) on field trips once every week or two; when asked how they get around, it turns out that the three women take all 15 babies and toddlers on city buses. Or the woman who told me, when I asked why she likes running a daycare, that she only does it because her husband doesn't make enough money. (At least she's honest.) Or the woman with a house that is even less childproof than mine, who told me not to worry about it because the children spend the entire day in the playroom, which is a room the size of a small walk-in closet, with no windows.

One of the daycares that we visited was called Julie's Little Angels Day Care. On the printed information that Julie gave me, there was a typo so it said "Little Angles" instead of "Little Angels." S suggested that maybe it's Little Angles because all of the babies are so acute. I really love my husband. But we still don't have childcare.

I recently took an online quiz in which you answer a bunch of questions about your interests, your climate preferences, hobbies, outdoor activities, career, and family, and then the site recommends that top 24 cities in the US where you would be happy living. Out of these 24 cities, my number one city ended up being the city in which I was born and raised. (I haven't lived there since I left for college at 18.) Number six on the list was where I went to college, more than 1,000 miles away from where I grew up. Of the remaining 22 cities on the list, 18 of them are within 150 miles of where I grew up or went to college (and most of them are actually within 50 miles). None of them, not a single one, is within 1,000 miles of where I live right now, where I've been living for the last 10 years. And people wonder why I plan to move after I finish my PhD.

LL finally, finally only woke up once last night, instead of the 3x he's been doing for the last few weeks. Sadly, the I'm-up-for-the-day time seems to have permanently moved from a reasonable 7:30am to a pre-dawn 6:15am. I think that's something I'm just going to have to live with.

LL is starting to wear 9-month clothing. The 6-month stuff does still technically fit him, but when he's in cloth diapers, they're very tight at the crotch. Now that I've emptied his dresser of all 3-month clothing and a good deal of the 6-month clothing, it is obvious that we're starting to run out of clothes. The mountains of clothing that we received as gifts seem to taper off around the 6-month mark. I think we'll still have enough clothing to keep LL comfortable while he's in 9-month sizes, but once he outgrows those, we're actually going to have to go shopping. To date, I've purchased three outfits for him, and everything else has been gifts or hand-me-downs. That's going to have to change in a few short months.

LL's consistent rolling from tummy to back seems to have stopped. (It only lasted one week.) Last week, it seemed like an awesome way for him to avoid the work of using his arms and abs and neck muscles when put on his stomach -- he could simply flip himself to his back. This weekend, he discovered another way to effectively avoid tummy time, without even having to do the work of rolling over: simply rest your head on the ground. We put him on his stomach, he briefly lifts his head, then he turns his head to the side and rests his cheek on the blanket. No exercise required. This maneuver seems fairly obvious now that he's doing it. Any suggestions on motivating a lazy infant to exercise on his tummy? Shaking toys above him doesn't do it. He just gives me this look that seems to say, "You want to play? Move me to my back! Otherwise, I'm just going to rest right here and suck on my fingers."

S and I are both only fluent in English, but people sometimes assume that I speak Hebrew, and that S speaks Japanese. Someone asked me the other day what LL's first language was going to be, and I said "I dunno, maybe Lisp." It wasn't until I got a really blank look that I realized what they actually meant. You think that LL is doomed to be a nerd?

LL and I visited my tech start-up again yesterday. He thought one of the robots was really cool until it moved its arms, which seriously freaked him out. So I guess we're not ready for robots yet.