Killing Time

Thank goodness for 20 free minutes of wi-fi at the Will Rogers airport. It’s Saturday morning and it’s a ghost town in here! I’m on my way to Anaheim, CA for a conference, by way of Houston. In the meantime, I thought I’d take a few minutes to post something new. The pregnancy is still blissfully uneventful. I’m feeling fine—the constant and lingering headaches are annoying, and if the doctor would just let me take some Excedrin, I’d be fine. Not good for the baby, yeah, yeah. But my head! J I guess I’ll just have to continue to make due with the Tylenol that doesn’t seem to help.

We had an eventful week though. After a few visits around Norman and OKC, George and I decided on a day care and even committed by putting a deposit down. With the work schedule we keep—4 days of 8AM to 6PM to allow George his Fridays off for school work—we just couldn’t find a way to make a Norman day care facility work that would still allow for that schedule. What we did find is that we really like the Easter Seals facility. It’s in OKC and actually it’s just a few blocks from both of our buildings, so dropping off and picking up Junior shouldn’t be a problem (or if I turn into psycho mom and decide I need to pop in through the day to check in on things.) The poor kid will just get an early exposure to rush hour traffic and George’s impatience with other drivers.

The facility has a child care wing and an adult care wing. The staff seemed great, the children have activities that get them around the older folks on the other side of the building—intergenerational activities, they call them—and the diversity of children was important to both of us. We saw children of all races and colors in the classrooms. What we found particularly intriguing is that at about 3-4 years old, the autistic children whom the facility takes care of co-mingle for pieces of the day with the other children. All in all, we thought this would be a great way to expose Junior to all sorts of people different from himself—different colors, different cultures, different abilities, and different ages. With any luck, this exposure will pay off with a greater appreciation for differences in people when he gets older. That, hopefully, he won’t ever question people who are different from him just because of those differences, they just happen to be different. All in all, it felt good (but a little scary too!) to make a decision about something!

The other big thing just happened last night. Our friend and neighbor, Autumn, just sold her house and is packing up to move. When we stopped by to say goodbye and share our news (it had been awhile since we’d seen her) she absolutely made our day! She gave us a crib, the mattress, most of the bedding, a stroller, a car seat, and a swing. GAVE to us!! She said it helped her out because she didn’t have to pack it up to move and store it at her new place, but I think we came out way farther ahead than she did. She helped us out so much with her generosity. Now, if we have a girl, we’ll be set for a lot of it. But, if we have a boy this time, we’ll just be ready for baby #2 and we’ll hope she’s a girl. Even if we don’t have a girl, the colors can be changed out, so we’ll manage somehow with all this free stuff one way or another.

Since there are no Disneyland rides in my immediate future, some friends/coworkers of mine and I booked a bus tour to take us up to LA to see some stars’ homes, see Beverly Hills, drive up and down Rodeo Drive and Sunset Strip, and have the opportunity to do some celebrity spotting. I’m looking forward to it way more than the conference! ‘Til next time.