Hands

Today was a better day, even though it was a Monday. Mondays are the worst day of my week again this quarter, with M gone with the car for a ten hour stretch. That's a long haul with a little baby. Luckily, I put Robert on a regimen of intense eating and napping, and that seemed to help ease whatever made him so fussy yesterday. He took a bunch of short little naps, had a bunch of small feedings, and was generally sweet all day until he started winding down around six o'clock. He even went to bed early, going down fussy at eight, but only needing the paci replaced twice before he was off to his dreams. All of Robert's dreams are of someone robbing the baby, to judge by the way he throws his hands up when he is especially asleep.

One fun thing I've noticed lately about Robert is how much he is starting to use his hands. He is still not good with them, but he is really trying. He can grab the foil part of his balloon and wrestle with it, good for many minutes of enjoyment for both of us, and today he got his hand on the bottle I was giving him and held it himself for a little bit. (Pumping is going a little better these last couple days, thanks, yucky nasty tea!) He's also laughing now, which is hilarious. I'll lay him on his back on our bed, lean over him, and tell him "It's...time...foorr...KISSES! Mwah-mwah-mwah!" and kiss his cheeks or his forehead or his tummy, and he will laugh and laugh. He's still really easy to overstimulate, so it's common to go within moments from laughter to tears, but he's getting so much more personable with each passing week. I love it!



Good news on the financial front today, and not just the fact that I didn't get out of the house to go shopping. ;-) I got the official word that I have finished paying off my debt to the law school for my computer that broke two years ago. The EXTREMELY overpriced piece of crap computer, I might add, that never worked right and cost three times as much as a comparable private market computer might have. The payment that I've been working on, a 750 dollar chunk, was actually the third of three installment payments on a laptop, if you can believe that. The reason it wasn't in with my student loans was that the school screwed up and didn't bill me for it until after it was too late to include it with the loans, and after the money I did get was all budgeted. They informed me that I owed this money the week before finals in my third year, right after my grandmother died, right as I was working on a very stressful senior research paper, just before the trauma of law school finals. They weren't going to go without their pound of overpriced flesh, of course, but they magnanimously deferred it for a year, when I, naive as I was, was sure I would have a job. Not so much, but the bills come due anyway. I got an installment plan and have been paying it off in bits. That bill was a reminder of one of the worst times in my life, and having it finally paid off and gone is awesome. As for the student loans... we're not going to talk about them right now, when it's been such a nice day.

I have to think of something to do with the rest of the barbecued chicken. I never realized how much meat could go in a crock pot until I tried eating barbecue chicken sandwiches four days in a row. Pulled pork is great because you've got sandwiches, you've got meat for soup, you've got meat for fried rice. You can change it up. What on earth do you do with shredded barbecue chicken except eat it in yet another sandwich?