We started out the month with the twenty-four-hour barfing bug, followed by a cold, another cold, and finally the otherwise symptomless intermittent fever bug. At this very moment, both girls have temperatures within the normal healthy range, and it looks like we have an outside shot at everyone going to their respective daycare, preschool, and places of business.

I had Anna home today with a 100-degree fever, but she was an absolute peach otherwise. I even brought her to my Tuesday volleyball game, where she ate her packed lunch and watched videos while I played. I think she only had one time out the whole day, and although I probably spent an hour and a half reading Pippi, and most of the rest of the time playing with her in her room, I’d consider it a low maintenance day. She only began acting up when Jennifer came home with Tara, in part, I think, because having Tara around divides our attentions and gets her riled up that the same time. Another contributor is that Jennifer tends to be objective driven, and when Anna gets in the way of Jennifer accomplishing what she wants to do, the two of them end up butting heads. I’m guessing this is a preview of the next thirteen years or so. I just try to play peacemaker.

Anna and Tara have really seemed to bond lately¹ and there are more and more tender moments between them that we are able to capture. It is truly special to see the two of them so close, but in other ways it’s just nice to squash any previous notion that the two of use were insane to have a second child given what a hard time we had with the first.

¹ Possibly through shared germs.

This weekend has been somewhat of a more typical weekend. Most typically, it’s Sunday, and I have no recollection of what happened on Friday night. We did have a night on Friday, right?

Saturday, we attended a company picnic which turned out to be a very family-friendly, hugogenous shindigapalooza. There was a live band and 4-5 inflatable jumpers, midway games, dunk tanks, and volleyball nets. And lots of food. Anna and I were there early, because Anna really really really wanted to go. Jen and Tara joined us later and made the rounds showing off Tara. No one can resist Tara; you can practically hear the women ovulating as they walk by.

Jen took the girls home while I played a little volleyball; it was fun, even though it was utter jungle-ball, since I couldn’t dig up the regular players. After I got home a little later, Jen went out with M. and M. for a scrapbook-a-thon, which, since none of the three women are truly hard-core scrappers, I’m sure it was mostly a mom’s-night-out-a-thon. Good for them either way. The girls, for the most part, didn’t give me any trouble for the rest of the day, except for when I took Tara in the stroller and Anna on her bike for a trip around the block. Anna was getting scared at just about everything she passed by: bees in the bushes, the neighbor’s lawnmower, the slope of the driveways. With each threat, she jammed on the brakes, dismounted her bike, ran around, wailed, pushed her bike a few feet, ran around and wailed again. Finally I told her it was time to turn around and go home. As she no longer wanted to ride her bike, I told her that I was not going to bring her bike home for her; if she couldn’t ride or push the bike the 150 feet back to the house, she would lose it forever and I would put it in the shed until Tara was ready for it. At this point she had already been making a scene; at my ultimatum, she raised her game to academy-award level. Despite her theatrics, I remained completely calm as I pushed the stroller back to the house, while Anna trailed behind me in tears, alternately pushing her bike and striking a dramatic pose, prone behind her bike.

She finally got it back into the garage, and I sent her to her room until she settled down; about ten minutes later she emerged and I told her that no more whining would be tolerated for the evening. Within a couple minutes she sarted whining, and was sent back to her room for another ten minutes. The rest of the evening was whine-free, and both girls were easy to handle.

For the last couple weeks, Anna has been absolutely addicted to the Pippi Longstocking books, even to the point of giving up her usual “happy things” and daily review to have extra time to read Pippi. It seems that we’ve read “Pippi Goes On Board” a least four or five times cover to cover (Anna bookmarks it in between sessions), and it probably takes two hours to read the whole thing once. Some of the material seems a bit mature for her ears: cannibals, firearms, and of course Pippi herself is an uneducated rich girl who lives with a horse and a monkey¹.

Jen heard from a german friend that Astrid Lindgren’s books are very popular in Germany, and more of them have been translated from Swedish to German than to English. Perhaps we’ll have to dig up some of the German versions for Jen to read to Anna. Although Anna takes Spanish lessons at school, I don’t practice with her at home; we haven’t even begin to take advantage of Jennifer’s fluency in German.

¹ Perhaps she could be considered the Paris Hilton of her time.

Today, we actually got some of that weather business that some of you people have in other parts of the country. It hasn’t rained here in months, and today on my way out of work, I heard thunder, and actually saw a couple streaks of lighting on the way home. Back in the midwest, a good thunderstorm was something we used to see a few times a month during the summer months. Out here in southern California, there just isn’t any weather, least of all the dramatic sort we had back east. When I arrived home, it was just starting to rain, and Anna was out on the driveway, dancing around Gene Kelly-style

In other news, I made most of a week’s worth of food yesterday in order to save some time during the week. While making sauteed salmon with a moscato beurre blanc, I simultaneously made chicken soup for chicken & dumplings, and shrimp risotto. Yay me.

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These last few weeks since going back to work, I have been absoluted staggered by the hectic pace of having two kids with two working parents.

Today was more busy than a typical day, but not by much, basically proceeding like this:

• 5:15am Wake up to Tara crying. Witness Jennifer zombified in bed after having been awakened several times during the night by Tara. Offer to take baby monitor downstairs, on the condition that I’m going to let Tara fuss unless she goes ballistic.

• 5:20am Log on to work and move some projects along while listening to Tara fussing on the baby monitor.

• 5:35am Jennifer comes down and says she’s going to feed Tara because she can still her her crying and therefore can’t sleep.

• 6:35am Stop working and go get Anna out of bed and attempt to quietly get her dressed and ready for school.

• 7:05am Jennifer gets up and takes over Anna while I get ready for work.

• 7:20am Leave for work.

• 7:40am Arrive at work and continue projects.

• 11:30am Meet friend R., who I haven’t seen in a couple months, for lunch.

• 12:30pm Return to work.

• 4:00pm Leave work.

• 4:05pm Arrive at daycare to pick up Tara; discuss eating, sleeping, pooping, and fussiness with M.

• 4:20pm Arrive at preschool to pick up Anna; discuss Anna and Tara with Mrs. T.

• 4:35pm Arrive home. Unpack car of daycare items, sorting out dirty clothes and bottles. Unpack car of preschool items, sorting out reports, artwork, leaves, and stones. Fetch and sort mail. Move Anna’s bicycle from garage to backyard per request, fasten helmet. Change Tara’s diaper.

• 4:45pm Assess contents of refrigerator and pantry. Begin making spanish rice with chicken. Simultaneously prepare Tara’s antibiotics and baby food, Anna’s fish sticks and fruit. Warn Anna to put away whiny voice.

• 5:00pm Put Anna’s dinner on table. Continue preparing adult dinner. Feed medicine and baby food to Tara. Threaten Anna with time-out due to excessive whining.

• 5:05pm Put Anna on time-out due to whining. Continue feeding Tara and preparing food, while also washing dishes.

• 5:07pm Parole Anna from time-out. Repack Tara’s bag for daycare tomorrow.

• 5:15pm Clean up glue Anna has deposited on floor. Place Anna on chair in front of her dinner. Clean up glue Anna has deposited on table. Clean up Tara and place in exersaucer.

• 5:30pm Complete adult dinner prep. Continue washing dishes.

• 5:50pm Greet Jen who has come home from work. Continue cleaning kitchen, packing for day care tomorrow. Make tomorrow’s lunch for Anna. Jen takes Anna upstairs for shower.

• 6:20pm Eat PB&J sandwich for dinner.

• 6:30pm Spend short time with Tara. Get her cleaned up and changed into PJs.

• 6:40pm Get dressed for volleyball.

• 6:45pm Leave for volleyball.

• 7:05pm Warm up and play volleyball.

• 9:30pm Drink lots of water and drive home.

• 9:55pm Arrive home and take shower. Jen has been asleep for over an hour.

• 10:30pm Write blog post, realize I still have to prepare to-do list for tomorrow, bring in Anna’s bike from the backyard. Listen to Tara wake up crying.

• 10:4opm Discuss strategy with Jen for dealing with Tara. Change Tara, listen to more crying.

• 11:00pm Go to sleep.

Note that in all that time I did not actually spend any significant quantity of time with my wife or children. How is this supposed to work?

• 5:30am Wake. Repeat.

Tara now has an ear infection in both ears. As soon as we started her in daycare, she came down with a cold, and then another cold. It hasn’t been a surprise to us, but the ear infection, followed by another ear infection when she was already on amoxicillin was a surprise. Last night, she was fairly miserable in the early evening, and tonight looks like it will be a repeat of last night. It’s really hard to listen to her scream, even 10 minutes at a time. Until now she has been such an easy baby, so we haven’t been through this with her.

Im pretty well wiped out after last night; I should have gone to bed already, but Jen’s playing hockey, and I usually wait up for her.

My “paper pda” has been working out wonderfully, I can scarcely remember a time when I have felt so productive. The Strattera is working great to keep me focused, and I can see now why some of my previous attempts to get organized have failed–if you never get much done, what’s the point of organizing it? In the last seven days, I’ve knocked off 79 tasks. That reminds me; I have to start writing down stuff to blog about, and putting down blogging as a task; I have really gone light on the writing lately.

Recovered as we are from our previous condition of having stuff flying out of us, we can consider things a little more back to normal. Jennifer took the longest to recover, and thankfully Tara never had anything. I am starting to be convinced that it was a virus rather than food poisoning, though. Jen thought from the start that this was the case, and I thought it was just wishful thinking, that she was not willing to boycott the local sushi place. We have run in to some other people who have also been sick with something similar, and worse yet, some people we have run into have become sick, so the prevailing evidence is that it was some sort of bug. If you’re reading this from the toilet, um. sorry.

In other news, I have really started to notice a difference with the Strattera. This whole week at work I have absolutely felt like Superman. More exactly said, I have been nearly indistractable, even in the face of the demoralizing uncertainty which poisons our office atmosphere. Even better, my insurance approved coverage of the drug, which runs something like $125/month.

Last night we made another outing to Souplantation at Anna’s request. For my money, this is the best value in going out to dinner. It’s not fancy, but both of the kids behave because we can be eating within 20 minutes of leaving the house, and it costs less than $25 for the three of us to eat, including tip. There is enough variety to satisfy even Anna’s picky palate, and some of the food is even healthful. Yes, I am an old, married, father of two.

I can’t remember if I’ve posted that Tara has sprouted two teeth. They’re really starting to come in now, and she is even starting to use them to bite things now. She stretches her mouth comically wide, like a little jack-o-lantern, and moves her jaw up and down, saying “yaayaayaayaayaa.” She has started doing this when a bottle is stuck in her mouth, which is a habit Jennifer would not like to see catch on. Tara is expanding her solid food repertoire, and lately has 3-4 oz. of food three times a day. What a chow hound.

There is even gadget news, as I have a “new” PDA. It’s a notebook. Yes, it’s true, I’m actually tracking my to-do list on paper. The last reasonable all-around PDA I ever had was a Palm; my cell phone is now a great tool for tracking my schedule and contacts, but my to-do list has always been a problem. No portable method of entry (even a small keyboard) can compare with a pen and paper as far as I’m concerned, and to-do’s seem to be the most demanding PDA items on a speed-of-entry basis. I just bought a 3×5″ spiral-bound pad in a little leatherette case with a pen loop, but I have a Moleskin reporter-style notebook on order; it’s much smaller, yet better ergonomically because of the flip-top binding.

Lately, we all decided we haven’t had quite enough family togetherness, so we all went out and got food poisoning. Last night after our trip to the world’s smallest water park, we got sushi take-out from the place we were formerly so happy to have found in our neighborhood. We are somewhat less happy now. The fireworks started wth Jen somewhere around 4-5 am, then me at 9am, and Anna around noon. Tara is so far happy as a clam, and has even obliged us by taking a lot of naps today. There’s an outside shot that it’s some other bug that we picked up somewhere, but my guess is that it was the sushi. Anna didn’t eat anything that was raw, but most food poisoning is the result of cross-contamination anyway.

By now it appears that we’re on the mend, as nothing has come flying out of any of us for a couple hours. Tara has been very tolerant as usual, and Anna has been watching the same Dora, Clifford, and Caillou videos on TiVo all day.

I’ve been back at work for a week, and I guess it’s not so bad. Morale at work is at an all-time low in my 10 years there because of the layoffs looming. I had more then 20,000 messages in my inbox upon my return (most of them were spam and computer-generated notices). After a week of filtering, filing, and taking action, I’m down to under 100 messages to deal with. The uncertainty of upper management’s actions really doesn’t have me all that worried–it’s good work and all, but it is just a job. After two months off, I feel like I have my priorities more in order.

Tara just went in (a little late) for her six-month checkup, and we were surprised to find that she’s still just barely under 20 pounds. I was sure she weighed more¹. We also discovered that she had a mild ear infection; she’s so mellow, we didn’t even notice. She has been waking up more at night, what with having had a cold, followed by the ear infection, the transition to day care, and the resultant bad napping mixed in. She’s a trooper, though.

Every day it seems that Anna is becoming more of a “girly girl.” She has ten times as much interest in clothes and accessories than the rest of the family combined. I have no idea where she’s getting it from. I suspect that some day a DNA test will reveal a pink, sparkly, recessive gene has completely taken over Anna’s personality.

Today we join a playground outing to the world’s smallest water park, which is found out in East County. Anna showed no interest for the first half hour or so, then finally ventured in and manage to be the only child to play in the water area without actually getting wet. Thereafter, she spent the rest of the time setting up her towel, laying out, and reading and gossiping with her friends. I am not making this up. Parents of older girls always tell me how bad things get when they become teenagers, but I really think I’m most of the way there. Heck, I’m looking forward to the point that she’ll actually sleep in.

¹ One of our playgroup friends explained, “She’s just fluffy.”