Sweet Yet Sour

McCain VP Pick

Friday, August 29th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Just a quick blog about the choice of Sarah Palin for McCain’s running mate…

The choice of a female running mate on the GOP ticket is certainly a very interesting one.  But it’s very obvious that this was a choice made specifically to bring over disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters.  For me, there seems no other way to see this move.

I am sort of fascinated to see if this works for McCain or if it backfires on him with the true party conservatives.

I myself hope that all of the disgruntled Hillary supporters truly listened to Hillary on Tuesday night when she said, “Were you in it for me?”  Because when it comes down to it, a woman in the Republican party is still a Republican; just a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

McCain’s campaign must be hoping that we pay no attention to that man behind the female VP candidate.

August 26th – Weekly Update

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Updates | 1 Comment

Update! Update! Another Update!

Here is a review of the exciting and not-so exciting things going on here at the House of Munhall.

1. We took Anna to the pediatric opthalmalogist on Wednesday to see if she has a lazy right eye.  After an hour and a half long appointment and three sets of eye drops to dialate her eyes, we were told she does not have a lazy eye.  It’s apparently a “pseudo” lazy eye, but they want us to have her checked again in 6 months anyway.  Here’s the weird part though – we saw a Dr. Steele, a nice, but not terribly friendly, woman who looked like she was about 8 months pregnant.  When we were walking out with our paperwork I did a double take when I realized that the doctor’s name was Anna and her middle initial was L, just like our Anna.

2. Mike gave Anna her first cold and me my second cold in two weeks.  It’s lovely when we can all share these things as a family.  Anna was pretty congested, but with lots of baths, the humidifier cranked up and the elevation of her crib mattress we kept it to a minimum. She seems to be pretty much over it by now.  Just so you know, if your baby sneezes out a lot of snot, you need to be very quick with the Kleenex.  I learned this the hard way after watching Anna sneeze once; I guess the sweet little thing thought  “Oh, what’s that on my lip? I should taste that and see.” and before I knew it, it was gone….

3. I went to see my eye doctor today about some redness in my left eye.  Turns out I have lots of sun damage from when I was a child and one area of damage is irritated.  No more contacts for a while for me and lots of eye drops.  The doctor said, “I bet you spent a lot of time outside when you were a kid.”  I did actually; I rarely came inside for anything.  Once, my mother put me down for a nap right before some of her friends were due to come over for tea.  They were just beginning their tour of the backyard when they found me halfway out my window on my way out to play.  Oops!

4. On Saturday we went up to Laura and Nate’s for a lunchtime visit.  The drive up to their house was so green we thought we were lost; we’re pretty used to it being snow covered.  Cash came along too and as usual, Duke spent the entire time showing Cash how much Duke loves him. We got to taste some of Nate’s latest brewing adventures, some grilled meat and veggies and yummy peach pie.  Nate is making some great alcohol, including a lovely apple cider and a peach beer. Do these count as fruit servings?  I hope so, because I had two!  Mike and I each had second helpings of the peach pie that Laura made – so that in the end, there was no more pie when we left. Oh, and I helped to finish both the vanilla and the butter pecan ice cream.  See how helpful I am?

5. Because the DNC is in town, Mike’s office decided that everyone could work from home this week. The DNC doesn’t really affect Mike, except that some of the train stations closest to his office are closed, but it’s nice to have him home. Anna and I do pretty good at pretending that he’s at work – but not always.  Sometimes, Anna says, “Hey, I want to show Daddy how good I am at drooling today.” and really who can say “no” to her cute self?

Number 5 – The Gibbons

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 | Weird Things | 1 Comment

Okay, back to the weird/interesting things about Dorrie list. Here’s number 5.

I am proud to say that once, I was hit in the head by an ape.

In college I majored in anthropology, which has a few areas from which to choose your focus.  Anthropology includes cultural anthropology – where you can do a Margaret Mead thing and go live with the natives, and archaeology – where you spend days using a paint brush in the dirt to reveal ancient trash.  There is also forensic anthropology – the study of human bones, and evolutionary anthropology – where you learn that you can call someone “Australopithecus” and they won’t know that you are calling them “Ape Man”.  The other area of anthropology is primatology – the study of primates.

I was really fascinated with forensic anthropology and I had a great professor who was a nationally known expert.  While I was a student he helped to identify the remains of a 12-year old girl who had been murdered and dumped in the mountains by her neighbor.  But I decided my junior year to focus on primatology.

In order to complete the graduation requirements the anthropology department at Colorado College requires that you do one of two things.  Either take a test about all of the areas of anthropology or complete a research thesis documented with a paper and a presentation.  I chose the thesis because I have never been a good test taker; I’m a much better writer.

For my thesis I chose to focus on gibbons and their calls.  Gibbons are a “lesser” ape (in contrast to Gorillas for example, which are a “Greater” ape), native to Borneo and Sumatra.  Gibbons spend almost all of their lives in the trees, they live in family groups of mom, pop and babies, with each family having their own territory.  In the wild, each morning the male and female gibbon do a series of calls while circling the edges of their territory in sort of a “this is our house” statement. I found a YouTube video of a female gibbon so that you can hear an example of what gibbons sound like when they call.

During the morning call session the male and female have very specific parts; it’s as if it’s a scripted song.  For my thesis I wanted to research whether captive gibbons do the same calls and if they do if it’s the same as the calls that wild gibbons perform each morning.

I studied three pairs of White-handed gibbons at three different zoos.  Spike and Ebony at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Rocket and Suzy at the Heritage Zoo (in Grand Island, Nebraska), and Ralph and Lucky at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.  Of these gibbons, only Ralph was born in the wild.

Studying gibbon calls means that you arrive at the zoo by dawn – since that’s when the calls start and spend all day observing them.  I would bring a chair, a tape recorder, and a special form to take down every move that the gibbons made under my observation. When they moved, I wrote down what they were doing and for how long.

Just as a side note, being outside all day writing down gibbon movement during the summer in Nebraska has two downsides: a) It’s freaking hot – like 105 degrees with 100% humidity, and, b) Gibbons, being pretty intelligent, know that the best thing to do when it’s hot is too sleep in the shade.  I spent hours writing “sleeping” on my observation notes when all I wanted to do was find air conditioning.

I discovered that gibbons perform pretty much the same calls in captivity as they do in the wild – which was good since that was my hypothesis. The male and females sang their parts at exactly the same time each morning and didn’t really deviate from the song performed in the wild.

I also discovered that you can very easily piss off a male gibbon if you mess with his baby.  Rocket and Suzy, the pair in Grand Island, had a cute 1-year old baby named Bubba Sue.  (Don’t ask, because I do not know the logic on the silly name.)  At the zoo I was allowed to sit next to the cage within a few feet of the gibbons.  One day Bubba Sue was playing in the cage near me and decided that a small piece of metal wire would be the perfect thing to put in her mouth.  Rocket and Suzy were at the other end of the cage and I didn’t want Bubba Sue to be hurt by the piece of wire.  So, without thinking, I leaned over to take the piece of wire from Bubba Sue.

Here’s the problem, gibbons have really long arms, and can swing 30 feet in one swing.  I was just grabbing the piece of wire from Bubba Sue when I got smacked on the back of my head – hard.  Rocket did not take too kindly to me being close to the baby and in the space of a few seconds had swung across the cage, reached out and taken a good swipe at my head.

Thankfully Rocket wasn’t close enough to bite me, because he would have if he had the chance and gibbons have nice, sharp teeth. And really, I think “once I was hit in the head by an ape”, sounds so much better than “I lost my three of my fingers in an incident with an angry gibbon”, don’t you?

This Week’s Update

Monday, August 18th, 2008 | Updates | 2 Comments

Here’s the news from my little corner from this last week (in no particular order).

1.  I’m over the cold thankfully.  I was well enough to attend a ladies night planned by ElleBee (thank you ElleBee!).  We hung out at The Hornet, talked, ate and drank cider (at least Ellebee and I drank cider).  It was absolutely lovely to sit and have adult conversation.   The Hornet makes a lovely Guinness battered fish and chips that I just had to have – yippee for deep fat fried goodness!  There was a discussion that I spend far too much time on my blog telling about the bad stuff of parenthood (apparently the diaper post was a little scary for ElleBee).  So I’m drafting a post about the good stuff that comes with being Anna’s mom.

2. Mike updated my WordPress version for my blog.  It’s a much nicer interface on the backend, but it meant that I had to change my theme.  I’m not really liking the new theme very much, but it was the only one that I had on reserve that didn’t make the Blogroll and the categories look screwy.  I’ll be looking for new themes sometime soon.

3. My mom’s birthday was Friday and she and my dad ventured up from the Springs to celebrate.  I made my mom a chocolate chip cake that she loves and a simple dinner of baked potatoes and corn chowder.  The winter meal seemed fitting since it rained all day Friday and the high was in the 50’s.  I gave her the earrings I got for her from Sundance Moods (lovely blue iolite and pearls), which she loved.  My sister gave her a camera for her computer, which we will hook up for mom, so that she can talk to Anna and my nephew whenever she wants.

4. My cousin John from Portland was in town this weekend.  John is the youngest son of my mom’s brother Tom and I have not seen him in 15 years, at least.  Unfortunately, I was only able to see him for a few minutes since he could only meet around the same time that our Childbirth Preparation Class Reunion was planned.  John is a younger version of my grandfather Tom, with a lean lanky build and a thin patch of red hair and red goatee.  The weirdest part is that he smells exactly like my grandfather does.  I have a tendency to notice the particular smell that people have and it was strange to be hugging my cousin, but smelling my grandfather.

5. Mike and I really thought that Anna was going through a growth spurt a few weeks ago.  It seemed like a logical conclusion when two weeks ago she began demanding food every 2-3 hours (at least), even at night.  Previous to that Anna would go for a nice 5-6 hour stretch after we put her to bed.  Now that it has been two weeks of this, I’m not sure if this is a growth spurt after all.  Being up three or four times a night was something I had hoped was in the past for me, but I was, as usual, forgetful of the “roll with the punches” life of a parent.

6. We finally hosted our Childbirth Preparation Class Reunion at our house this weekend.  Two other couples and our teacher were able to show up and bring their babies.  We were missing two more couples and three babies, but I think I will try to organize another get together soon since this one was so fun.  Our teacher wanted to hold babies, hear birth stories and asked questions about how things were going now.  It was great to hang out with parents of kids almost exactly Anna’s age (Anna is the oldest by a few weeks).  I am so immersed in my world with Anna that I forget what other babies can be like at the same time.  One boy was not very active and just wanted to be held; his lucky mother said that he sleeps from 8 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.  The other boy was active, but unfortunately very fussy – so much so that his poor mom said, “My child should make other parents feel good about their babies.”  I showed his parents a little better swaddling technique that seemed to calm him down and Mike played Anna’s favorite motorcycle game with him.  We sent them home with the “Happiest Baby on the Block” video from which we had learned the tight swaddle in the hopes that we could help them calm the fussing.

7. Tuesday Anna and I spent the day at our friend Kristen’s house.  Kristen has recently broken her foot and needs help with her one-year old, Evan.  There were times when I had to hold both of them and other times when I had to change two diapers in a row.  How do those people with twins manage?

8. Wednesday my sister and I went to a meeting of the “Liberal Ladies of Highlands Ranch”.  Sadly, there were only five of us, but it’s a start.  The other women in the group are a little more active politically and are, like ElleBee, volunteering for the DNC.  One woman has been campaigning for Obama and told us a story of being escorted out of a Lone Tree neighborhood by the police because someone objected to their presence.  I have no idea why, but the suburbs seem to be the place where Republican’s have gone to breed and frankly sometimes I feel a little choked by the conservatives in our area.  It was nice to meet with other like-minded women and finally see that we are not the only Democrats in Highlands Ranch.

9. We started Anna on rice cereal this week.

Anna tries rice cereal

Here she is looking at the bowl from her high chair.  Mike and I put her in the high chair only to discover that she is a tiny little girl in comparison to her high chair – and that we can’t adjust the tray level.  We spent a lot of time laughing at the poor thing staring at us from her perch.  Anyway, we are trying out the rice cereal in small bouts.  So far most of it ends up on her chin and on her bib.  Until she gets the hang of swallowing something on her tongue, feedings will be immediately followed by a bath.

Weird Thing No. 6 – You put that in your hair?

Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | Weird Things | 1 Comment

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but around 9th grade I decided to join a synchronized swimming team with my best friend Sarah.  Yep, that’s right, I used to swim around making leg formations while holding my breath under water.  And no, I have no idea what I was thinking.