One more cup of coffee

Random Nathan update

Meredith has amazing luck. I am pretty sure that I have changed every single one of Nathan’s dirty diapers in the last week. This is not to suggest that Meredith has not been changing his diapers; on the contrary, she’s probably changed more than I have in the last week because of our schedules. But somehow I get all the dirty ones. Hmmph.

…

I think I’m going to have to start calling him Houdini. He has an astonishing ability to wiggle his way out of his shoes. This is even more astonishing when you consider that he doesn’t have any ability to use his hands to help him yet – this is just from moving his feet around. I woke up yesterday morning to find one foot completely out, only to later discover that Meredith had already put that same foot back in his shoe when she got up with him at 5 AM. This, perhaps, is his solution to not liking the shoes: simply get out of them. Meredith suggested that my plan to super-glue his feet to the inside of his shoes was not, perhaps, my best one. Maybe this becomes easier as his feet get bigger and the shoes aren’t as loose. In theory, these are the smallest shoes of this type available. Ugh.

Beca asked how long Nathan has to wear the funny braces for his club feet. The plan is that he wears these 24/7 for three or four months, then only at night until he’s three or four years old. So he should be out of them in the day before he even starts crawling. The doctor said that occasionally, babies will need another round of casting for a short time if they start to regress, but usually not. Of course, babies probably don’t usually manage to keep pulling their feet out of the damned shoes.

…

We went out last night to Los Altos Grill with friends to celebrate anne’s new job. He was awake when we first got there, then slept all the way through dinner. Loud noises always do this – he goes to sleep. All things considered, I’d much rather him fall asleep to loud noises than to silence. It is, after all, far easier to make noise than to make silence.

…

I’ve decided that baby monitors suck. There are three basic classes of baby monitors available – those at 49 MHz, 900 MHz, and the fancy new ones at 2.4 GHz. I decided to skip the latter, since 2.4 GHz is part of the unregulated frequency band that is used by anything and everything. Most cordless phones, WiFi network connections, even microwave ovens. In this area, I’m pretty sure the last thing we need is one more device trying to use that frequency space. So first we tried a 900 MHz monitor, which worked great so long as the transmitter and receiver were in the same room. Much further away then that, though, and there was way too much interference. So then we tried the oldest frequency, and got a 49 MHz model. Evidently part of the benefit of living in such a high-tech area is that no one actually has crappy old 49 MHz cordless phones, so this one mostly works. I say mostly, because it’s still prone to interference, and doesn’t sound all that great, but at least we can hear the sound of a pissed-off Nathan over the occasional static.

What I really want is something that uses the existing wireless network in my house – my WiFi network. I should be able to buy transmitters and receivers that can plug into Ethernet (hey, I want everything to use Ethernet) or connect to WiFi. That way, there wouldn’t be additional interference, and it would also be secure (well, as secure as WiFi is), so random people couldn’t listen in on our house. They do make wireless webcams now that interface to 802.11 that presumably also serve audio, but I don’t really need the video. The bigger problem is that I don’t know of anything that acts as a stand-alone receiver. Sure, we could run a laptop in the bedroom at night, but that seems like overkill.

Meredith thought that I was the only one in the world geeky enough to think about wiring a baby monitor into the computer network, until at dinner last night when I was complaining about interference with baby monitors and Sam said, “You need one that plugs into Ethernet.” ;)