Halloween 2008.

October 31, 2008. Halloween. A good day to sign your life away to the bank? We hope so.

We did it. We now have a mortgage. We went to the bank with our adorable ladybug and signed all the papers. We'll start construction as soon as it stops raining... there's supposed to be a break in the weather sometime next week. Forgive me for not being more excited, but I'm actually terrified. With all of the awful things that are happening with the economy right now, I can't help but worry.


Halloween evening, we went trick-or-treating on the Plaza. We didn't collect any candy because we already had too much at home. We dressed Ava as Flava Flav from Public Enemy, and we were two S1Ws, lesser-known members of the same 80s rap group. Not many people got our costumes, but that's okay. We got plenty of looks anyway. Here are our inspiration photos:


We had a good time showing off "Ava Flav." There are more photos of us and some of our friends on our flickr site. (Click the animated rectangle on the right.)

100th percentile for cuteness.

This morning was Ava's 6-1/2 month well baby checkup. Excuse me, she feels like typing... I must oblige or feel her wrath:
qwzlhh,m nyh v a MNJK KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKJZKESIU87 JMHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRYRDF C B.

Okay that's enough.

She's over the 100th percentile foe height, at the 100th percentile for head circumference and 90th for weight. She's a big girl for her age, but since it's all proportional, she's all good.

As far as percentiles go, I've had it explained to me like this. Someone took a random sampling of 100 female babies every month for X months. They made graphs of the height, weight and head circumference data. 0 was the smallest baby, 100 was the largest. So, in the case of height, Ava would be taller than all 100 other 6-month-old baby girls.

We're glad she's healthy. Period.

Saying goodbye.

Just thinking about what I'm going to say is causing me to tear up and see things all blurry. Ugh. My dad passed away on October 14, 2008. It was much more sudden than any of us expected. We all knew he had been sick for about six months, but the final decline only took a day or two.

Vasculitis is a chronic condition, and he was going to battle flare-ups for the rest of his life. On his third flare-up battle, he got a massive infection and it basically shut everything down. He was in bad shape at the very end and we made it to his bedside just in time to shut off the life support machines. It was awful to see him in that condition—the ventilator artificially pumping his lungs full of air—it was just his body at that point, not my dad.

I think I get most upset when I think of all the things that he won't get to do with Ava. He was never comfortable around her as a baby—during their visit in July we had to force him to sit down and hold her. Make no mistake, he thought she was an angel, I think he was just nervous about hurting her or not keeping her content. As I look back on my relationship with my dad, it was the years between toddler and kindergarten that I remember most fondly. We would roughhouse and sing songs and laugh a lot. I was beyond the fragile baby stage and too young for school, maybe things were just so much more innocent at that stage. After that though, Dad worked a lot. It seemed like he was only there for us financially; family vacations consisted of Mom, me and Bob, and usually included a soccer tournament. Anyway, I'm not upset about my own relationship with him... it's that Ava is turning into a little person, and my dad is missing it.

Just a quickie

Ava's second tooth popped through on Saturday.
Her 6 month birthday was yesterday and we celebrated by driving 1.75 hours each way to our nearest Home Depot to price stuff for our house.
My dad is doing worse, so we might be headed down to the Bay Area later this week.

Happy Monday!

The ramblings of an insomniac.

Ava is cutting her second tooth. It made the hours at home pretty interesting yesterday. She always seems to behave better when we're out; I think it's because she gets distracted by all the new things happening around her. At home, she just gets bored with me and her toys. Two days ago, my back pain started again, the same back pain that put me out of commission and started early labor a month before Ava was born. It's a bit better now, but it is still difficult to lug around a 17-pound teething 6-month old. (Yes! She'll be 6 months old on Sunday!!!)

My dad is back in the hospital again. This is the third time since Ava was born. They say he's got vasculitis, but he's not responding to the typical vasculitis treatment: chemo. (Vasculitis is not a cancer, but chemo is the recommended treatment.) Apparently it's a chronic condition and he'll have to deal with flare-ups until it eventually gets him. It has now caused a pulmonary embolism--a blood clot in the lung--which could move and cause stroke, heart attack, etc. They have put him on blood thinners and expect to do some kind of surgery in a few days. I don't watch the show "House," but I feel like my dad's case may be perfect for an episode plot.

We got the appraisal for our project back earlier this week... it came back $35,000 to $100,000 less than we thought it might appraise for. It just figures that our construction project would be appraised on the worst financial week since the Great Depression. Anyway, we found a way of scraping $30,000 of stuff from our construction costs, and that may make things a bit better. Still, our monthly payments may be too high and the bank may decide to not give us anything. If we wait until Spring to start this, could things be worse? If they do get better, could they be significantly better or will we have wasted another 6 months? It's such a game and I'm really tired of playing it.

I'm really tired in general, but I can't sleep. My back hurts, my allergies are giving me problems, I can't stop thinking about my dad, SIDS, illegal street races, the dumb song playing over and over in my head, PG&E bills, our house, the cardigan I'm crocheting for Ava and 37 other craft projects in the works... I could go on...