Broken

Maybe I'm just a nervous father, but I'm a little worried about Peach. She turned 4 month old yesterday, and she still has a hard time lifting her head off the ground when we place her on her tummy. She's nowhere near rolling over, and Peanut was doing both of these things when she was four months.

I sometimes wonder if it's because Juice had her C-section almost two weeks before her due date, and because Peanut was a week over that makes the difference, because it seems like everything with Peach is 2-3 weeks behind when Peanut did them.

I suppose this is the problem with having a running journal of everything your first child did (my family blog) because it makes it that much easier to compare. I just want her to be healthy...I don't want any more problems with her. I don't want her to be any more broken.

We have our first big meeting at the local deaf ed school tonight so they can help us track Peach's development in speech and language. I think in that regard, she's doing really well. She "talks" to us all the time, and giggles a lot. She's become very vocal in the last couple of weeks, so I don't have as many concerns about her development in that regard as I do in her physical development.

Speaking of physical development and things that are broken, I broke my pinkie toe this past weekend. Twice.

How in the hell is it that one toe can seek out and find both a doorjamb and a coffee table, but not take the other toes down with it? The first time I cracked it, Juice held ice on it for me for about 15 minutes, then did some other things to take my mind off it :-P It still hurt the next day, but wasn't bruised that badly. I was able to walk on it pretty well on Sunday, then Sunday night while I was busy watching a replay on the TV walking through the living room....CRACK! Again. This time, it looked and felt a lot worse than it did the previous time, and here I am two days later, struggling to walk without limping, and eating advil like they're candy.

Oh sure, I could go to the ER, but why? I'll spend $100 on a co-pay, sit there for 3 hours minimum, to have them tell me to ice it, elevate it, and take advil. Thanks, but no thanks. I have better things to do with my time than spending my hard earned money for a doctor to tell me what I already know: It's broken and there isn't a whole lot they can do about it. Try to stay off it for 6 weeks.

So it looks like I won't be doing any heavy exercise for the next month and a half (not that I was doing that anyway), but that puts me right around New Year's and just in time to start a New Year's resolution to take better care of my body.

I'll start by watching where I'm walking.

Well read. Well, read.

It seems like once a year, I'll get a bug up my ass to try something new. A couple of years ago, it was playing guitar (and I'm doing pretty well with that for being self-taught...concert coming soon).

This year, it seems reading is on my list.

Not that reading is anything new. I do a lot of it every day. Except the kind of reading I've been doing for the last 6 years or so involved short snippets on the web. I haven't really picked up a real live book since I got out of grad school.

So I decided I'd read stuff that a lot of people have read, were forced to read, that I never was. I'm talking about the classics.

I went and got myself a library card, and checked out a couple of books by Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath.

I decided on these two because I had recently seen a Google Lit Trip about Grapes and felt bad because I'd never read it in high school, like so many other people I knew. And sitting there beside it on the shelf was Mice, significantly shorter, so I figured I'd start with that.

It's taken me over a week to get through Of Mice and Men because it seems like the only time I have to read anymore is once the kids are in bed, and that doesn't leave a lot of time before I go to bed to get any reading done.

I just renewed the books because they were due yesterday, and I'm getting ready to start Grapes of Wrath tonight.

I feel so smart. It won't last.