Well, everyone, it’s the first time I have posted on here for a very long time — I had been leaving the blogging duties to Mr. Ben.  Tonight, though, I HAD to post because Abby hit a major milestone last night:  she slept through the night!!!  She went to sleep around 9:30 last night.  She woke up at 5:15 and was a very hungry girl!   Now, if only Ben and I had gone to sleep when Abby had gone to sleep, we would have been really happy!  Our little baby is getting so big so fast…

P.S.  Also, I am writing this post from my brand new MacBook Pro.  Happy Birthday to me – thanks Hubby, Abby, Ted, Julie, and Colin!!!!

Just a quick preview of more photos to come. We had a great weekend in the north country – North Dakota. We visited Kirsten’s grandparents, aunt and uncle, and some cousins over the holiday weekend. It was Abigail’s first big car trip and she was a champ, sleeping all but around forty five minutes of the almost ten hour car ride on the way up and all but around two hours on the way home.

Another big development this weekend? Abigail is starting to smile up at us as we interact with her! This photo was taken while we were outside shooting off a few fireworks in the backyard. She has her sun hat on for protection because the weather in North Dakota was gorgeous for us the entire weekend.

More pictures and fun to come from the weekend, so stay tuned!

Having a blackberry with a *decent* camera on it is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I find that I have a small device with me almost at all times that I can use to take photos and upload them from wherever I’m at. It’s a curse because sometimes I fall back on it and don’t want to carry my DSLR or my point and shoot camera with me.

I leave you for the long weekend with these two photos. The first is of Abigail’s first smile in response to interaction with someone! Lucky Uncle Andrew! The second is of Abby napping with me a week ago or so. Such a precious moment that I got to spend just cuddling with her, feeling her breathe, sigh in her sleep, and wiggle around!

I hope that everyone has a great fourth of July weekend!

VS.

Kirsten went to the University of Northern Iowa for her undergraduate schooling. I went to The University of Iowa. Thankfully, Kirsten also went to Iowa for law school, so we’re not often actually a house divided.

Kirsten found these items at a local boutique the other day and couldn’t resist. The UNI onesie, though perhaps hard to tell in the picture, has rhinestones all over it. The Iowa burp cloth is, well, just awesome. Go Panthers and Go Hawkeyes!

What a beautiful site, my three girls! In the past when I would day dream about my future family, it didn’t really occur to me that I’d be in a household full of girls! I grew up with my dad, my brother, and my mom. My mom affectionately referred to it as “the frat house.” Now that I have started a family of my own, and it happens to be all women (albeit, ones a dog, but still), my mom likes to tell me that I’m getting poetic justice for her years of torment.

Ah well, if this is what I get for my time in the “frat house,” then I’m A OK with it!

So, after going on under these conditions for about a week, I decided finally that I should just run some Ethernet cable from the basement internet connection, through the floor, and up to the entertainment center area of our living room. To set the stage a little bit here, I had been planning a project like this for over a year, but I’d just not ever gotten around to it. No more procrastination, it was time to do something!

I had the perfect opportunity on Saturday, when Kirsten and Abigail went to a shower for our wonderful friends and I was stuck home alone with Mattie:

I removed the baseboard from the wall behind our entertainment center using a putty knife, flathead screw driver, paint scraper, and a 12oz claw  hammer. Then I was able to drill through the floor underneath the drywall but behind the baseboard with a long wood boring bit. I would say those two steps were the “scary” part. Once they were done, the rest was slowing going, but not hard. Simply running four CAT6 Ethernet cables from my bulk supply down through the hole in the floor, into the basement, along the floor joists and into the soon-to-be-network closet. Here are some pictures:

Here you can see the hole I’ve drilled through the floor down into the basement, along with one CAT6 cable running down through the void.

Here are the four cables after I was done running them all through the floor. Notice the conspicuous absence of a baseboard.

This shot is from the basement and is of the four cables tacked to the wooden flooring for some semblance of organization.

Here are all four cables at the entertainment center end (notice the baseboard back in place). They are all terminated in CAT6 punch down jacks. The four jacks will pop into a “keystone” wall plate that I have on order, but isn’t quite here yet.

And here is the shot of the tools I used to get the job done. Drill, wood boring bit, fish tape, several sets of pliers of various types, screw drivers, hammer, putty knife, RJ-45 crimping tool, punch down tool, flash light, and utility knife, to name a few (and not in any order, sorry).

If you’d like to see more pictures of the project, you can find them in our Flickr account. More pictures coming soon too after the wall plate is in, the network patch panel for down stairs, etc.

]]> http://www.webarnold.net/2010/06/22/diy-fathers-day-weekend-edition/feed/ 0 http://www.webarnold.net/2010/06/21/abigail-arnold-1-month-old/ http://www.webarnold.net/2010/06/21/abigail-arnold-1-month-old/#comments Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:38:07 +0000 Ben http://www.webarnold.net/?p=58 Continue reading →]]>

This comes a few days late, but it’s close enough. Abigail Joy has reached (and now passed) the 1 month old mark. It’s hard to believe that Kirsten and I have known her for that long. It simultaneously feels like a very short month and a very long month. At the time this picture was taken, Abby weighed 9.5lbs and was about 20 inches long. We’re very happy that she is growing and is healthy (even if she wasn’t happy at us for taking this picture of her).

Abigail, we love you, and we can’t remember what life was like before we knew you!

Then we hit a rough patch where she wouldn’t even sleep at all over the course of those night hours. She was constantly fussy and irritable. She wouldn’t eat well, going for just a few minutes and then refusing to continue. Those couple of mornings Kirsten and I were like zombies.

Then we decided to try getting the “Happiest Baby on the Block” DVD from the public library and watch it. We had purchased the book a few weeks ago, but hadn’t had time to read it. Hopefully the DVD could give us an abridged version of the most important information, we hoped. We watched it Monday night this week and started applying some of the concepts that evening. To our complete surprise, they worked!

While Abigail is not sleeping through the night or anything, she does sleep for up to three hours at a stretch now, and goes right back to sleep after feeding. She even has better, longer feedings. Kirsten and I now wake up feeling much more rested. What did we do specifically?

1. We swaddled her more tightly. We’d been swaddling her already, but loosely, to the point where she could get her arms free very easily. A tighter swaddle ensured she couldn’t get her arms loose and wake herself up by accident.
2. Brought a radio into the bedroom to play static as a white background noise. It works, it calms her very quickly.
3. Introduced a pacifier. She’s nursing very well now and despite that, we were nervous to do this. We decided to make the jump and she’s taken to it quite well and hasn’t experienced any “confusion” when trying to nurse.
4. To soothe her after eating and a good hardy burp, I will take her from Kirsten and put her on her side in my arms and gently rock her that way. It works much better than keeping her on her back in my arms.

By their powers combined, the above steps have helped us, seemingly, get Abigail on the “right track” for a better sleeping pattern. I’m not saying she won’t regress some nights, but for the time being at least, Kirsten and I have gotten two nights in a row with around six hours of sleep, and that is something that we can both be very happy about!

Her mother woke me up at about 1:30am that morning saying she had been having some “bad cramps” since about 1:00. Those bad cramps turned out to be contractions. By 1:30 they were already coming about every six minutes and were lasting for about one minute or so. Being the Lamaze-trained father-to-be that I was, I knew that if we got closer to four or five minutes between each contraction, it was go time. Well, we hung around the house for a while and finally, around 3:30, decided to call the hospital to see what they thought. They said we should “come in to be evaluated.”

Well, thankfully, I’d been finishing our hospital bag packing between contractions and we were all set. We threw the poor puppy into her crate, loaded the car, made sure the car seat was in place, and took off for the hospital. Sure enough, we get there, they take Kirsten into a triage room, and about a half hour later, the doctor gives the word that we’re going to have our baby that day! I was in total shock! I could little understand at that point, that later that day, I’d be holding my precious little one in my hands.

We’ve already been home for a full week and things are going pretty well. She’s not the greatest sleeper in the world; preferring instead to be the most active between the hours of 10pm and 6am. She naps all throughout the day. This is good for Kirsten, who is staying home with her for eight weeks, it allows her to get some basics done… like showering. It’s amazing how God programs us for parenthood, however. I might feel like a zombie for a little while after getting three to four hours of sleep, but somehow, it’s always enough. I can function that day when I really need to.

I can say that I wasn’t prepared for fatherhood. Prior to her birth, when people would ask if we were ready, I’d respond: “yeah! I think so! As much as you can be anyway.” I didn’t really know how accurate that statement would be. There’s nothing, no class, no parental wisdom, that can prepare you for the feeling you’ll have when you first see your son or daughter and instantly, you’re changed. I know I am. I melted that first time she looked at me, and I think I’ll keep on doing so throughout her entire life.