The right name?

Maybe we should have named her Danica instead...



The streets are safe for at least 16 years.

Not a good week in the Zilge household

In the immortal words of Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon II, "They f*** you at the drive-thru, okay?" That's how I feel about my former health insurance. Before Anika was born Mary and I had individual coverages through our respective work places. When Anika was born it is considered a "life changing event" (that's for sure!), if you have an LCE at any time in the year you can make changes to your coverage. We had discussed it and figured it was best to get family coverage through Mary's school.

On the 15th of October I called my provider to cancel my coverage. They said it would take from one to two pay periods for the change to take affect ( or is it 'effect'?) and that my coverage would be retro-active back to the 6th of October since that is when Mary's policy would kick in. Basically anything that happened between the 6th and the 15th that was billed to my carrier would need to be sent back to Mary's. Not a problem. I figured that I would be reimbursed for the month of October since they weren't covering me. Nope, according to IRS rules they can charge me for October and not provide any service at all. So Mary and I paid for family coverage and an extra single coverage.

Also this week Mary got a nasty cold, so bad that she had to stay home from work. Which really sucks for this year, since she has no more sick time (used up for maternity leave). This results in a day of no pay.

Could it get any worse? Sure it could. When you are sick, what do you feel like doing. I basically feel like laying around and watching television.

One problem. That black box with the mish-mash of wires you see above, that's our television just before it went out the door to the repair shop. The tv stopped working on Thursday and won't be fixed until mid-week. Did I mention that the warranty ran out two months ago.

Through all of this we were reminded of one thing. How lucky we are. We have a great support system as both sets of grandparents were around to help out. We wold have gone insane without their help.

More pics of Anika

That's why everyone comes here right?

We have been working on rolling over. We have found that the cloth diapers get in the way of rolling over because they are bigger than normal diapers. So she gets to practice while naked, and boy does she love being naked. Let's hope she grows out of that phase before high school.

Do you ever notice that babies and puppies aren't treated much differently. Think about it, we teach them to roll over, their toys either have bells on them or when you squeeze them they make noise not to mention they both chew on their toys as well. We also talk to them in funny voices.

Time to eat...at this point Mary banished the camera from the room.


Having fun with Grandpa Mel...

...that's enough fun, now I am bored.

I have put more pics out on the web gallery

Some new pics of Anika

Here she is working hard at tummy time.

And after working up a hunger from tummy time, wouldn't you want to eat your toys as well.

Just chillin' with Grandma Nat


Getting her first driving lesson from Grandpa Tom.

"Driving's easy, where's my cell phone, I need to multi-task"

Video testing

Our nephew Sam has two major interests in his life at this point: baseball and guitar. His family is in Ireland right now and they will be there for the next four or five months. Paul, his dad, took a sabbatical from teaching at North Hennepin to go and teach in Ireland. Sam brought along his guitar and has joined the Traditional Irish Music Club and the Guitar Club at Colaíste Eínde. He was also asked to join in on a punk/alt rock band for weekly jam/rehearsal sessions. Here is the little guitar hero himself, screwing around at his grandparents place in Shakopee.



Oh, did I forget to mention he is only 13. I can barely get through a song on Rock Band in easy mode.

Wordle

Scooter alerted me to this neat little tool called Wordle. You can paste in a url and it will create a word cloud from the words it finds on the site. Giving more emphasis to those words that appear most often.
Obviously Anika and Mary are two of the largest words. I was concerned to see that boogers was quite large as well (click on the picture for a larger version).

The clouds are random and come in many various forms. You can also paste in any text you want to create a world cloud from.

It happened so fast...

Yesterday we were talking about getting a new bed, today we bought one. Normally making a decision of this size would take me quite some time (Mary still takes shots at me about how long it took before we got married). But since my back has been hurting it didn't take much to push me to a quick decision. Our current bed is queen size and it has a foot board. So basically I can't stretch out on it. Also it isn't very firm.

There were two requirements this new bed needed to meet: must be a California King and be firm. We ended up getting a Select Comfort Sleep Number bed. For the first time since I was a sophomore in high school, I won't have to lie diagonal to fit on the bed. For those who don't know the California King is 4" longer than either the King or Queen size bed.

Anika was with us while we were shopping and either she learned a valuable lesson or she is very devious. While I was looking at the beds Mary and Anika were looking at the stuffed dogs named Dozer that they had for sale.


While looking at one of them Anika spit up on it's front paw. While no one but Mary and Anika saw this, Mary felt obligated to purchase the dog. So either Anika learned the rule "You break it, you buy it", or she already knew it and spit up on the dog on purpose. Either way we now have a new stuffed dog at home.

Some pics...

Quality parenting time...sleep when they sleep.


Hmmm...this nook is hairy.

Anika has a cold...and a new talent.

Last night Anika was quite congested and her one eye was red and teary. You might be wondering what her new talent is. She shoots boogers out of her eye. Yep, you read me right, boogers come flying out of her eyes. Mary went to pick her up from daycare today and Julie our daycare provider said that she was shooting boogers out of her eye and that is actually not uncommon in babies.

Three month picture

On Tuesday Anika was 3 months old. So here is her three month picture with Lamb.

For comparison you can go back to her one month picture and her two month picture.

So what has changed between two months and three? For starters she is being really nice to her mom and dad by sleeping through the night. Just in time to, as she has started day care. Mary will usually feed her around 10:30 or 11:00 pm and she has been sleeping until 5:30 or 6:00. At some point during month two, she discovered her hands. Granted she couldn't do much with them other than stare at them. But now she is able to use them to push her nook back in, if it is propped up just perfectly on her chin. She is also starting to grab things, like mom's hair and some of the animals that are hanging from her jungle mat. She is also smiling a lot :)

Good Old times

For Mary's Christmas present this year I had photos professionally scanned in of us from our childhood, and I put a book together of us and Anika. Here are a few of the photos.

Baby photos...awww.

What a tough guy...luckily I was able to kick the habit before the sixth grade.

Mary's cooking isn't just for dogs anymore...

Of course you need to have the obligatory embarrassing photo...gotta love those glasses

Tears were shed...

Today was the first day Mary went back to work. That means this is also Anika's first day of Day Care. Mary was quite sad. Especially since I threw my back out over Christmas so she is in charge of both drop off and pick up. Originally I was scheduled to do drop off, because it was going to be to hard for Mary to leave her little Angel. So this morning we both dropped her off and Mary saved her tears for the car.