I Love YouTube

Before I get to that, a few quick things:

The surgeon has pronounced me healed, for the most part. All my stitches were subcutaneous (inside!) and I just had some strips of tape that initially held my incision together on the outside, but I peeled those off and everything looks good. I can bound up the stairs two at a time now, and pick up Abby. She was pleased.

Jake had his first "all-crib" night with no time spent sleeping in the cradle in our room. It went OK, although he had a long stretch of restlessness where he couldn't sleep on his own. Otherwise, he's coming along, and he's already 4 weeks old.

I only have two weeks of the semester left, but then Lisa has to go back to school until the end of her year, which is in June.

I'll get more pics of everyone up soon.

Now, YouTube: initially I always thought of Nick and Beth when Youtube came up, mostly because Beth's boss, Paul Robinett, is a "Youtube personality," to say the least. Also, while in Columbus with N & B over Dad's birthday last summer, we all made a video-card for him that prominently featured Annika and Abby and posted it on YouTube for him to see from home.

But now most of my YouTube activity comes through links provided by column writers on ESPN.com, who can easily post a link to just about any event that's ever happened, because someone posted the video on YouTube. I mean, why describe the final play in the career of the cockiest high-school basketball prospect ever - a slam dunk off an alleyoop from himself followed by throwing the ball into the stands and getting ejected - when you can link to it instead? It's nice to know that any sports play of signficance that you missed from the night before (or 20 years ago will be there on YouTube in no time - even the recent incident at a Red Sox game featuring a foul ball, two fans, an oufielder, lots of spilled beer and a flying piece of pizza (hi-larious). Oh, and go see Bo Jackson score a 99-yard Tecmobowl touchdown on a play that takes up an entire quarter. The fun . . . is endless!

And here it ends.

I Profess My Love For...

As of late, like I've said previously, life has been sheer chaos - I'm recovering from my surgery, our house is in perpetual disarray, we're all adjusting to life with a son and brother (Abby is taking steps backwards in the world of potty-training), Jake had his worst night last night, resulting in little sleep for Lisa and me, and then today was Annika's birthday, which involved Chuck E. Cheese (a blackhole of chaos).

Parenthetically: Annika pulled one of the biggest stunts ever, today, on her birthday. We were busy dealing with multiple things upstairs, including trying to figure out something to do for Annika's birthday. At one point she was in the basement trying to feed cat food directly to Tate (the cat). Later, Lisa's grandma called to wish Annika a happy birthday, and when I went to the basement to give her the phone, I found every square inch of the basement, including couches and ledges, coated in cat food. Annika had taken it upon herself to evenly distribute cat food all over the place, to the point that you couldn't walk around without stepping on it. Needless to say, we were totally floored, and underwent a long cleanup process. End parenthesis.

Halting the complain-o-rama, here's where I profess my love, for . . . radio static. I'm generally pretty worthless when dealing with babies after bedtime, because working for 30 minutes to get the kid to sleep alone for 8 minutes reeeeeallllllly aggravates me when I should be sleeping. But, in a small moment of determination, I decided to take Jake at 10pm and let Lisa go to sleep for some period of time, in hopes that I could at least last until 11pm. Jake was OK for about 5 minutes, and then started the "I'm gonna be crabby for undistinguishable reasons" routine, so I fell back to an old gimmick that I used with Abby a lot: turn the stereo to 87.5 FM and crank up the static. The result was almost instantaneous relaxation on Jake's part, followed by some snoozy snoozin', while I watched TV with the volume up just enough to hear over the static. More than two hours later, he's in bed, and I haven't heard him stir yet. Most importantly, I made it through some time late in the day with my son without resenting him or myself, and that feels like a lottery win for me right now. Now it's 12:18am and I'm going to bed. PEACE OUT!

Appendectomy

Clearly it wasn't enough to be raising a 2-week-old, selling a house and dealing with snow in April, so my appendix went on the fritz. I woke up at 2am Saturday morning with abdominal pain, and after no culminating flu-like event occurred and the pain just got worse, we headed for the ER around noon. Once some pain medication kicked in the weekend got relatively easy for me, at least, as I pretty much laid around, slept, went through surgery and had my appendix removed, remembered nothing of it, watched TV, slept, ate, and eventually went home. Life for everyone else around me got more complicated, though.

I'm planning on heading back to work on Wednesday, and I'll only have missed one day of teaching. Annika's spring break is over then, too, so we'll have those logistics to deal with as well. I've been appreciating my Vicodin today, but hopefully things will start to heal up so I can return to normal soon and life can start to even out.

A few weeks ago we had a nice routine in our life, but since Jake was born it's been serious chaos. Here's looking forward to some normalcy (in 2008?).