Waxing philosophical on work-life balance and...oh, my knees

It's always really busy during the holidays; this always makes me think about how much time work takes up. Of course, with Keegan in the picture, this has become more of an issue for me than it ever was before. I made the decision to come back to work full-time. At the time my options were basically quit or come back full-time. I did talk my employer into letting me come back 1/2 time until Keegan was 5 months old. This was a wonderful thing. I don't think I could have lived with the thought of my little 8 week old being in daycare and getting sick all of the time.

Even though I made the decision to come back to work full-time, this decision constantly haunts me. There are a million thoughts about the working vs stay-at-home options always buzzing through my head. When Keegan gets sick, I think I could have prevented his discomfort if I stayed at home with him and he hadn't gone to daycare. When Keegan comes home from daycare tired and crabby, I feel like if he had spent the day with me he would have been happier. Sometimes I feel like daycare is raising Keegan. I wonder about the intelligence of having my child raised by a bunch of girls in their mid 20's to mid 30's. The saving grace of this all is my mother. Had she not offered to watch Keegan a couple days a week, I don't think I would be working still. Well, maybe I would be working.

That leads to thoughts of working and many more questions. Is it selfish that I like my work? Is it selfish to enjoy the challenges of work and the camaraderie of my coworkers? Is it selfish to like the extra money that me working brings into the household? Am I wrong for believing that all my hard work to get through college should be put to use on a daily (or at least weekly basis)?

Like any problem there are many aspects to it. Lyle and I discussed all of these issues many times through and came up with some answers that led me back to work. Of course, like any problem, the questions and situation keep rapidly changing.

When I spent those 5 months at home with Keegan, I was not happy. I missed my work and I missed my friends. I began to see how staying home with Keegan would be mentally very challenging. Staying at home with your child is grueling and under-appreciated work. At times I would even resent Lyle because he could go out to lunch and he could talk about interesting things that happened in his day and I couldn't.

This was part of the decision to go back to work for me. Keegan deserves to have a happy, energetic mommy around. He does not deserve to have a depressed and jealous mommy around. My mental well-being was part of me going back to work. The other part of the decision to go back to work was the money. I make good money. With this money I make we can save up for Keegan's college, we can take Keegan interesting places, we can do interesting things, and we can reduce the general stress of the household. Money isn't everything, but it goes along way in keeping a household secure and running smoothly.

Do all of the above out-weight having somebody else raise my child? I guess I really don't know. To be quite honest up to this point Keegan hasn't needed much direction. We have also been fairly happy with daycare. There have been a couple incidents where daycare skipped a nap, forgot to do his diaper ointment, or forgot to give him his morning bottle. I always talk to them about these issues and the issue is quickly corrected. I understand no one is perfect and they have multiple babies to take care of.

As Keegan has gotten older and can do more things I really enjoy being with him. Sometimes it makes me very sad that he does something at daycare or my mom's house before he does it for me. It does make me happy that Keegan is always happy to see me and always crawls over into my lap when he doesn't feel good. I guess I feel like the time I *do* spend with Keegan is high quality. Lyle and I and Keegan get time to sit down and play almost every night. To be honest more than a couple hours of playing can start to get a little bit boring to me. Sometimes I think Keegan has so many toys so that I can stay interested in playing and not him ;-)

As Keegan gets older and needs more direction though I am revisiting the topic of staying at home. Last week I talked to my manager about going down to 4 work days a week. He was very amicable to the suggestion; although he said it would have to wait until after our project gate in Feb. He suggested a compromise instead; he thought I could work four 10 hour days and stay at home on Friday. Since I am already at work 9 hours a day, it is not a bad suggestion. I will try this schedule out starting in the new year (prior to upper management approval). I was very pleased that he was willing to hear me out on this!

Most of the mothers I know that work say that if they had a choice the perfect work-life balance would be to work part-time. Luckily I am at a job that may be able to accommodate this. If that is the case maybe I can stop angsting a bit about the work-life balance and find a perfect balance with working part-time.

Okay second topic...my knees.

I mentioned a couple posts ago that my knees were giving me awful troubles. Well they are better, but still swelling and hurting. So I had a doctor's appointment today. I love my internist; she is funny, concerned, takes me seriously, and gets straight to the point about a diagnosis. So the diagnosis, while not pretty, was as follows.

Both of my knee joints grind; she jokingly asked me how old I was because usually they see knees like this on a 60 year old. This is because of bone spurs in my joints. The swelling is bursitis (not sure how to spell this).
The bone spurs can be caused by trauma (back to marching band maybe) or can be hereditary. No one knows why it happens to some people and not others.

Short-term the bursitis can be controlled by wearing a splinted brace over my knee, icing it, and taken large does of anti-inflammatory meds. She mentioned taking glucosamine might help if I want to give it a shot.

Longer-term it will not get better, only worse. I can mitigate it by controlling the bursitis (see above) and avoiding high impact activities (like DDR and running).

If the swelling and pain continues long term there are two options; surgery and shots. I can get a series of three very expensive shots into my knee joints. These shots help the knee to lubricate itself and should last a year or so. The surgery would remove any bone spurs from the joints, but would probably only be effective for 1-2 years before more spurs developed.

If my knee at any point gives out I am in trouble. It was pretty wobbly last week but it never gave out. She told me that if it does give out I need to call her immediately; they will have to do a scan to make sure I don't need re-constructive knee surgery. She prefaced all this by saying that this is serious and if I don't take care of myself I will probably need knee replacement surgery by the time I am 40.

So, that sucks. I have had trouble with my knees as long as I can remember, I figured it would catch up to me eventually. Oh yeah, and the doctor also said that she thinks DDR is great fun and recommends that I try limiting my sessions to 30 minutes or so and wearing shoes. She would hate for me to have to give up that fun activity :-) I loved the fact that she was straight forward, laid out my options, and tried to do it with a sense of humor!

She also, like usual, asked me about everything else in my life to make sure I was doing okay in every way. She wanted to know how Lyle was doing, how Keegan was doing, how work was, and how I was handling Keegan having to be in daycare. We discussed the whole work/child thing. She sympathized with it all, told me that she hopes the part-time thing works out, and told me that it sounded like I was doing okay mentally :-) She is great about trying to track overall health to make sure that nothing else is causing me undue stress or discomfort. Anyway, my family has heard enough about how much I love this doctor. Anyway, back to work. I will do my utmost to help my knees be better.

Of course we do SIR

Well we did have a night out which was really great. The movie was ok, I wouldn't say it was the best movie I had ever seen, but then The Matrix is pretty hard to beat :). Anyway just another couple quick things. Keegan is as Karissa mentioned walking a lot more since Sunday. I have to concede that it has to do with the fact that Corinne came over and he watched her for quite a bit and probably did learn it from her! Which if you ask me is kind of cool since it means that he can do anything if he just has the right motivation :).

Also Keegan has gotten much better at copying you if you do something funny. Like Monday night Karissa and I were making faces at him, and he would try and copy the face. Now I am not saying that he has complete control, but just a couple of things like making a kissing sound he was able to manage. Of course he has been able to copy sounds for a while, and is getting pretty good at that too. So all in all I think he is progressing very well, and will be running circles around us in no time. Ice skating is coming soon!!

One other funny story this morning. I was getting him ready for daycare, and while I was holding him I went and got his nuk. I gave him the nuk, and he started to put it in his mouth like he usually does, but he fumbled with it and it started to fall. So I caught it, and grabbed on to the edge of hard plastic with my teeth to hold it while I repositioned some stuff to get ready to go. Keegan immediately reached for the nuk like he normally does, which is what I expected him to do. So he grabbed the nuk, and looked at it for a second, then a wide grin stretched across his face and he push the nuk right back towards my mouth. I grabbed it with my teeth like I had before, and then he giggled a little. He smiled again, and then grabbed the nuk back. After that we repeated this little game about 5 times and every time he would smile and giggle. I guess that means he is starting to learn to share, which is cool. Sharing is suppose to be something they pick up around this age, so I am not really surprised by that, but it was just kind of a funny moment.

Night on the Town

My dismal week last week was finally broken after I wrote that last blog. When I got home Lyle has already cooked dinner and Keegan was peacefully sleeping. My shoulder miraculously stopped hurting the next morning, and everything in general seemed much better.

So, the movie, The Golden Compass came out in theaters last Friday. I thought it would be fun to make an effort to go and see this movie some time the coming week. We talked to my parents and my mom agreed to keep Keegan through Tuesday afternoon into Tuesday night so that Lyle and I could go and watch a movie.

Lyle and I left work a bit early and met at home. We looked up movie times and then jumped in the car in an attempt to catch a 4:15pm movie. When we got to the theater we found out that between 4pm - 6pm the Carmike theater in Mounds View has their bargain matinée. Tickets were only $5 a piece and, if you brought your own bucket, you could get it filled with popcorn for only 50 cents. Who knew there was so much benefit to going to a movie at 4:15pm on a Tuesday night?

The movie was excellent and afterwards we discussed where to go and eat dinner. Neither of us were all that hungry. We decided to stop by a Caribou. After getting some drinks and pastries we went over to pick up Keegan. We picked him up a little before 8pm and he was sleeping. He went back to sleep easily when we got home. All in all it was a very nice afternoon/night out. Lyle and I are very grateful that my parents could watch Keegan so that we could have an adult afternoon out together. Although I did miss seeing and playing with Keegan a little bit.

As for Keegan...on Sunday we played Dungeons and Dragons. Aaron and Michelle brought Corinne along. We gave Corinne her bday present and Corinne and Keegan trucked around after each other for a bit. This always ends up being very significant for Keegan, he studies Corinne very intently. In the last month or so Corinne has become a very proficient walker. Keegan has been able to precariously toddle across the distance of maybe half a room. He seems to get a bit nervous and then he falls down. Well that all changed on Monday.

After spending a couple hours observing Corinne he figured it all out! At daycare on Monday his teachers exclaimed that he was walking everywhere. Monday night we got to observe this as Keegan quickly walked across the room. He now walks very rapidly, usually between things that he can grab onto. He also is getting better at bending over and picking things up off the floor while walking and not falling over.

Late last week we found out that Keegan had picked up the sign for milk. We don't think he knows what it means yet but he can do that sign very well. So there's your update (disjointed as it is) and an assurance that this week is better than the last.

One of those weeks...

I know people don't necessarily want to read about what a crappy week it has been. I think it would be very therapeutic for me to vent though so, I am going to write about it anyway. With the disclaimer that this entry is purely a rant of frustration you can read, or not read, as you feel fit.

Things have been stressful in general because of all of the holiday stuff that has been going on. We have even tried to tone it down some this year. Still there are presents to be wrapped, etc, etc.

I think the frustration started last week when the left headlight went out in my car. Lyle, Keegan, and I ran to Target to get a replacement and promptly replaced it. The next day it was out again. For the last week and a half I have been trying to remember to replace it..again. Last week I was also trying to finish up a cute yearly calender with pictures of Keegan in it. It was supposed to be a surprise Christmas present but since they were sitting out when Lyle got home on Monday I ended up just giving them to my parents and Lyle.

Of course Keegan was sick this whole weekend which resulted in near to zero sleep for Lyle and me. Keegan is doing better now but is very persistent about eating at 3am in the morning. This is especially irritating because it is only 1.5 hours before we normally get up. He goes right back to sleep after eating a bottle but Lyle and I can't get back to sleep before it's time to get up again. As if the normal mad dash of trying to get Keegan dropped off, get to work, get home, get errands run, and get Keegan to bed wasn't bad enough it had to snow.

I normally love the snow. I still try to tell myself that I love the snow. On Tuesday when it snowed I had gotten into work late because of dropping Keegan off. I left an hour early to avoid a two hour commute home. Instead of having my normal 35 minute drive home (I left at 2:30pm) I had a 1.5 hour drive home. It sucked. But not as bad as it sucked for Lyle. He left at 3pm and didn't get home until almost 6pm. There went the whole night. By the time Lyle got home I was getting ready to give Keegan his bottle and put him to bed.

Then the next morning (Wed. morning) was no better. It took me an hour to get into work (I left at 6am) and it took Lyle over 2 hours to get into work. When I backed out of the driveway this morning and saw it was, once again, snowing. I had a few things to say about that; I am grateful that Keegan isn't picking up any of the words I say...yet.

To make matters worse last Friday I woke up with a horrible pain in my neck. You know how that happens sometimes. Well it hasn't gone away. It has just gotten worse to the point where it hurts up the back of my head and down my arm. It hurts to pick up Keegan and it hurts to drive. Since I am on a rant about bodily pain; let's next address my knees. I have always had bad knees. During marching band my left knee swelled up to 5x its normal size. I was on crutches for 6 weeks and on painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. So we have started playing DDR a lot. Last night while I was crawling around after Keegan my left knee made a crunch sound and then started swelling. I spend a good portion of last night with ice tied to my knee. Not sure what made my knee give, it could have been the DDR or it could have been all the crawling around on wood floors. I am not sure. It really makes me wonder what my knees will be like when I am 50.

So since the weather, the sick baby, and my body are not enough to throw me in complete chaos; the powers that be have decided that work should uber suck this week too. The only good thing that has happened at work is that I do not have to go out to the plant this month. The bad thing is that they have split our coating run at the plant into 3 parts. 12 hours of our stuff, 12 hours of salable product, 12 hour of our stuff, 12 hour of salable product, 24 hours of our stuff. Now changing the coater back and forth from an experimental set up to the set up for product we actually sell is always a huge endeavor. With this schedule we are not going to get any coating done and the experimentation is going to be so fractured that it's useless.

There are tons of arguments about what should be run and how useful it is to run it. We are already over budget, yet upper management is determined to spend another half million on this fractured experimentation. Now you ask should I be blogging about this; well, trust me they already know what I think about it.

To make matters worse I am the only woman engineer on the team and I have asked to not travel this month since it is hard for Lyle to drop off and pick up Keegan from daycare with his long drive to work. I have traveled a lot lately, I have a 10 month child, and I am the female of the household. I have been getting a lot of accusatory glances and comments of "well, I guess you're lucky you have an excuse to not go." or "well, you won't be there to observe it will you? So why do you care?" I feel guilty about not going out there; but on the other hand I think I am entitled to a little break given all the extra hours and extra travel I have done recently and in previous years.

One of the other female engineers and me were discussing how unfair this is especially during Christmas. I make sure that we get all of the presents, I make sure they are wrapped, and I make sure all the Christmas cards get sent out. I make sure we make cookies and I make sure the Christmas decorations get set up. This is not to say that Lyle doesn't help a ton with all of this stuff, but he does not drive it. I think if I weren't there, none of it would be done. After talking to my male counterparts it seems that this is the case with most of them also. They talk about their wives getting this and that done for Christmas. So, they aren't that concerned about being out at the plant the week before Christmas. Well, unfortunately, not only do I have a small child, I *am* responsible for making sure all the Christmas stuff gets done.

The topper on everything last evening was yet another attempt to help Keegan celebrate something fun for Christmas. I saw a police car coming down the road and asked Lyle if he knew what that was about. He mentioned that it was probably Santa coming around on the firetruck like he does every year. I, was like, well we have to get Keegan out there to see it. I whipped on a coat and slid my shoes halfway on. We threw on Keegan's snowsuit. It really only took a couple minutes. I picked up Keegan and went limping down the driveway with him; my knee an shoulder killing me. We got to the bottom of the drivway just as Santa was getting there. I got Keegan to wave at Santa and...Santa didn't even look at us. We were the only people out there and somehow he didn't see us :-( Keegan liked the lights though, so we stayed and waved at the police car that was trailing Santa. No response there either. Feeling somewhat defeated, yet proud that Keegan had made an effort to wave, I limped back to the house. I heard somebody call "Hey, miss". I turned around to find one that one of the firemen had seen us and run all the way from the firetruck to give me and Keegan a candy cane and wish us Merry Christmas. It made me feel much better :-) That is until I got to the front door and it wouldn't open. Lyle pounded from the inside, while I tried to wrench it open from the front...still no luck. I had to go in through the garage. The door is still broken; we need a new handle.

Oh yeah, one last thing...our computer died last night too...we think the motherboard gave out. I can here money draining out of the bank account from here...

I guess I am running out of steam and I do need to get some other work done. I am just at the end of my rope with work right now and have negative desire to be here. I have to sit through a 3 hour design review this afternoon and I am hoping, with Keegan's new penchant for 3am feedings, that I can stay awake through it.

Having a sick baby sucks!

Everyone already probably knows that having a sick baby sucks. I just thought I would reiterate the fact out of frustration.

After bragging to a coworker on Thursday that Keegan had been perfectly healthy for over 3 weeks, I came home to find that Keegan had developed a fever during the day. This fever persisted to Friday morning. And, though I was tempted to give him some Tylenol and send him to daycare, I didn't. I stayed home with Mr. Crabby, as we have taken to calling him over the last 4 days.

It kind of sucked because I had stuff I needed to get done at work; alas it was not meant to be. Keegan has been unhappy every night because he coughs, wakes up, and doesn't feel good. So there has been a lot of rocking Keegan in the glider at 2am in the morning. He has been unhappy all day. I was thinking about taking him in to the doctor today but yesterday he finally pulled out of his sickness and out of his seemingly chronic crabbiness.

Yesterday afternoon Keegan finally took a nap. Lyle and I collapsed on our bed and took a nap ourselves. After that we were all much happier.

Still it sucks when the baby is sick. You can't do a whole lot to help them out and they can't tell you what's wrong. The only thing you *can* do is be there for them. So, that's what I did on Friday I rocked Keegan, I played with Keegan, and I did my best to comfort the horribly crabby baby. Sometimes I guess that's all you can do!

Thank goodness that he is finally feeling better and cracking frequent smiles again!

Something not to try for Christmas....

The night before last we tried something that I recommend not doing. I don't think we'll ever do it again; at least not until Keegan is older.

In one of the many kids' catalogs that I now receive (not sure what mailing list I ended up on to receive these) there was a really cute kit to make a plaster caste of your baby's hand. The kit was set up to turn the caste into a Christmas ornament. I had been trying to think of something neat to do for Keegan's first Christmas, I really wanted something cool that we could hang on the Xmas tree that would have some significant meaning.

The kit was $9.95 so I went online and ordered it. I was so excited. Apparently I hadn't thought this one through very well.

When I received the product, the picture on the box showed a pristine baby handprint complete with fingerprints. Did I mention I thought I was clever for doing this and super excited for having found this? So I read the directions.

Step 1 - mix plaster with 3 cupfuls of water (cup provided) and stir until even consistency

Step 2 - pour the mixture into the mold and let sit for 2-5 minutes until the mixture firms up.

Step 3 - Dampen child's hand and place on plaster firmly pressing the hand down to get good indentation of all fingers.

Step 4 - Let mold sit for 2 hrs for plaster to completely harden

Easy breezy, right? So I mixed up the plaster. Some of the plaster missed the mixing bowl and ended up on the floor and counter. Seras (our three-legged wonder) thought it was baby formula and tried to eat it. As the mixture lumps together in the bowl I am chasing Seras away and trying to clean the plaster up off of the floor.

I mix the plaster to "even consistency" and pour it into the mold. There is too much plaster for the mold and it drips over the edges of the mold onto the counter. It also drips off of the counter to land on my new black suede shoes. That sucks.

Still, I am doing okay here. I set the kitchen timer for 5 minutes and clear all cats from the area. 5 minutes goes by and I check the mold. There is no firmness here; it is still liquid. I refer back to the directions. In tiny letters at the bottom it says that setting time may vary depending on room conditions. Okay the house is at 70oF and ~35%RH...pretty standard.

I wait another 5 minutes...still liquid. I set the timer for 10 minutes and wonder if maybe they wrote these directions in Arizona in the middle of the summer.

After - add it up - 20 minutes, the mixture is somewhat not-liquidy. Keegan is crabby because he is tired. We were going to do this right before his bedtime and now it is getting late. Lyle brings him over and holds him up while I straighten out Keegan's hand and hold the mold. I carefully, painstakingly, press Keegan's hand into the somewhat firm plaster. Now, everyone think about what is going to happen here...wait for it....

What does a 9 month old baby do when something touches its hand? Yes, you have it! Keegan closes his hand trying to grab the plaster. We now have a pretty darn ugly plaster Christmas ornament and Keegan has a handful of plaster he is trying to eat. Lyle gives me a look that says that this was just a great idea of mine.

I will not be detered though. After washing the plaster of Keegan's hand; I flatten out the plaster and we try again. We still are not able to keep Keegan from grabbing the plaster. I suggest we let the plaster firm up a bit more.

10 minutes later I realize the plaster is almost solid and I have an epiphany. Let's do Keegan's foot instead. I pull of Keegan's sock and get Lyle to hold him over the mold. I press his foot into the plaster cast and Keegan starts crying. He is tired and wants his foot back! A vaguely foot-shaped print is in the plaster. I don't like the way it looks. We wash off Keegan's foot.

I rewet the surface of the plaster and we try Keegan's hand again. He is unable to dig his fingers into the plaster now but instead leaves only a vague handprint. Keegan is crabby and Lyle is pissed that I didn't leave the footprint on there. I say "Let's just do it one more time." Lyle says "Keegan's going to bed now." I glare at the vague handprint and shrug. Taking my fingers I press down into the vague handprint shape with my fingers making it deeper while keeping it Keegan sized.

I look at the mold, it is disgusting. Apparently Keegan had been playing with the cat between prints, so there is cat hair stuck in the mold. Now it's not even Keegan's handprint but my fingerprints following the trace of Keegan's hand print. I suppose one way to look at it is that that the ornament has a little bit of everyone (including the cats) in it. I am not sure if I should keep it or toss it.

As Lyle comes back into the room; I suggest next time maybe we should stick with finger paint and construction paper.

To add insult to injury apparently Seras had her paws down the drain in the garbage disposal again. She does this every night to look for food. I guess this time she found some leftover plaster. When I came out yesterday morning there was plaster tracked all over the kitchen in the shape of little cat pawprints. She only has three legs so we know it was her.

Note to self. This was all a bad idea.

Can you kill yourself playing DDR?

Of course this last weekend was Thanksgiving weekend; which Lyle talked briefly about a couple posts ago. It really was a fantastic 4 day weekend. We had a lot to do and we accomplished everything we wanted to and more!

Thanksgiving itself was pretty low-key. We chilled in the morning and then headed over to my parent's house for a very nice Thanksgiving dinner. Keegan had his first taste of cranberry sauce and also enjoyed some turkey, green beans, and sweet potatoes.

Last year we went and saw a movie after dinner, but that was out this year because of Keegan. One of my coworkers told me that her family goes bowling after Thanksgiving dinner. We talked about it and decided that would be lots of fun. And guess what, it was lots of fun. Keegan sat in his booster seat and played with toys while we bowled a couple games. After that it was bedtime for Keegan and time for Lyle, me, and my parents to play some Cranium. Cranium always gets a bit competitive when we play against my parents :-)

Friday was crazy. Keegan woke up at 6am and decided that he didn't want to go back to sleep. Lyle and I realized we were out of formula. What a day to run out of formula! The good thing was that Super Target opened at 6am, the bad thing was that Super Target opened at 6am and everyone in the 3 state area was there! By 7am we were at Super Target buying formula. We cruised around the place to check and see if there were any great deals. The electronics and toy departments were crazy! We got out of there in one piece though, and headed home to feed Keegan. Keegan went down for a nap and by 10am we had packed everything we would need for a day on the town and headed over to my parent's house. We all got packed into their van, with deluxe stroller in tow, and drove downtown to commence one of our long lasting family traditions.

Every year we go downtown to see the exhibit on the top floor of Dayton's/Marshall Fields/Macy's. This year it was The Nutcracker. We stood in line for maybe 20 minutes. Keegan was very good and wanted to get up and "walk" in line. He walked holding my hand and with such determination; it was adorable. We did that for a while and then it was up on dad's (Lyle's) shoulders so that Keegan could see the exhibits. Keegan was in awe of all the lights and moving figures. He especially liked the room with the sugar plum fairies and the giant strawberries hanging from above. It was super cute to see how excited about it all he was. Afterwards we went and stood in line for pictures with Santa. The line was maybe 15 minutes long, but it was in this little shack-type room with lots of bright lights. It was hot and crowded; once again Keegan didn't care. He was smiley and excited the whole way there.

When I put Keegan in Santa's lap, Keegan just stared at Santa. Keegan looked puzzled, like he wondered who in the world this guy was. Keegan yanked on Santa's beard a bit (I held my breath hoping that he didn't unmask Santa and ruin it for all the kids); then Keegan looked at Lyle, me, and my mom and smiled his big Keegan smile. Santa gave Keegan a big shiny button that said "I meet Santa at Macy's 2007". Keegan thought the button was cool and then we were off to eat our gingerbread cookies and walk back to the car.

Keegan took a nap while we drove to Maple Grove (yes Maple Grove). We ate at the PF Chang's in Maple Grove and then piled back in the car to go to the....Albertville outlet mall. Keegan was all bundled up in his stroller while we walked around the outlet mall. Old Navy was absolutely trashed, but Carter's had some very cute baby cloths at 50% off. Gap and Banana Republic also had very nice sales going on. By about 5pm it was getting dark and Keegan was (finally) starting to get a little crabby. We left the mall and went back towards home. We stopped at Chile's for dinner; Keegan ate his dinner like a champ but was *very* tired. Then back to my parent's house we went and Keegan went down to sleep. Lyle, me, and my parents played some more Cranium; we had some scores to settle from the night before.

Saturday was just as crazy as Friday. We got up at 8:00am so that we could be to Aaron and Michelle's house for Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) by 9:00am. We got home from playing DnD around 1pm and then called my parents to see if they wanted to go to the new best buy with us. After eating dinner at Outback we went to the new Blaine Best Buy. It's a very nice Best Buy. Our main reason for going there was to buy the new Wii version of "Hottest Party Dance Dance Revolution" (DDR). After getting home and putting Keegan to bed, Lyle, me, and my parents played DDR for three hours or so. The Wii version is neat because you coordinate both your hands and feet to the music. Yeah, it is about as hard as it sounds.

Sunday I woke up and I hurt. My arms hurt and my knees hurt. I tried to remember what I could have done...maybe 3 hours of DDR would do it :-) We put up all the Christmas decorations on Sunday, with Keegan providing some assistance that could dubiously be called help. Sunday night Lyle and I played DDR for another couple hours. Monday night Lyle and I played DDR for another couple hours. Maybe we are addicted? Maybe if we play it enough my knees and arms will stop hurting? Could DDR be my ticket to the strong, buff body I've always wanted? I doubt it. Still I seem to be slightly better at it than Lyle...so there is that.

Keegan has also been impressing us a lot lately. Lyle mentioned Keegan has his first tooth coming in. (Please Keegan don't do anything to that tooth until next year, that's when your dental coverage kicks in!) Then last night Keegan let go of the kitchen cabinet and walked 8, yes count them 8, steps across the kitchen towards me. We were so excited! Keegan was excited too; he had a giant grin on his face the whole time. Anyway, so far it's been very exciting to have Keegan through the holidays. I can't wait for Christmas. Of course, I always get really excited for Christmas, but this year I can be double excited since Keegan is here!

Okay, well back to work. Hopefully we'll have some time after Keegan goes to bed tonight to hit the DDR again. Lyle and I really are getting better. Although I think we both wish there was a middle finger action you could do when the DJ pisses you off. Nothing like a comment blaring through your Wiimote speaker "You call that dancing!!!???" after you've missed a string of moves to really piss you off. The crowd boos when you are doing bad too; no pressure. As Lyle so eloquently put it to the DDR DJ "Let's see you dance with this Wiimote up your #@^!" Good thing Keegan is in bed while we play this.

*static* Huston we have tooth! *static*

I was playing with Keegan yesterday and getting him ready for dinner etc. Anyway I noticed that there was a little hole in his lower gums. Well low and behold there seems to be the start of a tooth coming in! So right around 9 1/2 months Keegan is starting to get his first tooth. The tooth is the left front bottom tooth. Of course you can't really see anything yet, and trying to get a picture will be a real hard thing since Keegan does not stay still ever.

Ok, the other thing of interest is that Karissa uploaded the pictures from Thanksgiving, and the rest of the November pictures so far. So if you are bored and really want something to do, go check them out. There is a video in there of Keegan raising his food and worshiping it. I think Karissa talked about this particular favorite past time of Keegan's in an earlier post.

Hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving! We are going to be hanging out with Karissa's parents for dinner, and then Friday go down to the old Dayton's and see that Christmas special they put on every year. We figure that Keegan should get a kick out of that since he really like the lights and stuff they usually do. We are also in the market for a stocking for Keegan. Karissa and I don't have stockings, but all the animals do, and we would like to add Keegan to that list. And yes before you ask, we do put stuff in the stockings for our furry friends! Silly I know, but they enjoy the presents :).

Personally I am hoping to find a stocking with dragon's on it since pretty much everything I want to get him does. Though I have a feeling that will be a little harder to find. Anyway hope that you all have a great long weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

In the future will there be books?

This post isn't really about Keegan but more about the world Keegan will live in in the future. Today I was reading about Amazon's Kindle. This links to an article on it.

Kindle is similar to Sony's Reader. It allows you to electronically download and read books. The screen is specially designed to alleviate eye strain. The books are cheaper to buy because you aren't buying any material so-to-speak; just data. To me it's a little bit scary that we are going in this direction. I guess that the ability to make books more widely available and available at lower cost is a good thing. Also having all your books as e-books would solve many home storage problems, and alleviate back-problems of students world wide. Imagine if, instead of three 10 pound text books in your bag, you could just upload the whole book to your digital book reader? No more forgetting textbooks at home.

Even for the everyday person this would be convenient. Imagine not having to pack three books to drag along on the airplane with you on a long trip. Imaging not having half of your cubical taken up by research texts. It would definitely be a time and a space saver.

Still for some reason it bothers me. I love books both for their content and there physical presence. Granted, Lyle would probably heave a sign of relief at being able to get rid of the multitudes of bookshelves that line our basement walls, but there is something to be said about the act of reading. There is something in the act of prying open the pages to a good book, nestling down in the couch, and inhaling the aroma of dust, ink, and paper that wafts from the pages. I find it hard to think that reading my e-book by candlelight would have the same ambiance.

Unfortunately, like so many things, I fear that the most convenient, space-saving, and cost-saving option will start to prevail over time. Books have existed in one form or another for nearly as long as humankind. It's weird to realize that we might see the end of the traditional book in our lifetime. I suppose we went from stone tablets to papyrus to paper - who's to say the next step isn't to LCD.

Let's Dance...

Since a number of people were amused with the details of Keegan's artistic additions to the world I thought I could provide an update in another fine art area Keegan is skilled in. Our impresario Keegan, in addition to improving the selection of the world's art, is also big into the fine art of dance. Keegan has been performing four new types of artistic dance. While these types of dance are of various quality; all of them are unique in our household.

The first dance is the least graceful of the dances. In this dance Keegan remains on hands and knees on the ground and rocks back and forth in time to the music. Usually he keeps his head down, as to concentrate on keeping his rocking movement in exact beat with the music. Keegan performs this dance when he is caught up quickly by the music and unable to assume a position more apt to dancing. For instance crawling across the floor he suddenly hears the thumping beat of a Weird Al tune and he is taken by the sudden urge to dance *now*! There is no time to sit up or stand up; so he must improvise as he best can and dance on all fours.

Dance number two is Keegan's version of head banging. I guess you would call it more of a horizontal head banging rather than the vertical head banging that left so many necks aching in the early 90's. This "dance" has no rythem at all, but rather is a spontaneous expression of movement that can accompany external music and speech. This rather spastic head jerking is sometimes followed by a small grin and a giggle as Keegan reveals in his own creative genius. Usually this form of dancing is brought on by someone signing to him, talking to him, or by someone showing him a more subtle version of this move. This dance has the side effect of leaving Keegan slightly dizzy and causing him to crawl and walk crooked for a bit; especially after a very vigorous dance session. It is a type of dance that Keegan developed a few months ago and then forsook as he couldn't do this dance while learning to crawl/walk. Now that the crawling and walking skills are more developed he is returning to this dance with a vigor.

Dance number three is the most versatile dance. I can think of no other way to describe than as Keegan's Groove. The Keegan Grove involves bopping your head, shoulders, and whole upper body back and forth to the music. The movement is minimal, as to convey total coolness, but it is very important to keep the beat of the music. It requires complete concentration. This dance is versatile because it can be performed both standing up and sitting down. The dance is at odds with the music that provokes it. Generally it is a romping rendition of "pop goes the weasel" or "mary had a little lamb" that is blaring from the plastic speakers of various child-like toys. Keegan's choice of this cool, groovy dance movement paired with the simplistic chiming of his musical toys makes the dance all the more groovy and contrasting.

The last dance we are uncertain how to label. It appears to be a creative movement, but it may point more to Keegan's acting skills than his dancing ability. This movement is in general provoked by inanimate objects. The objects used are not always the same. The objects can be of toy in nature or of food in nature. What we have observed is that Keegan must have one object in each hand. This move requires Keegan's total concentration; he does not often perform it when people are talking to him. Upon grasping one object in each hand, Keegan fixes his face in an expression of utmost seriousness and thrusts his hands toward the sky. We haven't figured out yet if this is a form of modern dance or possibly a pose of worship to the gods of crackers and toys. If Keegan is able to hold the pose long enough without interruption then the chanting ensues. Usually he holds his face up to the sky and chants a long series of screeching "DADADADADADADADADAs". This dance is probably the most amusing to his audience since it is mysterious in origin and grabs the audiences attention the quickest.

Hopefully over time we will be able to get a video of each of his dances to save for the future generations to observe.

Is Keegan Going to Be the Next Picasso??

Okay I truly doubt that there will ever be another Picasso. Yesterday our collection of Keegan art doubled. That is to say we acquired one additional rare piece of Keegan art. As part of the Make a Wish drive that our daycare is having we actually had to purchase the piece of art to bring it home with us. Does that make Keegan a professional artist?

This piece of art work, like the last, is very abstract in nature. It is also a bit self-centered, as Keegan used a picture of himself as the center theme of the artwork. This central theme is surrounded by a number of slightly abstract blue colored handprints. The handprints make a statement all in themselves; as they are a perfect mix of realism combined with careless abstractedness.

Although we only own two pieces of this artist's rare artwork, I know that there are a few other pieces in existence. The majority of them feature a medium of construction and fingerpaint; which would be quite at home in an abstract art museum such as the Walker. Once particularly astonishing piece features a red construction paper apple with smears of white fingerpaint adorning the apple's singular shape. Exactly what does this piece of art say to us? Personally I think it is a deeply moving statement on the state of the institution of education. The precisely cut solid-colored apple filled with a riot of disorganized patterns in white paint...is the institution of education internally flawed in some way that this artist feels a need to portray?

Only the future will tell what other intellectually astounding pieces this new artist will create. I have heard rumor that Keegan is considering trying a medium of cat hair and drool in his next installation...or possibly that was just the remains of a hard night of playing with the cat.

The State of Mommyhood

I was thinking about Keegan hitting 9 months old and I thought that's a pretty big milestone. That means he's been out of the womb as long as he was in it, right? So a big deal. As Lyle mentioned we were also watching some of the "old" videos of Keegan that we took when he was only a few days old. Watching those videos I started thinking about how my opinion of having Keegan around has changed drastically in the last few months. So I thought maybe I could write a blog entry on the state of mommyhood and how it has changed in the first nine months Keegan has been here.

So in the beginning.....I was pregnant. I was talking to one of my girlfriends that is thinking about having a baby and I was trying to explain how being pregnant is. I mean you are worried and concerned and excited; but no matter how people tell you your life is going to change you just will never understand until it happens. It sounds cliche' and it is; but it is also the truth. That's really what got me thinking about all of this; I mean how can you ever prepare for having a child?

Next we had Keegan. He was a little larva...basically when you think about it babies are little more than parasites for the first couple months. They feed off of you and poop. They sleep and cry when unhappy. You are responsible for feeding them, moving them, cleaning them, and comforting them. If you are lucky your reward is a few moments of silence; as time goes on you get the rare and ever-cherished first smiles. Sometimes you make up the smiles...."Oh Lyle, look I think he's doing a half-smile..."

Lyle and I loved Keegan from the get-go but there is a difference between love and enjoyment or liking. I remember my mom telling me in high-school that she would always love me, but there were times when she didn't like me all that much. I understand what she means now, I have a feeling that understanding will mature as Keegan matures :-) What I did not feel from the get go is some fabulous glorious adoration for the little needy creature we named Keegan. I have heard other mothers go through this, and I, like them, felt guilty about it. When Keegan arrived what I felt utmost was tired. I felt tired, overwhelmed, I hurt, oh and did I mention tired? Keegan had a lot of tummy problems and was especially difficult. Some days he slept maybe 12 hours; not the 20 or so I was told to expect. There were many nights in those first few months where Lyle and I would ask each other what we had done. Would we ever sleep again? Would we ever have our bedroom back to ourselves? Would Keegan ever sleep anywhere but his carseat? Why had we done this? Was there anyway to, you know, send him back for a quieter model? Is this kid thing ever good?

It was during those first few months that I learned that being a mom was going to be both tougher and easier than I thought. I never thought that I would love Keegan and want to protect him from everything as much as I do. I also never thought that at 2am in the morning after a week with meager sleep I would wonder what would happen if I just left him on the neighbor's doorstep. Of course we never did that; but the thought did enter our minds on some of those nights.

Fast forward to where Keegan is today. He is just a delight! It is so neat to watch him develop and so awesome to see him figure out stuff. I love watching as Keegan has an "ahh haa" moment and connects how something works or how things interact. Keegan at 9 months is a different creature from that immobile, non self sufficient larva that he started out as. A big development that I have really enjoyed is Keegan being mobile. I love that he can show me what he is interested in. I love that he can communicate his happiness and his joy. I still think it's ironic that babies can pout and frown from the day they are born, but it takes them months to learn how to smile.

Some people say that once a baby gets mobile, "boy are you in trouble then!" I have to say I disagree. Keegan is so much better at making himself happy now. He is so much better at communicating. His fascination at the world makes me take another look at everything I have taken for granted. I think about why things work the way they work; is there a better way they could work? Keegan has so much to learn and I am so excited to help him learn it all. I am excited to see Keegan when I get home for work, I am excited to spend the weekend with him, and I am excited to see his smiling face every morning. It's a far cry from the weepy Karissa who would call Lyle on the phone from home and ask when Lyle was going to come home because Keegan had cried for hours this morning and it was all Karissa could do not to abandon him in the neighbor's yard...

The last thing about mommyhood that I wasn't expecting was the connectedness it helps you see. I mean I guess before I knew that everyone was somebody's child. I took that for granted and was sympathetic to people who lost their children or were having trouble with their children. Now the relationship between parent and child seems like so much more. Everytime I see someone I think they are someone's child. When I hear about someone getting hurt or someone comitting a crime I think about them being someone's child and wonder if they have children. I wonder even more so why parents do some of the things they do. Why do some people do things to hurt their child's well-being? Why would anyone ignore a child or not try to put their all into helping their child make sense of the world? I always thought about these things some; but seeing Keegan's little smiling face makes it all the more poignant. I often look at Keegan and wonder who he will be and what he will do. I wonder how much influence Lyle and I have on how he will end up. I guess I just wonder what all parents wonder.

So in summary the State of Mommyhood is great. It is so much harder and easier than I thought it would be. The state of mommyhood has just kept improving as Keegan has been developing into a unique and curious little human being...I think it will keep improving until he learns to talk :-) I have a feeling this little boy has a lot on his mind.

I know that this post is filled with cliche's galore. I guess even though you always know about cliche's you don't always know how it feels to live them ;-)

Another day another ........

So yesterday was an exciting day! Well ok, not really exciting, it just was what every day seems to be lately, get up, get Keegan to day care, work, come home, play, go to bed! However it was the 1st birthday yesterday of one of our friends child. So we had to hustle last night to get everything done, and get to a party. Sadly when I got to daycare to pick up Keegan, he hadn't been down for a nap since 11 in the morning, which meant that he was really tired by 4pm. So in the 5 minute car drive home Keegan was asleep. Well you can imagine how happy he was when I woke him up to bring him into the house. Since the party started at 5, there was no way that we were going to make it for the beginning. So I put Keegan in his crib so he could catch up on his Z's a little.

At about 5:30, Keegan is still asleep, Karissa and I have eaten, and we really need to get moving soon since the party ends at 7, and Keegan should really be back by then to go to bed himself. So we wake up Keegan.... again, which he doesn't really appreciate, but that is the way it goes. We fill him up on solids and get out the door just before 6. It takes about 5 mins to walk over to the other house, and when we get there, we find that none of the other friends have shown up, it is all family... except us... Well there were other kids so at least Keegan felt like he had gone back to daycare, and he just had a blast playing with all the mini dogs that were there. At one point he is just looking at one and laughing his little head off.... man I wish I had brought the video camera. Anyway we stayed for 40 mins or so, and Keegan played with the other kids and dogs. Though it was a little strange Keegan seemed like the only one of the 3 really little kids that was even close to walking. The 1 year old isn't quite there yet, and there was an 11 month old that wasn't even pulling herself up on things, which kind of surprised me. Keegan got a hold of one of the walkers and was just zooming around the room like a madman. So I feel a little better about how at least his walking skills are developing.

So the only other interesting thing that I wanted to mention. I pulled down a package for Linux for creating DVD's on my laptop last night, and was able to create a DVD with all of the videos that I posed on picasaweb a little while back. I have to try again tonight with adding a title menu etc, since navigating without a menu was a little weird. Karissa and I watch some of the video's on the DVD last night just to see how it worked on our own machine. Of course it worked great, and the videos were in widescreen this time, which is the way they were taken. If you want a copy let Karissa or I know, and I will see what I can do about getting you one. This of course was all kicked off by my parents wanting a copy of the videos on DVD, because they are not very computer savvy, which is ok, though it can be kind of weird at times :), and cause me more work...

9 month checkup

I know boring title but I am tired. Keegan had his 9 month check-up yesterday. Before I get into that though Lyle and I had a new experience on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. We got to experience Keegan having the flu. Poor kid wasn't sleeping well at all Tuesday night. He woke up around 3am Wednesday morning and puked all over in his crib. So we're trying to clean that up and Lyle fed him a little bit. We had given Keegan some Motrin at midnight because it seemed like something was hurting him; we figured maybe he was teething or something. Well apparently the Mortin didn't sit well in his tummy; at least that's why we thought he puked.

So at 4am Lyle and I are sitting up trying to decide if Keegan should go into daycare or not. I really didn't want to stay home because I had an experiment set up for Wednesday and if I didn't go in I would have to remake some of the solutions. Not to mention I was trying to get all of the testing done for this experiment before Friday. On Friday all of our samples from our last experimental manufacturing coating come in; so no lab work will get done for a couple weeks after that.

Anyway, Lyle and I decide to see how Keegan seems to feel. Keegan goes back to sleep for about an hour. Then he wakes up and we take him out of his crib to see if he is acting sick. Keegan seems very tired and lethargic but he hasn't thrown up anymore. So I say to Lyle "well maybe Keegan can go to daycare". Then Keegan looks at me and starts to cry. He screws up his face all sad like and then....he pukes all over me. Guess I am staying home with Keegan. So Keegan and I stay up and play for a bit while Lyle gets ready for work. Keegan is just pitiful. We are sitting on the floor playing and Keegan keeps crawling into my lap and leaning into me. I can tell he just feels horrible.

I ask Lyle to watch Keegan for a second so I can make the prerequisite call to work letting them know that I am staying home with my pukey baby. Keegan is tired, so I put him back in his crib and he is out like a light. Lyle calls daycare on his way to work to let them know Keegan won't be coming in. The rest of the day basically goes like this: Keegan sleeps for 2 hrs, Keegan wakes up, I try to get him to eat some formula and drink some water, Keegan is awake for maybe half an hour and then he goes to sleep for a couple hours again. I manage to get some rice cereal and some formula in him and he keeps it down.

At 3:15pm it's time to leave for Keegan's 9 month well child visit. Lyle came home early from work so that he could go with us. Keegan woke up from a nap at 3pm and is raring to go.

We find out Keegan weighs 20lbs 14 ounces and is 28 inches long. He is now average instead of being 75th percentile. As the doctor watches Keegan try to climb over everything she mentions that with his level of activity he might drop below average for height and weight for a while. This is perfectly fine, she explains, that he will probably be just way more interested in exploring than eating.

I had promised Keegan no shots this time. Well I lied. I asked Dr. Kuku about getting a flu shot for Keegan; she thinks it is a great idea since he is in daycare. Keegan has also had this rash in his groin area that went away for a little bit and then has been back for a couple days. Ends up it is a yeast infection. Poor guy also started getting some diaper rash again on Monday. So now little Kee needs Butt Paste on his butt and Nystatin on his groin every time the diaper is changed. After all of his frenzied action during the examination Keegan is starting to get tired. So, of course now it is time to get his flu shot. The nurse comes in to give him the shot. Keegan is all helpful smiles until the nurse pokes him. Then he screams, but not for that long. Next we have to go and get Keegan's finger pricked for his 9 month blood testing.

We have to go and wait for our turn outside the lab. By now Keegan is getting bored and tired. Lyle and I take turns walking him in circles around the waiting area; Keegan thinks this is great fun. Keegan likes it even better because people stop and wave at him; this just tickles him. Then Keegan's name is called. I go sit in the chair with Keegan on my lap while Lyle waits with our stuff in the waiting room. Keegan is getting a bit listless but still has a little smile for the nurse. That is until she pokes his finger; then Keegan screams. The nurse has to squeeze his finger to get the blood into a little vial. Keegan screams like he is dying; he has this supersonic shriek that makes your ear drums ring. It was just really special.

Then the nurse gives me a cotton ball to hold on Keegan's finger to stop the bleeding. Well guess what, Keegan doesn't want a cotton ball held on his finger. He wants to leave. So I am trying to hold him and a tiny little cotton ball pressed to his tiny little finger. It just not happening, he yanks my hand away and the cotton ball falls off and Keegan starts dripping blood everywhere. Try to remember neither Lyle nor I have gotten any sleep for the last few nights because of Keegan's antics. I ask the nurse for some help and she is like "Oh, my". So she kneels down in front of Keegan while I hold him and she holds the cotton ball to his finger until he stops bleeding. Well the nurse touching his finger starts off another new set of wails. I am sweating by now; don't know why but it suddenly seems really warm in the room.

Lyle peeks around the corner to pass in Keegan's nook. Finally Keegan's finger stops bleeding and we are done. Lyle hoists Keegan onto his shoulders, which Keegan loves. Now Keegan is smiling and giggling (with tears still running down his face) as we leave the building. I grab my purse, his diaper bag, and look down on my coat to realize that Keegan must have hit my coat with some puke earlier today; lovely.

Keegan hasn't vomited since early this morning. So I offer him his full dinner of oatmeal, fruit, and veggies. He gobbles down most of the stuff like a champ and then smiles at me and pukes it up all over me. Okay, no more food for Keegan today.

Keegan is at my mom's today; hopefully he is feeling better. I really don't want to have to stay home again tomorrow. Not that I object to spending the time with Keegan; I am just getting behind on things at work.

Let it Snow!

So latest weather report from Oakdale, MN...it was just snowing here. I looked outside and it looked like sand was blowing through the air. Upon closer inspection I realized it was snowing. The quick bout of flurries last only a minute or two but it was exciting just the same. I know, I know, a lot of people hate snow but I think we should all enjoy it and not get bogged down in snow-negativity. Let's all try to forget about what snow does to the roads and to our driveways and think happy snow thoughts. Soon we will be able to go ice skating, build snowmen, throw snowballs, put up Christmas lights, and rejoice as we enter the holiday season. Yep, the holiday season is on its way. Time to start your Christmas shopping.

Speaking of Christmas shopping, this Saturday Lyle, Keegan, Ruby, and I had to go to PetCo to pick up dog and cat food. I thought that since we were at PetCo we might as well get the pets and my parents' pets their Xmas presents. When we got home from PetCo I safely stored the pets Xmas presents in the hall closet before the Halloween party.

Fast-forward to Sunday night. Lyle, Keegan, and I went to eat dinner at Perkins and upon our arrival home I noticed Ruby was chewing a bone. It was a new bone and looked suspiciously like the bone we had bought her for Christmas. After closer inspection I realized that she had removed the tag and left that further forward in the sunroom; the tag was stuck to a cat toy that she had also dragged out of the bag. As the night went on I found a dog toy meant for my parents' dog in our bed and another dog toy meant for Ruby (for Xmas) in the bathroom. I have a weird suspicion that Ruby had some help; as we also found cat toys in suspicious places. I can't wait until the cats, Ruby, and Keegan all gang up together to drive me crazy.

Okay rewind now to Saturday night and a different topic; the Halloween party. The party went very well. Thanks to Julie who brought some yummy pnut brittle and Cate and Chris who brought some yummy almond bark. Both of these were very good! Lyle and I enjoyed all the costumes people came in. It was also great fun watching all of the babies play together. You can see pictures of the party online here. We were so happy that everyone could make it. That party is always a ton of work to get together but I think everyone enjoys it; so all is good.

We spent most of Sunday taking down all the Halloween decorations. The house looks so much cleaner without them; guess it must be the absence of all those spider webs. In another month or so we can put up all the Christmas decorations. I still haven't figured out what we're going to do with the tree. It's hard enough to keep the cats out of the tree; Jubei has climbed it a couple times and knocked it over. I can't imagine how we are going to keep Keegan out of it. I guess we'll put all the non-choking hazard ornaments near the bottom this year. I have this nightmare of a cat climbing the tree and knocking it on Keegan; or of Keegan climbing the tree and knocking it onto the cats....guess it could happen either way.

It's an exciting week coming up; Keegan has his 9 month well child visit on Wednesday and then we have Family Christmas Pictures this Sunday. Oh, boy the fun never stops :-)

Videos uploaded & halloween party

Thanks for all the people who came over on Saturday for the annual Halloween party we like to throw... well mostly like ;). Anyway it was fun, and the pictures were put up yesterday by Karissa (who does a fabulous job of keeping the pictures up to date on picasaweb!).

Aside from that there are now some videos of Keegan posed on picasaweb. Here is a direct link to the videos. But you better hope you have at least two hours to get through them all. Since I have been delaying putting them up, we now have a fair amount of video. They all had to be reduced in size as well to actually fit into a size that picasaweb will accept. So sorry for the poor resolution! If you let us know we can try and make you a DVD of them, but I haven't quite got all that down yet.

Well hope you all had a good weekend, I just wanted to make sure people knew there was some new content to waste more time :)

Trick or Treat - Or a Halloween Tour of the Grandparents

Good to see that Lyle has *finally* posted something to the blog!

As Lyle mentioned Keegan was a Lion at daycare and then Tigger for the night. He didn't wear the Tigger costume to daycare because it's a bear (or should I say tiger?) to get off and on; whoever designed this costume was a dodo bird.

Halloween was a bit of a blur. We got home and I fed Keegan his solids for dinner. Then I changed Keegan into some jammies and Lyle and I got his Tigger costume on (yes it took two people to get it on him). Keegan suffered the costume just fine although it took a bit of effort to get him buckled into his carseat with that big fake Tigger belly. Then we dropped Ruby off at my parents house so that she wouldn't be alone when all the trick-or-treaters came to call. We went from there over to Lyle's parents house.

Keegan showed off at his Gma and Gpa Eckert's. We ended up taking his costume off so that Rick and Liz could see how good he crawled. Keegan stood up for them and even took a step before falling back down. We spent a little over an hour there goofing around. Then it was time to suit back up into the Tigger costume and go over to my parents house.

My dad made gluten-free pizza for dinner. This was really yummy and I was absolutely starving. We all exchanged Halloween presents. Halloween is a really big deal in my family so there is always some gift giving going on :-)

Keegan was adorable but it was after 6pm by this point and he was getting tired. We got some video of him loping around in his Tigger costume and then tried to put him down for a nap. He wasn't having any of that. So shortly after 7:30 we left and went home. Keegan's bedtime is 7pm so he was pretty cranky by this point. We had taken off the Tigger costume when we put him down for a nap.

When we got home we realized that our neighbors Tom and Joan were home now. I had promised them earlier in the year that Keegan would stop by to show off his costume. So, looking at my sleepy and cranky baby, I sighed and put him back in the Tigger costume. This time Keegan wasn't so tolerant, he got upset and started crying, but he was only unhappy for a moment. We went over to Tom and Joan's and Keegan picked a pnut butter cup out of the candy jar. Then mommy took the pnut butter cup away from him; this kind of pissed him off. I told him it was a good choice in candy though, and that mommy would eat it later for him :-)

Then it was to bed time for Keegan. While Lyle read Keegan to sleep; I passed out candy to trick-or-treaters. Year before last we only had 5 trick-or-treaters come the whole night. This time it was really busy. I think we had 20 trick-or-treaters just between 7:45 and 8:30pm. We had left out candy for kids to take and when I went to retrieve the cauldron of candy (once we got home) it was almost empty. So either we had a lot of trick or treaters before we got back home or a couple kids took a lot of candy...

By 8:30pm, Lyle and I were exhausted. It had been a long and busy day. We were in bed by 9pm. Everyone slept very well through the night. In fact I had to really work to get Keegan to wake up at 6:30am so that I could drop him off at his gma's for the day.

I am very excited that we have a kid now so that someone other than me (in the house) is super excited about Halloween. We have our big Halloween party this Saturday. I am excited about that since quite a few people are going to be coming. Although, I am always amazed at how much work it is to get everything decorated, all the groceries bought, all the creepy foods made, and get the house cleaned up. Unfortunately for us this week is the off week for the cleaners. So, I took yesterday afternoon off to get all of the grocery shopping done and clean up the basement. It was weird to vacuum again; I haven't done that for a while :-)

I just had to take yesterday afternoon off. I was feeling kind of overwhelmed with everything that needed to get done at home. There's the party, and then there are normal things like trimming the bushes before it snows, getting the wash started, and making some lasagna to freeze. Not to mention it's that time of year again and we need to start doing some Christmas shopping. I did remember to schedule a portrait sitting for the family though. Hopefully we can do photocards for Christmas this year; that is if the pictures turn out okay.

Even better Lyle is finally getting paid for his latest contracting gig. Just in time for Christmas! That's the best Christmas present ever ;-) Anyway, time to go back to work. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Keegan the Cat!

Sadly Karissa seems to think that Keegan is a monkey with all the crawling, swinging, and bouncing that he does. However he was a very happy cat yesterday! As Karissa mentioned it was his first Halloween and he dressed up as a lion for daycare, and then was Tigger last night. Boy he is quite the handsome dude when he is all dressed up :) We will get pictures up on the website soon, but it will probably be early next week since we have a lot to do this weekend for some reason.

Also I wanted everyone to know, that I am planning on uploading the video we have taken of Keegan so far. Now sad to say, I was just about to do it because I have them stored on a device that would have made it pretty easy to upload. Sadly the two videos I currently have with me are too large in size so I will have to rerip them to get them smaller so that you can all see them. Again it will probably be some time next week (hopefully).

Things are going pretty well around our house other than the occasional bruising that Keegan sustains from falling over and all that jazz. Karissa got a good video of him standing last night. He can do it for a good 10-30 seconds when he wants to, and has tried to take steps from there. Last night he only made it one step before he fell, but the first one is always the hardest right? Sadly we didn't catch that on video, that was over at my parents house, and we hadn't gotten around to taking out the video camera yet. We do have some great pictures of him standing etc. though.

Lastly I wanted to mention that Karissa and I both heard a report this last week about Doctors now testing for Autism around Keegans age, and up till the age of 2. So we looked at all the "early signs" which can be found here. Anyway just thought I would let you know that it looks like Keegan is doing just fine from that standpoint.
Keegan is a little behind on getting teeth, since he still doesn't have his first one, and most kids have at least one by 9 months. I figure this isn't a problem after hearing a story from a co-worker who's kid started to fall down the stairs and was caught before getting past the first couple. But had his front tooth knocked loose by the impact. They were able to just shove the tooth back in, but it sounded pretty painful! So I figured it is a good thing he doesn't have any based on all the movement he has been doing lately.

Well I have done my good fatherly duty of posting to the blog once every 3 months or so :). -- LATER

Keegan is a monkey & a lion

Last Friday, while I was out at the plant, Lyle dropped Keegan off at daycare. Lyle went to put Keegan's bottles in the fridge only to turn around and find that Keegan had crawled over to one of the highchairs, pulled himself up on it, and had proceeded to grab the tray and start swinging from the highchair tray. Lyle was amazed. Keegan's teacher turned around and sighed saying "Yep, he does that all the time." I guess I didn't realized swinging from things was a skill that babies learned before proficient walking.

Speaking of walking...Keegan can stand up by himself and take a couple of steps before falling down. Oh yeah and he tried to climb the bookcase again. He's just very....active....either that or he's part monkey. People keep telling it's great that his is so active, curious, and persistent. I agree but coming home at night is like having a second job; a fun job but a job nonetheless.

I get developmental news letters from Healthy Start for each month of Keegan's age. Reading through the last one there were a couple study results and interesting recommendations. First thing that I hadn't though of; they were recommending to not tell your baby "no" for everything but to explain to them why they shouldn't do that thing. You're supposed to save no for really important live-threatening things. Unfortunately I am trained to say "no" because that's what the dog and cats understand. So we have been trying this out. For instance when Keegan tries to tip the pets' water bowel over I say "That will make you wet and cold, you don't want to do that" instead of "no". Then I relocate him to a different part of the house. So far it hasn't been very effective; he really likes the water bowl. He likes to splash in it and lift it up and tip it over himself.

The other thing we have been having an issue with is that Keegan would rather play with anything other than his toys. The newsletter suggested hiding toys places to interest babies in them. So I started doing this with some of his toys. I don't hide them really well, but I'll stick one in a drawer in the kitchen and one sticking out between the couch cushions and maybe one between some books. This has worked like a charm. Keegan gets *so* excited to find the toys and then he will sit and play with the toy for a few minutes. Only thing I don't like about it is that there are toys all over the house. That and I bet we will open a drawer 5 years down the road and find a baby toy in there :-)

As I mentioned in the last post Keegan gained some new skills while I was at the plant. In addition to those, my mom has been teaching him to give high 5's. Keegan is very proficient at waving, he can kind of clap, and now he has added high 5's to his repertoire of gestures. This weekend he said his first word, and it was "dada". Actually it was more like "dadadadadadada". Whenever he says it now I tell Lyle "Oh, I think Keegan wants daddy" I don't actually think that Keegan associates dada with daddy but it's fun to think he does.

Just a couple more things to write about. Last night we took the cats (Loki and Jubei) to the vet for their yearly physical. Of course Keegan came along. Keegan loved being at the vet. I tried to hold with some standard of cleanliness and make him stay in his stroller but then finally gave up. Keegan and Jubei had a great time crawling around the exam room (Jubei walked though). Loki did his normal routine of sitting on the exam table and shaking in terror while trying to hide his head under my arm. Dr. Bear, our vet, and the vet tech had a lot of fun with Jubei, like normal. They also enjoyed meeting Keegan and watching Keegan and Jubei "play" together. Keegan was crazy happy the whole time we were there. Dr. Bear made a comment about how active Keegan was and how crazy our house must be with the 3 cats, Ruby, and Keegan. It's crazy but it's a good crazy...most of the time.

So today is Keegan's first Halloween. We got him all dressed in his lion costume this morning. I was going to go in as a pirate but was up really late last night ordering baby snow boots online (long story there) so when I woke up this morning getting all my pirate gear on looked like too much work. Instead I put on a black skirt, Halloween shirt, and my orange and black striped knee high socks. I think I look suitably Halloweeny. I stopped by Cub on my way into work to grab some Halloween cupcakes for my coworkers. Can you believe there is a line at Cub Foods at 6am for Halloween cupcakes? Ridiculous.

Anyway, at work there is a witch, an evil jester, and a Halloweeny me. I talked to Lyle and the little lion got to daycare just fine. Keegan seems perfectly thrilled to be crawling around in his Lion pants (they took the lion jacket and hood off until the Halloween parade). Tonight Keegan will be Tigger; unfortunately the Tigger costume isn't the easiest to change diapers in so he didn't wear it to daycare. I know, I know the kid's got two costumes for Halloween. What can I do, baby costumes are *so* awesome I just couldn't resist.

Tonight we are going to change costumes. Go over and hit Lyle's parents, maybe come back to our house and hit the neighbors, and then we will go and eat dinner at my parents house. It will be a busy night. I really shouldn't have stayed up so late last night but, what can I say, sometimes I get distracted online.

I should probably do some amount of work today. So off I go to work, work, work. Hope everyone had/has a Happy Halloween. I think Halloween is in a tie with Xmas for my favorite holiday. I am so excited to have a kid so we can celebrate with enthusiasm and not get too many weird looks.

At the Plant Again

So after spending a week at home after our South Dakota trip I got to leave on a trip for work on Tuesday. I am back out in Oregon at the plant again.

Things are just as slow and frustrating as ever. On my 12 hour shift yesterday we had the coating web break (2 hrs downtime), unwrap table break (2 hrs downtime), an accumulater break (1 hr downtime). In the 12 hrs I was here we got three coatings done; our goal was to do one coating an hour. Then when I came back in 12 hrs later they had made wonderful progress and we were back on schedule. That is until the RTO broke; I have no idea what the RTO does, only that we've been waiting 3 hrs for it to be fixed.

I am on a strange shift this time, noon - midnight. Better than doing the night shift but a weird one. I get confused about what day it is and I am not sure when I am eating lunch, dinner, or breakfast. I will be here until midnight tonight and then I will catch the 5am flight back to Minneapolis tomorrow morning. Somehow this flight doesn't get into Minneapolis until 2pm. It's going to be a long 24 hrs.

All that being said, Keegan has been changing so fast that it is hard to be away from him and Lyle. In the three days I have been gone Keegan has said "bye bye" (although it was hard to hear bcs he had his nook in his mouth) and he has also learned how to give high 5's. Keegan is learning hand gestures very quickly now. He knows how to wave bye bye and will wave bye bye when ever you say bye bye to him. He also knows how to clap and now, how to give high 5's.

It sucks to miss all of these little things but I try to remember that being away from Keegan and Lyle always let's me appreciate being back with them even more. Still, it sucks. Especially since we have been on so many vacations lately and now our Halloween party is coming up. It just seems like I haven't been home at all lately and there is so much to do.

Anyway, I suppose I should get back to waiting. Supposidly the coater should be up in another hour or so. If I am lucky Brian will decide to come in a bit early and I can leave around 11pm and get a few hrs of sleep before catching my plane home.

Road Trip to South Dakota - Day 4 (and the trip home)

So Keegan followed his new found tradition of waking up at 1am to be fed and then waking up again at 6am to eat. Keegan went back to sleep right away after eating and Lyle and I were grateful. Everyone was kind of dragging a little bit this morning. Apparently we had tried to do a bit too much the previous 3 days and we were ready to take a break.

Lyle, Cate, Chris, and I were all up around 9am and then Keegan woke up around 9:30am. I fed Keegan and we all piled into the car. It was nasty outside. Probably around 50 degrees, windy, and drizzling. We had lucked out so far; all of the previous days had been absolutely beautiful. Now we were paying for it. The plan for today was to go to Wind Cave and then maybe think of something to do after that.

We stopped at a different coffee shop in Hill City. This was a very nice coffee shop, very similar to what you would find in the Twin Cities. Chris, Cate, and I went in while Lyle stayed in the car with an already sleeping Keegan. Lyle was starting to feel a bit under the weather with a cold, and I was still fighting my lovely cold. Anyway, I got a Cafe Mocha and a hot chocolate for Lyle. I also got a white chocolate raspberry scone for breakfast (yummy!). We all got back into the car with our drinks and drove to Wind Cave. We were trying to make it to the 11:30am cave tour.

We got there a little after 11am. It was a Saturday so there were quit a few more people waiting for the tour. Keegan got to crawl around the carpet for awhile and we looked at some rock samples from the cave. We toured the gift shop and found a cute kids book on how caves are formed along with a map of Wind Cave. Lyle and I decided to buy those on the way out.

When it was time to go to the cave we all piled outside and stood under a shelter to avoid the rain. It was blustery and damp and we were all kind of huddled there waiting for the guide. Finally the state park guide arrived and took us to the natural entrance of the cave, which was outside. The natural entrance was a hole about 6.5" in diameter. Wind cave gets its name from the hurricane force winds that can sometimes be found going in and out of the natural entrance. One of the little boys on the tour thought we were going down that hole and got really scared. We didn't have to shimmy down there though; good thing too the backpack would have never fit...much less my butt.

Anyway the entrance we used was an entrance that was made for excavation and tours a long time ago. They have a revolving door installed at the entrance now; after you pass through that you go past a thick wood door with iron bars in it. This used to be the old door. Apparently this old door modified climate in the cave enough that it caused a collapse in the 1950's or 60's (I can't remember exactly). Anyway they put in the revolving door to help with this.

The tour guide on this tour was awesome. He explained that they have some experiments going on with different types of lights in the cave. Apparently normal incandescent lights encourage algae growth which they don't want in the cave; they are looking at going to LEDs since they are cooler and cheaper to run.

Wind Caves was much more enclosed than Jewel Caves. You walked on the ground for the majority of the tour; which I liked. What I didn't like is that some passages are very low and enclosed...normally not a problem. Of course if you have a baby in a backpack, like Lyle did, that means you almost have to get down on your knees and crawl through some spots. I was Lyle's spotter and I stayed behind him to let him know how deep he had to duck. It's a bit of a trick to watch your own footing and try not to bump your own head while telling Lyle "okay, now down a couple inches more..."

They had told us when we bought the tickets that some of the passages were low and we would need to duck some. Unfortunately I think Lyle had to squat or crawl for 70% of the tour. Lyle definitely worked up a sweat by the end of the tour. Oddly enough Keegan slept for probably an hour of the tour. This ended up being a good thing since the passages were also very narrow. You are never supposed to touch the walls of a cave because this can damage the natural growth of a cave; it's the number one cave tour rule. Well try telling this to a 8 month old baby who keeps stretching to reach the walls from the backpack. We did pretty good in preventing Keegan from doing cave touching but he got a couple fingerprints in here and there.

It was a good tour. Wind Cave is the third largest cave in the nation. The second is Jewel Cave and the first is Mammoth Cave. Both Wind Cave and Jewel Cave, despite their enormous size, are thought to only have 5-10% of the total underground cave area mapped and excavated. After the tour we went to the gift shop to make some purchases and then got back in the car.

We didn't really have any solid plans on what to do next; so we decided to go to Rapid City for lunch and then maybe stop by the Reptile Gardens on the way back to the lodge.

We ate at a late lunch at a pretty good Mexican restaurant in Rapid City, I can't remember the name of it. Then we started talking about finding a book store. We had been joking earlier on the way from Hill City to Hot Springs that wouldn't it be awesome if all the sudden in the middle of the Black Hills there was a Barnes and Noble? Anyway, Lyle did a search on his cell phone and found out there were 3 Borders Books in the Rapid City area. We decided to forsake the rural roads and visit some good old surburbaness. We drove to the Borders and went in to peruse the books. The Borders was insanely busy and it was right next to a Best Buy.

We were having trouble downloading the pictures from the camera to the laptop. Lyle wanted to get a USB SD card reader so that we could read the SD card from the camera. So next we went to Best Buy. Cate found a CD that she had wanted and we found our USB SD card reader.

We all got back into the car. It was still miserable out and it was around 4-5pm. We decided to forgo Reptile Gardens and just go back to the lodge.

When we got back to the lodge I fed Keegan and then we let him roam around for awhile. We all started getting our stuff packed up. I was standing in the living room when a mouse ran out from under the couch to under the fridge. It startled me, Lyle and Chris who had seen it. We thought something had nibbled on the bread we had left out from the night before but couldn't decide if someone had eaten some of the bread or if something had nibbled it. Well, now we knew! Cate and I were both unhappy with this new development...we had all really liked this lodge. Chris and Lyle didn't think it was that big of a deal...after all we were in the country and this was a field mouse. Well life went on. We put Keegan to bed and resumed packing.

With almost everything packed we ate a dinner of snacks again and then went to bed.

Keegan woke up at 11pm wanting a bottle so we complied. Then we all got up at 5am and, after final packing and loading, we left by 6am.

Keegan was very crabby for the first 2 hours of the drive. He didn't want to eat, didn't want to play with any toys, he just wanted to be out of his carseat and I couldn't really blame him. Lyle and I listened to our audio book some more. We stopped at a gas station for snacks and a potty break. Keegan got to eat his solids then and when we got back into the car he was happier and fell asleep. There were a couple more pit stops on the way home but all in all Keegan was good for the remainder of the trip. It was rainy and cold the whole drive home. We finally got home around 5:30pm; Lyle and I were tired and Keegan wanted to play, play, play.

It had been a good trip overall. Although we learned that traveling with a baby is a lot of work! I was very impressed with how good Keegan was the whole time. Of course, there were times when having him there made me a bit of a nervous wreck...I was worried about his being too cold in the caves, I was worried about him not eating because he was tired and cranky, I was worried about him being too noisy at night and waking Cate and Chris up, there was just so much to worry about :-) Despite all of my worries we had fun. Though I am having second thoughts about traveling internationally with him; at least until he is off formula and baby food!

Road Trip to South Dakota - Day 3

Keegan woke us up at 6 am again to eat. After a quick feeding he went back to sleep. Lyle and I got up around 8:30am. While I got dressed and ready; Lyle started making french toast for all of us. Cate, Chris, Lyle, and I ate french toast together. Shortly after Keegan woke up and I fed him. We all discussed what we were going to do today. It was decided that since it was supposed to rain the next day that we would save taking the Wind Cave tour for tomorrow. Tops for the agenda today was seeing Mount Rushmore. Second most important was going to Hot Spring to see the Mammoth site.

We all got into the car to go to Mount Rushmore. When we got there Keegan was strapped in his backpack and hoisted onto Lyle's back. Mount Rushmore was very nice; it was very impressive after the disappointment of Crazy Horse. It's a very beautiful site. As we walked down the promenade bordered by flags of the various states; we heard that a tour would be starting in 5 minutes. So we decided to join the tour. The tour went along presidents trail snaking around the amphitheater and beneath the carving. Mount Rushmore was different than all of us expected. The carving was higher up and further away than any of us thought it was going to be; it also looked smaller.

As we had found was the trend; Keegan got very restless when we stopped moving to listen about the history behind Mount Rushmore. Between bouts of blowing my horribly stuffy nose, I whispered to Lyle that if he put the backpack down I would take Keegan out and let him play a little. The tour moved very slowly; so Keegan and I "walked" behind the group. Occasionally I let him crawl along the paved trail. He was having a blast and keep giving people these huge grins. He made quit a few friends during the tour.

We all enjoyed the walk and the tour. The tour took a very reasonable 30 minutes and afterwards we wandered around the gift shop. I was hungry and convinced everyone we should check out the cafeteria. The general consensus was pizza for lunch would be nummy. After a quick perusal of the cafeteria and a potty stop we decided to get lunch in Keystone. Keegan needed a quick diaper change in the car before we were off.

Lyle had seen a pizza place across from the Keystone Mall. I think calling it a mall was a bit of a stretch. It was maybe seven or eight touristy type shops in a row with a somewhat western theme to the building architecture. We found out shortly after parking, that most of these shops were closed for the season. So we ended up at a different pizza shop in the Mall. Oddly enough the pizza place was run by a middle eastern family; it was odd because so far this part of South Dakota had been predominately non-ethnic. The pizza was nothing special but it was pizza. Keegan ate a bottle with some prodding and we paid. Then back into the car and off to Hot Springs.

We found the Mammoth Site without much trouble. On the way to Hot Springs Keegan and I both fell asleep in the car. Cate and Chris sat in the back looking over maps and information on the area. Once at Mammoth Site Lyle went to purchase tickets for us all and I perused the shop. I bought Keegan a small stuffed mammoth that he liked a lot and a small t-shirt that said something mammothly funny on it. We went in to watch the pre-tour video. Keegan was in his stroller and decided that he didn't really want to be in his stroller. He was getting tired and crabby. So him and I left the video and went to walk around some. When the tour started we fell in with the rest of the group. Shortly after we entered the mammoth site Lyle and I realized there was going to be a lot of standing and not much moving; not an ideal situation with Keegan.

Lyle took Keegan out of the stroller and put Keegan on his shoulders. This had Keegan giggling gleefully and loudly. The tour guide had us listen to her through phones that were propped over the railing that was around the mammoth site. It was cool to see all of the mammoth bones. The tour guide was unimpressive though; she was maybe 15 and kept describing the mammoths as "like, really cool" not the kind of tour I was expecting. Maybe I am just getting old. But hearing about how mammoths thought the water hole was "like just awesome" was just weird. Needless to say Lyle and I stopped listening to her and tried to keep Keegan busy. After Keegan got bored of riding on Lyle's shoulders Lyle let him down to hang onto the chain link that enclosed the area. Keegan happily stood there holding onto the chain link and rattling it back and forth with a huge smile on his face; he though he was *so* cool :-)

After the tour we went to the exhibition area which was really lame. It had a replica of the columbia mammoth and some cases exhibited replicas of animal bones etc. We then took the elevator down to the research lab area. Down there there were a couple small windows looking into the lab and a sheet of paper taped to the wall that said "go ahead and ask question, we can hear you!". Except there wasn't a single person in the lab that we could see; so we went back upstairs and got into the car and left. All in all a somewhat disappointing stop; although seeing the mammoths was neat. We debated going to find a bookstore in Hot Springs but we were all sick of driving around so we decided to go back to the lodge. On the way we though we would go through Custer Park and drive the wild life loop.

It was getting late, probably around 4pm, when we got to Custer Park. The wildlife loop was awesome. On the way there Lyle pulled over because Chris and I wanted to take pictures of the prairie dogs. Lyle, being a Nebraska native, kept mumbling about why in the world would we want pictures of the annoying vermin he used to throw rocks at. Chris and I tried running down the prairie dogs to get pictures of them and, when they proved too fast for us, we resorted to stalking them. Well that didn't work very well either; we got a lot of pictures of empty holes in the ground though. Keegan had been sleeping and, upon the stopping of the car, had started to wake up. Apparently he got upset when he woke up and Lyle honked the horn on the car yelling that Keegan was getting upset and that we probably had enough rodent pictures. Chris and I returned to the car.

Upon entering the wildlife loop we saw a ton of elk, antelope, wild turkeys, prairie dogs and even a coyote. Finally we saw the motherload of all creatures; a Bison sitting quietly in a field. We were so excited; I especially could hardly contain myself this was *so* much more exciting than a prairie dog. As the bison slept in the field I thought about all the road signs we saw that said "Buffalo are dangerous, admire them from your car"; he didn't look that dangerous. Shortly after we saw a whole herd of buffalo in the road in front of us. The small amount of traffic going through the park came to a stop as we tried to weave our way through all of the buffalo. I opened up my window to get good pictures. That seemed to make Lyle kind of nervous; he was like "you can shut your window any time now".

The most exciting part of the ride was over after the buffalo. We realized we were only about 1/3 the way through the wild life loop and it had been some 45 minutes since we started. I was getting particularly grumpy being hungry, carsick, and tired. Keegan had woken up and Cate and Chris were trying to amuse him as he crabbed in the back. Finally we gave up on trying to get to the lodge before Keegan's feeding time and pulled the car over. Lyle fed Keegan in the back of the car while Cate and Chris wandered around looking for neat rocks. I tried to figure out how long it was going to take us to get back to the lodge. Realizing how far we still had to go; I recommended driving by Mt. Rushmore in the dark since it was already getting dark.

I was extremely car sick and asked Lyle if I could drive for a bit since that always makes me feel better. We all got back into the car when Keegan was done eating and had been changed. Shortly after I started driving we ran into the infamous burros. The walked right up to the car and stared in the windows; we stopped to take pictures. I have got to say the drive was probably one of the funnest ones I've ever done. With a spd limit of 30 mph and all the twisting and turning and the one way tunnels it was a bit of an adventure and was a fun, if long, drive. After we left the park we stopped to take some pictures of Mt. Rushmore all lit up.

After 3 hours in Custer State Park (who knew the drive would take that long) we ended up back at the lodge around 7pm. It was bedtime for Keegan and he was crabby and wouldn't eat. Keegan went down to bed. The rest of us were strangely exhausted despite having spent the majority of the day in the car. Cate and I went to go take naps. Lyle and Chris ran out to the gas station to get gas and pop. When I woke up I had another excellent dinner of popcorn and ice cream cake. We watched "America's Most Smartest Model" on TV and then went to bed. Everyone was probably in bed by 9pm. Keegan woke up around 10:30 pm hungry, so we fed him and then went back to bed. Trying to rest up for our last day in South Dakota.

Road Trip to South Dakota - Day 2

So on to Day 2 of our trip. Keegan woke up at 6am hungry so we gave him a bottle. We convinced him to go back to sleep. Lyle and I got up around 8:30am; Cate and Chris got up around the same time. Lyle and I spent a little time playing the Wii while we waited for Keegan to wake up. By 9am Keegan was awake again. We all piled into the car and headed into Hill City to get something for breakfast. We found a coffee shop in Hill City; thank goodness for small blessings. Keegan was strapped into his stroller and we went over to get breakfast. The coffee shop was also the town's office supply store, copy center, book store, and Harry Potter merchandise store. It was interesting, I guess you need to have your fingers in a lot of pies to make it as a business in such a small town. I got a Cafe Mocha Latte and a bagel with cream cheese. We sat outside the shop in the sun and ate breakfast; while plotting out the events we would undertake for the day. Keegan was content in his stroller for a few minutes and then I had to get up and walk him in circles to keep him happy.

Cate and I poured over the map and it was decided that we were closest to the Crazy Horse memorial so we would go there first. Crazy Horse was on the way to Jewel Caves so we would go there second. Then we planned on driving through Custer State Park on our way out to Mount Rushmore. The drive to Crazy Horse was nice; the black hills are very pretty. We had all heard that paying to get into the Crazy Horse monument was silly so we were looking for a place to see it from the road. Fat chance of that; we ended up down a one way road at a ticket booth and payed $25 for the car to get into the memorial area. Keegan had fallen asleep on the way there; and being we were going through the caves next Lyle and I were reluctant to wake him. We took pictures of the memorial from the car and then I offered to stay in the car with Keegan while the others went into the Crazy Horse Museum.

I wasn't feeling great; I still had a cold from earlier in the week and was more than happy to sit out in the car and wait. Lyle, Cate, and Chris came back from the museum maybe 10 minutes after they had gone in. There was a lot of mumbling about how I really hadn't missed much and how lame it was to have paid anything to see that. For an additional $4 a person we could have taken a bus up to the memorial but that seemed really lame considering we had paid $25 to get in there in the first place. Grumbling about what a lame stop this was we got back into the car and took off for Jewel Caves.

Of course Keegan woke up as soon as we left the Crazy Horse memorial parking lot. Then as we started moving again he promptly went back to sleep. On the way to Jewel Caves we passed a lot of forest where the pine trees had no needles and were just dark sticks of wood sticking up from the ground. We found out later that a fire had gone through the area in 2004 destroying much of the forest in that region.

We got to Jewel Caves 30 minutes before the next tour. So Lyle and I brought in Keegan's bottle and we tried to get him to eat some formula. There was a little room where we could watch a video. Cate and I sat down to watch the video while I fed Keegan. Lyle and Chris disappeared; a short time later they reappeared with pictures of themselves trying to get through the example 7.5 inch crawl space that you needed to be able to make it through to take the spelunking cave tour. After Keegan was done eating he crawled around under the chairs in front of the video screen. There was really no one there and the floor looked reasonably clean; since he was going to be strapped in his backpack for the next hour and a half I figured there was no harm in him getting rid of all that energy.

We had to run back to the car to divest ourselves of all bags and other items. We were only allowed to bring in cameras and the baby backpack. The cave tour started with a long elevator ride down. Keegan enjoyed this immensely and kept shouting out and giggling with joy. Jewel caves was immense; bigger than any caves I had been in before. There were over 700 steps we had to take up and down. All of the steps were made of aluminum that was kind of slippery in the dampness of the cave; the rails were also aluminum and were wet to the touch. The steepness of the stairs made me nervous. I was trying to make sure and let Lyle know when he needed to duck so he wouldn't whack Keegan's head on the cave ceiling. All of the catwalks and steep staircases went over very deep crevices and chasms in the cave. I do not like heights. I was also on cold medicine and that was making me a little dizzy. I fought vertigo the whole time we were in that cave. The openess of the cave and the height of the stairs were horrible. I was constantly scared that Lyle would slip (which of course he didn't). And everytime Lyle turned to talk to me with Keegan and the backpack hanging out over the rail over a chasm I almost had a stroke. I know Keegan was strapped into the backpack but I keep having this vision of him falling down, down, down....

I figured I was the only neurotic one of the group. Thankfully I wasn't. As we crossed one particularly long catwalk over a particularly deep chasm, Cate murmured something to the effect of; wow wasn't this just great taking this little aluminum catwalk over a large height, she didn't like heights and she also didn't find the wet slippery handrails particularly reassuring. It made me happy that I wasn't the only one finding this cave walk a little intimidating. By the end of it all I was just happy to get out of there. Keegan was very good throughout the tour. He would start "talking" whenever we stopped moving though. Lyle had to keep walking in circles to keep Keegan calm. Keegan wasn't upset he was just excited. At one point the tour guide asked if we had any questions and Keegan said "Booo GGaaa Gaaa Maaa" really loud. Everyone got a laugh out of that.

Well now it was almost 2pm and we still hadn't eaten lunch. We drove into the town of Custer and ate at a small restaurant there. The food was nothing special but it was good enough. I felt kind of bad that we left a ton of cheerios under the high chair. I think Keegan dropped 10x as many cheerios as he actually ate. Custer had a candy shop in it. We went to the candy shop and got some dark chocolate covered caramels and some truffles. Keegan walked around the shop with some assistance and then snuck some hard candy sticks out of a bin and tried to chew on them. I put them back and let him know he's not big enough for that yet. The owner of the shop said "well you could buy some for him to eat later"... Luckily she was just kidding and we left the shop planning to go to Custer State Park.

When we got to Custer State Park the park ranger at the entrance asked us if we had ever been there. We were like "No". So she highlighted a couple of the roads on the Custer State Park map and recommended taking the Needles Hwy Drive or the Wildlife Loop. Although she said that they had just round up the Bison on the Wildlife loop so it might be better to do that a different day. She mentioned that the Needles Hwy Drive was very nice and would take an hour or so to get through. We discussed it and looking at the map decided the lady was exaggerating and there was no way that Needles Hwy drive could take that long. So we opted to do that; we figured we could still get to Mount Rushmore.

Half an hour later we still weren't to the start of the Needles Hwy drive and we began to wonder about timing. Keegan fell asleep in the back and fitfully snored through the whole discussion. The Needles Hwy Drive was awesome but it was also very slow. With the winding road, 30 mph speed limit, and the one-way tunnels it took us much longer to progress down the road than we had initially thought. There were a couple highlights on the drive. The biggest one was the cathedral spires formation. This appeared through the trees as we crested a hill. Excitedly Chris and I told Lyle to pull over so we could take pictures. Lyle pulled off of the road and him and Chris noticed that there were some rocks you could climb up on the opposite side of the road. Him and Chris took off up the road. I started to go after them and remembered Keegan was sleeping in the back of the car. Cate saw me hesitate and told me to go on, she didn't want to climb up there and would stay with Keegan. So we climbed up the rocks it was a beautiful view. We took lots of pictures and then climbed back down.

The rock formations on needles hwy were really cool. That is until Lyle started comparing them with various parts of the male anatomy. The next highlight was Sylvan Lake. This is a beautiful Lake in the middle of all of this rock. It reminded me a lot of Lake Loise in Banff National Park. We wound around and around and finally got out of Custer State Park. It was after 5pm by the time we escaped Needles Hwy and Mount Rushmore was closed. We decided to go back to the lodge.

We stopped by the market in Hill City and got some stuff to make on the grill. Upon getting back to the lodge no one was really hungry. While I fed Keegan, Cate and Chris went out to get everyone ice cream. It was decided since no one was hungry we'd have ice cream for dinner. After Keegan was fed I gave him to Lyle to put to bed. Keegan fell asleep easily, exhausted. Cate and Chris came back without the desired ice cream because all the Dairy Queens closed at 7pm; but they managed to find an ice cream pie at the market. We sat around eating chips and ice cream pie. Then Lyle was determined to fire up the hot tub outside. We all piled into the hot tub and watched the deer grazing out in the forested area behind the lodge. Then it was time for bed.

Keegan woke us at 1am hungry again and had to eat. I struggled with a stuffy nose and cough all night. Other than those things the day had gone great and we were looking forward to the next day.