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While putting Madeline to bed tonight we had the following conversation:
M: I have a fairy pants on.
D: Are you a fairy?
M: No.
D: Are you a little girl?
M: Yes.
D: Am I a big boy?
M: Yes.
D: Am I a man?
M: No.... You are a daddy.
D: Are there any other daddys?
M: No.
The last few weeks we kept getting sick in the Housman family. I recall a blur from two weekends ago when people came over but I was dizzy throughout the weekend. Last week was worse than the one before since we caught the inexorable vomiting sickness. Madeline awoke on Tuesday night to surprise me with a sudden vomiting spell that led to a sheet and bedding replacement extravaganza. I spoke to two or three people around work who mentioned their kids had also gotten this illness so I figured that it was limited to the younger generation. But on Thursday night Sarah was ill with the same symptoms. So I cancelled work on friday to take care of her. So I figured that only women and children would fall victim to this vomiting flu. But by 9 PM on Friday I was on my knees sick. Oddly it was great to take the three day weekend with Madeline, Zachary and Sarah regardless. I enjoyed spending time with them.
By Sunday we were on the road to recovery but still cautious about eating any real food. Since it was easter I snapped a few hundred photos trying to capture Madeline's outfit and other various Easter occasions. Madeline loved hunting for eggs and despite only having 24 plastic eggs I think she found about 100 due to some creative re-hiding after she had filled her basket. We have been playing a dysfunctional game of hide and seek lately where Madeline hides in very obvious places like lying down next to a radiator but she loves the idea of hide and seek. She is good at hiding in her closet low on the floor under a shelf but that doesn't stop her from selecting the hiding places where she is in plain view. So I get to tune my acting skills multiple times per session to look for her in all of the places where she isn't. It is quite fun. Zachary is fighting the transition from breast to bottle. I felt like we were torturing a captured enemy into telling us the location of the big guns on the hill as he screamed in discontent from the bottle feeding experiment this evening. Hopefully it will get better since we are in need of some alternatives to Sarah always being 10 feet away from Zachary when he is hungry.
About a month before Zachary was born in January we decided to schedule a trip to Turks and Caicos in May. We are going to take one of those Beaches tours where we can wake-up and have Elmo excercise with us or bake cookies with Cookie Monster. As part of the reservation process we made a reservation for the yet to appear Zachary offering him a name even though he wasn't going to be arriving for another 6 weeks or so.
So we were committed to getting him a passport back then since T&C is a foreign enough location to require a passport for us all. When Zachary was born, at home, we had no idea of the difficulty we would face in acquiring a passport for him. But here is the basic story thus far of our adventures to acquire positive identification for him. It started when I went to city hall to file the paperwork for his birth certificate. The basic workflow is that first you get a birth certificate then a social security card and then a passport. So I knew there would be three steps.
With a home birth there apparently is some increased risk of creating fraudulent children so the city of Newton and the state of Massachusetts are quite leary of us. In a hospital they would trust the physicians and the automated systems and punch out a social security number automatically. They are also leary about us because our house has two addresses but I'll get to that soon. At city hall I quickly was able to register to vote and then a nice clerk let me know that I couldn't get my birth certificate processed unless I brought a copy of my marriage license.
So I went home to look for my marriage license and was unable to locate it. Since Brookline City hall has these sorts of things on file I went in person to Brookline a few days later to see if I could get a copy or two made of the marriage license. Unfortunately when I first got there they were doing so much construction on city hall that I couldn't find my way to the door and needed to turn back so that I could make a meeting. Then when I finally figured out where the location was for the temporary town clerk's office they mentioned that all of their files including my marriage license was stored in the part of the buildings that were under construction. So we discussed the whole thing and I had them mail me the license since I didn't think I was ever going to get around to pick it up in person.
About a week later the license came in the mail. About 8 days later Sarah finally had the time to go to Newton City Hall to bring it to the town clerks office. Upon receipt of the item I figured I was on my way to getting a birth certificate for Zachary. But I received a call a few days later letting me know that the paperwork couldn't be sent on to the state processing folks because our official address in the logs for the tax payers is 80 Glen Ave. and the paperwork from the midwife said 80 Leeson Lane so they would need me to come and resolve it in person by signing some documents at City hall.
So we cleared-up that mess in about a week and were happy to know that we could get a birth certificate about 14 days later when I picked it up. Feeling confident that we were well on our way towards a citizen child we asked what to do to get a social security number. The answer was to go in person to a social security office in Waltham where they handle people like us. So on a day full of weather Sarah gathered the kids and took the birth certificate to the people at the social security office. They were happy to asisst her but sent her home because they need TWO forms of positive identification and the birth certificate was only one form of identification. Now I may be naive about global terrorism but I don't have a driver's license for my 8 week old child. When offered the documentation from the midwife that was used to process the birth certificate the social security folks said that the documentation was equivalent to the birth certificate so it couldn't count as a second form of identification. Sarah returned to the office about a week later with some medical bills and the documentation from the doulah and despite the policies of the US Government they agreed to send Zachary his social security card.
So just yesterday we received in the mail a new social security card. Now all we need to do is get a photo of Zachary and apply for a passport! How hard can that be?
A few weeks ago Sarah and I were out in Natick running errands on a Monday holiday. Madeline was with us and it was a dreary rainy day. We drove around looking for a suitable location for lunch and didn't have much luck finding anything interesting. So we stopped into Chili's and ate a Meximerican meal. The highlight of the day and maybe a lot longer was that after we left the restaurant, with no prompting, Madeline said "I had fun at the restaurant." It is so good to get that rare appreciation and confirmation that something we chose to do even without much thinking was a success in the mind of the little ones.
With the new eye-fi card from Yuval's company I have the capacity to instantly publish photos. I looked into integrating this with my world and came to the conclusion that instant publishing to web sharing sites is a good thing for reducing overhead on my side in publishing pictures. I reviewed the policies of Picasa Web albums and Flickr and came to the conclusion that Flickr was a better deal. Flickr offers unlimited file posting (we'll see how they like how many photos I want to publish) and has a free bandwidth restricted model (100MB per month) which is pretty much useless or a "Pro" model where you pay $24/year for unlimited bandwidth to Flickr and unlimited storage. Google/Picasa offer a disk space model where you pay for a block of disk space annually and for about 500GB it looked like it would come to $500 per year. I opted for Flickr's model so they have me locked in for 2 years while I try them out. I figure if it doesn't work out after 2 years there will be a new model by then for how to share what appears to be ridiculous amounts of photos today but in reality is just the amount you can generate with 2GB or 4GB flash cards and easy access to offload them to a network. My limitations are really on the storage local side which for now is about 1TB.
Anyways with all that said I basically started a new photo library at Flickr that I will soon link or RSS integrate with the existing archive I have on my site. The new library will be at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danhousman/archives/ and hopefully it will be self explanatory for how to wander through Flickr to find whatever photo you want to see. One big adjustment for me is that I have had to group photos by date ranges to keep them straight on my side. Flickr can use the EXIF data from the camera to automatically group photos by day so I will try to stop organizing in that way and let Flickr figure out where in an archive to order the photos. One confusing thing for me will be sorting out what a public viewer vs. me the publisher sees. I just don't know what that looks like but I am trying to make pictures public for viewing where I can. The new library picks-up in late January and has most of time through March 4th.
Well I guess having the second baby was the rough equivalent of a blog blackout for the past month or two. I have been playing with slices of time to try to fit everything into the week and it hasn't been working out great to have that extra slice to take a record of what is going on. But with that said there have been a lot of updates in the home and nesting front that may have been all about burning off extra nesting hormones as a result of the birth of Zachary.
We went and bought a new rocking chair and Ottoman the day after Zachary was born. That finally came about a week ago. I also ordered some things online including a 32" flat screen Aquos TV and a system for making seltzer at home. Yuval's eye-fi card came in the mail a few weeks ago but I didn't have time to look into it for a while. I bought a blue-ray DVD player since it was too frustrating to watch the 1080P tv tell me my DVDs were playing at 480p. I also bought a 2 terabyte Lacie drive to hold the growing mountain of photographic documentation on our lives. We also bought a hot tub for the yard. That prompted us to need to acquire a patio since we couldn't figure out how to get to the hot tub without creating mud and when faced with the idea of having to build my own hard structure underneath it I realized I was better off hiring professionals. So the yard that I spent many an hour last year cultivating to grow grass is now a combination of pavers for the patio and torn-up from the construction. But the hot tub (a Sundance Marin) is now in the yard and Madeline's favorite thing to ask about before or after dinner.
Last weekend as Sarah's father was helping to rig the wiring behind the new television I was hunting for which panel on the circuit breaker ran the TV and I reset the computer in the office to the point where it wouldn't boot. Luckily I had already moved the photos off of it onto the Lacie 2TB drive so rather than worry about it I switched to my old Windows XP box that sounds like a jet engine but works fine. The benefit was that the computer that died was the Windows 2000 machine and the Eye-Fi card from Yuval requires XP to run. The unfortunate event lately is that I can't find the charger for the Canon Powershot camera so I am not sure what I will do when traveling or in situations where it is more convenient to have a smaller camera. I am tempted to deconstruct the whole house looking for it but don't have the time and I haven't taken a picture outside in a long time.
So I set-up the Eye-fi card and have been quite excited to see my photos saving both directly to the hard drive and output to Google/Picasa web albums. So I am considering revamping my photo publishing mechanisms to just point to Picasa Web albums given that I am already a few months behind on any publishing photos due to baby and start-up busyness.
But today is a quiet day for some reason with little plans and just some clean-up from the snow. Madeline and I began the day at 8:30 and took an hour long time in the hot tub with palm sized snow flakes falling on us. She enjoyed throwing the rubber ducks out of the tub and asking me to go fetch them... which I periodically did.
Zachary has been a lot of fun but I haven't had all the time I would hope to with him. He likes the swing which generally puts him to sleep. Lately he has had some unexplained acne that we are hoping isn't a long term thing.
