Since we converted the kids’ cribs to toddler beds in late summer getting them to go to sleep has been an issue. They love to play and move from bed to bed after we put them down at night but it seemed like the novelty was beginning to wear off in recent weeks. Some nights, the kids would be asleep within 5 or 10 minutes of putting them down.

The sleeping trouble began right after we returned from the party in Massachusetts.[readmore] That night, Gabriel woke up several times during the night screaming. Each time, Robyn or I would go in, comfort him, get him settled back into bed and then leave the room. As soon as we would leave, he would start to scream and cry and run to the gate (we have a toddler-safe gate at the door of their room, so that they don’t wander around at night). His tantrum would increase untile he was kicking and yelling and coughing. After four rounds of this, I couldn’t take it any more so I took pillows and a blanket and slept on the floor of the kids’ bedroom until morning. This kept the boy quiet and allowed us to get some sleep, too.

This pattern continued for several more nights while naptimes started to get hairy too with crying and screaming. I continued to give in during the night and camp out on the floor. We knew it was the wrong thing to do, but the allure of sleep in any form was just too strong and I really didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. My back felt great in the morning and the kids were so darn cute when they woke up and realized that there was daddy sleeping on their floor! The saving grace in all this was that Gabriel was not putting up a fuss at bedtime, so at least the time from 8pm on was “safe”.

…or so we thought.

My mom stayed with us for Thanksgiving. That entailed me driving to MA to pick her up and then driving back home. Yeah, that’s 16 hours of driving for the whole visit. But, my mom loves being with the kids and we don’t do it more than a few times a year, so it’s worth it to me. Anyway, Robyn had to work on the Tuesday and Wednesday nights before Thanksgiving, so I was alone with the kids (with my mom, too!) after we arrived back home. The night went well and the kids were in bed and quiet by about 8:30. I was sitting at the laptop upstairs checking my email while Mom was downstairs I suddenly heard Gabriel begin to whimper and then cry. He came to the gate at their door and started his usual routine of asking for me or Robyn…and then saying that he “had a poopoo”…and then telling me he “bumped my keppi (that’s Yiddish for “head”)”…and then that his “belly hurts”. With each new “problem”, he got louder and more upset. I went through all the usual responses including just letting him cry and then became creative. I tried laying on the floor for 30 minutes until he got quiet, but when I stalked silently out of the room, he went ballistic.

After two and a half hours of this, I was at my wits end. I was so angry that I was being held hostage by my two year old during the night and now during the evening that should be mine to relax. Finally, I called Robyn at work hoping I would catch her before she walked out the door. I finally got her on the phone and told her to “talk me down”. Of course, I would not have done anything stupid, but I felt like I wanted to jump out the window and run screaming from the house so I needed her to calm me. She did and she told me to just hold him in the living room with the lights off until she got home. The boy was asleep in minutes after I did this – no doubt the screaming tired him out.

The next day, I was not feeling well. I thought it might have been stress-related, but I think I actually had a little stomach bug or something. Since she was not going to be home, Robyn asked her mother to come by and help out. I felt bad about this, but it was a good thing she agreed because I really didn’t feel so hot and needed to lay down right after we gave the kids dinner. I woke up just in time to put them to bed. I tried standing in the doorway until Gabriel fell asleep (Chloe generally goes right to sleep), but a wave of nausea rolled over me and I had to sit down. As soon as I did the whole scene from the night before began to be repeated. My mother-in-law went through pretty much all the steps that I did until finally, around 9:45, she decided that the only way he was going down was to hold him. Once again, this worked. We were able to transfer him back to his bed and she was able to go back home.

Okay, long story short…this is getting [b]way[/b] too long…. This went on for several nights but Robyn and I had had enough. We decided to let him cry no matter how long it took. Amazingly, Chloe seemed to sense our change in attitude and while Gabriel cried she started to talk to him and offered him toys. Distracted, he started to play, which was not ideal but was certainly better than wailing! After about 30 minutes, they were both asleep. The nights were a little touch and go, but I wasn’t sleeping on the floor anymore. Each night was easier and each morning he’s been sleeping a little bit later. So, now it seems like we’ve gotten past this latest sleep-related hurdle!
[/readmore]

Things have been busy around here.

[b]The Party[/b]

Back in November, we threw a surprise birthday party for my Mom. She was turning 75 this year. The plan was to throw the party in Massachusetts the weekend after her birthday. Robyn and I (but mostly Robyn as she created the invitations and took care of the list and dealing with the restaurant, etc – THANK YOU, BABE!) have been planning this since late summer and it was quite a challenge. It’s always tough to plan a long-distance party, but it was more difficult because I didn’t[readmore] have the addresses or contact information for the majority of my cousins and family who would be invited. Since moving to NJ more than 14 years ago, I have hardly seen anyone outside of my immediate family except for the rare (thankfully!) funeral so I contacted my cousin Doris and my Aunt Kay who’s email addresses I pulled from one of my mom’s forwarded emails. With their help, we were able to put together a list of family and friends to invite. The many on-line directories were very helpful in finding and verifying addresses and the invitations were sent with directions to RSVP.

A week before the party, my mom called (this is very unusual in itself!) and said that she was in the emergency room. She had not been feeling well for several days and had asked my cousin to bring her because she thought that she had pneumonia. My mom’s pretty tough when it comes to not feeling well, but when the pneumonia started to affect her breathing, she must have gotten quite scared. She was diagnosed with [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease]COPD[/url] in 1991 and it’s really only in recent years that it’s begun to affect her. I’m glad she went because the docs confirmed that she had pneumonia and wanted to keep here in the hospital for several days to administer antibiotics and monitor her O2 levels. Robyn and I were not quite sure what to do at this point because if she wasn’t feeling better we would have to cancel or postpone the party in time to get in touch with everyone and let them know. Things were shakey for a few days, but my mom was discharged on Tuesday and since she was sounding so much better, we decided to go ahead.

We drove up to MA on a rainy Friday afternoon, checked into our hotel and then had dinner at my sister’s house. The next day, the party went off without a problem and my mom was COMPLETELY surprised. In fact, she didn’t even notice us or our kids until after everyone yelled “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” so I think we caught her completely off guard. I was really happy to have been able to put the party together. I found out a few days later that this was the very first birthday party that my mother had ever had![/readmore]

The “Imperial Command” has recently imposed a lot of new restrictions on what we can access on the Internet from work, so I decided to bypass their network altogether so that I could see what I needed (or wanted!) to see when I’m connected to work during 99% of my weekdays.

There are several ways I could have gone about this. First, I tried to install a light Linux distro on a very old laptop that I had laying around. But the pentium 200 with 256 meg or RAM couldn’t even handle the smallest distro I could find that still let me do what I needed to do. So, I chose to spend a little money and buy an off-lease corporate computer from eBay for $20 and install [url=http://www.xubuntu.org/]Xubuntu[/url] on it. BTW, if you’re interested in getting a second (or third or fourth…) computer, this is a GREAT way to go. I got a Compaq EVO small form factor desktop box with a 1.8 ghz processor, 256 mb RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. These are the same boxes we use in the office of Imperial Command and they get the job done. I added an additional gig of RAM to speed things up a bit. I used a USB KVM switch to connect the keyboard, mouse and monitor (yes, I only have one monitor!) and started installing. The only thing that is making me a little nuts is the loud fan in the new box – it’s got this high-pitched whine that is slowly eating away at my brain! Not sure yet if it’s the PS fan or the CPU fan, but I gotta get that thing quieted down….

Xubuntu has been great. I can’t believe that all these tech pundits are saying that Linux is still not ready for the desktop of the average consumer. The installation was totally painless and I’d say that about 75% of people would probably never have to change the default settings on their machines in order to do everything they generally do with their computers (which I’m guessing is mostly surfing the web and checking email with an occasional document or spreadsheet thrown in. Watching DVDs and most common video formats is enabled by default now, so that’s pretty much a no-brainer.

I’ve been doing a lot of customization so that I can use this as a development and testing box and generally just trying to get up to speed and make sure that I can do everything I can do on a Windows box within this new environment. So far, I’ve not run into too many things that I can’t do in Linux that I could on Windows. I installed [url=www.winehq.org]Wine[/url], but I find that things work better using Linux apps.

[url=http://conky.sourceforge.net/]Conky[/url] is great fun. Check out the screenshot of my desktop below to see my customized Conky setup.

[url=http://www.universetoday.com/2008/11/07/deepest-ultraviolet-image-shows-a-sea-of-distant-galaxies/]Check this out[/url].

This is another observation of the universe that just blows my mind. It’s just incomprehensible – each dot and speck and “cloud” a galaxy….

Each galaxy harbors billions of stars many of which, like our Sun, will have planets in orbit around them. In those thousands of billions of systems, what are the chances that life exists on many of those planets?

Yeah, we still have snow on the ground from the storm the other day.

This is what it looked like at about 10am on Tuesday:

We ended up with about 4 inches of heavy, wet snow. At some points it was coming down so hard it was almost white-out conditions. We didn’t think much of it in the AM since we were mostly just bemused that it was snowing so hard so early in the season,but as the day went on, the trees that still had their leaves began to collect more and more of the heavy, wet snow. They started to sag and then to snap.

The top of one of the big trees in the empty lot next to us came down and snagged one of the windows on that side of the house shattering the glass in the storm window. I started to get very concerned that one of the big trees was going to fall onto our house and the rest of the day became a tense waiting game as we listened to trees crack and snap all around our neighborhood.

We lost our electricity around noon so we didn’t have any lights, heat, water or internet access!! After the kids napped, we decided that we’d get out to somewhere warm. We just decided to get a hotel nearby and hole up there rather than be on the road for several hours driving to friends or family. Long story short, we ended up getting the hotel room for free anyway….that’s a story for another time.

Everything is fine now. Got back home yesterday about noon and the power came back on about 4 minutes after we walked into the house. Luckily, there was no additional damage to the house or anything in the yard although there are many, many branches to clean up this weekend.

The kids love staying at hotels, so I’m sure they enjoyed the adventure.

Yes, we woke up this morning to see snow on the ground. And it wasn’t a fluke. Big, wet flakes have been coming down for the last hour or so. I don’t think I recall it ever snowing quite this early in the year before. Ah well…makes it seem so much more cozey and warm at home.

Have you checked your 401k lately? I have not. I’m actually too scared to look at it.

Today the Dow dropped below 9,000 for the first time since 2003.

I don’t know what the next few months has in store from a financial perspective but I am growing more concerned by the day.