The Goldfish Chronicles

So far our house search has seen us like 4 houses.

House 1 - on second look we decided it needed too much (new electrics and new windows).

House 2 - we liked it, but Levi was too soon around the corner for us to be doing with such a thing.

House 3 - we liked it, we put an offer down, they refused to budge more than 1% from their asking price.

House 4 - we saw it on Sunday. Really liked it. Same price as House 3 but with no negatives. We decided tonight to put an offer down first thing in the morning. 5 seconds later it was “Subject to Inspection”.

I guess a good house still goes quick, it was only on the market for 6 days.

A week since my last update. Life continues to be busy.

The new job role has turned up the heat - I’m going from looking for things to juggle to juggling lots of things - especially with the old job role still intended to fill my time.  Each day at 4pm I tend to be exhausted - not due to lack of sleep (tonight’s late night not withstanding) as I get lots of sleep, but due to having nearly all my time outside of work and sleep being filled with Nathan.

I’ve managed to do a little coding. Commons Collections is getting closer to the next bugfix release - real close, and Codec too. I’ve started moving towards Lang 3.0 - including such wonderful things as removing deprecations! Maybe… depending what the opinions are etc.  It continues to be what I call dim sum coding - coding that works well with a high amount of context switching. Tonight’s late night comes from committing an extra hour or two to breaking the back of a painful serialization issue [mostly just in terms of figuring out why it didn’t like the test framework, and then once I had real tests why it wasn’t working in the first place].

Levi’s growing happily along. A fair bit of work as any new baby is, but still being remarkably chilled. Nathan’s also a delight and we’re starting to get a weekend routine, him and I. Must repeat this weekend despite relatives being here.

Reading my wife’s blog, I realized I hadn’t followed up on the original post here for Levi with more details on the post. Carrie has most of them in her birth story entry.

The main thing that will stay in the memory for me is actually watching Levi come out - largely due to being a part of the process [I got to hold a leg - Carrie’s not Levi’s] rather than relegated to hand holding as I was for Nathan. It’s a pretty amazing thing to watch - the head is this flat pancake at first, then seems to inflate. Purple face, no sound, the obvious worry from the expectant mother as to whether things are good - to which of course the expectant father says things are fine (like I have any clue… he’s a purple pancake honey, couldn’t be better eh?) and then a wriggle of the shoulders and out shoots a baby. Literally.

More worry for the expectant mother as he’s not yet made much of a sound beyond a “*gurglegargle* Hey this is breathing” type of thing. Compounding her realization that the doctor, while deftly unwinding the cord in a sleight of hand moment to make a Vegas magician proud, had commented on the cord being looped twice. Then finally some crying and the expectant father’s job of dishing out liberal doses of optimism and calm is done. Now to focus on the baby, record some video footage of those first moments, cut the cord (wooop! didn’t get to do that last time either… damn chewy things they are) and be impressed that the doctor seems to have bleeding etc well in hand. Last time it sounded a little bit like we’d be off to surgery any moment, this time it was focus and efficiency.

Then it all calms down, accept the congratulations of the meconium team, and take newly cleaned baby over to his mother for some relaxing and shock that he seems to get the boob thing. Finish off with phone calls to the newly minted grandparents (from the room! You mean I don’t have to head out to the car park to phone this time?) and of course the lad who has just become a brother and the birth was over and it was time to get Levi through his first few days, many poops, guzzling of milk and some surprisingly long naps.

He spent his first 8 hours feeding and crapping like he was born to do it (err….) and then slept for 5 hours. Lad was full.

Update on life….

New job role… busy. I came back a week early and had 1 day of slack before the new role filled all my time

Levi - doing superbly.  Putting on the pounds one ounce at a time, sleeping moderately well and a big fan of music. Pretty much anything with a melody will make him happy, though he does not like the concept that one track ends and another starts.  He also screams blue murder when those little yellow stains are working their way into his nappy.

Open Source - I’ve managed to find a few moments to work on the odd patch; and am getting closer on being able to turn off the OSJava JIRA and have a static version that sends people over to code.google. I also created some infrastructure over at Atlassian’s developer site so I can start working towards my JIRA plugins being supported by Atlassian. Given how simple they are, seems an easy win for Mike and his aussies. Two more Apache board meetings to go as a board member, and then I get to try and find time to regularly attend as a member.

Other… This year is about my family; much more so than Open Source. I want to do more with my sons in my evenings rather than hacking on code and letting them play with themselves. Once Levi understands night and day, I’ll get some evening time back, but in the meantime I need to get Nathan to football lessons, to the park for kite flying, t-ball and bicycle riding, to start learning his letters and to improve his Mario Kart Wii skills. Lego Mindstorms too - after being addicted to playing with the designed Lego spaceships, Nathan made his first original the other day by using two discarded tie-fighter wings to create a flying wing.

Lots to do - never enough time.

I’m struck with a newborn about the monkeyness of it all. He’s currently shedding his birth layer of skin, it’s a light covering of small body hairs, including hair on his ears. A ‘down’ would be the correct word, though you have to look closely to see it. Apparently it’s sometimes very noticeable. Very monkey-like.

Babies come out with the instinct to grasp things, especially hair. It’s almost as if they’re expecting to hang onto their mother’s belly as she swings through the trees. They like swinging motions too, have agile toes and parents are always impressed at the strength of their newborn. I wonder how well a human newborn could do the monkey thing if their parents just had the genetic grace to still have copious body hair. I wonder when newborn monkeys are able to hang on on their own.

There are two very human things [I think] that strike me about newborns. The first is ’shhh’. I’ve read that this works so well because it’s similar to the sound of a mother’s heart while the baby is in the womb. Many cultures have the word ’shhh’, and it’s because in this case, the sound came first. We say “SHHH” in cinemas not because that’s a word that evolved, but because it’s the first sound we heard. I wonder if any monkey’s say shh, and I wonder if that was our first word.

The second thing is melodies. I also recall reading that for premature babies, babies born before the hunger reflex exists, researches have found that playing melodies is a sufficient reward structure. That is - we like hearing melodies before we know to feel hungry. Levi definitely likes melodies, I swayed monkey-like to Pink Floyd’s Division Bell earlier this morning and he happily fell asleep in the sling [his first Daddy sling wearing, and his subsequent first walk out into the cold to post some bills]. That begs the question - do monkeys like melodies, is it a human trait. If a human trait, it seems an early one. I seem to recall some memory that ape mothers will sit and croon to their baby, but whether that is a shhh, a melody or another noise I’ve no clue.

Must search the internet, for it will not lie to me.

As to the title of this post… I pondered earlier while Levi cried; “What would a monkey do?”. Pick fleas was my answer, so I sat and rubbed and picked at the hair on his head. He quietened up and fell asleep in my arms.

More of a pre-announcement than an announcement. Pictures aren’t up, movies haven’t been edited, the middle name is not 100% decided upon, but Levi was born yesterday evening (Friday 18th). Carrie’s doing well, and Nathan adores his baby brother. Levi’s taken to feeding and filling his nappy with equal talent, and we’re looking forward to when he stops being nocturnal. Carrie’s tired, but it was a relatively quick delivery so she’s doing very well. We’re extremely glad to have Carrie’s mother here - taking care of Levi, Nathan and trying to catch up on sleep would be a losing battle with only the two of us. He was a 8 lb 12 oz baby; 20 inches long. More details, picture and story once we are a bit more recovered.

Frustratingly Nathan didn’t get into the preschool that he’s been top of the waiting list for for the last year. Everything was seeming like it would happen until the last minute when the rug and carpet vanished. Very frustrating, and leaving us feeling that the poor blighter’s parents have failed him.

We’d heard about how hard it is to get your kids into daycare/preschool/school of your choice and how, back in KY, parents were signing up before their kids were born. Sadly that was something we could never do as our location is still very fluid - we knew we were leaving KY, and we know we’re not going to be in our rented apartment close to downtown Seattle indefinitely. Given that it costs money to be on waiting lists, the strategy of whoring yourself out does not work well (well, literally it does work well as that’ll pay for the lists, but you know what I mean). With N top of the list for the very nearby preschool, it seemed silly to find other lists to be lower down on. Who’d expect no one to leave eh?

The downside of that is that N enjoys the company of older kids hugely. If he does goto this preschool in a year, it sounds like he might be the oldest kid if all the other kids are the same age and leaving for school. That’ll suck.

So we’re left with a young boy whose life is about to have a younger sibling sucking up his parent’s time, and who isn’t going to get a regular involvement with other kids unless we pull our tired arses into gear and come up with some ideas. Of course he’s old enough to have a measured opinion now, so we also need to talk with him about what he wants to be doing.

Swimming classes are one idea I’ve had; though the easy to get to nearby pool has one on one training, not classes. So a good idea as swimming is a good thing to get early (like riding a bicycle… which Daddy needs to adjust and then make taking N and bike somewhere a regular event), but not a useful idea for the other-kids need.

Soccer class is another. I need to look into the tiny tots classes and see if there are any I can take N to. It looks like Lil Kickers over at Arena Sports has a Saturday schedule. The lad calls it baseball for some reason, but otherwise seems to enjoy kicking a ball around.

Lastly there’s the need for education - he wanted to write his name this morning so I was a bit late getting in to work after an effort to give him some help. Need to make sure we don’t slack on being there for those urges.

Anyone else been in this spot and had ideas work out?

I sat on the bus/shuttle this morning listening to Queen mp3s. I’ve a lot of Queen, so that’s been the case for the last few days. On came “The Prize”, a remix of “Gimme the Prize” from the Kind of Magic album, which is somewhat the Highlander album. If you recall the film, Ramirez, the oddly named Egyptian with a Scottish accent, tells the young McLeod that “When only a few of us are left, we will feel an irresistible pull towards a far away land… to fight for the prize. “.

Now, if you’re like my wife, then you only want to enter competitions for prizes you want. Does young Conor ask: “Old goat, with the cool Japanese sword, what prize is it thou speakest of?”? Nope. He knuckles down to learning how to run with the deer, goes on holiday while Ramirez is killed and has lots of adventures while waiting for that irresistible pull.

Dumb eh? Which got me thinking. What’s your prize? What’s my prize? There’s always the “get out of debt” one. I’m out of debt currently, but only because we rent. In effect I’ve exchanged debt for a high level of instability. What are the other prizes? Are we blindly obeying the Egtypo-Celt sages? Obviously for any of you who have followed this blog for a while (or care to dig into the history), the only new prize I give a crap about this year is having a healthy newborn baby in 2 weeks time.

This is all, I presume, somewhat related to my family/career/job post of the other month. It’s also, I’m sure, a juvenile set of thoughts to be pondering, but what can I say, I’m most at home thinking like a 3 year old nowadays

Here are some more Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez quotes. As he was “born 2,437 years ago”, Ramirez was born in or around 895 BC in Egypt. That would put him in the Third Intermediate Period, which looks like a bit of a messy time in ancient Egypt as this map shows. Did you know that Egypt was that fractured?

Odd is it sounds, I had an enormous amount of fun at Jump Planet, bouncing around large inflatable bouncy castles, slides and climbing walls. Nathan and I spent most of the time laughing at each and lying at the bottom of each inflatable slide in a heap of arms and legs.

Only injury - grazes on my left arm where the side of one of the slides kept rubbing as I went down.