A birthday wallow

Well, first things first. We've had some reports of voter fraud in the polling. It appears that the nefarious Snuffy political machine is at it again. I don't like to mess with this crowd, so I'm afraid I will have to certify the results as they turn out.
Next, Uncle Joshy and Aunt Laura have moved to town! I foresee a lot of this:

Third, guess what we got Dylan for her birthday? I will tell you. A pony.
Well, technically it was a trip to see a pony.

Aaron made a new friend too.

And so did I.

Some pig

Dylan thought the idea of the tractor was very exciting until she was on the tractor and then it was terrifying.

Is this really the sign they were going for? For the pond?

I asked Aaron to go take a picture of this sign, figuring he was on the same page as me (website has music. heh.) As it turned out, he was not, as I learned when I started humming a few minutes later.

Then we had to chase Dylan home because she wanted to go live among the horseys. Who wouldn't, really?


Happy Birthday, baby.

Birthday girl mug shot

In mid-NO

One week down, an untold number of weeks to go

Hey. That was sort of fun. It did not actually cause me physical harm to 1) not wear a grubby t-shirt every day of the week, 2) make my lunch, 3) work for a prescribed number of hours, 4) try to get my head back into medical stuff, 5) keep working in the evening even when I am really tired, or 6) not spend many many hours with Dylan for a few days. I am finding that anything I knew reasonably well before I stopped med school is coming back very quickly, while anything I was shaky on is gone entirely.

Speaking of work, I just got an e-mail, at 3:30pm on the Friday before Labor Day Weekend, with proofs for an article I am working on that wants them back, corrected, within 48 hours. Hm. Good thing we don't like to do anything fun around here anyway.

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Snuffy is so smart it is UNREAL. He doesn't usually get all excited when we get back to the house from a walk unless I tell him Aaron is home. Today Aaron wasn't there when we left, but had gotten home as we went around the block. I didn't do or say ANYTHING, but he still knew Aaron was home from the car being in the driveway and started Snuffing around happily until I let him in. I feel like he would be put to better use being a therapy dog or herding sheep or something other than his current use, which is to take up all the space in our bed at night and look meaningfully at us if we don't take him out to play enough.

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Dyan LOVES the new room at daycare. I saw a bunch of two-year-olds for well child checks this week, one of whom tried to lift up my pants to pinch my ankles because I wouldn't let him escape the room. By the end of his visit I had a large pile of stuff on the counter that I had had to confiscate because he was wailing on me with it. So, Dylan, thank you for not physically abusing me at every opportunity, like some of your peers.

Itchy

Yesterday the bug of the day was lice. Today, scabies. What I learned: hearing the word lice is enough to make you itch for the rest of the day. Lice lice lice. There, now I shared my learning with you.

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The poll is in the sidebar, in case there are others besides an unnamed relative who missed it.

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The See Me TeePee has now been set up in the middle of the living room for the entire week. It feels like an adventure every time you walk downstairs! Or maybe a pigsty, one or the other.

Ask the audience

I am actually enjoying myself a fair amount at the clinic. It's really interesting, and I've seen all sorts of different stuff this week. However, working from 8 to 5 or 6 and then coming home, hanging out with Dylan for a couple hours, then spending another few hours on my dissertation is possibly not a schedule I'm going to be able to maintain for very long. The answer is to finish my dissertation, but the writing process seems to have a mind of its own that I'm not sure I'm totally in charge of. Who, you may ask, is in charge? I sense a poll coming on.

Day 2

This is going...well. I am completely exhausted because I'm not used to being on my feet this long or working this many hours in a row, but being tired is not so bad. It is definitely going to be an adjustment for all us bleisenblogs, but Aaron is doing a good job of taking care of...everything. I walked home for lunch more or less every day for five years, so I am going to miss that, as is Snuffy, who benefited greatly from that arrangement. Dylan had her first taste of the new room at daycare and loved it. The elective I started with is excellent and everyone is so nice to me and even if they weren't I can already tell that I am so much tougher than when I last was in med school. So don't mess with me or I will take your blood pressure or something.

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Oddly, I seem to have a child who likes Pretty Dresses and Party Shoes. Oh well, I guess she can pull it off.

Day 1

The first patient I went in to see with a resident caused about an hour and a half of, "Um. What do we do now?"

The first patient I went in to see by myself had to go straight to the emergency room. But not before I said, when asked, that he should go home and stay hydrated. Actually, they said, we think a spinal tap would be the way to go. Oh.

Party redux

Dylan's party on Sunday was really fun, except for the part where the sun kept getting higher and higher and forcing us all to ever-smaller patches of shade throughout the yard. We weren't going anywhere without the food, so by the end we had all the guests trained to hoist up the tables and haul them over to the new location. Good work Team Eat! We also made all the...more mature guests do a kickline to earn their cake, but I'll save those pictures for blackmail.

Before

After

Sun, shade, it didn't matter to Dylan, who was busy broiling herself in her new See Me TeePee.

As was Aaron, who was completely worn out after growing a tail. It looked better on Snuffy, I have to be honest.

We were even able to lure loyal reader Bryn over, despite her (later successful!) plans to be married later that day (congrats guys, it was gorgeous!), and our tendency to have all her law school professors over as party guests.

And to Dylan, how about this for a plan: you stop putting your grubby little mitts all over the camera lens, and I will take a nice picture of you once in a while. Thx.

First Day of School

Dylan's birthday, T minus one week

I met someone this weekend who asked how old my baby was. I said almost two, and she said oh, that's not a baby, clearly incensed by my false advertising. Now that I've been straightened out, there are going to be a few changes around here. For one thing, people who are not babies can tidy up for their own birthday parties, thank you very much.

Two, plastic bags are totally fine to play with.

Three, mimosas.

Also, it's time to learn how to break a stick over your knee like a real man.


And finally, it's time to undergo that rite of passage where we put a picture of your face on a cake and then cut it up and eat it.

Aaron pointed out that ideally the picture on the cake would have been Dylan eating last year's cake, but there's always next year.

Does it count as multitasking if one of the tasks is being awake?

Hey! You know what I hadn't thought of? Using the 3-4am time slot to write posts. Thanks to Dylan to making sure I didn't sleep through this opportunity.

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Dylan took her cue from the terms 'charming' and 'easygoing' and ran in the other direction as fast as she could. She declined to let me make dinner, even when offered the job of MICKING the EGG. Then she declined to eat dinner, let me remove her bathing suit, or let more than two minutes pass without emitting some kind of painful whine. I myself have spent the last two days whining, so I guess I can't complain too much.

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Did you see the article on food in the Finger Lakes? Anything that describes the Finger Lakes as the juicy center has got to be worth reading. She went to a bunch of our favorite places, so we must be on the right track in the stuffing our faces department.

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Dylan apparently hadn't realized that Uncle Josh and Uncle Ducky were two different people, not just one big fun unclejoshyduck. So that led to some initial skepticism and confusion when she saw them both in the same place this week. I think we've got things mostly worked out, but this is a kid who still mentions the plane that daddy works on most days.

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One interesting side effect of the driveway has been that we realized we actually had a front door. Visitors to our house may have noticed the somewhat annoying backup at the side door as we make everyone remove their shoes due to our longstanding cultural tradition of not wanting to clean very often. There is a lot more space at the front door, so I think this is going to allow for some innovative developments in entering the home such as: not tripping over a big pile of shoes and not being outsmarted by the foot pedal baby gate.

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Dylan has been up from midnight to 4am two of the past three nights. Please send help.

Flight path

Turning in my key

Here is our fridge. I draw it to your attention not because I still think of it as our cool new toy (although you know I do) and not to point out our cool new super strength fridge magnets (thus allowing for the display of 300% more 'artwork'), but to point out the presence of the newest fridge-dweller:
Up until this afternoon this name tag marked the doors of the four offices that I have inhabited in my department over the past three years. Okay, technically this name tag is a newer, fancier recent replacement for the name tag that marked the doors of my four offices, but the point is, now it's on the fridge. And my key, after a week of hedging and avoiding and negotiating one more week of office time, is now in the hands of one of the incoming graduate students. Or would be, had I been considerate enough to return it at a reasonable hour of the afternoon. It has been so many years since I first started there that it is going to take a real effort for me to remember that it is no longer an option to wander down the block to work at all hours of the day or night.

I seem to have passed my audit by the quality assurance branch of the ethics board this morning with no problems, but I have to say, the very fact of being audited by the ethics board makes you feel like you must have done something unethical. But those are the kinds of things I am unlikely to detail on the internet.

This week has been a scramble to get everything together before I start medical school again on Monday. I had wanted it to be a scramble of dissertation writing, but it ended up being all logisticating all the time, including many rounds of Where In The Neighborhood Is The Car Parked Now?, a game born of the the combination of the new driveway and our street's No Parking, Now Or Ever policy.

When I was writing my dissertation proposal, I fell into a schedule where Dylan would go to bed and I would work for another few hours in the evening. In trying to get the rest of the damn thing written I have been on the same all-work-all-the-time-makes-Kate-sort-of-whiny schedule. This time it seems more intense, and when I can't even find 15 minutes (or, um, longer on occasion) at the end of the day to put together a blog post I know I am stretched thin.

Luckily for my mental health, Dylan has been particularly charming and easygoing lately. I think it's the talking, like when she started being able to crawl, she's just so happy to be able to express herself. It is so easy and fun to spend lots of time with her, although she was sort of a mess today because she was tired, as evidenced by an episode of sitting down on the sidewalk on the way home and whimpering about the Sunder that woke her up from a nap several weeks ago. For a while I found it absolutely impossible to do anything in the kitchen with her around, but now I just have to give her a job and I can get a lot done.
She LOVES the new driveway, and stood chatting happily with it a couple days ago for longer than I would usually consider normal for a two-year-old's (almost!) attention span. When we parked the car on it for the first time today she jumped for joy.

Next week she is also moving on, after almost a year in her current room at daycare. She'll be in the two-year-old room with her buddy from the pictures from the other day, and we are excited for her. We are slightly less excited for me, because I will be exchanging years of 100% freedom and autonomy for...not those things. I am also taking a gamble that I will be able to finish my dissertation in the next six months or so even with med school, and it is something I am about 90% certain about, but we'll have to see how it goes. So anyway, one way or another things are going to be very different around here, and I think I will try a little harder to find 15 minutes every day.

This is what happens when you let the child watch Olympic Trampolining

Welcome to Snuffsterpiece Theatre

Two-headed two-year-old monster

Assorted

Is anyone else finding it difficult keeping track of what day it is, Olympics-wise? At night we get to watch stuff live, then we wake up the next day and the news is about the same stuff and other events that happened 'today.' As long as we're on the topic, where am I, anyway?

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I finally figured out what is bugging me about Michael Phelps. Anyone watch Heroes? Hmmm?

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I had one of my best ultimate games ever tonight. It would be better for me to have one of my best dissertation-writing evenings ever, but we take what we can get around here.

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At daycare, all the little girls coming running up to you when you walk in and smile and want to play. They all seems really cute and sharp, like they know what's going on. Meanwhile, all the little boys are these little roly poly butterballs who always seems to be doing the one-year-old equivalent of running into each other with pots on their heads. Aaron says it's just like a Simpsons episode and at this point I just smile and nod at such comments. Also, Dylan's moving up two classrooms in a couple weeks, to the two-year-old room. Actually it's the same week I'm going back to med school. We are going to have some grumpy and disoriented Bleisengirls around here in a couple weeks.

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The various and sundry noises and rattles that entertained me during all the driving last weekend turned out to be not bells and whistles so much as alarming signals from things such as: brakes. And tires. Many many dollars worth of brakes and tires.

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Speaking of many many dollars going to not fun things, they're paving the driveway this Friday. I've gotten a lot of questions re: are they finished with the driveway because it seems like they ripped it up and put some gravel down and skipped town, but just stop asking questions, okay?

DYLAN PRETTY DRESS