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Wednesday, November 21, 2001

 
I have been totally unmotivated to write these past few weeks, but really should jot down some of Devon's latest accomplishments so that I have them on record for her to look at when she's older.

Putting her down for a nap is a little easier these days. I just wait until she's really tired, then put her down in her playpen. Since it has mesh sides, she can't pull herself up as easily and falls asleep more quickly. She seems to sleep for just as long, so I'll stick with this for a while.

She's also learned how to play peek-a-boo. It's very cute. She pulls a blanket over her face then pulls it off really quickly and squeals. Yesterday, she was in her playpen standing up holding onto the edge. She kept putting her head down below the edge of the playpen, then quickly looking up and squealing. I couldn't figure out what she was doing, then I remembered that that's what we do to her all the time. We hide behind something then jump out and say "boo." I think she was trying to do the same thing.

We spent the weekend babyproofing the house. We installed a gate at the top of our basements stairs. This involved careful measurements to make sure that the cats could still get underneath it, but Devon could not. We managed to do it without breaking the 'gate must not be more than 4" off the ground' rule. The cats aren't too happy about having their food in the cold musty basement, but it's better than having a choking hazard within easy reach of the baby.

Putting a gate on top of our second floor stairs is going to be trickier. We have 11" high moldings at the top of the stairs and we couldn't find any gates that would accommodate that. At first we resigned ourselves to removing some of the molding (boo hoo), so the gate would fit, but Mark then suggested that we might be able to cut off a bit of the bottom rail of the gate so that it would accommodate the molding. We'll see what we can do. It might still be tricky because the molding is 1.5" wide on one side and we don't want to make the gate unsafe.

Another big project this weekend was to move the ugly IKEA bookcase out of our dining room. This meant trying to find a place for all our nice pottery and glasses... and the 60 or so hardcover artbooks that have been residing there. We had to go through all the other books in the house to weed out some in order to make enough space to put our artbooks in the office. Yes it's true, I'm actually going to give away some books. Am I really going to pick up my old textbooks again? Well, "Law of the Sea," "Makers of Modern Strategy," and "A History of Ukraine" are spellbinding, but I think I can finally part with them. I still have about 5000 books, so I probably won't miss them too much.

I'm sure there's more to say, but I can't remember what. I'll have to get Jeff to read this over to see what I've forgotten.

Have a great day and Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!