Family

Travelling with a baby

Kelly

Recently RevolvingDork and I headed to Detroit for a wedding. We have been doing a lot of traveling with Bitmap recently and we’re finally starting to get good at it.

At the airport and on the plane

Bitmap had her own seat on the plane, and we brought along her car seat to use. We have a Safety 1st infant seat and it fit in coach just fine, although the flight attendant said Bitmap had to have the window seat.

I carried Bitmap through the metal detector, and they pulled her bag aside for a hand check since it had bottles, formula, water, and baby food in it. In addition to her car seat we brought the folding stroller frame it fits in, which we gate checked. Gate checking is perfect for things like strollers; you drop the item off on the jetway so you have it right up until departure but don’t have to deal with cramming it into the overhead bins.

2013-06-01 13.41.36
Bitmap was REALLY into the water feature at the airport

The flights themselves were pretty uneventful, although after a delay on our flight home Bitmap was getting tired of being in her car seat.

At the hotel 

We called the hotel ahead and found out that they had pack-n’-play cribs available, making for one less item we had to lug on the plane.

Sharing a room with a baby can mean little sleep for anyone. Bitmap and I are light sleepers. White noise has been a godsend. Having white noise in the room makes it possible for RevolvingDork and I to flush the toilet or rummage around in a bag without waking the baby.

We use the ‘pink noise’ file from simplynoise.com. You can play the sound from their site directly, download an app, or load the mp3 file onto your ipod. We chose the last option. I have an old portable ipod dock we pack in the baby bag. Many hotels have ipod docks these days, but I find it’s nice to have our own.

Of course, my mother in law has a much simpler solution: turn the radio to static.

There’s a free baby monitor android app we use which will call the number of you choice if the baby cries so you can listen in. I leave my phone in the room (plugged in so it won’t run out of battery) and set it to call RevolvingDork. But usually when we travel she’s so tired it isn’t an issue at all.

Overall

Bitmap travels pretty well. She’s at an age where she’s generally accepting of strangers, and loves to explore new places. The hotel room itself was fascinating enough we didn’t have to get out any toys. I’m not dying to jump on an airplane with her again any time soon, but it’s totally doable.

 

Family

So this happened

Kelly
Yup.
Yup.

While sitting in traffic on the way to daycare this morning, I got rear-ended. The guy behind me accidentally nailed the gas instead of the brake, which sent me careening into the car in front of me. Oof.

My first instinct was to panic. I had no idea what to do so I called the first grown up I could think of: my father in-law who also happens to be a police officer. He called up my local district and had them dispatch an officer to the scene.

2013-05-09 08.45.19

It took us about an hour to exchange information and get everything straight on the police report. Everyone was very pleasant, if a bit irritated about giving up their morning. My car suffered the most damage by far, having been in the middle of a automotive sandwich. I was able to drive it home (one whole block away) and I think we’ll be able to limp into the auto repair shop.

Bitmap was in the car and seemed unconcerned. She was strapped into her carseat which looks more like a NASCAR harness than a baby carrier. I have some whiplash, and a headache, so I went to the hospital to get checked out. They said I’ll be sore for a few days, and to watch out for signs of internal bleeding (yikes!) but I’m otherwise OK.

So other than the irritation of getting to spend the rest of my week playing phone tag with the insurance company, I’m OK. It’s just not how I’d planned to spend my Thursday morning.

Family

Tantrum Time

Kelly

Bitmap is just about a year old now! She is celebrating by being a jerk.

Ok, fine, not a jerk, she’s just little. And she has opinions. And she expresses them, constantly. I feel very much in tune with the blog Reasons My Son Is Crying, where such offenses include “we let him play on the grass” and “the juice is not milk.”

Here she is being cute. Which, to be fair, is most of the time.
Here she is being cute. Which, to be fair, is most of the time.

I’m trying to keep from letting it stress me out. I have to accept that it is not possible, and probably even not good, to keep her happy 100% of the time. Sometimes, she will have to cope with less-than-ideal situations such as playing with HER toys instead of MY toys. Because I need those keys to drive the car.

I read the book Bringing Up Bebe, which I have mixed feelings about, but it did make me realize I need to stop hovering over her all the time. And that provided she is not bleeding, it is OK to finish what I am doing before tending to her.

So now when she starts throwing a fit because I closed the refrigerator door, I offer her a toy. And if she rejects it I shrug my shoulders, say OK, and go back to what I was doing. I presented her an option, play with a toy or cry, and she chose to cry. That’s her prerogative. It doesn’t mean I have to stop everything and present her with every toy in the house until she finds one she likes. She knows where the toy box is. Dumped out in the middle of the room.

We’re starting to do the same thing with food. You want a snack? Have some veggies. Oh you don’t want veggies? Let me offer you every food item in the kitchen get you down from your high chair because you must not be that hungry after all.

My mother asked me “does it work?”  Well, sort of. Has she magically transformed into a broccoli eating, even keeled delight? No. She still throws tantrums, and eats way more white bread that I’d like. But I’m spending less time freaking out because she’s crying. She’s spending more time exploring things on her own, and as a side effect I’m also starting to hone my “mom voice.” Sometimes when I say “no” she even pauses before smiling (it’s more like troll face) and going back to what she was doing – and overall we’re much happier.

Software

Integrating Github Issues with Pivotal Tracker

Kelly

Over on offbeatempire.com we’re using GitHub’s issue tracking as a means for the staff to submit bugs and feature requests. But after years of using Pivotal Tracker, I found GitHub’s issue management to be a little wanting.

Thanks to rich APIs from both GitHub and Pivotal there are many third party integrations written between the two. So many that picking one to use became a task by itself.

After reviewing 5 or so I went with Pivothub, on account of the fact that it was a) recently updated and b) would run in an environment I could set up easily (heroku). I also really like that when a Github-linked story is accepted in Pivotal it’s link on GitHub is closed too.

Since Heroku is a read-only filesystem and I didn’t want to commit my config file to the repository, I forked Pivothub and changed it around to use Heroku’s environmental config variables.

It works pretty well, though some tighter integration wouldn’t be amiss. Right now if a closed issue is repoened via github, it doesn’t come back into Pivotal. The original author isn’t really using Pivotal much these days so any additional features are ones I’ll have to add myself.

Gaming

Anniversary Mario Playthrough

Kelly

9582_10101820976400499_1408507493_nRevolvingDork and I celebrated our two year anniversary, and kept up our quest to play each Super Mario Brothers sidescroller straight through, in order.

This year’s game was Super Mario Brothers 2 (SMB2), which came out for the NES in 1988. We played it on the Wii’s virtual console as we sadly don’t have the original cartridge.

Our rules are pretty simple: we hotseat lives / levels, and if we get a game over we’re allowed to warp back to the world we were on, but no warping past that.

This game is probably one of the most challenging. It is also one of the weirdest Mario games, because it wasn’t actually written as a mario game. It’s actually a reskin of the Japanese game Doki Doki Panic, as the Japanese Mario 21 was deemed too challenging for American audiences.

Aside from the somewhat punishing levels, SMB2 is challenging because 1-ups are few and far between. You get two continues before you are unceremoniously booted to the start screen, losing all your progress. Your only real chance to rack up some lives is to voraciously collect coins2 and then participate in the bonus round slot game at the end of the level. With some practice I was able to consistently get extra lives, but even then our maximum life count was a measly 25.

The other factor that made it a challenge was the layout of the warp zones. You can warp from world 1 to world 4, 3 to 5,  4 to 6, and 5 to 7. So when we died in the last stage of world 3 we had to start all over from the beginning. It took a while, and there was a lot of cursing.

We did finally vanquish the game – on our last life with only one heart remaining. If this was an XBOX game, I would have demanded an Achievement for that.

  1. Later released in the US as Super Mario: The Lost Levels [↩]
  2. Coins are counted and displayed in hexadecimal. You can collect up to B coins per level, which is 11 in decimal [↩]
Crafting

Billington Bag Knit-Along with The Tangled Web

Kelly

I’m organizing the Billington Bag Knit-Along with a local yarn store, The Tangled Web. It’s a felted bag that’s fully lined, and I finished the knitting yesterday.

Double_shot_medium2
Their version
My version, unfelted
My version, unfelted



It came out super huge, but I think a lot of that will felt down in the wash. We have a front loading washing machine so I’m a little nervous to try felting in that. The disadvantage of front loaders is that you can’t open them mid-cycle to check the progress of the felting. I may end up going over to a friend’s house to use their top loader.

It used 2 skeins of Ella Rae Classic worsted. Ravelry users can follow the project here.

 

Gaming

My PAX East packing list

Kelly

We’re heading up to Boston for PAX East and every I manage to forget some Very Important Things so this year I am making a list. Maybe this year I won’t have to make any emergency trips to Best Buy on the way up!

There are a number of PAX packing lists, including an “official” one on the forums but they’re really just the same “so you’re going on a trip” list you find everywhere. And there are some very specific items I wouldn’t attend PAX without.

So here’s my list:

  • Clothes for 3 days. I have gone on enough trips I no longer feel the need to break this out.
  • Toiletries for 3 days. See above.
  • A swimsuit I will not actually use but bring every year “just in case.”
  • Exercise clothes. If I’m going to eat conference garbage for 3 days I ought to at least keep up with my workout routine.
  • Exercise shoes. The exercise clothes are less useful without them. Ask me how I know this.
  • A niceish outfit in case we want to go to a niceish restaurant. This really just means an outfit that does not include a nerdy t-shirt.
  • Shoes to go with that niceish outfit if it is a dress.
  • A Nintendo 3DS. Mario Kart and Tetris are the universal language of PAX.
  • A 3DS charger. Mercifully there are a bunch of these you can usually borrow from folks, but it’s a lot handier to have your own.
  • My cell phone.
  • My cell phone charger. This is the #1 item I purchase at out of town Best Buy stores.
  • My laptop (mostly just in case something comes up with work)
  • My laptop charger. This is the #2 item no prescription online pharmacy I purchase at Best Buy stores.
  • A deck of Magic: the Gathering cards. The little starter packs they give out always makes me long for my own deck, which incidentally I only ever play during the month after I attend PAX.
  • An empty tote bag, useful for anything you might buy or pick up on the expo floor. I hate walking around all day with a backpack, tote bags fold nice and small
Exercise

Exercise

Kelly

I spent the entirety of January and February sick with a cold and didn’t do much exercise of any kind. As a result I’m not in awesome shape. I’m trying to kick start spring by getting back into the habit of running, working on my upper body strength, and continuing to take aerials classes.

Step one is to peer pressure my friends into running with me, for motivation. I started a Facebook group called the Slow Jerks Running Club.  The first rule of the slow jerks running club is you have to run slow. The goal is cardiovascular endurance, not speed, and I’m hoping we can make it a regular thing.

I’m also trying to develop habits that encourage activity. For instance: only allowing myself to watch web videos on the treadmill.

A blurry photo of my running set up
A blurry photo of my running set up

I set up a treadmill desk which allows me to use my laptop fairly easily while walking on the treadmill. It should go with out saying that you really shouldn’t run while using a laptop. But I can use the time it takes me to read my email + queue up a video to walk and warm up.

The laptop is an old one of RevolvingDork’s, sitting atop a surf shelf. I grabbed a spare plank of wood, set it across the treadmill arms, and use it to rest an Apple wireless keyboard and a Microsoft bluetooth mouse. The yellow cable is ethernet, only because the jack was right there and  the wireless adapter in the laptop was being flaky.

The laptop is set up with XBMC, and sync’d up to our central media server (yes I know I still need to write that up). So I have no excuse not to go for a run if I want to catch up on Community.

Hopefully by the time spring is in full swing I’ll be in better shape and can consider signing up for another 5K.

Family

9 Months!

Kelly

I guess my inability to post more than once a month disqualifies me for mommy blogger of the year. The truth is, between parenting, my new gigs, and trying to have a little bit of a life it’s really hard to find time to write.

483761_10101018516082656_2077340170_nBitmap is getting HUGE. She’s crawling like crazy, and starting to stand up independently. She’s so good at crawling though that she doesn’t really seem that into walking. But we went to the play area at the local mall and she had a blast.

I wanted to get a jogging stroller now that it’s starting to thaw out, but didn’t want to drop $200+ on something I wasn’t sure I’d use. So I asked the local mom’s mailing list if anyone had one I could borrow for a week. I got 3 offers from people who had unused joggers they just wanted out of the house. So for a grand total of $0 I got two joggers, one for here and one to keep at my in-laws’ house down at the shore. Which is good because neither of them fold very easily so I’m not sure how I’d fit them in our car.

The calm before the shots.
The calm before the shots.

She had her 9 month check up and everything looks good. She’s up to 18 pounds, 8 ounces which is average for her age, and 2’3″ long. Also she still has a 90th percentile head. I guess she’ll grow into it?

Meanwhile I’m doing a bunch of knitting, and finally finished a sweater I made for a friend’s baby. Bitmap was gracious enough to model it for me before I put it through the wash to soften it up.

Sweater!

My next big project is to organize my office, which is a mess because there isn’t a place for everything so I just put it all on the floor. But every time I sit down to do some organizing I get overwhelmed and quit, so we’ll see if that one happens any time soon. Right now Bitmap isn’t allowed in my office because there are way too many things that could hurt her, and she gets in to everything.

Oof, I can’t believe it’s March already.

Easy to knit baby sweater made from a free pattern
Crafting

Striped Baby Cardigan

Kelly

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92196131@N00/8474216465

I knit this for a friend of mine’s baby, and my daughter was kind enough to model it for me. It uses the Little Coffee Bean Cardigan pattern, which is a free Ravelry download. I modified the stripe pattern a bit to give it a sort of stained glass motif.

Easy to knit baby sweater made from a free pattern

Each color block is 6 rows, with 1 row of black between each color change. It’s knit in Caron Simply Soft 100% acrylic yarn, which is a fairly heavy worsted weight. The 6 month size came out a little big on my 9 month old. Total yardage used was roughly 420 yards.

Colored stripes like these are a great way to use up odds and ends from other projects. You can make the stripes thicker or thinner depending on how much you have of each color. Just make sure to plan ahead so you don’t run out!

Looking for more details on the exact colors used? Check out the ravelry project page for this sweater.