I'm still alive, despite not having written in here in forever.
Work has been crazy busy, although it's starting to slow down. The released product is definitely coming soon ... or something like that.
Nathan's back on a crazy sleep (where 'crazy' ~= 'little') pattern, waking lots of times in the night. He usually chooses to maul Meredith in the night, demonstrating that the most comfortable place in the world for him to sleep is with his torso across her neck. Well, perhaps it's not so much that that's the most comfortable place as it is that any other position is like being boiled in hot lava, since he doesn't actually seem all that comfortable there, but any attempt to move him provokes screams of protest.
I occasionally hear other parents talk about the long three-hour naps their young children take, and how well they sleep through the night. I wonder what that must be like.
Aside from the sleep thing, he's doing great. He's learning new words to speak every day, and is forming simple sentences. He's started to say please. He knows that on Thursdays, it's Pizza night, and on Pizza night, he gets to see Cassie, his favorite waitress in the world, at Coyote Creek Pizza. It helps that she brings him milk. AND pizza. Nathan is in love with Cassie, we think.
Meredith is loving school. She reads me sentences out of her books that make my head hurt trying to parse them, but she loves it. She's taking three classes - Hebrew Scriptures, Pastoral Care, and Christian Anthropology.
Microsoft's vacation policy in Washington state is different than in California, a difference mandated by the different state labor laws, I think. At any rate, the way it works in Washington is that, come January 1, you can only roll over so many hours of vacation. The number that depends on your years of employment, but is 120 (3 weeks) for me. Anything over that, you lose. I had a lot of vacation time in California when I moved up here, plus what I've earned since moving, so if I didn't take any vacation, I'd lose about 3 1/2 weeks. Thus, I'm taking December off. Meredith's quarter ends the first week or so in December, so we'll all be around and free. I have no idea what we're doing yet, but I'm really looking forward to taking the time off. If nothing else, I hope to play a lot of Gears of War, which will be a bit of a switch from the LEGO Star Wars II that I've been playing. (Who'd have thought that a game involving LEGO Star Wars characters could be so much fun?)
Posted by Mike at October 25, 2006 11:10 AM