Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

We started off the week last Sunday playing some games with Karl and Angela and Chris and Alyssa. Ethan and Thomas and Paela were all nice playing "together" (babies don't really play "together" so much, and Paela really just napped and watched and practiced rolling over...and fussed some, wishing we were outside). We have to make good use of Sunday afternoons since this is the year of early Church for us! Though some weeks (like today) we just want to use it to catch up on sleep, hanging out with friends and family last week was definitely fun.  read more »

Paela loves her feet. She loves her toes, in particular.

Two Sundays ago, I took her with me into a church meeting and a little toddler boy kept running up to her, grabbing those toes and shouting "toooess!" at her. While his father was embarrassed for this child's actions, Paela was mesmerized by the sudden interest in her body. What are toes, she seemed to inquire of herself.

Since that day, she's been obsessed with those little toes. She loves them so much, everytime she's on her back she grabs at her feet and holds on tightly.  read more »

Paela set a new world record for herself. She fell asleep at 8 last night and slept and slept...until 6:30 in the morning. Whoa. It's the longest she's ever slept in a row. Who knows when she'll decide to do it again, but we kept waking up all night wondering if she was still okay!  read more »

In a moment of desperation, we got out and assembled a hanging/moving mobile to keep Paela's interest. While it did keep her minorly stimulated for a few minutes, we have found that she is becoming more interested in objects in general. She waits for the hanging objects to come her way, grabs them, and then pulls with all her might to force the mobile backwards on its mechanized track.  read more »

Paela and her cousin Thomas both shared a first camping trip this weekend. It started off later than we would have liked, but these things usually do. We went to Lehi Park, which is a little over an hour away towards Santa Cruz.  read more »

Paela took a bottle. When Rebecca went back to work on Monday, she had no problems figuring out where food was coming from. And, as a side effect, she has now become an avid pacifier user.

The rest of the week we tried to adjust to our new roles in taking care of Paela since Rebecca is back to work. Overall it was a highly stressful week, but not overwhelming or overbearing. There has been a little bit of restructuring at Rebecca's job, but after this coming week we will have that sorted out and how it will affect our time arrangements in caring for the little girl.

I tried to find new ways of spending my time with Paela, since at this juncture of time she only gives me roughly a 20 minute interval of hands-free time to work on things. With Rebecca, she's much more content playing on her own. We hope that changes.  read more »

So we left off last week with a cliffhanger: the airlines had lost our last box and kept telling us to "call back in four hours" to find out more. Every time we called, however, it was the same thing: call back in four hours, please. Well we decided on Monday to drive down to the airport ourselves and not bother with calling and talking to people who were just looking at a computer screen. Good news for us, because they had our box waiting for us when we got there! Rest assured we finally got our box back from the airlines! Plus we dropped off the damaged suitcase...we'll have to remember to follow up on that, but they should be either fixing or replacing it. It pays to follow up with customer service, right?  read more »

It always starts with a double flight, at least for us. Who knows? Maybe someday we will get lucky enough to have a sibling tip us off to a cheap direct flight before we buy tickets, but until then we take double flights. While our flight out of San Jose wasn't originally scheduled terribly early, over the course of six weeks prior it was bumped earlier and earlier. We arrived at 6 am to find a long line for the airline as well as security.  read more »

Yet another semester bites the dust for Wayne. He finished up finals and final projects this past week, including a 10-page paper for Thursday and a journal article Monday. He was a little worried he wouldn't finish because he didn't start on things as far in advance as usual, but I knew he'd get it done and get done he did.  read more »

Ah, it's Christmas time again.

While the first half of the week was warm, the second half was really cold and it was time to get out warm jackets and stop running around in sandals. I still ran around last night until my toes needed some defrosting.

Wednesday we went to our local Creche exhibit in Palo Alto. This was their 20th anniversary exhibit, so since I grew up in Ann Arbor I spent the day comparing the two exhibtions. While the Palo Alto exhibit was a few years younger and a lot smaller, there was no hesitation in declaring how much more posh and elitist their exhibit was. Instead of a simple card explaining where the nativity scene originated from, it was a full declaration of how it was acquired on the collector's "fourth trip to Switzerland from a master carver," etc. Quite humorous, really.  read more »