rundeks

Sarah, Jeff, and I were walking back from Chipotle in Palo Alto just now. We crossed Page Mill on the east side, going south, which meant that the cars on El Camino who wanted to turn right down Page Mill/Oregon Expressway had to wait for us to clear the intersection.

As we were crossing, there were two cars in this position waiting for us, and a third guy behind them who wanted to do the same thing. He started honking at the guys ahead of him, who (obviously) weren’t going to be turning because they weren’t in the mood to slam into pedestrians. I started telling Sarah what I saw going on, gesturing with my hand to her that we were crossing while the guy was trying to pressure the people in front of him to go. I was doing this as we cleared the intersection, and the guy saw me talking about it as the people in front of him started their turns. He turned to me to flip me off while driving forward and …

SLAM!

He ran right into the back of a completely different vehicle that was turning across the crosswalk.

See, in the meantime, the crosswalk timer had timed out, which indicated that cars on El Camino going south would get a left-hand turn signal (so the next group of people to go would be turning across where we were walking). The guy slammed right into one of the cars making this turn because he was looking at me instead of looking at where he was going. I ended up calling the police after work in order to offer to be a witness and found out that the car BEHIND this car pulled around him in an effort to turn right, and turned right in front of him while he was going straight (and not paying attention). So, the person who was hit was doing something completely illegal and the guy who hit him could have possibly avoided it, had he been paying attention… oops.

HA!

Holiday leftovers: the airport is too exciting

Originally uploaded by alibee09

Notice the veggie stick in her hand. She passed out *while I was giving
her noodles*.

Child feeds self, mess follows: story at 11

Originally uploaded by alibee09

There are two types of flu vaccine: injections and nasal mists.

You absolutely CANNOT get the flu from the injection. They give you a killed version (“inactivated”) of the flu virus, meaning that its proteins are all broken and cannot suddenly recombine to become something that will infect you. If you tell me that you don’t get the shot because it “always makes you have the flu” I will send you to read about this thing in the dictionary called “coincidence” related to the fact that you got yourself vaccinated during a season rife with sickness. However, you might experience side-effects from the antibodies that are being created against those little broken bits of virus, which can make you feel sick and symptomatic.

You CAN get the flu from the nasal mist, however; it’s made of live attenuated influenza, which is a modified version of the virus they are vaccinating you for. This means that you can get a flu (but it won’t be the actual one you’re being inoculated for, so you wouldn’t get H1N1 from the mist, but a modified version of that flu).

The More You Know™

Having been at home with Katie for the last two weeks, I find myself so incredibly out of touch with my online life. Katie developed some hardcore mommy dependence while we were home together, so it was nigh impossible to do anything other than interact with her when I was home. I did all my updating to Facebook via IMs to Ping.fm, so my interactions online were primarily push oriented. If I missed anything key, please let me know!

Things that happened:
- I turned 33 over the weekend! Woot! Even though I am not super into celebrating my birthday, it is still heart-warming to receive a bunch of phone calls (although I couldn’t answer any of them because my phone died). Now that I can sit at a computer without a clingy monkey attached to me so I can respond to emails, woot woot.
- Katie is 15 months old tomorrow! In addition to identifying her parental units, can tell you what a cow says (“boo”), show you her nose and ears on command, and do the spider-crawling hand motion from “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”. She points to things that she wants and loves to flip light switches. She likes to say “uh oh” when she does stuff, and if you say it loudly and she hears you from another room you’ll hear her engaging in a chorus of responding “uh oh”s.
- KAAAAHN!
- We had a play date with Caroline, Riley, and my mom, to Little Farm, which is part of Tilden Park in Albany. Katie hilariously fell asleep on the drive there and slept through almost the entire trip, until the very very end, when she woke up and stared, dazed, at the cows. She eventually fed a goat (which was pretty easy for her because it’s much like feeding her own pups).
- Katie also had her most tremendous tantrum, clocking in at ~7 minutes, as a combination of us clipping her nails and some mean teething. I had time to try to soothe her, go and get the video camera, take 2 min of video, and then attempt to soothe her again.
- Dragon Age: Origins. One word: ADDICTING. I actually hallucinated that my daughter had to spend spell points last night in order to go to sleep (around 3am when she woke up).
- Katie actively pets the dogs and will give them (or you) kisses spontaneously. The first time she spontaneously gave me a kiss, after waking up, I almost died.

Being a stay-at-home-mom was pretty incredible. I haven’t had such an intense amount of baby time since she was born, and I feel like I really got to know her and connect with her little person personality a lot; I miss her an incredible amount right now. It blows me away how much she learns and explores in a day, to the point that there’s really no downtime for either of us (unless she takes a nap). The downside of all this interaction was the aforementioned Mommy-dependence that developed, meaning that the wee beeble cried when she was dropped off today. :(

Christmas was spent in Arizona with B’s family. Flying with a lap child was much more challenging this trip than it was when we went to Hawaii, even though the flight is 3 hours shorter, because Ms. Wiggles wanted to walk up and down the aisle instead of sitting with her mom, which didn’t work too well during takeoff and landing. Most people were charmed by her toddle and her smile, however, and she didn’t do too poorly (although she was much more unhinged on the way back because she was overtired thanks to the late hour).

We got to see Patti, Spencer, and Troutman, which was an awesome addition to our normal family shenanigans; Patti hadn’t seen Ms. K since she was only a little over a month old, and she didn’t seem completely turned off by the little girl she’s become, which I think was promising :) It always makes me pouty, though, to see friends who live far away, because it reminds me why I need to establish my own island nation and invite people I enjoy to it.

The only considerable downside to this holiday was that Brandon’s 98-year-old grandmother, through a turn of unfortunate medical events (a fall, leading to a lack of desire to move to much, leading to decreased dental hygiene, leading to the need for a root canal which was disguised by pain meds used for the fall, which led to an abscess and an emergency root canal three days after we arrived), was found unresponsive in her room and taken to the hospital. She went in and out of intensive care twice before finally starting to recover, thank goodness. She was on all of our minds as we had Christmas dinner (which she would normally have been present for) and opened cards from her on Christmas day.

Katie finally started piping up with recognizable words, as I mentioned before; she’s got “Daddy” down pat (although sometimes she says “Yaddy”), and she can eek out a “Mama” for me when she really wants me (example: while wailing in the car seat today as we drove home, which was really the heart-wrenching kicker to an already pitiful display of needing to nurse and go to sleep). She also seemingly has “hi” and “bye” down, but uses them less frequently. When she wants to nurse she’s decided to overload the sign for “all done” (I can’t seem to redirect her back to the “milk” sign), and she usually accompanies it by saying “neigh neigh” (I have no idea where this came from but I don’t think I’ve ever referred to nursing as anything like “night night” so the only thing I can assume is that it’s from Brandon calling it “nom nom”). I also worked a little on the sleep thing with Katie — when I put her down awake, she can now fall asleep with no crying with me sitting in the chair in her room, as opposed to hovering over her or with a hand on her. Progress! :D

Katie’s favorite thing to do on this trip, besides cling to me like a little helpless monkey because she needed the safety of her mommy, was run around with her 1-year-old cousin Tristan and her 4-year-old cousin Jakob (who initially freaked her out because he’s super intense). B’s mom purchased a tent that connected to a tee pee via a tube that was kid-sized, so they either spent time zooming back and forth between the two or building things with the massive amount of Mega Blocks she purchased.

It was a great trip, but I’m super happy to be back home with my pups! Now on to our next national holiday, my birthday (which is on a Saturday this time around, woot woot). ;)

Katie has had spurts of what I thought were words, but nothing repeatable and clearly identifiable by someone who wasn’t a parent. Over the past two days, however, she has really perfected “Daddy”, to the point that when she sees/wants Brandon, she’ll run around hollering his name. I guess his teaching her his name has really had an effect :)

People are telling me that she calls for me, as well, when I am not around, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as when she demands her papa. :)