Kiddie Camo

So my wife and I decided to start letting our son sleep through the night. You know, let him cry it out if he woke up - because he's getting to that age where kids need to learn to "self-soothe." (He's four months old...).

Well, the first night we did this my wife also decided to get him out of his sleep positioner. It was a little too much for him, and in the end us. So my wife did a little more research and decided we could let him cry it out, but we'll keep him in the swaddler (as well as the sleep positioner) for present.

That worked decent, but we both realized that since he is a little long for his age (97+ percentile on the height - way to go son!) the swaddler was becoming more and more like a restrictive kilt. I kinda thought he looked a little like a mer-man...

So we decided to finally do away with the swaddler as well as the sleep positioner - hey we figured long as we were changing stuff on him, might as well do a bunch at once! The first night things got a little interesting. My wife had found some pretty cute "sleepers" (as they're called), I think he looks perfectly manly in 'em myself. The ones she chose for that night was yellow with black stripes.

Now our crib is black - and thusly has black "bars" going up the sides (no it doesn't remind me of a jail at all...), and she had happened to have put a yellow cover on the mattress. We had taken off the bumpers because we didn't want him to suffocate himself if he rolled over and stuck his face in 'em.

This being our first child, before we go to bed, my wife is watching him sleep, worrying just a little. She motions me to come in and look at him because he's doing something cute. Well I go in there, and the lights are out like they're supposed to be, with a little night-lite on. Well, it's so stinking dark it took me a minute to find my child in his crib. And when I did find him, I couldn't figure out why it was so stinking hard to make out where his head and rear end were - when I realized he was in Camo! He was wearing a yellow sleeper with black stripes in a crib with yellow sheets and black 'bars' coming up the sides. It was stinkin' hard to make him out!

So kiddie camo...yeah...let me advise all parents out there to put their children in clothes or 'jammies that CLASH with their sleeping arrangement, that way there are no questions about where the bedding ends and the child begins!

Internet phone fun...

Well, here I am scratching my head trying to figure out how I can cut my bills each month. Finances are more than tight as of late... But I had the brainstorm that we could get a single cell phone to share between Terra and I, and then maybe switch to having a home phone with DSL for internet - in switching the three around, we might actually be able to save around $50 a month!

The first disappointment was that Embarq (our local phone and DSL provider) would hand us a bill of approximately $65 a month (some friends who have Embarq let us know about this). I was almost hoping to be able to use AT&T, but they would have to run a cable to our house and all that fun stuff - though the cool part was if it worked we could combine all our internet, home phone and cell phone into one bill.

Then I remembered that voip providers (that would be internet phone service providers) usually charge around $15 to $20 a month. I could keep our present high speed hook-up and add home phone for just a little bit more. Disappointment. Time Warner voip service costs $30 a month - ridiculous!

But then I remembered Vonage - weren't they supposed to be cheaper? I checked 'em out. Yes they were cheaper, but they had all these taxes and extra charges. Could I go cheaper yet? Actually, yes. So now I'm weighing basically three voip providers: vonage, itel, and voip.com.

Yeah, if anyone out there knows anything about these, feel free to let me know!

More iPhone mania

I think i am actually more fascinated with the iPhone's impact on our society than in the actual iPhone (mainly because I'm extremely eager to see and play with the linux/open source equivalent which will come out in the next year or so...).

So I ran across and article on PC World which had all these random, crazy stories related to the iPhone. Check it out here.

And then there is this iPhone bill:



yeah, crazy stuff, huh?!

The Duck-tape Seamstress

Okay, almost. See, at CarQuest you can't wear pants with holes in 'em (go figure). Alas, all mine do have holes because of the various and sundry parts I've had to load and move around. And we can't afford for me to buy new pants every couple of weeks. In addition, neither myself or my wife do patching...

So I've had to go another route: Duck-tape. Yep that's right, duck-tape. I put it on the inside (sticky side facing out), and on the khaki-colored pants I have it almost blends in. Though a little of the sticky stuff got on the wrong side of the tape and sticks to me when I sit down. Luckily, I don't really sit at my job...

And duck-tape actually will stay in place through a wash. In fact, the gooey glue (that's kinda fun, saying "gooey glue" over and over again...alas I digress...) almost begins to bond with the cloth after a few washes.

Almost as good as a real patch...

Life philosophy...hmm...

A friend on facebook posed a "question" about my life's philosophy (actually, she just wanted to get everyone's, but you can't answer with everyone's, only yours...because, well...this rabbit trail just went over a cliff....).

so I wrote in response: Pursue God and everything else falls into perspective (and eventually into place as well); and patience, though a virtue, can be a long time in coming - so learn to live where you are now and let God deal with bringing your tomorrow to where you are today.

not too bad, I think. And, at least at the moment, it seems to describe where I am right now.

New favorite show!

Well, okay, it's not my new all-time favorite show. But last week, while we were at the beach and actually had access to cable channels I discovered this show called Dogfights on the History channel. Of course, when I first told my wife about it, she thought it was about dogs fighting - yeah, not so much.

Actually it's all about airplane dogfights in the different wars. Very fascinating. I've always been fascinated about flying and all that, and they do a really good job of explaining some of the physics involved, as well as comparing the various aircraft. Though the CG recreations are a little cheesey - they're actually not that bad. If you're into that sort of stuff, I highly recommend it!

Gotta love them crabs!!!!

So we went to the beach this past week. Great times. We also went crabbing - and I got this shot:



Note that I wasn't using the zoom function on the camera when I took that!