This is actually slightly old news, but my Mom managed to give Alex a Chinese name the last time I went back and visited her, and after some fighting with the computer and figuring out how to do the character using pinyin and whatnot fonts that comes with OSX, here it is, in a jpeg form.




It is pronounced Lei2 An2 Zhou1 in pinyin, and a crude translation would be the following: The first character, his surname (or last name) would be "Thunder", the second means "peaceful, tranquil, quiet", and the last character means "profound, brilliant, lofty."

YAY!

My first week back to work wasn't really too bad - took some readjusting to things I somewhat forgot. I suppose that's a true testament to whether or not the thing you do for a job means anything to you. If you forget about it, it's probably not that improvement in the grand scheme of things. But I digress.

My lovely wife has had a tougher time this week, because she would be the primary caretaker of the baby now, because she is very kind to let me sleep as long as I can. She wakes up and tends to his middle of the night needs, and then takes care of Alex all day until I come home. I spend some time with Alex, but then I would need to get to weddings or do my emails or whatever. So she's lost a lot of sleep, and is missing me terribly.

Alex certainly has changed the dynamic of the family a lot. My wife and I have a general feeling that JL is feeling really left out and ignored - seems like we're just telling her to do homework all the time now. It's not that we're trying to push her out of the picture, it's just that she's not doing homework on her own. She got a D in Math this past progress report and we're starting to be afraid that she'd do worse. Tonight she pulled a injury stunt that her cousins constantly pull on their mom, a rather devious but obvious (to us anyway) cry for attention. We pretty much ignored it, because it was her way of getting out of dishes and/or watching a R rated movie with us and Brendon and Maralise.

On the happier side of things, even though my wife and I had some time today, we went around doing errands and there was a noticeable change in our chemistry. The bond we had is slightly weaker, and we're taking a lot of playfulness and taken it rather personally, even though we used to do it all the time and be fine with it. Just feeling sensitive, and careful, and very aware of each other not speaking. Finally, when we got home, we took the chance that he was sleeping and we spend some time cuddling, joking around, and finally kicking each other's asses. So much that when Maralise popped over to buy some hash from us, we totally didn't know she came in. But that didn't stop us.

It's very difficult to wrestle with your wife when there's a friend in the room - you can't do the usual perverted things, so my wife and I were still at it, killing each other, but in a very PG-13 manner. She was annoying me by calling me a loser, so I spanked her ass hard a couple times, causing Maralise to cringe at my brutality. Not to fear, equality-minded readers, for my wife got me back royally by inadvertedly pushing my head with her weight into the wall, and giving me a mild concussion. Literally bounced my head off the wall. I took my revenge by lunging at her, and missing completely, giving myself the worse fabric burn on my right knee. That'll show her.

My son's thing to do now is groan, but in some sinusy way that's really worrisome but very funny. He would be sleeping and then he would scrunch up his facial features, and through some descriptive arm-flailing and stretching, grunt and sound like a baby elephant. A honking sorta sound, like a cross between a quack and a bear burp. It's adorable.

Yes, the long awaited post arrives... Finally.

There's a little space of time between now and bedtime that I can finally update this blog, and I'm going to make darn good use of it. We've had a really busy weekend, so without further delay...

The Visit to Redmond

As promised, my wife, my daughter, my son and I went down to visit Grandmas for the the weekend, starting off with Friday. It wasn't too bad of a drive, except at around the exit for Redmond, we realized that the baby didn't actually get buckled into his car seat. Sometimes we just set him in the car seat because it settles him, and we picked it up this time and went driving at high speeds for an hour and a half with him just sitting in there. Thankfully, we were fine, but man, we couldn't feel more irresponsible.

My brother and Mom were gushing tremendously over the baby boy. My brother took pictures, played with his hair, and held him as much as he could. He even volunteered to change the diapers, that adventurous guy. I think the only time that he got frightened was when he found out how much formula and diapers were, and went Alex went #2. And it was bad too. You would've thunk the little boy ate ground onions with beans, with a huge helping of fruit. But overall, he took a lot of pictures, some of which are on Imagestation. A little lazy updating now, maybe later.

My mom had a lot of little tips to offer about not holding the baby so much, and maybe giving him some water. Of course, most of what my mother had to advise was the complete opposite of what my wife was doing, thus firmly establishing the grounds of a daughter-in-law/mother-in-law relationship. There had been 26 years in child rearing differences since then, and opinions about how to built a better human has no doubt changed. Still, my mother put in her words, and my wife simply talked her way through it.

On the second day, for some unknown reason, my mom and brother decided, without any protest or reference to the previous heated conversations we had over the internet and phone, that I should return my exercise bike. I told them I kinda wanted a photo printer, and they seemed okay with that. So we went to Fry's, leaving my poor wife and daughter in care of my Mom, who tortured them with a library-loaned copy of "A Chorus Line", which evidently was the worst Michael Douglas "audition" film ever. The whole movie was just a long audition process, and that was the plot. But Fry's in Renton was awesome, just a super store of electronics that even had a Mac section. We looked at the photo printers and I gave up on the idea soonafter, thinking that it was something that was going to have to require regular feedings of money through photo paper and ink cartridges. I looked at some other stuff, then decided that I really wanted something else, and then went home and ordered a DVD burner online. It was something that I really wanted, because of what I do, being a homegrown pornographer and everything.

Man, I really have to clean up my blog before I give this to my son.

So anyway, I do feel a bit of a complete prat for making such a big fuss about my birthday gift. I feel as if there's almost nothing that distinguishes me from a bratty five year old child, with the exception that I have excellent typing skills and a somewhat talented skill to make my wife happy. Sorry for making such a big fuss about it, and thanks to everyone who indulged in my little monkey business. I'm better now. I'm now an in-house studio. Once I get my friend to mail me a pirated version of some DVD authoring program, I'll be a full-fledge geek.

So the visit was rather nice, and then we went to my mother-in-laws' house on Sunday, where I proceeded to fall asleep on the couch with Alex. There is a reason. I had not been getting that much sleep for the previous days, and when I was driving to Puyallup, my eyes were getting so heavy from the sheep-counting deprivation and the bright sun that I was just messed up. And once I got there, my wife's mom turned on a football game for me, which was a nice gesture, had it not been for the fact that I enjoy spectator sports as much as I enjoy watching fungus grow. So she turned onto some music channel on her digital cable, and we enjoyed about 30-45 minutes of German folk music before I turned it to 80s music. At some point I turn to my wife and tell her that it's slightly surreal experience to be present at that time, because of the "Wunderkind Schnitzel" music and polka soundtrack, a white cockatiel who talks and screeches like a phone, and two dogs who are extremely short because of their breed - A Dashund called Ginger and a almost blind dog named Spice or something, who has a fluffy head and a fluffy tail, so she looks like she's coming and going all at the same time, and some elaborate water fountain that is in the middle of the living room ... I thought the best thing I could do is just to space out and take a nap. I felt bad afterward for not spending time with my mother-in-law, but the nap probably did me good for the drive home.

So we drove back from Puyallup, a healthy 2 hour drive, and I thought about my bed, my job tomorrow, and being able to drink copious amounts of Coke at my leisure, when my daughter realized that she left her school backpack in Redmond. D'oh...

The Visit to Redmond 2: Not What I Expected to be Doing

So after a full day's at work, I drove back home with my bass up, and my mp3 cd player going, and it wasn't that bad of a drive. Got to sing badly for an hour and a half doing 80 mph - it can be relaxing. My mom then fed me dinner and it was kinda funny, because I found out that I had downloaded a game, "bookworm", and she had played it and liked it so much, that my brother found a registration code and plugged it in. Evidently she's on the computers for hours playing it, which is completely not like my mom at all. Also, my brother played Grand Theft Auto a bit, after I bought it for him. He was so entranced that he looked at the video online for Vice City, and had sequel envy.

I played GTA for a while, did a few missions, then headed back home with my daughters backpack. Whew. No more weekends like that.