Holiday, Finals, Work Madness

Alex the avid reader (just like his Mom!)

Sometimes I can get Alex to sit still long enough to play him a song (Blackbird, in this case)

Ryanne and Alex. Ryanne is one of the best things that's happened to us since his birth! Alex is crazy about her (so are we!)

Alex's big blister

The year is careering to a close as we approach the Christmas holiday. Dana is putting the finishing touches on her Constitutional Law final exam this week, a 1,750 word masterpiece of legal thought and analysis. Her professor was adamant that it be absolutely no more than 1,750 words, so we have been struggling to come up with terse and witty phrases to replace the typical long-winded, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink legal essay verbiage.

At work, my project is finally taking shape. The software analysis software project has gone through its final set of checkpoints and is now ready for public release. You can rest assured I will announce it here as soon as I am able. But sadly it's not very sexy unless you're a lawyer or an open source software developer, or possibly a CIO or director of IT operations. My team has been putting in some very long hours and bending over backwards to satisfy the whims of our management team and their ridiculously risk-averse stance. Now I think we've cleared all those hurdles and have just enough rope to hang ourselves.

We'll be heading to San Diego to visit Dana's Mom and Herb this weekend. We leave Thursday evening and get back Sunday. It should be a very fun trip for all of us. Dana and I can escape our work and school headaches, and Alex can hang out with "San Diego Grandma." Plus it's been snowing like crazy here lately, so we can get a few days' respite from shoveling the driveway. We had about 4 inches last weekend, and another 2-3 inches yesterday. Now it's sunny. My neighbor Bob let me borrow his snowblower, so Sunday morning I had fun for about 45 minutes clearing everyone's sidewalks on the block, plus Bob's driveway. He offered to let me use it anytime. What a guy!

Alex's bedtime routine...

I guess if I don't talk about Alex a bit more soon, they'll revoke my blogging license, so I wanted to share the details of how we generally get Alex to bed each night. There are three basic scenarios:

1. Angel Alex: When he's had a busy enough day, sometimes Alex just falls asleep, often before we've even taken him upstairs to his crib. Sometimes he'll be in the car going home and fall asleep and we can manage to shuttle him into his crib without disturbing him. Sometimes he'll fall asleep on the floor whilst playing. This is relatively rare, maybe once a week or so, depending on what we have going on.
   
   
2. Sing-along Alex: About half of the time, Alex likes to be sung and rocked to sleep. Usually this task falls to me, since Dana doesn't know all of the Cal fight songs by heart. Alex loves all of the Cal songs, but he seems particularly drawn to Sons of California, the California Drinking Song, and By (a.k.a. the Bowles Hall Drinking Song). The majority of times, if he's tired enough already, we only make it through about three songs. I call this a "Three and out," referring to the type of paid gig that the Cal Band's Strawhat Band would sometimes be called out to perform, where we'd play three songs and have a free drink and pack it up and go home. Usually I'll start by singing the first song, but then just hum the last two or so. Other times, I have to go through the entire pre-game show, or more, to get him to settle down. We'll almost always do this routine while he's in my arms, as I walk around the bedroom rocking him gently. He must have a green squishy pacifier in his mouth and a blanket in his hands with a satin trim. These are non-negotiable.
   
   
3. Snuggly, wiggly Alex: A bit less than half the time, Alex and I will snuggle up in bed together. I wrap my arms around him and tuck a blanket around him. If he's especially wiggly, I put him on my chest, face down, and gently hold him in place to keep him from wiggling so much. I usually do this either when I'm too tired to stand up anymore, or when he seems a bit too wiggly or restless to put up with rocking in my arms for very long. The major advantage of cuddling in bed is that once he falls asleep, he's already in the lying-down mode, so I can usually scoop him up and place him in his crib without disturbing him too much. It's always a crap shoot switching him from vertical to horizontal, so starting out the exercise lying down is a nice way to avoid that gamble.