Babysitter Wanted

Social Distortion and the Supersuckers are playing at Red Rocks on my birthday. I already bought tickets, and now have roughly two full months to find a babysitter. So I will probably begin the search in about 6 weeks.

Alumni, Orchids, and Moms

I'm not sure if why I don't post more often. It feels like I have less time than ever, but nothing has substantially changed. The Manling has continued to sleep in his crib, and has pushed back his bedtime to between 8 and 9 pm, and sleeps through the night, so I have more time to myself. Granted, my friend J. did visit from Tuesday until Sunday, so that may have something to do with it.

It was great having him here. I think he and C. will be moving out to Denver after all. We did several "urban" hikes with the Manling, and he, Mark, and a couple of other people went to see Ministry on Friday. So what with all the shenanigans, I had a great time.

Other things of note are that we finally had J. ( a different one) come over and take professional pictures of the Manling. Maybe we will finally send out birth announcements!

And after complaining about it all week, I finally checked my transcripts on Thursday night and saw that my internship grade was changed to the A that I had really achieved, and thus I had fulfilled my program requirements. So yesterday, in addition to having my first Mother's Day (with a child "out-utero"), I also graduated from college. I had a 4.0 GPA, but was only listed in the program as graduating cum laude, rather than summ cum laude. I suspect that it won't be changed since they look at your GPA from the semester before you graduate, even though the internship was from the summer of 2004. That dratted department and the dratted lady who "takes care" of things. I could almost spit. I'm just happy to be done with the place.

Mark had to work, but the Manling and I went downtown to at least attend Commencement. I was planning to hear Gail Norton speak. When we got there, there were about 10,000 people plus some sort of youth chess tournament going on. I couldn't handle the crowd and the resultant stuffiness and heat, and I would've had to leave the Manling's stroller outside, so I grabbed some programs and went to the Tattered Cover bookstore, ate a delicious brownie, and perused some books.

Mark got me some amazing gifts for Mother's Day, but I am returning them. The first was a gorgeous two-stemmed orchid. I love orchids, but seem to kill them. Sometimes I can get the leaves to stay alive, but the flowers never bloom after the ones that they came home from the store with fall off. I'm returning it rather than kill it. The second gift were these really pretty pear-shaped tanzanite and diamond dangly earrings. I'm not a big dangly earring person, and I don't think I'd wear them. Plus I hate thinking about how much they cost. Mark says that jewelry is pretty much crappy and cheap or super-expensive and nice; I guess he's right. I think I'm going to pick out something else that I'll wear. I may even just put the money toward getting my honeymoon tanzanite gem set. This is kind of similar to what I'm thinking. I want princess-cut diamonds rather than round ones, and less of a prong-type setting and more of a triangular wrap-over type. It would be helpful to know the lingo for that once I go to the jeweler!

My mom sent me 2 dozen roses for Mother's Day with probably the nicer sentiment she's ever expressed towards me as the message. It said something along the lines of hoping that my memories of the Manling will be as meaningful to me as her memories of me are to her. I was really touched.

Plus last night something amazing happened. The Manling went to bed, conked out around 9ish. Mark offered to give me a massage, which I of course accepted. It was wonderful. We haven't had a chance to really get romantic in many a long months. I said we should make a plan to do something like that at least once a week as a firm commitment. I'm not going into details here, but Mark and I have been talking about baby #2, and when we'd like to have him/her. This massage may have speeded up the process, which I highly doubt due to breastfeeding, but we were considering starting to "practice" beginning next month. Only time will tell.

Se7en

So the Manling is an unbelievably seven months old as of this past week.

He has some new skills:

• Sitting up for a long, long, time, in a galaxy far, far away. Seriously, the kid has mastered sitting. He can't get into the postion by himself, but he tries. He will try to go straight from a on-the-back position to sitting upright by contracting his abdominal muscles. He hasn't quite figured out that rolling to one side and pushing up might be easier. I just figure he'll have a great six-pack.
  
• Getting up in the dog's grill. Luckily I have acclimatized her to withstand repeated pulling of her jaw-skin, ears, tail and fur from the time we got her in preparation for this day.
  
• Scooting backwards. The Manling has now replaced any need for a Swiffer to remove said dog's shed fur from the floor. And he does an excellent job of getting the dustbunnies out from underneath the entertainment center. He does get a wee bit frustrated at not being able to move forward, but I hope that won't be for a few more weeks. I like still being able to put him down and finding him relatively where I left him after I come back from playing on Myspace or making quesadillas. Just kidding, social services!
  
• Push-ups. The Manling intuitively knows that crawling forward involves getting his belly and legs off the floor. But for some reason he believe all body parts must be off the floor at the same time. He does a sort of downward-facing dog (that's NOT the Manling) whereby only the pads of his big toes and the palms of his hands are on the ground. He will have the strongest big toes in the known universe.
• And, trumpets please: Sleeping in his own crib, in his own room! I hesitate to actually write this, but for the last few days has been doing that very thing. I tried and tried to follow the guidelines set out in Tracy Hogg's wonderful Baby Whisperer books, but I just couldn't. So instead I turned to advice given by a terrific bloggers out there: Tertia of So Close, among others. I can't say I enjoyed these last few nights, but it really seems to be working. And I'm not going into any more detail nor am I going to apologize or defend it.

The last few months have been wonderful. I can't imagine life without the Manling.