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!

say cheese!

yup. he was screaming his head off immediately following a diaper change and feeding. stuck my finger in his mouth and there it was - his first tooth is just starting to pop out of his gum. it's one of the middle teeth on the bottom. poor little dude. according to baby.com he's a little bit early - most get their 1st tooth around 4-7 months. but early seems to be this kid's MO. also learned from there that 1 in 2,000 babies are born with teeth - creepy! definitely explains the copious amount of drooling he has done over the past few weeks. we'll work on getting some pics, but it's just me tonight (jeremy is on call) and quentin does not like showing off his new asset yet.

well... part two

things are not looking so great for me to be able to stay with capital one. i have not heard back from the HR guy about the potential not-yet-created role that they maybe might consider me for. so i am making one last ditch effort to stay with the company. i have contacted the HR rep for my former team. i spoke with her this morning about my situation. she spoke with the HR guy up here yesterday and said that he hopes to get back to me by the end of the week. i'm not expecting good news. with money being so tight these days, creating new roles does not happen fast. i am fully expecting the "we'd love to hire you, but can't right now. try again in a few months." yeah, i can afford to not work for a few months and just wait. HR girl is also going to help me explore any flexible work arrangements that would allow me to work from home. i know they exist, but are pretty rare so i am not getting my hopes up. i think my day tomorrow will have to be spent brushing up ye olde resume, registering for monster.com, and just seeing what is out there. fun! on a completely unrelated note, a flock of wild turkeys ran through our yard this morning. i live in the country now!

well...

bad news HR called to tell me that they have offered the job i interviewed for to someone else. i understand - they were looking for someone with a very specific skill-set and experience that i just don't have. i'm sure i could have handled the role, but it would have been a learning experience for me. they wanted someone could just come in and rock out i guess. oh well. potentially good news they liked me though and think they might have a better role for me, however this role does not exist as of yet. so it could be good/great news if they create this role soon and offer it to me, but... potential disaster if this role doesn't materialize, i'm not sure what else i can do. there just aren't that many roles in the office up here so if something doesn't work out soon i will have to leave the company and enter the daunting world of unemployment, external job hunting (ugh power suit shopping!) and interviewing. in addition, a new non-capital one job would very likely be in boston proper, making our current day care arrangement obsolete. god i hope i don't have to job hunt while day care hunting again. and we definitely can't swing two mortgages on one salary. boo.

interview update

yesterday i drove in to framingham for some interviews with the office there. i met with 4 different people about a couple of different available roles. i think it went well but we shall see. HR said they would get back to me either today or early next week. fingers crossed!

my how they grow!

refer back to this post for quentin's last photographed bath when he was just 6 weeks old. at 3 months old, he is certainly filling out much more of his bath seat. notice in the first picture that i once again caught him mid-pee :) - i love his pudgy little baby belly!

for grandma

moose!!

random updates

1. i've got some really cute new pics of quentin, however our home computer is messed up and not working. well actually, the mouse is not working. and this is a new mouse too, because the last mouse wasn't working either. so now we're thinking it might be the mouse port on the computer. we'll see if a usb mouse works once i go out and get one.
2. the HR department has finally gotten back to me. i am going in on thursday to interview. not sure for which roles. they are supposed to give me a detailed schedule for thursday tomorrow.
3. we will be giving daycare a try soon. unfortunately, the day care can't take him on thursday when i'm interviewing but i might take him on monday just to see how it goes. of course it will be infinitely harder on me than it will be on him.
4. it might snow this weekend! just flurries but still awesome.
5. i freaking hate benefits enrollment. i have spent the better part of two days comparing and contrasting the 3 plans capital one offers with the 6 different plans MGH offers. i have finally decided which of the 9 medical plans and 4 dental plans we're going with, how much money we're going to put into flexible spending accounts, etc. i logged in to both of our open enrollments only to find that mine is not open. buried in all the paper work capital one sent me is some form that i needed to have completed my enrollment by 10/26 because i was on maternity leave. problem is - we didn't even have jer's info at that point. guess i have some painful phone calls to make tomorrow to try and enroll. ugh. i hate HR.
6. kinda funny that one of the roles i might be interviewing for is in the HR department :)
7. no real updates on the richmond house but we did have 3 showings last week (encouraging) and are now really pushing renting or rent-to-own as additional options.
8. i really dig this bulleted-list post format. i really works for my random trains of thought.
9. no real bullet - just have to have an odd number of bullets. at least that's what the brand department always said about our credit card solicitations - that people like an odd number of bullets better than an even number. good nite!

3 months old!

quentin is 3 months old today! it is truly amazing how fast time flies. he's developed such a little personality already. he has slept through the night 5 nights in a row so i think it's somewhat safe to say he has mastered that small but very important skill. he also holds his head up like a champ and is desperately trying to sit up on his own. he's also really close to rolling over from belly to back. he's got the strength to do it but not the coordination. i think he'll figure it out soon. he gurgles and coos like he is having a conversation with you and he loves to smile and laugh. it's been (and still is) a very crazy year but when we look at quentin, everything is ok.