Anyone ever wonder why most of what this guy says doesn’t make any sense?
Archive for the ‘Family’ Category.
Woke this morning to the news of the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. I’m having a hard time fighting back tears as I think of one of my favorite cities crumbling around its brave residents. I spent 6 months as the President of the L’Aquila branch in 1994 and I love those wonderful people and the ancient city they are so fiercely proud of. A tutti gli aquilini: che Dio sia con voi.
We took the kids to the Spanish Fork Kite Festival on Friday afternoon. We couldn’t get our kites to fly cause there wasn’t quite enough wind, but it was fun to see all the other kites and the new wind farm they’ve recently finished constructing out there.
The highlight of the event, though, was getting Erica to try a segway.
She was a bit reluctant at first, but after she saw me ride it around a bit she decided to give it a shot. Now she says she wants one. We’ve recently been watching Arrested Development, so even if we had the disposable funds it’d be awfully hard to overcome the G.O.B. segway stigma.
Well, Brendan threw us all for a loop by waiting almost a week past his due date to arrive, so nobody managed to guess closer than two days to when he was born. Not surprisingly, the time portion of the game ended up being the deciding factor, since being off by just a day meant a difference of 120 points. The average guess was off by 155 hours or 775 points.
Erica and I both guessed that the baby would be a girl and born two days before the due date, so we were completely out of the running. She scored 940 points and I scored 930 by guessing just two hours later than my wife did.
I’m sorry to say that the highest score went to my coworker, Erica Wilkinson, who scored 1825 points by guessing the baby would be born a week early, female and 8 lbs 1 oz. She guessed the right length, though, so that helped her score a little.
Coming right down to the line, another coworker, Dylan, went neck and neck with the winner, but lost out with a score of 345 points. Dylan managed to guess everything but the date exactly right, so that definitely deserves an honorable mention. Congrats to Dylan!
Finally, the winning guess breaks down as follows:
With a total of 300 points, my little brother Andy is the winner! Congratulations!!
Brendan James Bayless was born at 6:42 pm on April 7th, 2008. Erica’s doctor checked her this morning during her regular appointment and decided it was time to get the baby out. We arrived at the hospital at about 1:30pm and they started inducing Erica’s labor then. By about 6:30 all was ready and she pushed for just about 10 minutes. As Erica was in labor, the weather outside ranged from overcast to spits of rain to a cheery spring blizzard, but at almost the same moment Brendan entered the world, the sun broke through the clouds and flooded our delivery room with light (I’m not being poetic… it really happened!). He weighed 8 lbs 8 oz and was 20.5 inches long. He has a fuzz of reddish hair and a very happy disposition. He’s been well behaved all night. His mom is doing just fine, though her blood pressure continues to be a bit high as it was for the last couple weeks of her pregnancy. Here is our newest little addition to the family:
For those who participated in our baby guessing game, I’ll tally up the points tomorrow and let you know who won. Right now I need some sleep!
Still no baby. Erica goes completely stir crazy at about 4pm every day. We sit at home at night wondering if there is anything we can do to pass the time. And, maybe worst of all, 85% of the guesses made in our baby game have already passed. A few people did guess the 4th or 5th, though. Of course, just the fact that the date you guessed has already passed does not mean you can’t win the game, so stay tuned!
While we wait, it never hurts to watch the Allman Brothers Band for a few minutes:
Erica had a routine checkup Monday morning and after seeing slightly elevated blood pressure her doctor sent her in for some additional testing and monitoring. Once he saw the results of that he put her on bed rest till the baby is born. I heard Erica’s side of the conversation when she broke that news to her employer… it sounded like they were just thrilled.
So, Erica has been sitting still as much as possible since Monday afternoon and I have taken over most of her usual activities. Luckily this was the week when we had purposefully not scheduled much to be going on, since the baby is due next Wednesday. Still, adding her duties to my own, and adjusting my schedule to fit all the things that need to get done, had been quite a change. The main difference is that I now take Jonathan to school in the mornings and then go to work, then I pick him up when he’s done and bring him back to the office with me so I can put in my full 8 hour day. It’s only about an hour and a half difference in my arrival and departure times, but it has done a number on me. I feel like there is no time to get anything done when I get home in the evenings! It’s kind of ironic because I had been wondering lately what it would be like to work the same hours as the rest of the office. I don’t like it.
Erica has reacted well to the change, all things considered. Her mom had the latter part of the week off work already, so she has been spending the day at our house helping distract Marissa, who is on spring break this week, keeping things tidy and helping Erica get her lunches. I do breakfast and dinner. Mentally, I think Erica probably feels like she was in a big race that set records for the first 100 laps and has now slowed to a crawl for the last ten. She was already starting to get anxious to have the baby, and now suddenly she has very little to occupy her time other than navel gazing, which of course leads to thoughts of the rest of her belly and the little person who is occupying it. So we sit during the evenings talking about how much we want the baby to be here and trying to find interesting things to do that don’t involve being up off the couch or any kind of physical exertion. We’re watching a lot of movies and TV, needless to say.
It’s been almost 11 months since I last posted on here. What a lazy bum I am. The only really big news since then is that Erica is pregnant. She’s actually been pregnant for almost 8 months now. To be precise, tomorrow is 35 weeks. That makes her due date the 2nd of April. Naturally, my Mom is pushing for the baby to arrive two days early to coincide with her birthday. I’m sure Erica wouldn’t mind an early birth either. She’s been having all the same pregnancy related troubles that she experienced with Jonathan and Marissa, including fatigue, back pain, muscle soreness and trouble sleeping. This time, though, she has developed moderate carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and that has been a real pain for her to get used to. I bought her CTS braces for both hands and she wears those at night. They help her sleep well because they don’t allow her hands to get into positions that would aggravate the symptoms. Hopefully the CTS will go away once the baby comes.
Since we already have a son and a daughter we decided that this time we’d have a bit of a surprise by not finding out the baby’s gender when we had the 20 week ultrasound. We already have names picked out for either contingency and we have plenty of boy and girl themed clothing from the other kids, so we’re now eagerly looking forward to the moment we get to meet our new little one.
If you’d like to join in the anticipation, you can play a little baby guessing game here. I’ll leave that form up till the Ides of March then we’ll close the guessing and once the baby is born I’ll tally the results and see who wins. Good Luck!
Jonathan woke up Wednesday morning saying his right foot hurt. He had played outside with some friends the night before so we assumed a twisted ankle or a sore muscle and sent him off to school normally. He came out of school that afternoon still limping. When I got him home he crashed on the couch and slept for two hours, which is very unusual for him. That night I had to come into the office for some UPS work and I brought the kids with me. He was still limping and complaining when Erica came to pick them up at 7:45 so she took him to the local InstaCare facility. They diagnosed a bacterial infection in his heel and gave him a shot of uber-antibiotics. They also prescribed a 10 day cycle of oral antibiotics that Erica took to the all night pharmacy to have filled. I picked it up about an hour later and paid $129 for it after insurance had covered a measly $26. The instacare place wanted to see him again after 24 hours so I took him back yesterday afternoon and paid another copay only to have the doctor take a look at his foot and say “It’s getting better. Let’s give him another shot and see him again tomorrow.” We were in and out in about 15 minutes… that’s well over a dollar a minute. Oh well. I guess it can be fairly serious to have an infection in that area of your body. It can easily make its way from the inner layers of the skin and fibrous tissue of the bottom of the foot to tendons and bone, which would require a long hospital stay and IV antibiotics. He’s had to stay off it now for about 48 hours and I’m fully expecting them to increase that time after his followup visit today. Aside from that he will have had to endure 3 injections in 3 days, which for a 6 year old must be something like making the journey to hell.
We assume he must have acquired this particular little friend by playing in a large puddle that has been near the playground at school for the past few days. I hope no other kids have had to deal with similar issues. It’s no fun and it is certainly not cheap! Jonathan is a trooper, though, and he is being as tough as he can. We’ve purchased a couple new books, movies and toys to help keep him from going stir-crazy having to sit on the couch but if it goes more than a couple more days we’re gonna have a real problem.
Marissa is running around the house wearing a pair of her mother’s earmuffs yelling “19, 19 come in! Over! Can you bead me?”
I bought a used Xbox last September to use as a media center and game console. Since then I’ve bought a few used games to go along with it, including a couple for my wife. She was hesitant to let me get the console because she worried it would monopolize my time. It has’t so far… I’m not a hardcore gamer and I doubt I ever will be, especially since I can only afford to buy used consoles and games three to five years after they were originally released. However, I have struggled to find a title that Erica really wanted to play. I picked up a copy of one of the Harry Potter games because she is pretty into the Potter thing. She played for a few minutes when I first brought it home, but I don’t think she’s done anything with it since. She’ll watch me play Burnout Revenge and ocassionally race against me, but she’s not really into that either. Frustrating.
Well, score one for the home team, because I have finally found her gaming niche. Last week I picked up a copy of DDR Ultramix and a dance mat for her. She had seen the game in arcades and thought it looked kinda fun, so I started looking for a cheapish way to let her play at home. She was a dancer up through high school, and taught dance for two years at a middle school, and even though playing DDR probably isn’t really “dancing” I thought she would enjoy it. She was excited to open the big box and when she saw what it was she wanted to plug it in and try it out. Since then she has spent a few minutes playing almost every day and is getting pretty darn good at it. I’ve finally found a game that she will actually put into the Xbox and play all by herself. Woohoo!! A gamer is born.
