So What Else Is New?

Since I've gotten back into the blogging habit again, it seems like I should write and catch everything up on whats been happening since I last regularly posted in June. I'll try to keep this short and simple:

Home Life/Victoria: Pretty much the same thing here, as most new and exciting stuff revolves around the little one. We did manage to take a trip up to New York over the summer to see the Red Sox play the Yankees at the soon to be demolished Yankee Stadium. It was wet and rainy, and my Sox unfortunately lost, but it was a good trip and the baseball fan in me was glad to see such a historic stadium, especially Legends Feild. Victoria continues to grow by leaps and bounds. On the plus side, she's as cute as ever , her vocabulary has grown to a point where I can actually have a small conversation with her, and she's shown a real fondness for music, dancing, books and coloring. On the downside, she's started the terrible twos early. She quite determined to get her way and isn't shy to throw a fit or exaggerate an boo-boo. Despite this, she remains my perfect little princess.

Family: the big news here is that I became an uncle again! My brother Andy and his girlfriend decided to adopt a newborn, who was born November 19th. Welcome to the family Cameron Michael! My mom is doing very well. She recently returned to work and has just started the last stage of her treatment. She's in good spirits and things are going very well. Also along the new uncle vein, Meredith's brother Mark and his girlfriend are expecting in March, and my niece Angelina had the first of her procedures to remedy the cleft lip. Her beautiful smile is even better now.

Work: I'm still working at both LCC and Radio Shack. LCC recently moved to a more visible location in Staunton, and as result we've gotten more customers, which keeps me quite busy. I'm still enjoying both jobs, even if all those hours wear me out sometimes.

And finally, to those who've had birthdays since I last blogged regularly: Happy Birthday (Belated) to my wife Meredith, siblings Andy and Tess, Goddaughter Gail, nephew Cameron, and sibs-in-law Ronald, Inez, Ryan, and Tiffany!

Reflections On Fatherhood

Technically, this is my 2nd official Father’s Day. However, last year, I was a rookie dad still soaking in the concept that I was the father of a 2 month old baby girl. My Father's Day then was little more than a continuation of the swirl of events and emotions that I have been riding since the day Victoria entered my life and made me officially a dad. It was an acknowledgment into that wonderful fraternity of father figures, more than a celebration of any paternal accomplishments I've had up to that point. Now that I’ve had well over a year experience at this dad thing, I feel I can better appreciate exactly what it means to be a dad. I look at my daughter now, and reflect on how she was this time last year. In the past year, Victoria has learned:

• to sit up, crawl, pull herself up, stand, and now finally walk
• to climb stairs
• to clap
• to blow kisses
• to high-five
• to feed herself (or at least grasp a spoon and aim for the general direction of her mouth)
• to “talk”
• to open up a cell phone, put it up to her ear, and “talk”
• to identify eyes, ears, mouth, and nose
• to identify me and mommy
• that she can move one smaller object to help her climb onto one much larger
• that keys go in a door
• and others too numerous to list

To us grown people, they’re trivial things we do without thinking. To her, they’re major steps in her growth and development. To me, they’re windows to the person my daughter will be. (Heaven help my cell phone bill when she becomes a pre-teen!) I see how much she’s grown, and it boggles my mind that I have had a significant role in getting her to this point. It hasn’t been easy – the messy diapers, the food thrown on the floor, the tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, the sleepless nights – all of it, completely worthwhile for no other reason than those random moments when I am blessed with a smile, a laugh, a kiss, a hug.

To all my fellow fathers, have a wonderful day. Watch your children with reflective eyes today, see how much they have truly grown since they’ve entered your lives. That, my friends, is our real gift today.

This post has been cross-posted here

Catching Up, Again...

Random tidbits to bring the blogging world up to speed...

What do you do when you have a blog but haven't updated consistently lately? You agree to contribute to a 2nd one of course! I have been contributing to Parents2Parents, a blog started by my good friend Jen. It's just a bunch of parents sharing their parenting stories. Good stuff - check it out!

I'm officially at the half-way point in my effort to grow 10 inches of hair for Locks For Love. So far I've resisted putting it back into a ponytail, but with the summer heat coming around, I may have no choice. If the average growth of 1/2 inch per month holds, I'm looking getting my next haircut March 2009! My wife, who is also growing her hair out, has decided to donate hers instead to breast cancer victims. Obviously influenced by my mom's situation, but with the added benefit of needing only 8 inches. (If she cuts her hair short, she's at 7 already!)

Victoria continues to grow way too fast. She hasn't started walking yet, but has recently started taking steps. She has begun to say/understand the word "up" and even said my sister's name "Abbey" while we were up in New York.

I'm still working two jobs. Things have been slow lately at both, although there have been some real nasty computer viruses coming in lately at LCC that have been keeping us on our toes.

Tomorrow I get to go to Baltimore to see the Red Sox play the Orioles. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll get to see Manny hit his 500th HR.

One Year Ago...

From a post in April 2007:



On Friday, April 13th, my daughter was born into this world. We finally got to bring her home today.

We went in to AMC at 8am Friday morning for induction. They started my wife on pitocin, and later broke her water. Things were going good for awhile, but unfortunately Meredith never fully dilated. The doctor decided to do a C-Section. They prepped her for surgery, while I put on surgical scrubs. When they led me into the room they had already started. My wife was strapped down, and there was a cloth separating her head from the rest of her body. It happened very quickly, and at 11:17pm Victoria was born. I'm still in awe from the whole experience.

We had a longer stay in the hospital than expected. C-Sections require a minimum 3 night stay, and had Victoria been born 43 minutes later, that first night wouldn't have counted. On Monday we were all set to bring our little bundle of joy home when she developed jaundice. We had to keep her another night and put her on a "Billie bed" which made Victoria look like a space alien. The jaundice wasn't gone by today, but they let us take her home with our own little billie bed to finish the treatment.

Jaundice aside, baby is very happy and healthy and is already displaying traces of personality. My wife is recovering well, but as anyone who has had a C-Section can tell you, the healing process is a slow one. More details and photos to follow soon!

Halloween Pictures

Victoria was a ladybug for Halloween, and we're fortunate to have a neighbor who is quite a photographer.

Times Flies

I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted. It's not intentional. I have a whole bunch of things over the past month that were blog-worthy. Just haven't had the time/energy.

Hard to believe that it's been six months since Victoria was born. Six months! Has half a year gone by so quickly? What amazes me is how much she has grown and developed over these past six months. She had a checkup this past week and for the record she now is 17.8 lbs. and 26 inches long. She converses with us endlessly in her baby gibberish and has become quite jovial. It's becoming easier to make her laugh, which delights me to no end.

I'm looking forward to watching her continuing growth over the next 6 months.

Victoria Update

It's been awhile since I've written about Victoria, and since she just had a checkup yesterday, this seems like an opportune time to catch everyone up.

The doctor said she's right on schedule developmentally. She only gained a pound since last month, but the doctor wasn't too concerned about that. She currently weighs 11.5 lbs and grew to 24.5 inches long. She's doing everything a normal 4 month old should be doing - grabbing things, sitting up, cooing, laughing, etc. She's even started teething already!

The doctor suggested starting her on cereal, so today Victoria was fed her first "real" food - a watery bowl of rice cereal. Yum! She naturally was a bit apprehensive about it, but we managed to get a few spoonfuls in her mouth.

I think I've mentioned this before, but for that past month, she's been sleeping through the night. I cannot tell you how wonderful this is. The trade off, however, is that she fights taking any daytime naps. When she does fall asleep, usually on mommy or daddy, any attempts to move her to her bed result in loud cry. I've started comparing it to diffusing a bomb - one wrong step, the slightest noise and BOOM off she goes. Still, for a solid 8 hours of sleep it's worth it.

Hopefully, in the near future I can get her MySpace updated. I've been so bad with that since she's been born...

The First Of Many

To quote Peter Griffin: "I've brought you the greatest gift of all. A child's laughter."

Today marked a monumental day in the life of a first time father. For the first time, I made my daughter laugh. Our neighbor had done it last weekend and I've been trying to get a laugh out her all week. I finally accomplished my goal today with a variation of Peek-A-Boo.

No matter what kind of mood I'm in or what kind of day I've had, a smile from Victoria instantly lifts my spirits. I wager her laugh will be equally addictive.

Any Doubt She's My Daughter?

Attack Of The Gigantic Baby

It's been awhile since there was a Victoria update, huh? Victoria reached the 2 month mark this past week, and had her 2 month checkup as a result. She has grown! Check out these two pictures, one taken at a few days old and the other last week. She weighed in at 10.5 lbs this week, and is now 22 1/2 inches long. We're almost at that "too big for newborn size" stage.

She's been very well behaved so far. She's been sleeping through most of the night, and even slept for 8 solid hours a few days ago. (Granted, it was from 8PM - 3AM, but still...) We were even able to take her out to a restaurant and have lunch last Sunday.

Over Memorial Weekend, Victoria got baptized. It was a beautiful weekend, and we were fortunate to have many family and friends in attendance. My mom and Father-in-law stood in as proxy for Victoria's Godparents, who were unable to make it. Victoria behaved for the most part, even falling asleep at one point. (She can sleep anywhere!) Afterwards we had a small reception complete with cake from the same place that did our wedding cake.

I need to update Victoria's MySpace page, as well as continue with my longstanding project of getting pictures on Flicker. Maybe this weekend I can get stuff done.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Shame on me for letting 2 weeks pass without a post! Memorial Weekend is going to be hectic, as Victoria is getting baptized Sunday. We been making the preparations for awhile, and the out of town guests start arriving tomorrow. My family will be here Saturday. Coincidentally, the baptism will be held at the Frontier Culture Museum, in the same pavilion Meredith and I had our wedding reception. (Just to clarify, Sunday is Pentecost in the Roman Catholic calendar, and my church celebrates each year by holding Mass in the local park, which was switched this year to Frontier. And no, we didn't realize it was Pentecost when we chose Memorial weekend to baptize Victoria - we just picked a long weekend so more out of town relatives could make it.)

In other news...

The first batch of birth announcements went out this week, although we still have more to order/send out.

Speaking of Victoria, she's doing very well and has grown quite a bit. I'm still working on getting more pictures online, and hopefully will be able to do that next week sometime.

Meredith is doing well. She recently went back to work part time at People Places, mentoring the two high school girls.

Work is going well for me. It's been 3 months already! The company is paying for me and some other techs to take a 6 week, Thursday night, non-credit course at the local community college that will prepare up to get our Cisco Networking Certification. I actually had my first class tonight. It was fun, if you enjoy setting up small networks fun of course.

No softball games to report. We had 2 rain-outs and one game I had to miss due to a prior engagement. Next week Tuesday is our next game, so I'll post about that one

And just because it's funny to laugh at things that look like dictators, I give you Cats That Look Like Hitler. They're cute in an evil sort of way!

Electric Baby-Land

A while back, I blogged about some less-than-the-usual baby items that were just plain cool. During our hospital stay, a nurse directed us to another cool site, Psycho Baby. This site is worth it alone for the newborn sized rock T-shirts. In the near future, little Victoria can expect to be clothed in her new T shirt while she listens to some lullabies. Rock on, little Victoria!

Victoria's First Week

Time sure does fly! It's already been a week since Victoria was born! Some info that I didn't mention last post:

• born at 11:17pm on 4/13
  
• 6 lbs, 12.8 oz
  
• 20 in. long
  

As for pictures, they're coming, slowly but surely. The plan is to combine all the photos from the digital camera, my camera phone, and from grandfather's camera into one convenient folder, then put it on Flickr. Major updates to Victoria's MySpace Page is planned too. For now, enjoy these favored photos:

A picture of Victoria's first few seconds of life in the outside world. We had to stay behind the blue screen while the doctor performed a C-Section, and held her high for us to see when she arrived. Rather than tell us "It's a Girl!", the staff had asked us the names we picked and told us they'd call out the proper name. I can still hear the chorus of "Victoria!" whenever I see this picture.

One of the first pictures of the three of us together. It's amazing how she reacts to the two of us. She's so animated!

A close up of Miss Victoria. The general consensus is that she has my eyes and Meredith's mouth. We're still trying to place the nose.

As I mentioned before, poor Victoria has jaundice. As part of the treatment, she had to be placed on this bed with lights under it. A sticker sensor was placed on her forehead so the nurses can check her progress. As you can see, the whole thing made her look like a Space Baby. (Sound familiar, Paul and Jess?)

Introducing Victoria Grace

On Friday, April 13th, my daughter was born into this world. We finally got to bring her home today.

We went in to AMC at 8am Friday morning for induction. They started my wife on pitocin, and later broke her water. Things were going good for awhile, but unfortunately Meredith never fully dilated. The doctor decided to do a C-Section. They prepped her for surgery, while I put on surgical scrubs. When they led me into the room they had already started. My wife was strapped down, and there was a cloth separating her head from the rest of her body. It happened very quickly, and at 11:17pm Victoria was born. I'm still in awe from the whole experience.

We had a longer stay in the hospital than expected. C-Sections require a minimum 3 night stay, and had Victoria been born 43 minutes later, that first night wouldn't have counted. On Monday we were all set to bring our little bundle of joy home when she developed jaundice. We had to keep her another night and put her on a "Billie bed" which made Victoria look like a space alien. The jaundice wasn't gone by today, but they let us take her home with our own little billie bed to finish the treatment.

Jaundice aside, baby is very happy and healthy and is already displaying traces of personality. My wife is recovering well, but as anyone who has had a C-Section can tell you, the healing process is a slow one. More details and photos to follow soon!