Downs

• Calvin is starting to go to bed later. A couple of months ago, his bedtime was usually between 7-7:30. Now it’s closer to 7:30-8:00. It sounds like a minor difference but somehow it’s cutting into my free time at night. Jaeger and I were thinking about playing Carcassonne last night but by the time Calvin was in bed and we had finished our nightly chores, it was too late.

Ups

• This was a pretty good weekend. I played for church which is often stressful. “Grandma” J usually takes care of Calvin during church but I like to split up church and Sabbath School to avoid overburdening anyone. I called four people Friday night trying to find someone to watch him during Sabbath School without any success (which is really hard for me since I hate using the phone). Eventually, I decided to show up and hope for the best. Someone was available to watch him and, from what I hear, he was even pretty happy after the first couple minutes of abandonment distress. Music also went fairly well. After church I fed Calvin lunch and then we went to the library and didn’t get back home till around 4. I always pack lunch and snack on Sabbath so I can feed Calvin in a timely manner without having to rush home.
• Miss S, our Sunday childcare provider, continues to work out well. I’m really enjoying getting back to my Sunday morning work routine.

Calvin Moment

• I got a potty training DVD at the library yesterday. I’ve been having trouble getting Calvin to sit down on the potty chair long enough to accomplish anything. Normally, I don’t approve of videos for children under 2. However, I thought that letting him watch a video might keep him on the chair longer. It mostly works. The only drawback is it has very upbeat music and Calvin gets so excited that he bounces up and down in his chair. It’s really funny to watch but at the same time I’m nervous for the mess implications . . .
• We bought a tricycle for Calvin a couple of weeks ago and Jaeger and I finally put it together this afternoon. Calvin is very excited by the new toy. He doesn’t understand the concept of peddling yet but can scoot himself along with his feet or by us pushing him in back. We have decided to store in on the front porch so it’s out of sight and doesn’t distract him when we don’t have time to push him around.

Simplification

• UPDATE: Organized more financial documents . . .

Food Diary

• Breakfast – A cherry pastry and 3 Morningstar breakfast patties
• Lunch – Toasted cheese sandwich and 2 chocolate pieces
• Snack – Grapes, blueberries, and a plum
• Supper – Veggie burrito
• Evening treat – 2 chocolate pieces

Downs

• I was sick for the last couple of days which is particularly painful with a toddler. It started Wednesday right as I was going to pick Calvin up. However, I convinced myself that I was imagining things so I didn’t call and ask if daycare could keep him longer. That was a mistake. I spent the hours until Jaeger got home laying on either the floor, the couch, the porch, or the bed while trying to watch Calvin. I had made a lasagna dish a couple of weeks ago and stuck it in the freezer so I didn’t have to worry about dinner. However, apparently the smell was a bit much for my stomach. Once Jaeger got home, he took care of Calvin for the rest of the evening which was wonderful. I took a hot bath, I was also cold and achy, and then went to bed. Jaeger got Calvin ready in the morning and sent him to daycare for the entire day. I spent most of the day resting before picking Calvin up around 5. Fortunately, I was feeling better by then so Jaeger was still able to go to Boulder like usual on Thursday nights. Today I am almost completely recovered though for some reason I didn’t feel up to finishing my oatmeal this morning.
• Calvin is refusing to go to bed tonight. He is currently screaming at the top of his lungs. I’m not sure what else to do. I tried rocking him to sleep and had him asleep but he woke up the moment I put him down. UPDATE: Jaeger went up and gave him a dose of ibuprofen and he immediately stopped screaming. He’s been quiet for at least the last 5 min. I’m sure ibuprofen can’t work that fast but maybe the sugar in it released some happy endorphins or something.

Ups

• I’m no longer sick!

Calvin Moment

• When I went to the park today, I saw a women who looked familiar but I couldn’t tell for sure because of her large sunglasses. I eyed her on and off for about 1/2 hr while Calvin rambled around the park. Eventually, we ended up swinging our children together. At that point, she looked over at me and asked, “Did I deliver your baby?” Yes, I had run into Dr. B who had come to this park because of the water play area.
• Today I read Baby Talk to Calvin. The book ends with, “this little baby is sleepy” at which point you lift the flap and say “night night.” This afternoon, I got to that part and Calvin said “ni ni” all by himself. He asked me to read it a couple of more times and he started saying the words for some of the other flaps too such as “boo hoo” for the sad baby and “hehe” for the happy baby.

Simplification

• Didn’t do anything.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – Oatmeal with blueberries and soy milk
• Lunch – Lentil Soup
• Snack – 2 Chocolate Pieces
• Supper – Vegetable curry with chapati and 1 piece of chocolate
• Evening treat – I’m thinking ice cream. Calvin has me feeling wrung out . . .

Downs

• Calvin really didn’t want to go to sleep tonight. He was a little groggy when I put him in the crib but as soon as I closed the door, he started screaming. I let him scream for a couple of minutes but decided that maybe he had throw his burp cloth over the side so I went up to check. He hadn’t but I tried to relax him but massaging him a bit before leaving again. He started screaming immediately but I decided I probably wasn’t helping by being in his room. He screamed for about 15 min before falling asleep. It’s really hard to listen to your baby scream because he wants you to hold him

Ups

• This is the second day in a row that Calvin has slept in past 6:30 in his own crib!
• This was my “free” day. I picked out my piano songs for church this week, worked about an hour, worked for a couple of hours on money, and then had about an hour to read before picking up Calvin from daycare. I’d like a little more free time on my “free” day but it’s also nice to get useful things done.
• I finished reading Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas. I think it’s probably my second or third favorite in the series with my favorite being Tempt my at Twilight.

Calvin Moment

• Calvin is starting to have very definite preferences on which books I read him. Today, he wanted nothing to do with Sheep in a Jeep but instead insisted on Moo, baa, la la la, One Duck Stuck, and Quack! several times. In addition to “moo” he is also starting to be able to say “la la la.”

Simplification

• Didn’t really do anything. Recently, I’ve been focusing on getting our finances better organized and trying to finalize our wills.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – Oatmeal with blueberries and soy milk
• Lunch – Triscuits and Cheese and Blueberries
• Snack – 3 Chocolate Pieces
• Supper – 2 Veggie Burritos, Blueberries, and 1 Chocolate Piece

Downs
Calvin woke up again at 4:30am. However, instead of immediately bringing him into our bed, like I have been doing the past week or so, I decided to see if he’d go back to sleep if I just left him alone. He spent the next half hour crying intermittently. Eventually, I gave up because I wanted to go back to sleep. However, by the time I went to get him, I guess he was completely awake and wanted to play. I spent the next hour trying to convince him to go back to sleep. Finally, at 6:00am I gave up and put him on my shoulder in order to go downstairs and start our day. Almost the moment I put him on my shoulder he was asleep. I gingerly laid him back down on the bed and he slept until I woke him up at 7:30. I’m really not sure what my best course of action is at this point. For the most part, I don’t mind him sleeping in our bed, at least in the morning. However, it absolutely kills my morning routine as I can’t leave him sleeping by himself. I haven’t exercised in more than a week

Ups
Because of the morning excitement with Calvin, I debated calling in sick and sleeping. However, I decided I wasn’t really that tired and so just started work a little later than usual. To my surprise, I still managed to get all the “must do” things crossed off my mental list. (Though this is so unprecedented for my past few weeks that I’m sure I have forgotten something major.) One of the things I’m especially excited about is that we are working to implement a “spell checker” in our patron catalog.

Our vendor hasn’t felt the need to add spell-checking to our catalog which I think is ridiculous. A while back I collected about 800 real-life patron searches and was amazed to see that over 10% of the searches returned no results because of misspellings. It boggles my mind how our vendor couldn’t see this as being a problem. Our library doesn’t have the budget for a programmer and I have neither the time nor my managers blessing to do any coding myself. There are “discovery layers” that one can install on top of most patron catalogs. However, these are very spendy and, personally, I haven’t been very impressed with the spelling corrections.

A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that what I really wanted was Google’s “did you mean” suggestions instead of a real spell-checker. Regular spelling dictionaries often don’t contain proper names which would be included in a reasonable number of catalog searches, either for information on famous people or searching for specific authors. However, since Google’s “did you mean” is more flexible, it seemed like a better fit. I did some digging to see if an API existed for Google’s “did you mean” and stumbled across this entry which discussed a site called Jaunter offering a “did you mean” service to libraries.

I contacted a representative from Jaunter but they had never worked with a HIP catalog before. Since we were going to be upgrading to a new version of our catalog soon, I decided it would be better to wait to try to implement it in case there were any major stylesheet changes. A couple of months ago we got our new server and in the process, installed the newest version of our catalog software so we could test it out before upgrading in the fall. This gave Jaunter an excellent opportunity to see if we could get their script working on our test system.

We still have several bugs that need to be dealt with. However, it’s looking very promising. Today I started testing out the suggestions with the real-life misspellings I had collected previously. I’m not finished yet so I haven’t started analyzing my results but I can say that it usually comes up with good suggestions.

While testing the “did you mean” suggestions, I was amused to come up with a real-life example of Google’s “did you mean” failing. As you probably know, “did you mean” is based on the most common spellings people use, not necessarily the right one. Several years ago someone searched our catalog for “orgasum.” When you type this word into Google, it doesn’t suggest any alternatives but instead provides thousands of results with the word spelled this way. My conclusion is that enough people must consistently spell the word this way that Google doesn’t realize it’s incorrect. Sadly, this probably isn’t an appropriate example for my search class at the library

Calvin Moment
Calvin is starting to interact when I read him books! This afternoon he requested I read him Moo, Baa, La La La! several times in a row. The second time I started, I decided too see if he could make any of the sounds. I said, “the cow says . . . ” and Calvin supplied something that sounded similar to “moo.” He repeated this several times so I don’t think it was a fluke.

Simplification
I’m still working on our financial docs. I let them get into an appalling state during Calvin’s first year.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – 2 pieces of Peanut Butter Applesauce Cherry Toast
• Lunch – Triscuits and cheese, cherries, and 2 chocolate piece
• Dinner – Garbanzo Pot Pie, Glazed Carrots, and Bread
• Evening Treat – 3 chocolate pieces

After Calvin had his first breath-holding spell, I decided it was time to plan ahead and learn how to deal with a strong-willed child. Numerous people, including Jaeger’s mom, suggested I read Dr. James Dobson’s The New Strong-Willed Child. I resisted at first because Dobson was the founder of Focus on the Family and I don’t agree with their approach in certain areas. In addition, I’m dubious about corporal punishment of which Dobson is a legendary defender. However, as a librarian, I was taught that one must read a book before you can judge it*.

I checked out an audio book of The Strong-Willed Child because I didn’t want to waste my valuable reading time reading a book that I didn’t think I would like. To my surprise, I found a lot of good, sensible advice in the book. The book started out with a discussion of what a strong-willed child really is. It pointed out that many people who have “easy” children cannot comprehend why some parents have a hard time controlling their children. The second chapter where “mothers share their stories” was eye-opening to me. Calvin is what I would term “strong-willed” but unlike many of the children profiled, he isn’t actively malicious. While parts of this chapter were horrifying and depressing, I found it comfortable to know that there were many children much more difficult than Calvin and their mothers did survive.

Chapter 7 discusses what type of discipline is appropriate depending on the age of the child. I found this very helpful as I hadn’t seen many breakdowns of when I should expect Calvin to understand what I was telling him. Dobson says that from 8-14 months children start testing the authority of their parents. However, you should usually just try to distract and divert them from inappropriate behavior. From 15-24 months, Dobson emphasizes the importance of consistently enforcing your expectations. Don’t let yourself get into an argument with your toddler. Instead, state expectations and follow-through with a punishment if they are not met. In addition, he says that children should only be punished for willful disobedient, not behavior that is natural to learning and development. Once the child reaches 2-3 years, Dobson recommends time-outs or spankings, whichever is more appropriate for that specific child.

I’m not convinced that corporal punishment is a particularly effective form of discipline. For Calvin, I plan to stick to time-outs. However, I have learned as a parent that it is dangerous to make broad assertions about what is appropriate for all children. If you do choose to use spanking, Dobson reprints a “Parent’s Guide” written by Dr. Trumbull. You can see the guidelines here.

While I did find The Strong-Willed Child instructive and I’m glad I listened to it, I would hesitate to recommend it to someone leery of Christianity. This book is most definitely written from an evangelical perspective which may be hard for some people to get past.

*I find it ironic that I would have to remind myself of this with regards to a Christian book when many of the challenges to books in the library are brought forth by evangelical Christians who make assumptions or listen to hearsay about a specific book.

Calvin Moment
Today I picked Calvin up from daycare and headed up to Loveland with the intent of buying Calvin new shoes and sandals. We bought his last pair of shoes when my mother was here and they were getting snug. Since Calvin has to wear shoes at daycare, I thought sandals might be a good option to have when it was particularly hot outside. I fed Calvin a snack on the way up and he seemed relatively happy during the 30 minute drive. We got to the Stride-Rite outlet and I carried Calvin into the store. A friendly clerk met us and asked what we needed. I indicated that we needed to measure Calvin’s feet to see what shoe size was appropriate. She obligingly brought out the foot measurer. Calvin threw a fit. He absolutely refused to put his foot down to be measured and squirmed and shrieked. I tried to calm him down a couple of times to no avail. Eventually, we gave up on trying to measure his feet and decided to just start trying on shoes. The clerk asked which shoe I was interested in and I picked one that looked identical to the style he’s currently wearing. It appeared that the next size up fit him fine so I decided to move on to sandals. Once again, Calvin threw a fit. As far as I can tell, he was appalled or terrified at the idea of an unfamiliar shoe on his foot. I suspect he tolerated the first fitting because the shoe looked like his old ones. I tried several times without ever managing to get the shoe on his foot. Eventually, I decided that if he didn’t want sandals, I shouldn’t get them. Spending more money for slightly cooler feet probably wasn’t worth the emotional trauma it was apparently causing Calvin.

In retrospect, I believe that my error was trying to measure Calvin’s feet immediately without giving him an appropriate amount of time to scope out the area. I’ve noticed that Calvin has very cat-like tendencies when it comes to new spaces. He wants to carefully examine them from a safe area, usually my arms, before he is willing to interact with it. Next time we go for shoes, I’ll try to remember this.

I just finished reading Mouse and Dragon by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I enjoyed the book but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it directly between Scout’s Progress and Fledgling.

I was first introduced to the Liaden universe back in 2002. The first book I read was Scout’s Progress which is probably one reason I’m so fond of it. I’ve read a lot of books and many of them blend together. This one stood out to me. The library only owned one book in the series so I went out and bought the set as it existed at that time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read Scout’s Progress and Conflict of Honor. Both of these books have become comfort reads for me.

Knowing where to start in the Leaden universe can be intimidating. There are so many books published in various decades. However, Sharon Lee provides information on a suggested reading order. I think if I started all over knowing what I know now, I would have tried the following order:

• Local Custom (I personally like Scout’s Progress better. In addition, this is technically a standalone but you’ll miss a few subtle interactions in Mouse and Dragon if you don’t read it.)
• Scout’s Progress
• Mouse and Dragon – This is the one I just finished. Even though it has just been published, I personally think it’s better if you read this one before Agent of Change.
• Fledgling
• Saltation
• Agent of Change – this is actually the original book in the series.
• Conflict of Honors – not directly a sequel to Agent of Change but the characters from both books start interacting in the later books
• Carpe Diem
• Plan B
• I Dare
• Crystal Soldier – This is set hundreds (?) of years before the other books in the series. This is the only book Jaeger read and he found it very confusing. However, based on what I’ve told him of the other books, he suggests it might be read as a creation myth of Liad. The book stops in the middle and is continued by Crystal Dragon which is kind of irritating.
• Crystal Dragon – This really should be consider the same book as above.

As an aside, apparently there is another book in the universe titled Balance of Trade. Somehow I missed it when it first came out so I’m going to have to hunt it down.

Downs

• Calvin still isn’t sleeping well. Wednesday night he started crying at 10:30. I rocked him in the rocker and would get him back to sleep but the moment I put him in his crib, he woke up and I had to start all over again. It appeared that my options were either to sleep in the rocker the entire night or give bedsharing try. For the record, I would be nervous about bedsharing with an infant. However, Calvin’s now big enough that I didn’t think it would be a problem. Jaeger reconfigured the bed to be snuggly up against a wall and I put Calvin between me and the wall. He was pretty restless the entire night but he didn’t actually cry again. Last night, I was able to start him out in his crib and he slept pretty well until around 5. At that point, he would scream for a couple of minutes and then sleep for several minutes and repeat the process. I don’t know if he was getting any sleep but I certainly wasn’t so I brought him back to bed with us. He didn’t wake up again until Jaeger’s alarm went off. Unfortunately, this completely kills my exercise program. I’m a lighter sleeper than Jaeger and I also think it’s fair to say that I’m more situationally aware of Calvin. Even if I had been getting enough sleep to get up and exercise before Calvin woke up, I’m not sure I would feel comfortable leaving him in the bed. I have taken him on brief walks around the neighborhood in the morning but it’s not quite the same as real exercise.

Ups

• I’m participating in a beta Cooking Stack Exchange site. Right now it’s in private beta but it plans to go to public beta in a week. This cooking Q & A site is in the same format as my favorite parenting Q & A site. I like the Stack Exchange format because it seems to create a higher quality of answers than you’ll find in other places. Of course, this sucked up way more of my time today than it should have. I think I should begin to ration my internet usage.

Calvin Moment

• Calvin is starting to enjoy brushing his teeth. I think it’s because I make funny noises trying to encourage him to tolerate the tooth brush. Recently, he will grab the toothbrush and start brushing his own teeth while mimicking the weird sounds I make. I’m afraid he thinks the weird sounds are an essential part of the tooth brushing experience.

Simplification

• I worked on organizing more of our financial documents.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – Oatmeal with raisins and soy milk
• Snack – A plum
• Lunch – Triscuits and cheese and 2 chocolate piece
• Dinner – Macaroni and Cheese with Broccoli
• Evening Treat – 2 chocolate pieces

Downs

• All of a sudden, Calvin has reverted to his restless sleeping pattern. For the last month or more, Calvin has slept solid from bedtime till 7 or 7:30 in the morning. This has been great because I can get up, exercise, and shower before having to get breakfast for him. However, the past two days haven’t been as good. Tuesday morning was particularly bad. He woke up around 3:30am and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Finally, he slumbered a little bit as I held him in the rocking chair (I am so glad we have a comfy rocker recliner that I can doze in while holding Calvin). A little after 6 I handed him off to Jaeger who took Calvin jogging while I grabbed a couple more minutes of sleep. This morning wasn’t that bad but he woke up crying several times during the night before waking up for the morning at 6:30am.

Ups

• Jaeger and I had a date night tonight. We went out to eat at Ras Kassa’s which is an Ethiopian restaurant. I’ve been trying to convince Jaeger to eat there for years but their tagline is “Eat like you’ve never heard of silverware!” which I think intimidated him. However, after his trip to India, he seems more adventurous. The food was good but it was a very different experience. The dishes come with Injera, a crepe-like bread, that you use to scoop up and eat the food. They had a lot of different vegetarian dishes. I got one of the vegetarian combo options and Jaeger got a sweet potato “stew.” It was all served on one large platter so we shared our dishes. The meal was very good and had a nicely varied micronutrient profile We finished off drinking tea at Jaeger’s favorite tea place in Boulder. However, we were running late so didn’t have much time to savor the tea.

Calvin Moment

• It always amazes me how the simplest things can attract Calvin’s attention. I’m continuing to try to get him comfortable with sitting on the potty. This is slow going because he doesn’t like sitting that long. Originally, I would feed him crackers while he sat. However, he’s recently taken to sitting demurely until I give him a cracker and then he pops off. Sometimes, he even leads me to the bathroom, sits down, and then looks pointedly toward the cabinet where I keep the crackers. Today, in desperation, I gave him the Kleenex box hoping to keep him sitting down longer. To my amazement, it worked beautifully. He had great fun poking his hands in and out of the box opening as well as pulling tissues out and then stuffing them back in. I think he voluntarily stayed in one place for more than 10 min!

Simplification

• Yesterday, I discovered we hadn’t reconciled our savings account in over 6 months. I reconcile our credit card statement every week but don’t pay as much attention to more static accounts. When I first looked at the savings statement I panicked because GnuCash showed we had a lot more money than our statement said. I wrote a panicked email to Jaeger asking if he knew where the money went before I remembered that I had siphoned some of it off for a CD quite a while ago. Turns out I had never created a sub-account for that. Today, I straightened everything out so GnuCash matches reality again, at least when it comes to our general savings account and one of our CDs. I probably need to do a review of the other more static accounts and make sure there aren’t any glaring omissions there either.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – Oatmeal with blueberries and soy milk
• Snack – A plum
• Lunch – Triscuits and cheese, a bowl of cherries, and 1 chocolate piece
• Snack – 1 chocolate piece
• Dinner – Lentil Samosas, Goat cheese with crackers, Small portions of Spicy Sweet Potato Stew, Beets and Potatoes, Yellow Split Peas, Spicy Organic Red Lentils, Collard Greens, Carrot Salad, and a bread salad. As you can see, even though the portions were little, there was a lot of food.
• Evening Treat – Two Hand Chai

Today we arrived back from Calvin’s first camping trip. It went much better than I had feared.

Several weeks ago, Jaeger discovered there was exactly one campsite left at Moraine Park Campground in Rocky Mountain National Park. We reserved the site and started planning our first camping trip with Calvin with some trepidation. I spent most of my free time last week getting ready for it. It’s amazing how much stuff I ended up bringing for Calvin but since it was an experiment, I errored on the side of too much rather than too little stuff.

Saturday
We decided to leave home at Calvin’s nap time, around noon, in hopes he would nap during our drive. To our surprise, this part of our plan went without a hitch. We arrived at our campsite around mid-afternoon. I was entranced by the amenities. I don’t remember the last time I went camping at a site with flush toilets and running water. Our campsite was very nice. It was set back from the road and had a small rocky hill on either side. We had neighbors in front and behind us but they weren’t close and the campsite felt fairly secluded. Also, there were designated tent pads which meant we didn’t have to spend time looking for mostly level ground and clearing it of large rocks and sticks.

Calvin woke up and was very excited to see all the pine cones lying on the ground. Pine cones are just about the right size for him to pick up and toddle around with. He also had fun following Jaeger and I back and forth from our car to the campsite as we unloaded. We set up our new Kingdom 6 tent and got everything arranged to our liking. After feeding Calvin his afternoon snack, we went to the nearby visitor center. I believe Calvin thought the highlight of the visit was walking up and down the stairs with daddy’s assistance. He also found some of the exhibits interesting and insisted on calling most of the mammals “ditty,” which is his word for kitty.

After the visitor’s center, we went back to the campground and wandered over to the outdoor amphitheater thinking Calvin might like to run up and down the steps there too. We were lucky as there were two teen boys who were practicing with their skateboards on the stage. We sat down and Calvin watched the antics entranced. Every so often when he was particularly delighted, he’d clap his hands in approval.

We headed back to our campsite and proceeded to prepare supper and start Calvin’s nighttime routine. Supper took longer than I anticipated so we didn’t put Calvin to bed till almost 8. Even then, he was too excited by the day to go asleep right away though for the most part he didn’t protest too loudly. The tent we bought has a divider so we put Calvin’s Pack ‘n Play on one side and our sleeping bags on the other. We borrowed a child sized sleeping bag from our neighbors and also brought lots of additional blankets just in case. However, I kept popping up in the middle of the night worried that Calvin had escaped from his sleeping bag and was freezing to death. The campground we were in has a strict no-firecracker policy so we weren’t disturbed by loud sounds while we slept. It was very nice, especially compared to the raucous noises I’m sure happened around our house.

Sunday
Jaeger gave me his cell phone so I could keep track of the time in the middle of the night. However, I somehow managed to turn its alarm on. Thus, we were promptly wakened at 6:45am. After viewing the time, I was astonished that Calvin let us sleep in that long considering how light it was outside. We ate breakfast and then embarked on a short hike to Cub Lake. Jaeger and I were very nervous because every hike we’ve taken Calvin on prior to this experience ended in tears. However, for whatever reason, Calvin did very well on this hike. To my astonishment, he actually fell asleep on the hike to the lake. At the lake, I gave him a banana for snack which he enjoyed. After resting for a bit we started back. We gave Calvin opportunities to walk with us whenever it looked like he was getting restless. However, for the most part he was content to survey the surroundings from Jaeger’s back.

We got back to the campsite quite a bit after his normal lunch time at 11. I tried to feed him lunch but he was really cranky and we decided he needed to take his afternoon nap. I wasn’t sure he’d sleep in the tent since it’s so light so I fed him a bottle while Jaeger bustled around packing up stuff so we could take a drive in the car. We went up Fall River Road and circled back down on Trail Ridge Road. As expected, Calvin quickly fell asleep and slept for the entire car ride. The scenery was quite nice, I kept being surprised by how green it was, but I was tired and cat napped in between Jaeger talking to me.

Calvin woke up as we arrived back at the campsite. The weather was looking ominous and Jaeger and I didn’t have much energy so we retreated to the tent. Jaeger tried to nap while Calvin lunged around the tent. I believe Jaeger gave up trying to sleep once Calvin started banging his pan and a measuring cup together. It hailed while we were in the tent but by the time we had to emerge for supper, the weather had cleared up again. This time, Calvin was obviously ready for bed so I put him in the Pack ‘n Play at his normal sleep time of 7:30. Once again, he muttered and refused to go to sleep right away but wasn’t very cantankerous.

The evening had turned quite cool so I retreated to the tent fairly early and read until it was time to go to bed. I piled some more blankets on Calvin which he objected to. However, since toddlers don’t provide much feedback with regard to temperature, I piled a blanket on him every time I felt cold. Unfortunately, he started getting the hang of wiggling out of the sleeping bag so several times throughout the night I heard him start to cry and found him in only his winter pajamas lying on top of the mass of blankets.

Monday
Calvin woke up bright and early at 5:45am, probably because it was so cold. I picked him up and put him in between Jaeger and myself (our sleeping bags zip together). Calvin spent the next 45 minutes trying to convince us to get up and we tried to convince him to go back to sleep. Calvin won.

Eventually, I dragged myself out of the tent and got stuff together to make breakfast. I had planned pancakes for this morning but managed to forget the eggs and the oil I brought leaked so I had less than 1 tbs for both the batter and greasing the pan. I decided it was more important to keep the pancakes from sticking so didn’t add any oil to the batter and instead tried to use it sparingly on my cast iron skillet. Fortunately, I had spent the previous week re-seasoning my skillet so it was pretty oily to begin with and I managed reasonable pancakes. Both Jaeger and I decided that the pancake must be amazingly resilient to be edible after the abuse I had subjected it to. Of course, peanut butter and maple syrup can also solve a multitude of problems

We packed up the campsite and took a quick trip to Sprauge lake. There is a small 1/2 mile trail around the lake that had very smooth trails. Our thought was Calvin might like a chance to walk around a less rocky area but he preferred to ride in my Becco carrier. After our walk, we went back to the car and headed toward Estes Park. Calvin fell asleep on the way. We planned to eat lunch in Estes Park before heading home but arrived a little early. So, we hunted down a playground for Calvin. However, Calvin was too groggy from his short nap and mostly just watched the other children. After giving up on the park, we ate pizza and then headed home. Due to his earlier nap, Calvin refused to nap on the way home but, thankfully, neither did he scream the entire time.

We got home around 2pm excited that everyone had survived the experience intact and mostly sane.

Downs

• I’ve been very busy this week both personally and professionally. It’s good to be busy but I could do with a bit of breathing space
• I’ve been eating very unhealthy the last week or so. Today, I was making dessert for the camping trip and overindulged. I think I should finish the night with a spinach salad.

Ups

• I got all the food I was planning to pre-cook done.
• Calvin didn’t cry when I brought him home from daycare. Recently, he’s been crying when I pick him up because it’s while they’re outside and he really loves playing outside. I don’t blame him. The daycare has a very nice playground for little kids. Today he was outside but when he saw me, he headed straight over and held up his arms for me to pick him up instead of running in the opposite direction.

Calvin Moment

• After I finished cooking, Calvin and I went outside behind our yard to the common area. Turns out the common area has much plusher glass than our yard. We spent a while with me chasing Calvin on my hands and knees while he ran away giggling. He fell a couple of times and skinned his knee but was a big boy and picked himself back up without missing a beat.

Simplification

• Didn’t get rid of anything today. However, I did get a significant portion of packing for our camping trip done.

Food Diary

• Breakfast – Oatmeal with banana and soy milk
• Morning Snack – I had a cookie in the breakroom at Erie. I’m not sure why. I just ate it :S
• Lunch – Cuban Black Beans with Brown rice and 5 dark chocolate pieces
• Snack – I gorged on Chocolate Peanut Butter Cereal Bars. Ugh.
• Supper – I’m not feeling hungry but I should probably eat something healthy and vitamin filled before I go to bed.