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for January, 2006.
Great-Aunt Barb, Amelia, and the fluPosted In: Everyday life — January 30, 2006 @ 3:42 pm — StephanieOn Sunday, I woke up with extreme stomach cramps and felt utterly disgusting. I figured it was food poisoning, since I had it years ago, and the feeling was similar. My Aunt Barb and her husband, Bob, were paying us a visit later in the day, so I showered, dressed, and laid around until they came. When they got here, I tried to buck up, and distracted myself from the gastrointestinal misery I was going through. They came, and were enamored by our darling, as they should. Aunt Barb and Amelia: Bob, Amelia, and Aunt Barb’s head–Barb was playing the ‘tongue game’ with Amelia (her favorite game): After the visit, I felt increasingly worse, developed a fever and flulike symptoms. So… I felt at death’s door until I took a Motrin and got some rest. Feeling MUCH better now, so it might just be a cold, who knows. Amelia, so far, hasn’t shown any symptoms. I’ve been washing my hands like a fiend and boiling her pacifiers and everything to try to keep her safe from my germs. The thought of my baby getting sick just terrifies me. Peter thinks I might have ingested some trace dairy or meat products from Saturday night’s dinner (Indian), but I really can’t say. Yesterday, this was kicking my ass, but last night I started feeling better rapidly. No idea… I’m stepping up my germ paranoia even more after this. I had to take Amelia in to the doctor’s to have them look at a rash on her head and some guy shoved his face and his sick child’s face towards my baby before I could see it coming. I shielded her from them in time, I think, but not myself. You’d think another parent would know better not to do that to a newborn. Apparently, stupidity knows no bounds. BTW, we posted lots of new pictures from the past few days 
How not to run a businessPosted In: Everyday life — January 28, 2006 @ 11:22 am — PeterIn early November, Stephanie and I were quite pleased to find a custom baby mobile business on eBay. They offered a wide variety of figurines and music selections. Keeping with theme of Amelia’s nursery, we selected a butterfly mobile and Mozart wind-up tunes. In a week or so, our custom creation arrived…. Much to our surprise, the butterfly figurines were covered in glitter affixed with some sort of glue. Any reasonably intelligent adult would realize that glue degrades overtime and would result in loose glitter shedding from the butterfly. Actually, when I removed one of the butterflies, I ended up with plenty of glitter on my hands. Are we supposed to hang this over our baby? I think not! Unfortunately, we lost track of time and were so preoccupied with the birth of our baby that we never took up dispute with the online retailer. A couple months later we visited our eBay profile and saw the reminder link “I need to leave feedback for 1 item”. Ah hah–we almost forgot to issue warning to other parents that the products being offered by Baby Melodies (http://stores.ebay.com/Babymelodies) were unsafe and not suitable for babies. We said: The mobile is junk. It’s covered in globs of glue and glitter. Dangerous! They replied: Rnbw Btrfly Safe frm Distr,No glb glu,NO Cmplnt frm Byr for 2.5 mo.Now Neg Here? So, yesterday afternoon, a charming member of the Baby Melodies staff decided to give us a call at our home. Mind you, we never provided our phone number to this business, they took it upon themselves to scour the Internet for our phone number. Nice stalker tactic, you loon! Clicky below to hear some stellar conflict resolution skills! In hindsight, perhaps we should have contacted the retailer sooner… However, we have a newborn, mediating this sale was surely not at the top of our agenda. We aired our feelings about their product via the medium that eBay provides. Baby Melodies could have offered us a new mobile, sans glitter, and all would have been fine. Instead we get a lovely phone call. Needless to say, we’ll be reporting this incident to eBay customer support. Here are a few photos of what Baby Melodies claims to be selling and what was actually delivered.. Nowhere on their product description did they say the butterflies would have glitter on them. One variation was said to have sequins, the other were painted. So receiving something covered in glitter regardless of the quality of application (which was piss poor) is not what they are marketing. From their eBay store website: What we received, note the glitter that has fallen off from handling!
Lace so fine ballerina cupcake and my earthquake…Posted In: Amelia, Everyday life — January 24, 2006 @ 2:41 pm — StephanieMy younger sister, Melissa, sent Amelia this ballerina onesie set, so I thought some pictures were in order. The rest of the set doesn’t fit her yet, well, neither does the tutu, really. But…who cares! Look at her little toes!
This week, Amelia has gotten two very beautiful gifts that I feel I must gush about. First, our old friend from Southern Illinois, Sherry, has made Amelia a delicate little necklace with her first initial and first diamond. It’s so pretty! Thanks, Sherry! We miss you! And, Peter’s co-worker, Cindy, gave Amelia a gorgeous handmade blanket. It’s lavender and realllly soft. We love it! Thanks, Cindy!
Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile…Posted In: Video, Everyday life — January 20, 2006 @ 10:15 pm — StephanieAmelia started smiling fairly early–at just about 4 weeks. Since then, I’ve made it my mission to try to capture it on film. So far, no luck with still photographs (well, two very fuzzy ones), but I was able to elicit some smiles from her via video. Of course, these smiles were not easily obtained. I had to make fart noises, stick out my tongue, and make oogly googly noises at her. Quite embarassing…but worth it! Her smile can melt even the coldest of hearts. Aww…I love my girl! Amelia Smiling [320×240] 6.8MB MPEG
Turn on the bright lightsPosted In: Technology, Everyday life — January 15, 2006 @ 8:53 pm — PeterThis weekend zoomed by with me spending quite a bit of time catching up on work coding and project documentation. Not my ideal weekend fare, but it had to get done. The application development department I work in has recently adopted an Agile approach to projects, using the Scrum implementation to be specific. I’m enjoying the culture shift so far, despite resulting in having to take some work home with me. I’m certain as I participate in more projects organized this way that I’ll become better at estimating time required for coding efforts. I fit some coding for our website in too. Hoping to spruce up our image gallery, I put together a stylish tree view of our album structure. The only problem with it, I’m not sure where to put it. I’ll have to revisit our template and try to squeeze it into the album page. Ideas anyone? It was a fun little piece of code to write and reminded me why I did so poorly on recursion assignments in undergrad. While I’m on a geek bend, I should share a page I put together that uses MRTG to chart the usage of our DSL connection. Why is this important and why should you care, I have no idea… Regardless, it is pretty cool and made possible by the hacked firmware our WRT54G router now runs. To clear up the pretty pictures, green is us downloading from the Internet and blue is us uploading to the Internet. This MRTG-based page will someday be rolled up into a collection of pages that describe our home computing environment. We’ve been quickly accumulating movie shorts of Amelia doing random cute and adorable things. Not sure what to do with these clips, I’ve downloaded Ulead VideoStudio and have been merging the videos together with effects hoping to end up with something to burn to DVD and send to family. I was hoping to download Pinnacle Studio too, but they don’t offer a trial version. Anyone have opinions on either of these video editing suites, or perhaps a different one that I haven’t considered yet? « Previous Entries |
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Peter took some pictures, while I tried to not internally combust from the couch. Barb was on a quest to get Amelia to smile for her, and eventually she got plenty of smiles. They held, cuddled, and played with her for two hours and then left, making us promise to have more visits in the future. 
