jumperoo, jumperoo, jump up, jump up, and jumperoo

so you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to watch it, but work with me here. taking videos with a regular old digital camera sucks. which is why it is awesome that we got a brand new digital video camera for christmas. woo hoo! expect lots more videos in the future!

dear fisher price

we heart the jumperoo.

and when there's snow

you just have to put your baby in a snowsuit and take pictures!

winter wonderland

we moved to boston because we wanted snow. oh boy have we gotten it so far! we had almost 2 feet on the ground before christmas, but it has been warm (40) for the past few days and much of it has melted away. it'll be back though! :)

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we are wondering how much snow it will take before we suck it up and invest in a snow blower. if money wasn't such an issue right now, i'm sure we'd already have one. jeremy is lucky though - it only seems to snow when he is on call and has to stay at the hospital so i have to shovel the driveway!

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fortunately we have the best neighbors in the world. i was out shovelling during the last storm and the neighbor across the street told me to go inside and that she would send her husband over with their snow blower once he was done with their driveway. and then our neighbor next door said he would do our driveway when it snows if he could store his snow blower in our shed (easier to access than his.) works for me!

no power suit shopping... for now

some decent news on the job front. i have a 3-month temporary role in the office in framingham. it is actually one of the roles i interviewed for. after i interviewed for this role, they decided not to hire anyone into the job because of some organizational changes about to happen. they wanted to let the dust settle and then determine what type of role it would be and hire for it. oh boy did getting that call suck. this was the last open role in the office that i could interview for so when the HR guy said it was a no-go i had to hold back the tears, at least until he was off the phone. pretty much thought i was be headed for the unemployment line and back to the power-suit wearing interview process. i think the HR guy was as frustrated as me because he thought i was a perfect fit for the role. he said he would keep trying to find something before my temporary project with the richmond team ran out. then, a couple of days later he called me back to see if i would be open to another temporary assignment. oh heck yeah. temporary job is certainly better than no job at all. it would at least buy me some more time. he was able to work things out with the hiring manager so i will be starting this new role on 1/15 once i have wrapped up my current project. the really, really, really good news is that this 3 month role will get me through bonus day (yeah for money!) which i was really worried i would not be around for. AND that time of year tends to be a musical chairs job swap. everyone gets their end of year performance review and bonus and then finds a new role within the company so that they can maximize the amount of time they are in a new role before the next performance review (improving their chances of getting a better review and higher bonus next year.) so even if the temporary job doesn't turn into a permanent one, there could be more openings available to me by then. phew. imminent financial ruin halted for at least a few more months.

abby's house of pie

as promised a few days ago, i am catching up on a bunch of backlogged posts. abby is doing well. she is no longer relegated to wearing a lampshade and her stitches have been removed. we discussed the cancer treatment options with the vet last time we were there. he said that treating her with prednizone only (what we were going to do) would probably do more harm than good because of the extreme side effects doses that large have on small dogs. the chemo would probably make sure the cancer was gone, but it costs $2500-3000 a pop. and there's no way to know how many "pops" she would need - it's more of a do one round, see how it works, determine if another round is needed, repeat until no more rounds are needed thing. that could get super crazy super fast. so for now we have opted to do nothing. the vet was encouraged that the surgical margins (excised skin around the tumor) were clean, i.e. no cancer. she is a bit of an enigma though, because in general grade 3 tumors do not have clean margins. so maybe we caught it just in time, or maybe she's just a weirdo. we have an appointment in early january to have her looked at again to see if there are any signs that the cancer has spread. the good news is she is acting like her old self again. super bonkers, tail wagging like crazy, knocking over everything in her path (poor christmas tree ornaments!) in fact christmas night, jeremy and i were cleaning up the kitchen after a monster day of holiday meal prep. while our backs were turned, abby pulled a fruit pie off the dining room table and went to town. by the time we got to her, it was almost all gone. after that, i pushed in all the chairs to make sure she couldn't get up to the remaining pies and hoards of cookies. but... the next morning i came in from taking bailey and jackson out for their morning business and i found abby standing on the dining room table face-deep in a pumpkin pie. i have no idea how she got up there. she either jumped straight from the ground (doubtful, if you have ever seen the production she puts on when jumping into our bed which is considerably lower) or she jumped up on a chair several feet away from the table and made the flying-squirrel leap to the table. in a period of about 8 hours she consumed 2 whole pies. bonkers!

all i want for christmas is...

quentin's two front teeth. the bottom two teeth are in and now we are working on the top set. poor kid is in such pain. these mean teeth turn an otherwise agreeable baby into a screaming, drooling terror. a very fussy baby + getting ready for christmas = why i haven't posted much but i've got a ton of stuff to catch up so i may go blogging-crazy today and knock them all out. we'll see how long quentin will nap...

welcome to the fam

quentin proudly introduces his brand new cousin!

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calder laurent turpin

born 12/18 at 1:04 p.m.

7 pounds, 14 ounces

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congratulations to leah and bruce!

happy roo day to you!

on this day, one year ago, i peed. not just any normal pee. i peed on a stick. the magical stick told us that we would be roo parents. i already knew i was pregnant. jeremy did not believe me until i told him my boobs hurt. after that he was out the door to buy a pregnancy test and lo and behold i was right! the box said it could take 5 minutes to show a result but that darn thing had a plus sign on it the second the pee hit the stick! coincidentally, on this day 5 years ago, jeremy and i got engaged. happy roo day to you!

monday real estate update

again on tuesday (some day i'll actually get it up on monday!)

bad news (there's ALWAYS bad news)

• the people that had our house in their final four have narrowed it down to 2 houses and ours is not one of them

not bad news (but not exactly good either)

• our replacement air conditioner / heat pump will be going in on thursday so at least the pipes won't freeze leading to further cost
• we had three more showings last week, which is surprising given the time of year

the chance of a christmas miracle is looking less and less likely. stupid house.

naughty or nice?

quentin went to the mall today to meet santa claus. of course he had no clue what was going on, but he did like the little girl in front of us in line. she and quentin bonded over the fact that they had the same stroller :)

back to front!

at day care today quentin rolled from back to front, marking another big developmental milestone! he finally figured out how to get that pesky arm out of his way. now to spend all weekend trying to get him to do it again so we can see it this time...

I took care of this patient

With all the snow in Boston yesterday, the news started fishing for stories. Anywho, this family was taking their baby home yesterday when it became "unresponsive." Long story short she was admitted to the MGH NICU where I am currently working. I was her primary physcian today. Basically, all I did was discharge her but i thought it was cool that I was taking care of "the baby from the news." I was prepared to have a news conference today but apparently the media was not :) Here's the link to the story. Linky

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas!

we got about a foot of snow yesterday! at one point, we were watching the news and they said the snow had stopped. we looked out the window and it was still pouring down. then they clarified that it might still be falling on the south shore, where we are :) we shovelled the driveway three times to keep up with the snow. the dogs love it. too bad we don't have a fence so they can't romp around without leashes. note: there is really nothing funnier/cuter than a miniature dachshund that stands no more than 6 inches tall running through snow a foot deep time to wake quentin up and feed him. i have no idea how long it will take me to get to day care and back. it took jeremy over 3 and a half hours yesterday when he went to pick quentin up around 1!

the snow is falling down on our new england town

see that purple? oh yeah! the news is saying we'll get 9+ inches today/tonight!

so close!

after last week's exciting roll from front to back, quentin is trying to quickly follow with a dramatic sequel - back to front. he's not quite there yet, but so close! i also like how he doesn't stop chewing on his fingers during this roll attempt :)

roo jumperoo

quentin has a ton of energy and no longer just wants to lay on his play gym or sit in his swing. he wants action! so last night jeremy and i bought him a new toy - a jumperoo! i put him in it for a few minutes this morning and he loved it. he can play in it some more once he wakes up from his nap!

think it's time to take our fall decorations down?

monday real estate update

on tuesday, because i didn't get around to it last night. our real estate agent calls us every monday to let us know what is going on with the house, if we've had any showings, etc. (love it - so much better than our previous realtor!) even if there's nothing going on, it's nice to touch base. the past few updates have been pretty depressing so i haven't bothered to post them, but last night's was less depressing and potentially promising. we had three showings over the course of last week, and one was someone looking at it for a second time. apparently we have made their "final four" and they will likely be making a decision soon. don't know what other houses they are looking at but we're still in the game. we have not and will not get our hopes up, but this is a glimmer of hope that our house still might sell. we had officially given up on it and were pushing the rental options. we simply cannot drop our price any lower (we'd be entering the sell-for-less-than-we-paid territory - eek!) and the neighbors 2 doors down have plenty of room to keep dropping their price. any price drop that we make, they can drop 5-10K below us, which is exactly what they've done since they went on the market. we will not win that game because they paid a lot less for their house a long time ago. so why try? who knows, maybe it will be a christmas miracle. in other stupid richmond house news, i am truly amazed at just how easy making a home owner's insurance claim for the AC unit was. 2 simple phone calls and one fax. check is in the mail. we're good to go. i thought for sure it would be a complex maze of insurance hell, like the time i had to call the virginia state police to get my car insurance to pay for something. impressive state farm!

it's never good when...

the vet walks into the exam room and says, "i'm afraid i have some bad news for you." abby's biopsy results came back and her tumor was right on the border between grade 2 and grade 3, and with these types of things they "round up". grade 3 mast cell tumors are extremely aggressive, and even though they removed the whole tumor on tuesday, chances are very high that it has already spread to her lymph nodes and will eventually show up in her liver or spleen. according to the vet today, without treatment abby will have less than a year. all the articles i have read on the internet paint a similar dismal picture. she's probably only got a few months left. so we need to make a difficult decision. there are two chemo treatments we could choose from. one would be simply giving her prednizone which would be the milder (and cheaper) form of treatment. the other option would be to go on the full-out attack with the real stuff - vinblastine. even with the heavy duty (and super expensive) stuff there are no guarantees. if the cancer has already metastasized, the chemo will only delay the inevitable. and most likely make her miserable. i always believed that i would do anything, including going broke to care for my animals. they are family members no matter what non-pet people believe. but at the same time i have a baby to worry about, and two mortgages. i have no problem eating nothing but ramen noodles for a long time but that doesn't exactly work for quentin. and the practical side of me has a hard time sinking a ton of money into treatment that may only add a few miserable months to her life. right now we think we will start her on the prednizone and continue to monitor her condition. she isn't acting sick at all. she is back to her same goofy self. our main concern no matter what is her quality of life. we do not want her to suffer or be in terrible pain. no matter what happens i know that she lived a good life with us and was lucky to make it this far. if the beagle rescue had not sprung her from that shelter in west virginia, she'd probably already be gone.

something old, something new...

i'm so excited. i just sent my wedding dress here to be fashioned into a christening gown for quentin and any future babies. i had gotten my dress preserved after our wedding in case a daughter or someone in the future wanted to wear it, but i realized that was unlikely. i didn't want to wear my mother's dress - i wanted to pick my own. chances are, my future daughter (assuming i even have one!) would want to pick her own as well. this way it will become a special family heirloom and can be used over and over, rather than sit in a box, taking up precious space in my tiny closet for the rest of time! i can probably use the scraps for fun stuff too - tooth fairy pillows, handkerchiefs or ring bearer pillows for quentin's wedding, etc. the lady does beautiful work and i can't wait to see what she can do with mine!

cranky pants

mr. quentin has been quite the cranky pants today. he's been down right inconsolable. we think it's the post-vaccination ickiness that babies get. he's been up almost all day, crying and screaming. he should sleep well tonight!

veterinarians, pediatricians, & decorations, oh my!

1. abby is doing great after her surgery. she has a massive incision and a second smaller one. she also has to wear the lamp shade collar so she doesn't chew on her wounds. it's driving her crazy. she's a beagle so her nose is always on the ground, but the lamp shade prevents her from getting the nose all the way down. she's a beagle who can't sniff! she also has no sense for the size of the lamp shade because she keeps trying to get into coves that she could normally get into but then gets blocked by her cone head. she'll go back to the vet in a few days to have the incisions drained and then again in 10 days to have the sutures removed. i need to take pics of her cone head but the camera batteries died and i'm lazy :)
2. quentin went to the pediatrician today for his 4-month check-up. jeremy was even able to meet us there!. the boy is 25.5" long and weighs 17.3 pounds, which puts him in the 71st and 88th percentiles respectively. big baby boy but not too big! he's right on track with all his developmental milestones. we even had our first conversation about introducing solid foods. we could start him now, but they recommend holding off until 5 and a half months or so. gives me time to figure out how to make baby food :)
3. we got some of our christmas decorations up - the tree is up but not yet decorated, the lighted deer and moose are in the yard, and jeremy even got the icicle lights up across the front of the house. we've got more that we want to do, but it's a start!
4. i'm almost done christmas shopping! woo hoo!
5. i'm sleepy. good night.

roll over. good boy!

he did it! after weeks of being close and days of being really close, quentin rolled over from front to back today!!! and even more amazing i caught this monumental feat with the video functionality on our digital camera. no sound, but still fun!

he was really close to doing it this morning during tummy time so i got the camera out. on a few attempts a light breeze could have rolled him the rest of the way but instead he went back to his belly. after his last feeding i put him down for some more tummy time and he was gunning to go before i even got the camera out. i was lucky to catch the actual roll on film!

bye bye tumor!

abby is at the vet today to have her tumor removed and biopsied. if all goes well she will be back here tonight with a wicked cool lampshade collar. stay tuned for updates! (and funny lampshade photos!)

4 months old!

quentin is 4 months old today!!!

he is so big and has such a little personality now. he is SOOO close to rolling over both from front to back and back to front. he grabs on to everything and laughs and giggles like a little monkey!

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and i got most of his birth announcements in the mail last week so they should start appearing in your mailboxes soon!

rubber baby buggy bumbo

quentin loves to sit in his bumbo! what a fabulous invention!

title

sometimes coming up with a title is so hard. i'm too tired to be clever so "title" it is :) quentin and i have survived 2 days of day care. i think it's been harder on me than on him. he seems to like it a lot. he's really well-behaved there and then is a terror here! linda sends him home with a "report card" each day, detailing what he did, when he ate, etc. both days she commented about what a good baby he is - soothes himself to sleep without needing to be rocked, sleeps soundly even if the other tots are up and about etc. guess i got a good one ;) unrelated job update: i realized after like 8 people thought i had found a job up here, that i never posted an update for the most recent developments. apparently my thoughts only get posted to the blog if i type them up :) so here they are! i have work to do right now, but it's only temporary - helping my richmond team prepare for the next audit. should be enough work to take me through the end of the year. after that i am on my own. tomorrow i am going back to framingham for another interview - this one for a job more suited to my skills and experience though not directly what i have done for the past few years. hopefully this one works out, because if it doesn't, i've got nothin. there aren't anymore jobs there for me to interview for, unless something new gets posted. power suit time. ugh. anyone want to pay me a bazillion dollars to stay at home with my boy??? in other news, realtor gave us an explanation for why peeps would steal a massive air conditioner: copper wiring. they can sell it to scrap yards for some nice easy $$$. jerks. they make some money and i'm stuck with a @#$% deductible. speaking of... i hate deductibles. never thought about it until now. it's nice that my home owner's insurance covers most of whatever it costs to replace a whole damn air conditioner but it's still costing me $500. they didn't just steal my air conditioner, they stole $500 from me. that's a lot of moolah. stupid jerk-ass thieves. i am obvious very bitter about the AC right now. sorry.

i love our daycare!

linda knew today would be tough on me so she has sent me emails throughout the day letting me know what quentin is doing and letting me know that he is ok. she even snapped this picture and sent it to me!

mommy is sad

quentin is at day care for the first time today! it was very hard to leave him and the house is so quiet without him here, but it's a good thing so i can actually get some work done. i know he'll have lots of fun and he seems to love being around other kids. we'll see how he did on his first day when i go to pick him up later!

2th

the teething continues. he now has a second tooth coming in to the right of the first one. baby tylenol and oragel seem to help but unfortunately he doesn't like to hold the cold teething ring up to his mouth. he does however like to chew on anything else he can find - burp cloth, his singing ducky toy, his hand, our hands, our shoulders, our faces, whatever.

an "a" update

for abby, air conditioning, and announcements abby went back to the vet today so he could have another look at her tumor and see if the inflammation had reduced. she's feeling a lot better but she's still not ready for the surgery. the area around the tumor is frighteningly bruised - a deep, deep purple and is majorly swollen (think pregnant lady ankles - abby has the same thing going on - the edema is all the way down her hind left left to her doggy ankle!) so we'll keep up the crazy meds and go back to the vet on thursday for another check-in. if she's ready for surgery, we'll get that scheduled for the following tuesday. otherwise, we'll keep doing these check-ins until she is surgery-ready. i contacted our home owners insurance about the AC unit. the agent's reaction when i told her what had been stolen: "you have GOT to be kidding me!" sadly no. that's just how it is going for us these days. but it seems like we'll only have to pay the $500 deductible - not great but not terrible either. stupid burglars. i also called a couple of HVAC places to see if they could give me estimates. unfortunately they need to get into the house and we obviously can't be there. i emailed our realtor to see if he would mind being there to let them in and he took it one step further - he's going to call to get estimates and set everything up. he also worked with the police and got us a police report for insurance purposes. i love this guy. there's no way our previous realtor would have gone this far above and beyond! my mom, lois, and i spent spent a couple of hours doing some serious gluing on thanksgiving to finish quentin's birth announcements. hey, he's only 3 and a half months old! we're just waiting on some addresses and some special stamps and they should be in the mail soon! make sure you look at the stamp when you get it! ;) also - if you would like an announcement but you think i may not have your address, shoot it to me in an email :)

have you seen me?

yes. as if we haven't had a crappy enough year (other than the birth of our beautiful baby boy), we got a call from our richmond realtor yesterday... someone stole our @#$% air conditioner. the whole thing. gone. wicked awesome. how does this even happen? how does no one see this going down? un-fricking-believable. today i am thankful that this wretched year is close to over.

think happy thoughts

abby our beagle has cancer. please keep her in your thoughts. she's always had these harmless fatty tumors. we asked our vet about them a while back and he said not to worry. well, there's another type of tumor that resembles the harmless lipomas - a mast cell tumor. over the past few weeks, this one particular tumor went from marble-sized to golf ball-sized. it didn't seem to bother abby at all until late last night when she would wince in pain when it was touched. i called and made a vet appointment for as early as possible. the vet drew some blood out of the nasty tumor and concluded that it is one of these mast cell tumors and not the harmless lipoma. she will require surgery to have it removed, but we have to wait until some of the inflammation goes down. she's on a whole drug cocktail designed to do just that. and unfortunately, we don't really get a sense for the prognosis until they do the surgery and take a biopsy. if it a grade 1 tumor she'll probably be ok, but if it's a 2 or a 3 the outlook might not be as good. in the article about MCTs linked above she's got a couple of indicators for a poor prognosis - large tumor and rapid recent growth. these tumors sure sound mean - releasing yucky chemicals into her body. she's lost a few pounds and limps around because it hurts so much (the tumor is on her belly, near one of her hind legs.) she is still waggling her tail and eager to eat so at least it seems like her spirit is still up. we'll bring her back to the vet on friday (no black friday shopping for me!) to check on the inflammation and see if she is ready for the surgery. we love our abby and will do anything for her but this comes at a pretty uncomfortable financial point in our lives. today's visit was more than $250 and the surgery will be about $500. that's murphy's law for you... kicking us while we're down. stay tuned for more abby updates!

day care!

since i have legitimate work to do (yeah!) quentin will be starting day care on monday! it's a weird mix of feelings. i will really miss spending all day with my darling baby boy, but at the same point i am ready for some intellectual stimulation and it would be next to impossible to do real work with him here. i really like our day care lady and i know that quentin is going to love playing with other kids.

future reynolds scholar?

quentin received this letter from wake forest in the mail today:

Dear Quentin, Welcome to the world! You were born into a family with strong Wake Forest connections, and I wanted to be the first to welcome you as the newest member of the larger Wake Forest family! We hope that Mom and Dad will bring you to visit the Alumni Office soon so we can meet you. Until then, we wanted to send you something special to hang in your nursery: it's a Wake Forest pennant, and I hope it will be the first of many Wake Forest souvenirs. As you grow up, make sure to ask your parents to bring you back for Homecoming, and to see the Demon Deacon at football and basketball games, and to our summer camps. I want you to know that Wake Forest holds a special place in her heart for alumni children like you, and we hope to see you on campus as a student in about 18 years.

baby-sized wake pennant. so cute!

Vaccines

I want to chime in about vaccinations and the idea of people not giving them to their children. In my opinion it is reckless and dangerous. Vaccines are relatively harmless, in fact even if you have an egg allergy you can still get the MMR. Vaccines work on a herd principle to keep levels of disease low. The theory being that every person does not have the same immune responce to the vaccine. So, if I am only 25% protected against measles but the people around me are 99% protected my chances of getting measles is low. When you start to include significant numbers of people who have 0% protection, my chances start to go up. So, if your kids don't have vaccines stay away from Quentin :) The number of cases of measles and mumps are climbing very high in parts of Europe where people have decided not to vaccinate their children. As for austism, the original person who reported a link between vaccines and autism has been fully discredited and I believe is no longer employed! One of the biggest concerns was a potential link between a Mercury containing compound in vaccines (thimerosal) and autism. Not only is it no longer in vaccines, no study has been able to show a direct link. Here is one from the New England Journal of Medicine. Please email me if you want more. The impetus for this post was something we saw on the news up here. They had a piece talking about vaccines and basically had a point counter-point type thing. The advocate for vaccines was a pediatric infectious disease specialist from Mass General. The opponent was a.........wait for it......................Chiropractor. Chiropractors are wonderful for your back but are as qualified as Bailey to give out advice about vaccinations. So for everyone who reads this and has children, please please vaccinate them because if you vaccinate your child, you are not only protecting them, but you are protecting Quentin, and your child's friends etc etc.

it's snowing!

i love new england! i was just sitting at my desk and looked over to see snow pouring out of the sky. it's not sticking and looks like it's fading but still cool. it's funny because when i ran outside to get the mail earlier i thought to myself that it smelled like snow :) we'll be putting quentin in his rad new snowsuit and playing in serious snow soon enough!

i heart my 2 week meal plan

saturday concluded our first run through our rotating 2-week menu and i can happily say that we were never once tempted to go out to eat. i think we correctly diagnosed our eating-out problem. in the past it would get to be dinner time and jeremy and i would just go back and forth:

• "what do you want for dinner?"
• "i don't know, what do you want?"
• "i don't care, you pick"
• "i don't care either, what do we have?"
• "i don't know"
• "how about ruby tuesday? (or whatever restaurant commercial we'd seen most recently)
• "ok"

and doing the 2-week shopping is awesome. i had a blast yesterday. i printed off a fresh copy of the standard shopping list and then took inventory, crossing off anything i did not need to buy for this 2-week block. i then pulled out the grocery store circular to see if the stuff i needed was on sale and jotted down sale prices next to the items on my list. finally, i sorted through my coupons and noted ones i could use. the actual shopping was a breeze, except for the fact that the store was crazy busy with holiday feast shoppers. i seriously saw no fewer than 4 older ladies pulling 2 shopping carts each through the store and the 2 parties in front of me in the check-out line each spent more than $400! insane.

we know a little something about this

young doctors in debt at least only one of us is a doctor making $12 an hour. those poor people! but we do have that 1+ hour commute for jeremy after his 30 hour shifts.

quentin on teething

you can't really see the tooth in any of these because his pouty lip is in the way, but you can see what quentin thinks about the whole teething process!