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Wednesday, October 31^st
Happy Halloween!  We’re going to stay home tonight and hand out candy.  I’m not sure why because we hardly get any kids at our house, but I guess we thought Caden might enjoy seeing the kids come to the door.  It’s weird because we live in a dense neighborhood that would be a candy boon for kids but I think our street is kind of dark since it faces the creek so maybe they get scared and don’t come to our house.  We usually end up with three pounds of leftover candy; just what we DON’T need.

We put Caden in his chicken costume and he looked adorable.  But he would not move.  Frozen.  Like a statue.  We were cracking up because he would not move a muscle with that costume on.  Of course, after 30 minutes or so, it gets to be about 200 degrees inside, so the chicken costume had to come off.  He was sure cute though.

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Monday, October 29^th
This morning we were scheduled to have a home visit from our adoption counselor.  This is just one of those steps in the process you have to go through in order to become official.  They want to make sure you really live where you say you do.  Kind of like we expected, it was no big deal.  I mean, we put away our guns, pot plants and meth lab, but she probably wouldn’t have found those anyway.

JUST KIDDING!  Seriously though, the home visit went fine.  We actually cleaned house real nice and Karen was very impressed.  She’s pretty cool and we’ve enjoyed working with her a lot.

This afternoon, Caden had his 4-month doctor’s appointment.  Everything continues to look great:
Weight: 15 pounds, 15 ounces (75^th percentile)
Height: 25 ¾ inches (75-90^th percentile)
Head Circumference: 40.8 cm (25^th percentile)

He got several vaccinations again.  He didn’t even cry today.  After the nurse stuck him (4 times!), all he wanted to do was sit up to see who did that to him.  He didn’t take his eyes off of her until she left the room!

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Saturday, October 27^th
When we bought our home here, we were told by the nice sales ladies that the open lot across from our house would be developed into a one-acre park before we moved in.  Right.  The builder finished building all of the houses, packed up and left and the lot remains empty today.  So, who is the neighborhood squeaky wheel?  Me of course.  I contacted the City after the builder disappeared and was told that we were “only” about half a million dollars short of getting the full funds to get the park built.  Hmmm.  I’m thinking that bake sales are not quite going to get us there.

Eventually, I was squeaky enough that, over time, I just kept our park in front of the City planners and our City councilman that suddenly, one day, the money just showed up.  The City decided to fund it.  Over night, we suddenly had a million dollars available to build our park!  I thought it was Christmas.

Anyway, to make a long story short, today was the groundbreaking ceremony for the park.  Construction finally starts next week!  The City has to commemorate everything so they wanted to make a big deal out of today’s ceremony and had a bunch of speeches and we broke ground with a silver shovel, yada, yada, yada.  OK NOW JUST BUILD IT! 

Believe it or not, they say it is going to take ten months to build.  Everything in government takes twice as long as it needs to.  But I’m not complaining.  I’m just happy that we’re this far!

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Friday, October 26^th
I signed up for an Infant Massage Class at one of the local hospitals.  It’s supposed to be a really good way of getting your baby used to feeling touch and it certainly can work to soothe a kid who is sick or fussy.  Anyway, today was our first class.  And of course, I was the only dad.  All mothers, one dad.  They stared at me like I was a Martian.  But I’m getting used to it.  Caden and I walked in, took our spot and proceeded to do our thing.  Some mothers can be so weird!

Caden liked it!  We learned how to massage feet and legs today, but of course Mr. Ticklish couldn’t stop laughing every time I tried to rub his feet.  The teacher said that he’ll start to relax more he gets used to it.

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Thursday, October 25^th
Things appear to be getting better with the fires in Southern California.  From what we understand, the mandatory evacuations have been lifted and the fire lines are under better control.  Candice’s home is safe and their town seemed to survive well.  Thank goodness!  The only thing we wonder is whether we’ll still be able to go visit next weekend.  The hotel we planned to stay in is currently being used to house firefighters and power company employees.  For now, we’re planning to go!  We really want to see Candice and her family!

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Wednesday, October 24^th
I bought Caden a couple of new hats today at Target.  It gets a little cold at the hockey games, so I thought some new hats were in order.  He thought he would model them for the camera today.

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Tuesday, October 23^rd
I’ve been following a number of websites that are tracking the Southern California fires and things are getting worse.  We talked to Candice today and she said that they were evacuated late last night.  Luckily they have family to stay with so they don’t have to stay in a shelter.

Let’s hope for a change in the weather soon!

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Monday, October 22^nd
Good news and bad news today.  First the good news:  we’re going down to Southern California in ten days to visit Caden’s birthmom and her family!  Now the bad news:  a terrible forest fire has broken out in their area.  They live in the Lake Arrowhead area (Crestline) above San Bernardino and this isn’t the first time they’ve been threatened by fire.  This is really scary.  It seems like all of Southern California is burning right now! 

Anyway, we hope and pray that Candice and her family remain safe and don’t have to evacuate.  We hope our trip to visit them doesn’t get affected.

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Sunday, October 21^st
My kid has a bald spot.  And doing a comb-over is just not working!  Because he sleeps on his back, it rubs all of the hair off of the back of his head.  In this era, the new research about SIDS shows that you should never put your babies to sleep on their stomachs, only on their backs (Back To Sleep is the name of their marketing program).  But the side effect of that are babies with bald spots on the back of their noggins. 

Being the vain person I am, I googled “Infant Bald Spot” and what came up?  A product that you can use to reduce the hair loss!  It’s basically just a little piece of silk that you put down in their crib that they claim will not pull out their little delicate hairs when they sleep.  I ordered one.  We’ll see if it works!

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Saturday, October 20^th
Attended a Sharks game tonight.  Caden is starting to grow quite a little fan club in our section.  There is a group of people who sit behind us who have just fallen in love with him and, I think they watch him as much as they watch the game.  They’re really nice and they always goo goo and gaa gaa over Caden.

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Friday, October 19^th
Caden's answer to pretty much everything these days is plblblplplplpb!  The little raspberry problem continues unabated. (I did not teach him to do that!)

Can you tell that our cats love Caden?  (And yes Grandma, we DO wash his hands afterwards!)

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Tuesday, October 16^th
We’ve been having problems with our television reception so we had an appointment for the cable guy to come out today.  He arrived (sometime between 8 and noon of course) and fiddled and diddled and eventually fixed whatever needed to be fixed.  But after he went, he left the television on and I realized that it was the first time since I’ve been home with Caden that we’ve had the TV on during the day.  Really!  I know some of you out there think we probably sit and watch Oprah and eat bon bons all day, but it isn’t true!  The cable guy had it on the animal planet channel and so Caden and I started watching it.  He was fascinated.  I sat him up in his Bumbo and he got this fixated expression on his face that kind of scared me.  It’s that same face kids get when they play video games!

I’m not against my kid watching TV, as long as it is monitored and regulated.  It cannot be a babysitter.  It should be there to help add something to his intellectual milieu.  (We’ll see if I’m still so high on my horse about this in another year! LOL).

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Saturday, October 13^th
We had a Sharks game tonight.  We’re sitting there before the game waiting for it to start, watching the players warm up, and then all of the sudden, everything went black.  Not in my head, the lights I mean.  The power went out.  Big time.  First there was silence.  And then of course there are those people who immediately start hooting and hollering.  And then finally the emergency generators kicked in and there was dim lighting available.

Ok, that was interesting.  A little scary.  You always think someone is going to start a stampede or something.  We sat there for about 15 minutes and then they finally got the Jumbotron working and put a message up that the game would be delayed.  After about 30 minutes, they decided to play the game, old fashioned hockey style – no music, dim lighting, no announcer.  It was kind of cool.  Eventually, the power was restored and most everything came back online but it was all kind of bizarre.

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Friday, October 12^th
Today was the first rain of the season.  Caden has never experienced rain before.  So what did we do?  We went out and stood in it, of course!  It was fun.  And no one got pneumonia.

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Wednesday, October 10^th
There was a meeting at City Hall this afternoon that I really wanted to attend.  It involves some planning that some developers are trying to do in our area that the neighborhood staunchly opposes (like building a massive supermarket right next to our house).  I’ve been on this City task force for almost two years and today’s meeting is just a brief update from the Planning Department to tell us what’s happening.  Anyway, up to this point, Caden has been really great in meetings I’ve attended at the City.  Give him a toy or a bottle and he’s pretty quiet.  I decided to take him along.

When we arrived at the conference room where the meeting was being held, we entered the room only to find it filled, wall to wall, with developers in suits.  Uh oh.  You could already feel the tension in the room.  This was very unlike previous meetings where it was mostly neighborhood members.  And of course when I walked in with a baby stroller, they all sat straight up in their chairs and looked down on me with their condescending eyes.

Pretty soon the meeting started and Caden started to babble.  It was cute babbling but it was not high-paid land-use developer in $1000 suits cute.  I was getting all kinds of dirty looks and hhmphs.  "Oh relax, I thought... this was advertised as a community meeting after all!"  After a little while I decided to take Caden outside for a couple of minutes to see if I could get him to, well, shut up.  Just as I was going out the door, I heard one of them mutter under his breath to his fellow developer buddy, "Thank God they're leaving."

Uh oh.  You're messing with the wrong daddy.  We spent a couple of minutes chilling out in the lobby (more for me than for Caden) and then I decided it was time to re-enter the room.  I really didn't want to stay any longer but we needed to go back into the room to get our things.  We walked back into the room, I picked up our stuff, plopped Caden back into the stroller and the room fell silent for a second.  Never for a loss for words, I said, "It's getting really stuffy in here.  All of the hot air is making my son and I sick.  Come on Caden, let's get outta here."  We both had big smiles on our faces and left.  It was hilarious.

I'll get to see those same developers soon some day in a similar meeting.  I won't hesitate to remind them what jerks they were. 

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Saturday, October 6^th
John and I are attending a fundraiser event downtown tonight so Grandma and Grandpa Buffi are coming over to baby sit and stay the night.  We are pretty darn lucky that we have so many family members close by that are interested in helping us watch Caden.  He’s almost four months old and we’ve never left him with a stranger once.  Not many people are that fortunate.

They’re having an Oktoberfest event at our church tomorrow afternoon and we offered to make the German style potato salad.  What was I thinking?  20 pounds!  Let’s just say that we pretty much spent our day Oktoberfriggin our minds out in our kitchen today.  It sure turned out good though!

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Thursday, October 4^th
It gets pretty loud at the hockey games so we’ve been trying to find something to protect Caden’s hearing.  They just don’t make ear plugs small enough.  We found so ear muffs online that just arrived in the mail today.  He thought they were pretty cool.  We’re looking forward to trying them out at the next game.

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Tuesday, October 2^nd
Somebody has figured out how to suck his thumb and roll over all on the same day.

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Monday, October 1^st
Caden has a Bumbo seat.  It’s totally cool.  It allows him to sit upright even though he can’t really do that naturally yet.  He loves it.  He has head strength so he can support his noggin, but he can’t support his body upright yet.  The Bumbo seat is kind of like a big body cup that keeps him sitting upright.  I like it because I can sit him on a table next to me when I’m cooking or doing laundry and he can hang out with me.  He loves it.

Now with all that said, guess what?  Some dumbass out there put their kid in it and didn’t bother to keep monitoring or stay within arms reach.  Despite the warnings on the bottom that it might tip over, a couple of stupid parents allowed the thing to tip over – WITH THEIR KID IN IT.

Why are there such people in the world?  Is it natural selection?  Are these people perhaps doing us all a service to raise our awareness to such misfortunes?  Or are they just plain stupid?

In the past week alone, the hysteria about the Bumbo seat in the media has reached deafening proportions.  And not one reporter yet (interviewing these parents who “suffered” these incidents) had the balls to ask, “Hey dumbass, did you think about keeping an eye on your kid while he was in the thing?!”  Of course that wouldn’t make a very good story, would it?

We like our Bumbo and we’re going to keep using it.  Hopefully safely.

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