A Year

Well, I'll spare you the exhaustive and exhausting recount of reasons for the long delay in posting. Just imagine swarms of tiny microbes.

Winning. Winning many a battle in many a war in many a battlefield.

Imagine that we, as a family, have been losers. Many times over.

Alright, then. Let's just move on.

Today was my son's first birthday, and I am proud to say that we celebrated it at a brewery. Unfortunately for his mother, they were lacking in porters on this particular day, but I can vouch for the quality of the IPAs. The party was a good one, with much merriment and rejoicing. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of transferring digits from here to there, I have but one picture to share from the occasion.

Fortunately, thanks to the photographic skills of one Karen T. Reed, it is in fact a spectacular representation of said frivolity.

Behold, the birthday boy...

Back to our regularly scheduled programming

Enough about me, at least for the moment.

On the kid front it's mostly been about the walking and the teething lately, with the start of a very long career as teachers pet thrown in for good measure.

Lupe has pretty much mastered walking, at this point. He can go pretty much indefinitely, and has even taken to going more quickly (although I will restrain myself from calling this running) on occasion. The biggest thing, though, is that he can now stand himself up without using a prop, which means that he can fall, which he does very, very often, and still get himself right back up, whereas before he had to crawl over to some object in order to pull himself up.

It's all very exciting to him, of course. What is less exciting is the teething. It just seems never ending at this point. He got two good nights in this week where he wasn't sick and wasn't teething, then a bad night, and sure enough, we found a new tooth poking through the next morning. At least there is always an identifiable reason when he gets fussy, unlike some other small people.

Let's see, the only other news about him I can think of right now is that he got his first haircut last week, which was a serious pain because he just never stops moving, but in spite of the horrible butchery, he actually looks a bit better than the seriously wierd shagginess that was going on before.

And, so, on to news of big sis (who has yet to have a haircut, incidentally). As you may know, she is going to preschool three days a week, which she started in November. It took her a couple of weeks to say a single word, and longer than that to start to really warm up, but now she is fully acclimated and integrated. The school is really small, and right around the corner, so it's absolutely perfect for her. Unfortunately, it's less so for us in that it's really expensive. We're probably going to have to move her at some point since our money is fairly rapidly running out, but in the meantime, she has become, according to the director and lead teacher Kathleen (or as Ruby says it Kap-a-leen), her "star student".

This has pleased Mommy enormously, and probably bought her a couple extra months at the school. I think it's mainly due to that fact that she seems to be making big strides in learning how to read. I've noticed that she has moved from identifying the letters of the alphabet by name to making the sounds, so she must be doing some sort of sounds-phonics thing. When I was dropping her off the other day, a teacher asked Ruby if she was "going to read for us today". I'm not exactly sure what that meant, but it did seem to be related to her star-ness.

No doubt this will endear her to her schoolmates, now and for years to come.

Echo

As in, an echo of the month of hell in the form of a week of hell.

And it started so promisingly, too. My birthday, Feb 7th, happened to coincide this year with the 9th annual Bistro Double IPA Festival, which I've attended a number of times before, and looked forward to attending again. It also happened that the festival was this year the official kick-off to the first annual SF Beer Week, which consists of almost 200 hundred beer events in and around San Francisco.

Now, I have always enjoyed beer, but in the last ten years or so, I have been increasingly and irrevocably drawn farther and farther into beer geekdom. At first, I simply would gravitate towards better beers when available. Then, I started seeking out better beer. Then, I found myself seeking out establishments that offered good beer. Then, I finally took the plunge and started attending beer festivals.

All of this is to say that my excitement at the prospect of SF Beer Week was not just some frat boy style joke about wanting lots of beer. Not at all. I pored over the list of events and quiveringly picked out those that promised the most enticing probabilities of coming across rare, hard to find, or unique beers.

The list was long, and I knew that my chances would be limited, but I staked out a preliminary plan that began with the Double IPA Fest on my birthday. It included entire events dedicated to my two favorite brewers, as well as themed events that promised enticing surprises.

And it got off to a roaring start. The IPA fest couldn't have gone much better. It was fantastic. The beer was stupendous and bounteous, the day was beautiful, and I had the foresight to take precautions that made the next day much less painful than it might have been. On the next day, I had planned to spend the day with Kevin, Maile, and Jennifer before putting the kids to bed then heading over to the Toronado for something that they have never had before - a night dedicated to unbelievably fantastic Lost Abbey brewery in San Diego.

I must note here that I customarily go out to the Toronado, which is about four blocks away, on Wednesday evenings after the kids are put to bed with a regular group of friends. So, I planned simply transpose this custom to that Sunday night. Only, Ruby and Maile would not cooperate. There was no one incident that led to the downfall of my intentions. It was cumulative. They were just so excited to see each other that they gor really amped up, which led to late naps, which went long because they had expended so much energy, which led to a late dinner, which pushed bedtime way back, which put me at the Toronado at 10:30 at night instead of at 8:00, as I had intended.

Unfortunately, by that time all of the special beers had been long ago consumed, and what was left were beers that I'd previously had and that are readily available. So, since I was so tired, I simply turned around and went home. It seemed the prudent thing to do. After all, there was still so much beer to drink in the week ahead.

I took a planned break from the festivities on Monday, as there was no one thing that screamed out at me and it seemed a good idea to do a little pacing. Besides, the next night was to be the highlight of the week, Russian River, my favorite brewery at Toronado with about 15 beers that are extremely rare and delicious. Natasha even graciously offered to let me go early so as not to miss out on anything.

And here's where it all went so terribly wrong. That morning, both Natasha and I awoke with terrible colds. Hers was worse than mine, but that's like saying one Baldwin brother is crazier than another, both colds sucked. Since I am usually home with both kids on Tuesdays, that meant that we were all stuck at home in the infirmary. I held out hope all day long that I'd start feeling better enough to at least head out for a couple of beers, but it was not to be. The cold went into overdrive in the evening, and there was no way I was going to get out.

And so it went for Wednesday and Thursday as well. More sickness, no beer. We missed out on such fantastic fare as a sour beer and chocolate pairing, an all barrel aged extravaganza with over 30 breweries, a cask and queso night with cask beers paired up to distinctive cheeses. We missed out on a lot.

And then, the coup d'grace. I awoke on Friday morning finally feeling better, and quickly looked over the itinerary, seeing two or three exciting possibilities. And then Ruby woke up.

Sick.

Aaaahhhh! Foiled again. In the end, we missed out on every single event, save that first. The worst thing about the week, though was not the missed beer, it was the minute by excruciating minute experience as I stumbled around feeling terrible while taking care of Natasha and the kids. It was fantastic.

In the end, though, I don't suppose we can blame this one on the kids.

Unless, of course, one of them brought that cold home...

Videos

Maile (along with Kevin and Jennifer) was visiting this weekend, and here are some videos.

Bit of Wisdom

Teething Sucks.

Onward and slightly upward

Well, it looks like we have finally emerged, again in fits and starts, from the month of hell. We're back to the usual level of unbelievably tired and overwhelmed.

Hooray!

Which explains my inability to muster the energy to post anything here. It took something rather stupendous to rouse me from this slumber, and Lupito was kind enough to deliver.

In spite of the fact that he has been taking steps for quite a while now, he hasn't really been 'walking'. It was more of a lunging kind of thing, where he'd eye some bit of furniture or wall or person or object which he figured he could hang on to and lunge towards it, taking as many as four or five steps in the process. It resembles walking in that it involves taking steps in order to propel himself forwards, but I have not been ready to actually call it 'walking'.

Then, last night, he actually started walking. Full on bipedal ambulation. Moving up past 10 steps is one thing, but adding the ability to start and stop without the aid of something to hold on to as well as throwing in a couple of turns for good measure and style points has lead me to admit it.

Let the record show that he officially started walking on Jan 25, 2009.

I, for one, am glad he took his time. When he started crawling at five months, the situation looked dire. I privately fretted that he might be walking before he turned 9 months old. Thankfully, he was content to crawl in a way that Ruby never was. In the end, he started crawling a full two months earlier than she did, yet it appears that she actually walked before he did. I can't find confirmation of when she actually started, but there is an old picture on the blog for which I wrote this caption, "Mommy and baby doing what baby loves best right now - walking with a helping hand (yes, she can do it alone, but can't achieve the desired speeds that way..." that is timestamped by the camera Sept 14, 2006. That would put her 2 days older in the picture than he was yesterday.

Day 31

Jan 15: Antonio is still feeling really worn out, but not technically sick. Ditto for Natasha.

We have no idea what Ruby's problem is, but she is in a serious mood all day long. This is, of course, a pain in the ass, but really it's just Ruby being Ruby, and can't be counted as part of the 31 days of hell. What can, though, is the fact that Lupe is teething again. He woke up from his afternoon nap in a fussy mood, then woke up screaming at irregular intervals all night long.

This is compounded by the fact that Ruby refuses to go to sleep, and in spite of the fact that she was actually in bed by 8pm, she doesn't actually go down until 10:30.

Sometimes it seems like they are actively trying to kill us. Or at least break our spirits.

The fact that they were broken long ago makes this type of thing seem just cruel...