Most of last week it was in the upper 80s! No lie! All our windows were open and it was wonderful. (Currently in the mid forties! Brrrr) Last weekend John played in a softball tournament. (Yes, already!) Many of my buddies are on the team, and I hang out with the other girlfriends/wives. These are the sorriest bunch of softball players you ever saw! They are all basically Ph.D. economists from Wisconsin (a very good school for economics) so they are without a doubt the highest educated team in their league. However, the skill level is somewhat lacking. In the two day tournament they won a total of one game. ( However, this is their third year, and everyone seems to enjoy it. John even gets to play 3rd, which he really enjoys. JD likes going to the games because the one field is by a fenced it dog play yard, and he stays and watches the dogs until it’s dark. Another field has a good sized play gym.

New Baby: All is well as to be expected with the new baby. John and I saw her moving through my stomach for the first time on March 14. At that time I had to pull my shirt up, but you could see her kicking my belly button. (It looked like she was using my bellybutton as a punching bag! It was really neat!) It’s now to the point where you can see her moving through my clothes! Which makes for interesting entertainment for those individuals lucky enough to be sitting next to me in meeting. And she’s an active little bugger too! I just love feeling her move around, it’s very comforting! I really can’t emphasize enough just how much and how often she moves. It really feels like constantly. And recently she’s been getting the hiccups all the time. So you see this little pulsating beat in my stomach.

The only real negative with this pregnancy is that I am carrying her really really low. With JD he was really high, and I looked like a walking billboard of flesh. With this new one it’s like I have a basketball on my lap. So, unlike JD, my back hurts, I can’t sleep, I feel off balance a lot, and I can actually feel my stomach skin stretching. So, praise God I’m pregnant – but this one has been less fun. I feel uncomfortable a lot, and seem to be out of breath more often.

JD: JD is a gem as always. I took him to swim class the other day, and he really wanted to bring his juice cup in the water. So I said ‘No’. This did not make him happy and he basically lay on the floor screaming his head off. Great, just great. So, (since I LIKE swimming) I figured I would just take him out to the water and he would be happy. As I picked him up he flung himself backwards – so I ended up carrying him over my shoulder upside down. (You have to picture the sight, me obviously 6 mos. pregnant in a bathing suit with this squalling kid over my shoulder) And then – because there is a 5/6 year old swim class all these parents are sitting there as I walk by them with this screeching 2-year old. But I kept thinking – once he sees the water he’ll be happy. Wrong! As I put him in the water he promptly flung himself backwards again and got a lung full of water. Oi! I’m thinking, can I just die of embarrassment here?! Do I pick him up and carry him back to the dressing room and go home? Do I just sit here? Eventually he calmed down and we had a wonderful time in the water for the next hour and a half. And since I go there every Friday all the lifeguards (as well as the teacher for the class) know me so they had to come over and tease me about what a hellion I have. Last weekend I dropped him while we were ‘swimming’ so he (this is a trend) got a lung full of water and then screamed for a bit, and the guards came over later to ask if he was OK.

Anyway, that night we went to get JD some summer clothes, since it went from 30 degrees to 75 degrees in 1 day, and we realized we had a total of 2 pairs of shorts. As we drove to the store we noticed a fair, so we figured we would stop. So, there is this HUGE slide. (I would not go down this slide!) You know, the kind where you walk up all the stairs to the top and then sit on a burlap sack to fly down this thing? Well, JD wanted to go down the slide with his daddy. John thinks this is great and I’m down at the bottom thinking, “OK God, please let him like this! Don’t have him hit his head or be scared or start screaming his head off, because he probably shouldn’t go down that slide to start with. I’ve had my embarrassment quotient for the day” Of course, JD just LOVED this slide and the minute he got down to the bottom he tried to scamper back up the slide. We tried to take him on the carousel, but he didn’t like how the horsed moved up and down… we tried to take him on the choo choo train, but he didn’t like that either. So he scared on the 2 kiddie rides. But flying down this enormous slide that I wouldn’t go down, that he loved. So he did that like 3 or 4 times. This one woman was standing by me as I sat at the bottom, and she wouldn’t let her 7 year old daughter go down the slide – and I’m like, this is the only ride at the whole fair my 2-year old will go on! So that family stayed to watch JD come down the slide. (She eventually let her daughter go down.)

The other thing is that now that its nice outside, JD is always outside. And let’s just say there is a higher probability of JD falling down and getting hurt outside than in the house. So this is a bit of a point of contention between John and I. He’ll come home and JD will have fallen off something and scratched his arm. So John is somewhat annoyed with me – “Look at that scratch!” he’ll say, “That’s a nasty scratch!” And I’m like, get a life! Wait till he breaks his leg or wrecks our car! This is nothing! So then, just to make things perfect, yesterday JD is tearing around like mad and fell in the neighbor’s driveway and got a good sized ding on his knee. So now both his arms are scratched, he’s got this ugly looking thing on one knee and the other one is black and blue. But, what’s to be done? He loves running around outside! What I need to do is take a week vacation somewhere and have John watch JD 8 hours a day and see what happens while I’m gone! ( John is such the mother hen compared to me. Which is cute but exasperating.

Neighbors. Some new neighbors have moved in down the street. There never was a For Sale sign or anything, so it was odd that all of a sudden new cars and new little kids appeared. I went over to say “hey” and meet them, and it seems the woman’s step-father used to own the house and gave? rented? the house to them. I don’t know.

Anyway, their older son Jamie is the nicest kid on earth. Every day after school the neighborhood kids all congregate down in their yard (since they have their toys out all the time). JD wants to join in, and (this is the cool part!) Jamie has a younger brother Kenny who is 3. JD and Kenny get along famously! It was so cute – I wish I had my video camera – Kenny and JD are sitting next to each other, and they Kenny flops over giggling, so then JD does the same and they lay in the grass giggling at each other. Then they sit up and do it again. It was SO precious. For the past several days I simply take JD down to the end of the cul-de-sac, sit my butt next to Bruno the dog, and watch the children play together. I’m getting to know Bruno pretty well. They’ve taught JD how to ride his scooter instead of pushing it. They have races of some sort, which is funny because Jamie is much bigger than Kenny or Amanda but he still has to ride a little big wheel and not use the pedals. So it’s funny to watch. So I’ve been quite impressed with Jamie in particular. The only odd thing is except for that first day when I came by to say hello, I’ve yet to see the mother again. She seems to rely heavily on Jamie watching Kenny. Although my mother says when I was about 2 and a half I played outside without direct supervision.

Story about Al and Shirley. (I LOVE THEM!) Al is retired and an amazing gardener! He rotates his flowers for spring, summer and fall blooms and his yard is always amazing. (John and I are delighted to be living next to him!) One day I was out back with JD and noticed he had removed a large bush thing leaving a mud patch. And then I noticed that a holly tree on our property was still there, shading that patch. So next time I saw him I mentioned that if that tree was in his way that he had our permission to remove it. I said, I don’t remove things because I have no idea what should go in it’s place – but if you have a brilliant idea and it’s in your way feel free to remove it. So he says, Oh no, I’m not going to do anything etc. etc. Ha. The next darn day that holly tree was gone. And he planted this beautiful Japanese maple there. That evening Al and Shirley brought Blaze over to play with JD and John and I told them how much we loved their yard.

Procurement: I’ve mentioned repeatedly, the people in our procurement/property department are pretty incompetent. So, somehow they lost our 7 thousand dollar piece of memory. What ticks me off is that my boss really didn’t go to bat for us on this one. He was totally willing to eat that 7 grand loss! We were going to have to buy this thing again! This just pisses me off. Anyway, through huge luck and the fact that I kiss ass to our LAN support (those are the computer geeks) some guys in LAN helped me find my Unix. This is like 5 months after the damn thing arrived This is like the other day – I’m writing a press release – we went to some woman to have the tables for my press release checked and bossman is purring all over her. Oh, these are wonderful, this is so much better. Gack. My maternity leave cannot start too soon. So, maybe I’m just being hormonal. I’m also re-doing our web pages. Now, this is MY baby. (so this is a case were my emotions are getting in the way) I did the one’s that are up there now basically all by myself (without departmental approval from anyone except my old boss who basically said do what you want I don’t care) and I’m dealing with someone that doesn’t know the difference between HTML and PDF files. He’s too busy thinking about management plans and time lines. I’m like – we can’t have anything happen until we get a PDF translator, the order for which is still sitting unsigned on your desk!! (I did actually say that, which was pretty funny. He signed it and handed it to me right then and there).