Week 46 - Bar

Our first day pondering the other baby in the room.

Well, it didn't take too long for us to start setting standards high for our little girl. It's not that we are demanding performance from her, but more that we are giving her the opportunity to explore the world around her rather than bundling her up and watching the television. So as our little girl levels off her weight and hopefully starts to gain (she's just so active, she's not putting weight on!), we have discovered ourself in the mirror. That's right, this week our little Hannah was looking at herself in the mirror as she lay on  her activity mat. There's really not much else for her to do on the mat right now but be put on her stomach for a little "tummy time", so we let her lay on her back for a while and look around. She is so curious, I just know she's going to be a great learner.

My wife and daughter on our first walk.

Meanwhile, we've also gotten out on our first walk together which turned out to be a bit more difficult (and easy) than we expected. First the easy part. Courtesy of great family and friends, we were blessed with many gifts during the course of the baby shower period, and one of these was the Graco Click Connect (Fast Action) stroller/carseat system. Yes, shameless plug, but my wife did her shopping research and this turned out to be a great system. I recommend it to anyone. The seat base was easy to install (despite my wife's best efforts to complicate it with too many iterations of the manual), and the stroller pops right out of the back of the car and opens up into correct standing. When we're done, we remove the carseat and pull the handle and it folds right back up. It is light, sturdy and fits square in the back of the Corolla. The only difficulty is that it doesn't come with shock absorbers and living near a reservoir, our typical walking spot is up on the dike. This isn't quite level enough for the stroller though, so we had to seek out pavement where we could get a more smooth walk in that was as peaceful as little Hannah needed. Bumpy rides freak us out a little bit after the county forced us to watch a shaken baby movie. Nothing quite so inspirational to brand new parents like a forced viewing of destroyed children. 

Us, after our first ride together post-baby.

While I'm bragging on my wife for her shopping acumen, I should also praise her for her seemingly quick recovery. She is a champion and proved it once again by hopping back on a bike this week, less than 3 weeks after her C-section. Props to modern medicine and the staff that worked with us, but the main award goes to my wife for her dedication to the Pelotonia (approaching in just a few weeks) and her willingness to challenge herself. We only did 8 miles, but with an average pace of 13 mph, I would say that it was a pretty good first ride. 

The shelving all washed up before Old English oiling.

Projects around the house continue to progress, including clean-up work on the garden and my final start to the basement bar. I asked my mom to help us pick up some lumber from Lowe's and she mentioned the availability of an old oak shelf built by my great-grandpa Ralph back in the day. It took a little bit of love since it has been sitting up in the dilapidated seed barn for the past few decades, but it is a special piece for my basement since he is who I was named after. The wood is still very pretty and the shelving isn't too wobbly - you hardly notice on the uneven floors we have anyhow. Lumber picked up and 2 engineers and Mexican coke later, my brother has helped me make some almost square and level stands for some rejected cabinetry. Home Depot and their scammy register clerk who signed me up for emails helped me get some decent in-store cuts to build a bar counter and there will likely be a wheel table in the works as well. At least for now I can store all my glassware and finally take it out of the boxes it has resided in since we bought the house.

On the work front we have FINALLY put period 2 of the fermenter trial to bed. Not even kidding, but my Brazilians' lab notebook said "Period 2 Again Again AGAIN". My adviser says that to pull off a fermenter trial you need 2x as many experimental periods as you will actually measure and he has been sadly underestimating for this project. I know our visiting scholars are disappointed, but I have been trying to find them other things to get done instead. Here's to literature reviews and reading instead while we wait. We are also starting to talk about doing some video work to estimate protozoal volume more accurately than the oldschool L x W^2 method which is obviously incorrect based on a non-cylindrical shape of many rumen inhabitants. The real challenge is video quality because the eukaryotes are mostly moving too fast for a firewire on a standard microscope camera to catch them. The image is blurry and separates into red and blue at the same time for both pictures and video so the processing is obviously not fast enough.

Such a small hand grabbing my fingers.

Our little girl sleeping in the cool porch air.

Family get-together for Independence Day was a little different this year without Grandpa, and Grandma definitely had a struggle with the change. I had hoped we'd be sitting there around the table with him holding our baby girl, but things were not to be. At least we know he is at peace now and in a better place. With the cool weather, we've been able to enjoy a little bit of time outside, including fireworks for the 4th and a few different cookouts which once again murdered my diet routine in its sleep. But every day feels like a bit of vacation right now, even though I have to work and I have been better at opening my eyes to the great things going on around us. The world is a beautiful place most days.

This little frog was out front of our house this week.