Isaac is getting bigger!

Thought I'd post some pictures of the little squirt. It's been awhile and they grow so fast!

Isaac in his cute cloth diapers. The red one is a fleece cover and soo soft. Was tempted to buy some spiffy, neat-o one-size cloth diapers by bumgenius that my friend Renee raves about, but I already have all the cloth diapers I need since Matthew was little. And at roughly $20 a pop I just couldn't justify it.

Crawling:


Tried to get a picture of him head on, but he kept crawling towards me too quickly. [Must EAT camera!] Good shot of his baby blues though!
His hair curls back after baths just like Melissa's did as a baby. I think he's going to have curls!

Just today. Happy baby!

Recent Pictures

Reading with Great-Grandma Sinden during our last trip to Washington.
Visiting Grandpa Don in his new office. It's really nice!

Matthew holding Isaac. Matthew loves to hold and play with his baby brother.

Pictures of me from PyCon

Open space discussions at pycon 09

Open space discussions at pycon 09
Originally uploaded by jbellis

It was about 80% full to start with; then filling the rest of the
spaces became a bit of a game.

Nursivore

While at the dinner table Matthew, Melissa, and I discussed what different animals ate and classified them as herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore. When we got to people, we talked about all the different kinds of food people need to eat to stay healthy and "grow BIG." The "grow big" part was added for Melissa's benefit- she's become a bit picky lately. She desperately wants to be big, though.

Matthew grew thoughtful for a moment and then chimed in, "but what about Isaac? Is he a nursivore or a milkivore?"

This child needs to sleep better

He's been awake roughly 4-5 times and up since a little before 5 AM. This is where Daddy usually takes over and lets me rest while he gets Isaac back to sleep.

Daddy's out of town.

First I fed him, but he remained restless. I'm a pretty sound sleeper, but even I can't sleep with a squirmy baby kicking me and rolling around. So I wrapped him up and put him in his bed. He started crying. Sigh. I rocked him and he settled down and fell asleep. When placed back in his bed, full throttle crying ensued with his fists waving angrily. I picked him up and held him while rubbing his back. He calmed down and silently thrashed around for a bit, then tried to nurse. Sorry kiddo, you've eaten, you're full, the girls are empty, and I'm done. I'm NOT an all night buffet. Sorry. Exhausted, I tried putting him in his own bed while patting him, but he just cried louder. So I am singing (a tired tuneless song). He doesn't seem to mind the mediocre performance. Right now he is quiet in his bed and not tossing much. *Music* calms the savage pumpkin.

It's been over an hour of this and Mommy is beat. Matthew will be up in less than an hour to get ready for school.

Sigh.

I miss Jonathan when he is out of town!

[Update: 6:10 I think he's going to sleep...signing off.]

[Update 2: Well rats! He went back to sleep, but I couldn't.]

Daddy serves breakfast

Daddy serves breakfast
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Aww yeah.

Melissa's first bouquet

Melissa's first bouquet
Originally uploaded by jbellis

I got both my girls flowers on our last trip to the store. Melissa
was _very_ pleased. Of course she wanted the pink ones.

Chasing the baby

Tonight we played "I'm going to get Isaac!" for the first time. Isaac didn't really get the running (crawling) away part, but he still enjoyed being "caught" and tickled. Baby laughs are fun!

That's a lot of crap

This is how much stuff you need to take three kids to Grandma's for
five days.

Stealth cops

Stealth cops
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Unmarked police cars are not sporting to begin with. Now there are unmarked _SUVs_ pulling people over.

That's just not right.

Rolling over the Caravan

Rolling over the Caravan
Originally uploaded by jbellis

This is the minivan that Rachel's brothers drove in high school.  We borrowed it while we were up for the wedding.  If you couldn't tell that it's getting along in years from the dents her brothers put in it, you definitely could when you turned on the heat, and then immediately turned it back off because the smell of exhaust was overpowering.

We meant to take a picture when we rolled it over at 200k miles, but forgot until 15 miles later.

We thought Brian would get a kick out of this.

Drier hands through technology

Drier hands through technology
Originally uploaded by jbellis

With 150 employees, 90% male, in an office space designed for 30, some problems were bound to ensue. One such was the Great Paper Towel disposal problem: with that many men washing their hands, the used paper towels would quickly fill the bin and overflow to the floor.

Enter the Dyson Airblade. It dries your hands with cold air in about five seconds, literally blasting the water off of you rather than evaporating it -- you can see your skin rippling under the pressure. Truly a manly solution.

This is what $5000 looks like

This is what $5000 looks like
Originally uploaded by jbellis

We're adding 4 of these 160GB SSD cards to our database servers, for a total of $20,000 each.

It's sort of impressive for how unimpressive it looks.

Reminds me of the time I was an assistant sysadmin at BYU, and one of the memory boards in the combustion simulation lab's most expensive machine went bad. This was one of 8 256MB boards in the machine, each slightly larger in area than a sheet of paper, giving it 2GB of ram. This was when Windows 98 was new and a typical desktop had 32MB. And of course this was proprietary SGI memory which meant it was even more expensive. $15,000? It was enough to freak me out when I was handling the new one lest a freak static discharge ruin it.

This amazing toy entertained Isaac for all of lunch

This amazing toy entertained Isaac for all of lunch
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Yes: a stick.

A close call

There are 4 music stations I can listen to in San Antonio: one each of classical, rock, alternative, and metal. Everything else is pop, latin, or country. My favorite is the alternative station; I like most of what they play but it's not stuff I've heard a thousand times. (Except for when they sometimes play country. Sorry guys, country is not "alternative." Especially not in Texas.)

But a couple days ago I'd turn it on in the morning driving in to work and get some latin crap. What the hell? I switched back and forth unhappily between the other stations. When I got closer to work I tried it again and this time I got the alternative station.

I thought some other station must have started up and was overpowering the poor little alternative college-radio transmitter.

But last night when I got the latin I decided to wait for the station ID to see what was going on. When the song ended the DJ started interviewing the singer, some fairly popular guy from Brazil who's won a few awards. (Although he's not that popular -- I tried to google him based on knowing that his first name was Alexander, he's from Brazil, and he's on tour in the US now including SA this weekend. I failed.) So the latin crap was from this guy's latest album to promote his tour. Presumably Monday all will be back to normal.

Whew.

Matthew's Art

Matthew really likes to draw. Here are some of his most recent doodles:

Boy with Glasses (From his minimalist period)

For a long time Matthew primarily drew with pens. Lately he's become fond of oil pastels. Regardless of his medium, he often puts glasses on the faces he draws.

Valentine's (still from the minimalist period)

This was a card for Jonathan and me. Inside he wished us a Happy Valentine's Day and ended it with "Love, Matthew" Notice the glasses, and the spiky hair. A fairly accurate representation of Jonathan, I'd say! Matthew's let me know that he wants to be able to spike his hair next time I give him a haircut.

Birthday Cake

This one I think is inspired by the Hispanic culture here in San Antonio. It's supposed to be a birthday cake, but he used colors you would find more at home on the Mexican flag than a traditional birthday cake.

Boat on the water

If you look closely you can see all of the smiling people in the portholes. Guess they aren't seasick yet...

Starry (Day?)

Matthew has a series of drawings inspired by Van Gogh's starry night. This is the only day time one he's done, and I can't seem to find the night scenes (sometimes he draws a mountain, sometimes not)... Additionally he doesn't typically asked how to spell words, if he doesn't know he just guesses phonetically. Hence the "Mete the new picture. I like it. What do you think about it." I'm rather surprised that he knew how to spell "picture" but not "meet!" Go figure.

A Game

This is a game Matthew designed. He explained all the rules and details to me, but it was pretty involved. Rather than misrepresenting some fine point I will just say that it included robots, guns, tricky parts and was "cool."

[Jonathan notes: he got our neighbor Joseph to play the game with him. It involved killing bad guys, of course. It sounded an awful lot like Savage Moon on paper. After about ten minutes Joseph started asking plaintively, "can we play something else now?" Matthew tried and failed to get him to keep playing until they beat the boss. Then he tried to get Rachel to play. And then me. I sort of felt turning him down but it really did sound excruciating.]

Untitled

Not sure what inspired this next one.

Bluebonnets

Van Gogh had his sunflowers, Monet favored water lilies, Matthew likes bluebonnets. He has a whole collection of bluebonnet art on all different kinds of paper and varying styles. This one needs to be mailed to Grandma and Grandpa as you can see. Why bluebonnets? I'm guessing it must be the Texas indoctrination education system. It's the state flower naturally, and Matthew knows all about it. He is slowly imprinting on Texas. One nice side effect is his use of "sir" and "ma'am." Melissa has picked up on it as well, but she just uses "sir." Think of Marcie in comic strip Peanuts.

And finally the artist himself:

It's official

Isaac is crawling now. It's actually more of a forward scoot. But he can get where he wants to go, and fairly quickly too.

Time to baby-proof in earnest.

Stowaway

Melissa came downstairs because she "forgot someting" as Rachel and I leaned back to watch Enchanted. This was nothing unusual; Rachel showed her where she had left her (new, pink with hearts) wallet and stuffed cat. Melissa headed back upstairs with her treasures slowly, with many glances back. I knew what was going through her head: "Princess movie."

So when she paused on the stairs I shouted up, "go to bed!" And it sounded like she did. But she must have crept back because when Rachel put Isaac in the swing she saw Melissa again. "Go to bed!" Again bedward motion ensued.

When the movie ended at 11, I heard rustling on the stairs again. Little imp! "Melissa," I said, "come here, and I'll give you a ride to bed." Daddy is a softie. (Melissa talked to my mom on the phone earlier today. "Dranma says I am her sunshine!" she reported. She was very pleased.)

"Der was one dragon," she told me, "a talking dragon. A liddle bit scary." Was it a good princess movie? "Yes!" Enchanted was actually the last movie we saw in theaters as a family. I missed a lot, including the ending, because Melissa kept getting bored. What a difference a year makes when you are three.

This morning I walked Matthew to school. Everyone else is still sleeping. If Melissa gets up before Isaac, I have turned on Enchanted to keep her from barging her mom's room and waking up her brother. There is a banana on the coffee table in case she needs a snack.

Close to home

I had some extra time this morning -- Isaac was sleeping and we didn't have to get Melissa or Rachel ready for church -- and I was leafing through a Calvin & Hobbes book. For a guy with no kids himself, Watterson sure nails six year old boys. Of course some things are mixed in from older ages, but the resemblance is eerie. I read them out loud, substituting "Matthew" for "Calvin," and Rachel and I laughed hysterically. (Matthew didn't approve, of course. He does not think he is funny, at all.)

Like Calvin, Matthew is prone to exaggeration. "Never" and "anything" are very popular with him. So is "always."



Rachel and I refer to this one whenever the kids are "tired sick" (as opposed to "moaning and yelling sick"). Like Melissa today.



And when Matthew gets a shot, it goes remarkably like this. Only with less aggression and more tears.