Huntsville and Madison are fully stocked with chain restaurants, especially in the part of town where I work. When Misty and I eat lunch out on one of the days when Liza and Eli are in school, many of our options are ones like Ratherbee’s, Fettuccine Grille, or Uluru Steakhouse. There are native restaurants in the city; they’re just not right next to us.

We’ve decided to start seeking them out. Over the next few months, we’re going to try to eat out once a week in a local restaurant. We’ll let you know how it goes.

At heart I’m a keyboard junkie. From Interactive Fiction to command shells with emacs keybindings to the old Wordstar navigation key commands, I’m best when I’m on the keyboard and not shuttling back and forth to the mouse. In Firefox I use search strings that I can type into the URL bar. One quick ctrl-L, followed by “dict “, looks up that word in an online dictionary. That’s why I’ve looked longingly at Quicksilver, a Mac program for opening files and folders via keyboard. The Windows start menu takes a while to navigate, especially when I have to switch from keyboard to mouse to open a program. For whatever reason, I never thought to look for Quicksilver-like programs for Windows. I made do with Google Desktop: type ctrl twice to bring up the search box and start typing the application name, and often you’ll get the executable or the link in the start menu. It’s not perfect, though, since the results list is chockablock with plenty of other files.

It turns out there are several Quicksilver-like Windows apps. Launchy is an open-source program with the expected sketchy documentation, and Enso Launcher is a $20 shareware application launcher and window navigation tool. Neither of these do everything Quicksilver can do, but they do let you launch programs quickly from the keyboard.

I just got a new work laptop that has Vista on it. I was grumbling about the new Vista start menu, which got rid of the cascading menu that fills the screen in favor of a slowly-scrolling fixed-size list, and was about to switch it back to the XP/2000 version, when I saw something: a search box at the bottom.

A search box at the bottom that automatically had the focus when I opened the start menu, and that puts programs and folders in the start menu at the top of the result list.

That’s right, I now have a keyboard-based launcher. Hit the windows button, type in the first part of a program’s name, and hit enter. It’s not as pretty as Enso Launcher, but it’s built in and takes no more system memory. It’s not Quicksilver, but it’ll do nicely, and it’s a killer feature I hadn’t seen much discussion of.

[tags]windows, keyboard launchers, enso launcher, launchy, quicksilver, vista, start menu, the good is the enemy of the downloading new shareware apps[/tags]

“General Grievous’ Power Star goes to 11!”

After yesterday’s post, I got one or two questions along the lines of, “Why would you admit that you hated Liza?”

So here’s the thing. A lot of what parents deal with isn’t talked about, and when it is, it comes couched as advice or, worse yet, shared-misery gloating. When we were pregnant with Eli, suddenly other parents couldn’t wait to tell us how bad it would be. “You won’t sleep for months!” We heard stories of colicky babies, of kids who wouldn’t sleep, of the trouble moms had with breastfeeding. When we were pregnant with Liza, people would say, “Was Eli an easy baby? Then this one will be horrible!”

There’s a lot of contradictory advice available for parents. Being a new parent is such a stressful event that it can make you want the One True Way to Parent. Surely there’s a methodology that, if followed, will make my baby perfect! And given that capitalism abhors a vacuum, books and products and advice-peddlers have rushed to fill that need.

Other moms contribute to the stressed. Convinced that what worked for their kids will work for yours, and wanting the validation of having others follow their advice, they’re happy to tell you what you’re doing wrong and how you’re likely to kill your baby if you don’t do what they say.

I am a believer in information. It’s better to know about things than not to know them. I’m also a believer in sharing experiences over dispensing advice. A lot of our parenting posts flow from these impulses.

Eli and Liza have been, by any measurement you can dream up, easy babies. They ate well, slept well, were happy, and weren’t colicky. Whenever we’re telling stories to friends, we often have to caveat them. “We’re worried about the trip to Arkansas, because Liza sometimes doesn’t like the car seat and will scream for a while. Er, not that it’s anywhere as bad as when your son screamed his way across three states.”

Even with how great they are, we still have Freak Outs. And I think it’s good for parents to know, hey, you’re not alone. It’s understandable to get to the point that you hate your baby and can’t stand to be around them.

If you’re not a parent, you may not care. We certainly didn’t! In our 20s, we had friends who had babies, and that was all they could talk about. It was diapers this and sleep schedules that. For those of you who are in that camp, thanks for bearing with us. There will be more lolpanion cube posts later, I’m sure.

You might be wondering where we’ve been. Stephen talked about our Christmas trip to Arkansas and his Freak Out but since then we’ve been at Sleep Boot Camp. You might remember Potty Boot Camp. Well, this is another round of tough love parenting, except this time it’s for Liza to learn to a.) put herself to sleep for bedtime and naps b.) return herself to sleep if she wakes up in the night, and the lovely by-product of c.) eliminating all night time feedings.

Something happens to our kids’ sleep at six months. We had to radically change Eli’s habits starting around seven months, and here we are with Liza doing the same thing. I don’t know if that’s when they become more aware of their surroundings or what exactly the factors are. For those of you new parents that have babies with bad sleep habits before six months, they are going to get oh so much worse after that; work at changing them now, I beg you.

Since just after Thanksgiving, Liza’s sleep has been abysmal. She suffered multiple colds, one right on top of another, so we developed some bad habits for getting her back to sleep when she would wake in the night. During the very worst week, she was up for 4-5 nights in a row from roughly 10:30 till 2 at which time she would succumb to exhausted sleep. During that time we tried rocking, medicine, her sleeping on us in the recliner in her room–everything but standing on our heads to get the girl to sleep. Christmas traveling wasn’t much better, although we did have the bonus of being with family who could watch the kiddos while we grabbed naps as needed.

I vowed when we got home we would clean up her sleep habits and get her back on the right road. So on Thursday last week, I took her to the doctor to make sure she didn’t have anything wrong with her due to the succession of colds. She did indeed have an ear infection, and frankly I’m not sure why that surprised me. Eli’s first winter after I stopped breast feeding was a parade of ear infections lasting from Halloween to Easter. Their unfortunate inheritance from me is teeny, tiny ear canals. (There’s something you want to put on your résumé!) Regardless, the medicine seemed to help almost immediately. I know antibiotics don’t work that fast but she seemed perkier by the next morning.

Thursday night at dinner, Stephen and I mapped out the plan for the next few days to two weeks of how we were going to get her some better sleep. A lot of our methods came from this web page on untraining a trained night crier. The major points are: earlier bedtime, putting her in the crib drowsy to fall asleep on her own, let her have more time in the night to put herself back to sleep instead of running in there to check on her, and help her to find a security object.

I had forgotten that with Eli at about six months we had to start putting him to bed at 7 p.m. I know that sounds really early but it actually gives them more restful sleep to start earlier instead of getting so overly tired before bedtime. So that was the first place we started with Liza: we knocked bathtime back to 6:45 p.m. in order to get her in bed around 7-7:15 p.m.

I also chose to modify the checking ritual. Liza sometimes will hang out in her crib for a long time before getting mad so instead of watching the clock and checking on her every 10 minutes, then every 20 minutes, etc., we waited and listened to the tone of her cries. If she sounded like she was working toward sleep and just working off some energy by crying, we were going to let her be. If she sounded really mad or in distress then we would go in, pick her up and rock her back to drowsy and put her down again. I would continue to give her milk if she asked for it but otherwise not offer feeding as a solution to going back to sleep.

Below is Liza’s sleep diary from the past four days. I think the diary is helpful mostly because when I feel discouraged about lack of progress I can look over it and see the improvements in her sleeping. While putting Liza to bed is not the only thing I’ve done the past few days, it certainly feels like it. We aren’t cured by any means but we have seen giant leaps. I understand why people give up and let their kids sleep with them. It’s very hard work to get them to do it themselves.

Friday, Day 1
Morning Nap – Started at 9, between 9 and 10 rocked her till drowsy five times. Fell asleep at 10. Slept for almost an hour.
Afternoon Nap – Started at 1, fell asleep quickly slept for less than 30 minutes. Rocked till drowsy four times and slept for 1 1/2 hours.
Bedtime – 7:15 rocked till drowsy, slept until 8:30. Rocked till drowsy, slept until 12. Fed, slept until 4. Rocked till drowsy, slept until 6:45.

Saturday, Day 2
Morning Nap – Started at 9:15, rocked till drowsy, fell asleep by 9:30!! Slept till 11.
Afternoon Nap – Started at 1:30, went to sleep with no crying!! Woke at 2:45.
Bedtime – Put in crib drowsy at 7:15, went to sleep on her own by 7:30. Cried a couple of times around 9:30 but went back to sleep on her own. Woke at 2, fed, talked herself back to sleep on her own. Woke at 7.

Sunday, Day 3
I’ll admit up front we did a couple of things poorly here so we suffered the consequences in the evening of Day 3 and the morning of Day 4.
Morning Nap – Someone at church rocked her to sleep and let her sleep on them. Mistake #1, we should have told the nursery workers what we were trying to do and had them put her in the swing to sleep or in the crib. Even if they rocked her all the way to sleep and then put her down she would not have been sleeping on someone.
Mistake #2 before afternoon nap: we went out to lunch and instead of heeding her sleep signals after lunch, we went on to the store. She almost fell asleep in the car on the way home but when we got her out, changed her clothes and tried to get her to nap this is what happened:
Afternoon Nap – Started at 2. Rocked till drowsy 4-5 times. Fed at 3:30. Stopped trying to nap at 3:45. No Nap = Exhausted Liza!
Bedtime – 7 p.m., Asleep before I put her in the bed. There was no rousing this girl after the afternoon she’d had! Woke at 9, rocked till drowsy twice. Woke at 11, rocked till drowsy twice. Slept until 6:15!!!!

Monday, Day 4
Morning Nap – Started earlier because she woke up earlier. Put her in bed drowsy at 8:30. Rocked two more times. Asleep by 9:45. Slept until 10:30.
Afternoon Nap – Started at 1:30. Rocked till drowsy, she grouched on her way into the crib and then settled into sleep. Had to wake her up at 4!!
Bedtime – 7:20, she cried so I went back in and it turned out she wasn’t done eating. In bed asleep before 7:40.

Last week I had a parent Freak Out over Liza, and had to leave her crying in her crib.

The Freak Out is one of those secrets of parenthood that most parents don’t talk about. It is nearly guaranteed that, at some point when your kid is still a baby, you will lose it and be unable to cope with them. They’ll have been crying and crying, tears streaking their face, and you’ll be running on very little sleep. Whatever ability to cope you once had boiled away over the previous hour. You look at your kid and all you can see is a package of obligations that you can’t meet. You hate your child. You hate yourself.

Liza slept very poorly during our Christmas travels. She had a series of colds culminating with an ear infection. A lot of times, the only way she would sleep was draped across one of us. She’s also developed a habit of flailing when you rock her to sleep. You hold her lengthwise across you, head at one arm and feet at the other, and her left hand smacks you in the face and neck.

That one night last week, we’d been dealing with Liza for hours. We would get her to sleep, put her in the crib, and she’d wake up and start crying. I tried to rock her and calm her down when she slammed her forearm into my throat, choking me.

That was it. I dumped her in her crib and stormed back to bed, telling Misty, “I can’t look at her. I can’t deal with her.”

When you’re a parent, not only do you get a subscription to Guilt Magazine, but also you get to write articles for it. A good Freak Out is worth a three-part article.

Liza is much better now. Antibiotics are taking care of her ear infection, and Misty and I are trying a new sleep regimen that’s helping all of us. With luck, I’m done with Freak Outs for a bit.

Hey, friends and family who knit, look what Misty showed to me! It’s a knitted companion cube!

I note in passing that her pattern is licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, and so is freely usable by anyone.

Ah, that’s better. We’re once again online, after a series of server issues that just about left Geof as bald as I am.

I’m back from the dentist. According to the dental hygienist, I have a “small mouth.” You may begin making jokes now.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been absent from here for a few weeks. A good chunk of that was due to the holidays and our trip home to see our parents. During that time, Liza said her first semi-word: Pop. That would be my dad’s nickname among his grandchildren, and given that she only had eyes for him while we were there, I have gone ahead and written her out of my will.

Liza and Eli received their bounty of toys. Eli was particularly taken with a set of Tinkertoys two good friends of ours gave him. He would put a stick into one of the hubs, wave it around, and say, “This is a banger! Bang! Bang!” while smashing it into his other toys. He did build non-banger things, but the banger was his favorite by far.

We also secured a Wii, which has provided much entertainment. Eli likes bowling, though his release is so slow that the ball meanders towards the pins. Then again, he got more strikes than I did. He also likes “Super Mario of the Galaxy”.

Other random notes:

• Seeing a sign reading ONAN in front of a building marked “Cummins Mid-South” will cause a lot of giggling that you won’t be able to explain to your three-year-old.
• It is possible to make the trip in a Fit, though packing becomes more and more laborious after each visit.
• If there is a lolcat for every occasion — and there is — then this is the one for our trip:
  

  What gives, Little Rock drivers? Don’t they still teach you what that stick to the left of your steering wheel is for when you get a driver’s license? We hadn’t been in Little Rock for ten minutes before Eli asked, “Mommy, why is daddy blowing the horn a lot?”

• Yes, we took cute pictures. Expect them later.

It’s good to be back.