West Coast Hublers in town

Darren, Liz, Rebecca and Shelby are in town on their way from Washington State to Germany.



'becca is reading Aaron a story

HP Media Center PC

My frankenstien linux PC konked out in the middle of compiling stuff for work. I did some price checking and found PC on Dell w/what I wanted for $1100. P4 3GHz dual core. Checked circuit city and found same PC same price by HP, only with XP Media Center, photo crap, TV tuner card, dual dvd w/light scribe....blah blah blah, maybe someday I'll try to get half that stuff to work on linux, but it's not costing me anything and I get to pick-up computer now...gone to manchester, nh.

Take it home, dvd burner can't burn iso disk images w/o third party software. I'm going to have to go on the internet and download a special program.... I... I... may get one of those windows viruses and my pc will slow down to a halt.... oh well, windows will be gone soon...

ok, let me at least play with all these doodads before I wipe out windows... hmmm... you know I can do work stuff in windows and I can see what windows has been up to since '95...

Spent 30 minutes wondering why
set PATH=%PATH%;c:\java\bin
wasn't working. Apparently there are 2 different DOS shells, cmd.exe and command.exe. Command.exe is ancient useless program...I should have been using cmd.exe. oh man, I'm in trouble.

Mommy's away, time to play

Aaron and I went out for some well deserved ice cream today.



Faced his car seat forward in the van today, he didn't seemed to even notice.

Got movie at BlockBuster, Team America, World Police. Got I only got part way through it before Aaron decided I needed to stop the movie and get on board with guys party time.

He's asleep but we're going to pick up Charlie, Yvonne and Noah at airport at 10:30PM. Let's see how he reacts to the car transfer.

Heartford

Misspelling intended. Amy and I got to leave Aaron w/Anne and Bob while we spent the night in Hartford, CT and stayed at the Goodwin Hotel. I have an over exposed picture of Amy in front of the capitol building. Only picture we took unfortunately.



We ate at Black-eyed Sally's and Trumbull's Place. Mussels and Trumbull's Place were gritty, but Sally's Cajun BBQ was excellent. I highly recommend Sally's Pigout, although pulled pork and smoked cheese grits were the real winners of the dish.

Guy's night ...in

Amy's off partying on a cruise and we're home playing

Yard clean-up this weekend

Put some fencing around the garden, cleaned the gutters, put in some decorative cement blocks around a couple flower beds and raked a few scattered leaves, Aaron helped.



Also rented GT4. Huge hype around the game and it is amazing, but for some reason I got bored quickly. Graphics were practically perfect, cars awesome (cuda, super bird, charger) and entertaining, but then again, I haven't been engrossed in a game since GTA Vice City.

He's done with feeling sick

"jump"

I hold Aaron up to my stomach and say "jump" and he kicks his feet. At which point I lift him into the air as if jumped himself. I've also noticed he seeks attention now. Only 3 weeks old and he cries because he wants someone to play w/him. Unlike 1 week ago where food and pacifier were the only things that would stop him from crying. I suppose he's teaching me new words too, where everything is a homonym. cry=pacifier or food or play w/me or just because I can or...

gas-o-matic 2000

What a set of gas cheeks on my boy. I'm put to shame. And he let's 'em fly like they're no big deal. He'll be staring at his hand, rip an 9.0 on the sphincter scale, and not even blink!

We had 2 good nights of sleep and have yet to duplicate that again. What did we do so right those 2 nights that we're not doing right now? I'm pretty sure it has to do w/how awake we've had him all day, but keeping a baby awake it harder than you think.

I really enjoy reading to him, but he has to be in the mood for it. If he's not studying the pages on the book, I kinda feel like I'm just bugging him, trying to drill verbiage into his brain like every educational zealous parent.

You know you're a new parent when...

...your desktop background at work is a picture of your kid.

Two days back into work. Mom's been a beam of light on Monday after work, and a pack of wolves Tuesday after work. Longterm I'm predicting somewhere in-between. It was nice to leave work with a whole family awaiting your return.

Bellybutton fell off today. Marginally less gross then stub, but I'm told puss ball with clear up.

Working from home tomorrow, need to set ground rules w/mommy. All communication to me will be thru IM, even if you have to walk right past me to get to your computer.

1 week and already daddy's little boy

I discovered little Aaron likes watching Daddy play video games. I think it's more the light than anything, he seems to stare at lights for hours. He's watching my monitor as I type this.

So it's almost 11PM and he's wide awake. Not good. It's no fair the only time I get with him, he's supposed to be going to bed. Hopefully by next weekend his schedule will be shifted. I've noticed that when he's awake for any length of time, he ends up crying for food or going back to sleep. Now he's starting to entertain himself. Cool!

Going back to work tomorrow. We'll see what kind of routine we'll get into. I'll have to think of some interactive things we can do together and maybe get some chores done at the same time.

Sleep

Amy and I took some 20 hours of classes on baby stuff and there was not one word about how to best coordinate sleeping. It would have been the most important information. I suppose Amy was told to "sleep when the baby sleeps", but she's finding that to be impossible. "What do I need to be doing before he wakes?" can keep her up, or she's filled with too much anxiety from emotional overload.

Gas smiles are the funniest thing. Aaron's face goes from grimace to grinning in 2 seconds. Also, when he's in-and-out of sleep, his eyes flash open and they's usually to one side or the other and it looks like he's pretending to be asleep and checking to see who's sneaking up on him.

He's starting to wake, I think he's hungry. Amy will unfortunately have to get up, hopefuly she's been able to sleep. She gets about 5 hours a day if she's lucky.

Announcing Aaron Franklin Hubler

Email I sent out from the hospital
--------------------------------------------
Amy was in labor for 23 1/2 hours. I never realized that when someone says they were in labor for that length of time, it doesn't mean they were killing time for 23 hours, and had pains for 30 minutes. Instead it actually means 1410 minutes of pain, approx. 400 contractions, 17 glasses of ice water, 4 shifts of nurses and 2 shifts of Drs.. Amy did a great job through it all!

Aaron is in great health. Sleeping right now on Mommy's chest after having a nice big dinner.

We should be home Monday around noon time.
---------------------------------------------

6 hours in the house and Aaron's already running the show. We're at his beck and call. I was able to get groceries and put together dinner including some stuffed shells Nana Franklin made. Very good and very handy!

We're preparing for a long night, that's when he does his best screaming. I'm a heavy sleeper but I didn't realize how heavy until last night when he was balling his eyes out and I didn't even roll over. This can be a problem. Amy will have to get good at waking me up when she needs help.

So we're eager to get to know Aaron. So far I'd say he's got a very healthy appetite. Poor Amy. She's starting to make milk now, so with the increase in calories, maybe Aaron's appetite will change.

Lucy was intrigued, Hershey a bit less so. Lucy thinks this can only be bad news at the food dish. She's ready to lay the ground rules to Aaron if she has too.

It's great to be back home w/the baby.

I'll miss you mucous plug

Amy lost her mucous plug today. I won't look at it, she's slightly offended. I think the little guy is coming tonight. This will probably be my first and last post :)

Usual night for us, Amy at TV, me at terminal. I rented Driv3r for Ps2, driving was fun, missions didn't compare to Grand Theft Auto.