Breakfast

How did I ever not know this face?

Our Sweet Pea

6 hours old. We met him briefly before heading out to surgery. He was baptized before this.

4 days old (yesterday).
I think his hair might end up blonde. His skin is surely sensitive enough to be pale, as you can see below and in the video. He was born with a strange rash that's healing and peeling. No harm Paul, you're pretty enough.

Tiny legs and ankles, with oh so sensitive little toes.

Poppy and the littlest one.

2 minutes of a baby sleeping? Yup. : )

Paul, we love you so much, all of us.

Goatta Get Me Some of THAT!

I knew raising a cow to milk would be unrealistic on our soon-to-be kind-of-farm. Then we went to a farm today with the boys, and Luca as usual got comfy hanging with the animals. This time, a pair of goats.

Dad, you raise the bees plez. We'll raise some goats - two for the milking, and a third for the cheese and butter! These are things that make waiting for the right place at the right time soooo worth it.

Design-A-Station

Pandora Radio is a little bit fun. For free you can create your own radio stations around a group or even a song. Frank, as an Oat to you, I'm currently listening to a Hall & Oates-inspired station. "How Long" by Ace is on now. Which is so Annie. Which makes me realize how perfect you two really are for each other.

http://www.pandora.com/

Walk On!

The therapist takes Luca around in both directions along the fence (rounding both to the right, and to the left). This provides "input" to Luca's body as he must right his body to stay straight up on the horse as they make the turns. If Rebecca sees him leaning to one side (he leans to the right) she will put her hand on him in such a way as to prompt him to straighten up.



As the horse walks, the movement provides "walking" input to Luca's body.


After the session is the ideal time to get Luca walking, taking best advantage of the "reciprocal input" he's received in the past 20-30 minutes. First though, he gets to pet the horse.


This is what greeted me at the first pass around the fence. Needless to say, we LOVE riding horses!

Introducing...

Since I spend 9+ hours a day wasting away in a vomit-colored cubicle, I have done a great deal of blogging (browsing, not commenting). Most blogs are pretty narcissistic: "I'm a poet, mother, wife, lover of animals, and ardent liberal." A lot of blogs are celebrity driven: "Jennifer's turmoil over Brangelina's ever-growing baby bump!" And then there are the poor souls that just want to keep in touch with their family members: "Look! Chuck turned one and Mexican Hat Dancers came to serenade him! GO STAGS!"

However, if you search hard enough in the blogosphere, you'll find some gems. My gem? Design*Sponge. Man alive, this site makes me salivate with the great interior design examples, and if anyone else is bored at work (oh, you all like your jobs? Whoops.) I highly suggest this blog for window shopping. My fav is the "before and afters" and the "sneak peeks" into other rich interior designers homes.


Example #1:

Yowzaz! Ok, so this isn't the inside of a home, but I still think it's G-R-E-A-T. I'd probably offer up my first-born to own this bookstore in Denmark. I'd even break-up with Mike.. he's pretty dispensable.

Example #2:

I didn't even know there was such a thing as phone-stands. Thank you Design*Sponge!!! I'm on my way to replicate this lime-green dream RIGHT NOW!!

Example #3

Alright, maybe this one isn't that crazy-cool, but I had to add it for Dad. He's thinking about getting a dog but refuses my request that it be a wiener-dog. Dad, if, say, you ever change your mind, I'll certainly go to the Salve, get an old suitcase, and turn it into a doggie bed for you -- free of charge!

So, in conclusion, I recommend this site: http://www.designspongeonline.com/

You all can thank me later for finding it. And for those of you who actually do things with your life and don't waste hours upon hours browsing the net -- congratulations, you're life is that much better than mine.

BADA-BING!

My new addiction; I am totally hooked!

It's not "24".....nothing is "24". But, mercy, is this ever good.



And below, an out-take from an article by Ross Douthat, published in the Catholic Magazine, "First Things". ( If you google "catholic critique The Sorpanos", you can find the "First Things" article in it's entirety).

The Sopranos is a show about what it means to go to hell.

The Sopranos offers a devastating critique of American life. Unlike the kind of social commentary that Hollywood still churns out—in which everything would turn out better if only conservatives weren’t so busy oppressing homosexuals or women or maybe unionized employees—it isn’t interested in easy sociological answers or cheap political point-scoring. And while even the best episodes of Galactica and Lost are ultimately pop-culture ephemera, HBO’s mob show is closer to real art: Dostoevsky crossed with Emile Zola, a novelistic meditation on the nature of societal corruption and personal sin.
There have been pop-culture portraits of mob kingpins descending into hell before, of course—think of Michael Corleone fading into shadow at the end of Godfather II. But the artistic temptation is always to make this fall splendid and Miltonic, a matter of a few grand and tragic choices rather than the steady accretion of small-time compromises, petty sins, and tiny steps downward that usually define damnation.

The Sopranos dares instead to explore the terrible banality of evil, depicting ordinary people held prisoner by their habits and appetites who choose hell instead of heaven over and over again, not with a satanic flourish but with an all-American sense of entitlement. Sin is never glamorized or aestheticized: The violence is brutal rather than operatic, the fornications and adulteries are panting and gross rather than titillating. The characters’ sins breed even physical dissolution: obesity, ulcers, hemorrhoids, constipation, cancer. The show offers a vision of hell as repetition, ultimately, in which the same pattern of choices (to take drugs, to eat and drink to excess, to rob and steal and bully and murder) always reasserts itself, and the chain mail of damnation—in which no sin is an island, and gluttony is linked to violence, sloth to greed, and so on—slowly forges itself around the characters’ souls.

The only players in this drama who seem capable of escape are Tony Soprano himself, the mob boss and antihero who makes repeated excursions into psychotherapy, and his wife, Carmela, whose guilt over her husband’s lifestyle coexists with an unwillingness to give up the possessions and status that his criminality has won for her. The arc of the show, over six seasons, has traced their attempts to leave their sins behind—Tony’s dialogues with his therapist and halting steps toward self-knowledge; Carmela’s religious forays, adulterous fantasies, and abortive quest for a divorce. These always end in failure, partially because the avenues they choose tend to be therapeutic rather than truly redemptive (the show is particularly hard on psychotherapy’s pretensions) and partially because actually escaping seems to mean giving up too much: the combination of bourgeois comfort and the kind of “freedom” that the Mob life offers, a freedom to do as you please, unhindered by any societal restraint, that is gradually revealed as the worst prison there is.

All in the Family

30 Fish in One Day!

Monday Jim had a record fishing trip with his buddy John. Secretly he's been wanting to have me post some good pictures of his catches, so here you go...doesn't that smile remind you of a kid at xmas? I don't really get it, but if it makes him happy, more power to him!!

I can't stand the withdrawals.
I'm re-visiting Season 1.