The boys are back in town!

After a week at grandma and grandpa's house, the boys (aka Trent and Brian) are now back home. Quick update on Trent's rash... we went to see the dermatologist this morning and she shares my suspicion that the rash was shingles. The reason being that the rash contained itself to a specific muscle group on his body, which is characteristic of shingles. She suspects that it was from the chicken pox vaccine that Trent received. It's not common, but it does happen. The good news is that you generally only get shingles once in your life, and it's much less painful and easier to recover from it as a child, than as an adult. The rash is pretty much gone now. Just a few scabs remaining. Trent doesn't seem to be too phased by it, though now that the rash is healing he indicates that there's some nerve tingling in that region, which is common after shingles. I'm just relieved that it's going away. It's quite alarming to see a rash like that show up on anyone, but when it's your kid, it's a million times more scary!

In other Trent news, he's learning new words every day now. The rate at which he's picking up vocabulary is astounding. Every day he busts out new words that indicate understanding of the world around him. They're not just words he's repeating from hearing us. I'm so impressed with the little guy.

Yesterday I got to babysit Jett for the first time. It was only for an hour while Barbie showed a house, but we got a lot done. See for yourself: http://picasaweb.google.com/trent.bauman/Jett#.
Later on we had a visit from aunt Jen and cousin Ethan. It was so cute to watch the two boys play together. I think Ethan will make such a wonderful big brother ;-)

Happy New Year!

It's that time of year again. My favourite time of year, in fact: New Year. The mother of all holidays (for me). I prefer it over all other holidays because of what it symbolizes. Out with the old and in with the new. A time of new beginnings, and a time to reflect on the happenings of the year behind us, rejoice in the victories, learn from the failures, and look forward to all that the universe offers. New year's day is filled with good intentions. We resolve to do something or stop doing something with the aim to generally better ourselves. This year I have no new year's resolutions to speak of. But in in 2009 I hope for the following:

To have the awareness to see the opportunities before me, and the courage to take those opportunities that suit me.

Some of the highlights from 2008:

• Nothing is more important than the well-being of my kid, and that anything or anyone blocking that mission is going down.
• I've learned to let go of my need to have a tidy house and have adjusted my tolerance level of mess.
• I changed jobs, even though I was perfectly happy in my current job. The opportunity presented itself and the signs from "the universe" were received loud and clear.
• I've made new friends and reconnected with some old friends.
• Girl's weekend with Kris
• I can eat a Dove bar every night, and as long as I work out it's ok!
• Tequila is my frenemy.
  
• Eventually, a cat will figure out a way around the child gate.
• You can smuggle veggies into almost anything, and both husband and kid will be none the wiser ;-)
  
• Some day Trent will wake up and see me watching him sleep and get creeped out. LOL!
• Mineral make up is the only way to go.
  
• Johnnie got married!
• Social networking is fun, but one should always be aware of one's internet footprint.
• I finally have enough pairs of shoes. Is that really possible?
  
• All those cute trousers in my closet are too big, and I'm ok with that. I should get rid of them.
  
• Brian has never let a day go by without saying he loves me :-)
  

testing

Just installed Flock. I'm testing to see if this actually makes it to my blog :-)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Horsey horsey don't you stop...

Just let your feet go clippety clop
Your tail goes swish and your wheels go round
Giddy up we're homeward bound.

That's the song I've been singing to Trent all morning while he rocked his new rocking horse.

This morning we used the web cam and Skype to spend xmas with both sets of grandparents. One set here in Houston, and the other set on the other side of the Atlantic in England :-) it was quite successful. Nana and Grandad got to see all of us open our presents, and got to watch Trent play with his new rocking horse that they sent him. Trent's napping right now and I took the opportunity to shower and catch up on some web surfin ;-) The menfolk are all outside doing manly things, such as car maintenance, with the new man-toys they got from santa.

It's wine-thirty :-)

Xmas eve

It's xmas eve. 11:05 to be precise. Only another hour before mum gets up at the crack of dawn (6am GMT) to open her presents like a kid waiting for santa ;-)

Trent enjoyed his first xmas dinner. Not that it's his first xmas, obviously, but last year he was too young to eat solid foods. Today he drank BBQ sauce and sampled almost everything on the menu. He's such a great kid. I'm happy to report that his rash is looking WAY better. Of course, it's a relative term. I mean, someone looking at it for the first time would still be somewhat horrified, but having seen it progress over the past week, it's actually looking ok.

After Trent went to bed, Brian and I, with a little help from Grandma and some heckling from "Onion" (more on that in a sec), put together the rocking horse that his Nana and Grandad sent him. I can't wait to see his face tomorrow morning when he sees it!

Onion: Kevin's been trying to teach Trent to say "uncle". It sounds exactly like "onion" when Trent says it. Who are we to argue.

I've been tracking Santa for my own amusement. It's amazing how elaborate the tracking web sites are. Take this one for example: Norad Santa tracker You can even see youtube videos of santa making stops!

Merry xmas from Texas, y'all!

mystery rash

Last week Trent got a little rash on his right hip. We didn't think much of it and I put some diaper cream on it. The next day it was a little bigger, but still nothing to worry about. Then daycare called and mentioned it, and I decided it was time to take Trent to the doctor. We got in that day and saw the doc, who could not identify the rash, which was now red and raised with tiny blisters all over it and extending from his hip up the side of his torso about 6 inches. The doctor told us to bathe him twice a day with Dial soap and to call him the next day to let him know how it was looking. It looked bad. Had spread quite a bit. Anticipating that he'd advise us to see a dermatologist I made an appointment before speaking to him. The dermatologist narrowed it down to 3 possibilities, 2 viral and 1 bacterial. She took a swab and sent it off for testing, and in the mean time we would treat it for a bacterial infection with a topical antibiotic and a steroid. It took about 3 days of that to get the rash under control and meanwhile it had spread over to his butt cheek and down his right leg.
The surprising thing in all this is that it didn't seem to phase Trent at all. He never scratched it, and he never indicated that he was in pain or that it bothered him. He was marginally irritable on Thursday after we took him to the pediatrician, but beyond that he was his normal, charming self.
Yesterday, the last time I saw the rash, it was looking so much less angry and the blisters had turned into tiny red scabs. This morning the dermatologist called to tell me that the tests came back "normal". I asked her to clarify what she meant by "normal" since it could mean that it was an expected result taking the symptoms into consideration. However, she clarified it to mean that there was no virus and no bacteria. I should be relieved, right? He doesn't have a virus, and his skin isn't showing any signs of a bacterial infection, such as staph. But I'm not relieved. I want to know what it is. Of course, when the rash became a concern I googled it and found many sites with descriptions and pictures, none of which matched exactly. Some pictures of shingles matched, but the description didn't. And the way you get a bacterial infection, such as staph didn't match either. Usually you have to have an open wound that gets exposed to staph, and Trent never had a scratch on him. It's just so puzzling and frustrating.
Since the rash is responding to the current treatment, we'll continue to use it. And we see the dermatologist next week again so I hope to get some better answers.

The Queen's English?

I had to laugh today when I got a text message from my mum & dad on Skype, and they actually used the word "Y'all"!!!

It's nice to see them embracing the Texas side of the family :-)

Sssshoe!

Last night, Trent and I were hanging out watching "baby", which is what he calls the telly. (Start of tangent:) The reason he calls the telly "baby" is because when we were on our trip to Europe, we took his portable DVD player, and only played baby sign language DVDs. His favourite one, "Baby Signing Time" starts off with a song with lyrics "baby, baby, baby signing time, baby, baby, baby signing time" and of course the sign for baby is like you're rocking a baby. So he associated the word and sign "baby" with watching his DVD. Now he can actually say the word baby, and to clarify which baby he wants to watch, he says "big baby", which means the plasma (vs. just baby, which means the portable DVD player). (/end tangent)

Anyway, last night, while we were busy signing to each other I said and signed "Trent, help mummy take her shoes off". And do you know what he did??? He got off the couch, pulled off my right shoe, walked around the couch to the shoe cubby in the entryway, put my shoe in one of the compartments, walked back around the couch, took off my left shoe, walked back to the shoe cubby and put it in one of the compartments! How fricking smart is he??? I was so very, very proud!

I'm all a-twitter

Some of you might be wondering what that widget is on my blog that looks like a bunch of random posts by people you don't know. Well, that's exactly what it is. It's known as twitter. I was skeptical about twitter after hearing about it from co-workers, but I needed to try it out to see its potential for something I'm working on in my job. So I signed up, and within moments people from all over the world started to "follow" me. I guess you could call this the next generation in internet stalking tools. You can stalk - ahem - I mean follow anyone who has a twitter account.

The point is this: You update your twitter status as often as you want by simply answering the question "What are you doing?" These are known as "tweets" so for example, my status could say "I'm blogging about twitter (and I could put in a link to this blog)". People following me on twitter would receive this message either in their browser in a twitter application like twitterfox, via a twitter application they've installed on their system, on their phone as a text (if they chose that option), or the next time they go to twitter.com and log in, they'd see it. You might wonder why this is useful. I know I did, and I'm actually still on the fence about it. Although today I was posting an article to a product wiki, and within moments of me pushing the post button, I received a "tweet" from LotusInfo (it's a twitter user name, obviously) that mentioned my wiki article and provided a link to it. So I see it has potential. I just need to figure out the best way to use it :-)

Anyhoo, if you care to follow me on twitter, you can do so by signing up for an account yourself, and then searching for "amandabauman".

This concludes the geek portion of my day. Amanda out!

Dallas TX - You remind me of why I live in Austin

So this past weekend I made the trek up to Dallas for a wedding. 2000 was the last time I visited, and for good reason. I observed on my drive up there that as my proximity to Dallas increased, so did the arseholes on the road. There's a point, right between Waxahacie and Dallas where the courteous driver becomes the minority on the road and the SUV driving, bumper hugging, lane changing jerk who speeds up so you can't pass becomes the majority. It makes me very nervous driving around discourteous drivers and I swear I could have crushed diamonds with my buttox by the time I got to my destination, especially driving that tiny Honda. Why are people so dang angry in Dallas? Discourteous driving isn't the only off-putting thing about Dallas. When I checked into my hotel the guy at the front desk never cracked a smile, even though I was pleasant and smiling, and even joked with him. And later on in the evening I almost had to throw down with someone trying to steal a parking spot that I clearly had identified as being mine with my turn signal, proximity to said space, and the fact that I arrived there first.

Anyway, the reason for my visit, as I said, was a wedding. My friend Johnnie, who I've been friends with for about 14 years now, finally got married. This was the first time for me to meet his wife, Candace, and since my departure from Dallas, Johnnie has a whole new set of friends. I loved Candace and I made sure to let Johnnie know that he was marrying up. I made a couple of new friends at the wedding. The wedding took place in a dojo and the ceremony was fun and brief, as all good weddings should be.

After the wedding I took off for part 2 of my trip to Dallas. As luck would have it, my favourite Austin musicians were playing in Dallas that night at the Glass Cactus, and Michelle was there. Traffic getting to the Glass Cactus was ridiculous and it was here that the parking garage throw down almost ocurred. I must admit, though, I felt pretty cool when I got to the front of the club and told the hostess I was on the guest list, and she waved me through the velvet rope ahead of a line that was forming, and informed me that my party was waiting at the VIP booth on the far side of the dance floor :-)

Fortune smiled on me once again as one of the band members and his wife were not using their hotel room that the club had reserved for them and paid for, so I was able to take it and not have to worry about driving back to my hotel. That's when my good friend Tequila showed up. You know Tequila. He gets around, is the life and soul of every party, and man did Tequila party with us. We met up with our Dallas friend whom I'd met before at Cedar Street and she introduced us to her friends. What a fun bunch! we danced the night away and behaved completely inappropriately -- this tends to happen when you mix a bunch of girls with booze and good music. After the gig the party moved to the hotel and we partied well into the not so wee hours of Sunday morning. Further details surrounding this evening shall be omitted and locked in the vault to protect the guilty. I realized early Sunday afternoon that Tequila, despite being the life and soul of the party, is nobody's friend. In fact, Tequila will bite you on the arse, and kick you in the groin when you least expect it. Damn you Tequila.

Hey, Y'all... it's snowing (and Happy Birthday to my other BFF)

Last night was our first "snow" of the season. I'm using quotes when I say snow because it's Texas snow. The kind that causes the whole city to freak out and drive like complete idiots, even though the ground is far too warm for it to actually stick, and far too warm for ice to form. It'd be amusing if it wasn't life-threatening. It's rare for snow to happen in Austin, so we're ill-prepared for it, unlike the northern parts of the country.

Last night we went out for Michelle's birthday, anyone who knows Michelle will also know that on her birthday, more so than the rest of the year, she is the Queen and her every wish should be granted. And as her friends we all rally around to make this happen. And what fun we had. We started off with dinner at Azul Tequila, which was infused with margaritas and colourful dinner conversation, most if which should not be repeated in a public forum, but I can assure you that the restaurant mysteriously cleared out. Coincidence? I think not.
After dinner we went to Warehouse saloon for a bit of Karaoke. Now let me tell you, karaoke in the presence of a number of very well respected Austin musicians is rather an intimidating prospect. There were 4 of said well respected musicians in our group and as I took the stage for my rendition of Evanescence's "Bring me to life" I had a major case of stage fright, which I pushed through and sung my lungs out, accompanied by the fabulous Robert Wagner (of Suede fame, among other things), and Brian (Lee, not Bauman - who is musically challenged) belted out an amazing rendition of a Dio song that prompted a standing ovation from some neighbouring tables. Brian and Andrea were "nominated" to sing a duet together, and for neither of them really knowing the song, they did a damn fine job, and Andrea and I did Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't go breaking my heart", which I thoughoughly enjoyed singing with her. Michelle looked like she had a fun birthday, surrounded by great friends.

When we left to go out for the evening, the weather was not looking like it would produce snow and I was skeptical as we dropped Trent off at Aunt Tara's house when she said that the forecast predicted sleet. But as we left the bar it was, indeed, snowing. Driving home Brian and I observed that it was like experiencing warp speed as depicted on Star Trek (I'm a huge Trekkie). Tara reported that Trent was an absolute angel for her. He played and impressed her and Uncle Mike (via phone) with his mad skills with the flash cards. They cuddled for a while, and Trent curled up and went to sleep. What a good boy he is. We're so proud of him. Trent woke up during the transition from house to car and we got to introduce him to snow. He pointed out of the car window and said something that sounded like "whasat?". I said "snow" and he said "noo?" and I repeated "Snow" and then he started signing "bird". It occurred to me that bird is really the only thing he knows that floats around in the sky so maybe to him he was thinking the snowflakes were a massive flock of very tiny birds.

When I awoke this morning I was greeted by a Texas winter wonderland where all the houses had snow on the roofs, and any cars out in driveways had a nice layer of snow on them, but the rest of the world was relatively snow-free. It's funny that we can go from a high of 78 degrees to snowing on the same day. Ah the joys of living in Texas. I wouldn't change it for anything :-)

on a more positive note...

Thanksgiving was delicious! Some of the highlights:

Baked Brie with cranberry and walnut - I didn't make this but it is worth mentioning. Delicious! It's brie with a pie crust around it, and inside the crust is cranberry sauce and chopped walnuts with apricot.

Stilton cheese imported from England - if you have never tasted Stilton, you really should. It's so flavourful and creamy, and goes so perfectly with a big oaky red wine. MMMMMMMM!

Homemade sage and onion stuffing - Darice and I bought freshly baked bread and made our own breadcrumbs for the stuffing. I sauteed onions celery and garlic in butter until the onions were soft, then added freshly chopped sage, garlic salt, and chicken stock, combined this all with the breadcrumbs, and baked it for 40 mins. Delicious!

Shiner Bock Turkey with sage, rosemary and garlic rub - I made a sort of pesto with fresh rosemary (swiped from the bush outside my neighbour, Jim's house - thanks Jim for letting me "steal" some), fresh sage, garlic, and olive oil. I rubbed this all over the turkey, and separated the skin from the breast/legs and stuffed a bunch under there too. This year we decided not to stuff the turkey since nobody ever eats the stuffing inside the bird. It kinda groses me out that it's been touching raw poultry. Anyway, I shoved some coarsely chopped onions up the bird's bum, and then poured in 2 bottles of Shiner Bock. I basted the turkey every hour with the Shiner, carefully pushing the baster into some small incisions in the skin to baste under the skin. Oh my! what a wonderful turkey!

Orange glazed carrots with ginger - I got the idea for this from weelicious.com (http://weelicious.com/2008/11/25/orange-glazed-carrots/) however, I modified it by using butter instead of vegetable oil. Far less healthy but oh so yummy!

Garlic mashed potatoes - Freshly chopped garlic, garlic salt, milk, butter, feta cheese. Mash it all together. Need I say more?

Homemade cranberry sauce - Just a bag of Oceanspray cranberries, a cup of sugar, a cup of water/OJ or so, simmer and presto! way better than the crap you get in the can.

But the best part of all...

Best Bread Pudding - all credit goes to Darice for making it, and to "Paula Deen, y'all" for coming up with it. It truly, absolutely, was the best bread pudding I've ever had. Ever. Seriously. Go make it. The recipe is here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/the-best-bread-pudding-recipe/index.html

Slight variation on the sauce though. We ran out of eggs and we didn't have brandy so we used rum. It was amazingly good.

Aside from the good food, we had good company, and Trent, as always these days, was a proper good boy. And we finally got to use that room at the front of our house... you know... they call it a dining room. It's not just a place for stashing your strollers anymore.

Xmas funk

Thanksgiving is over, and I can't shake off this grumpy feeling I get whenever the subject of xmas arises. I'm not trying to be a grinch, in fact, I was hoping that this year I would get into the spirit of things because now I have the best reason ever to celebrate xmas... to see my son's face light up when he opens his presents. And I am looking forward to that aspect, but the consumerism of it all just sucks all the joy out of the season for me. I hate having to come up with a list of things I want people to buy me. It takes all the thought out of gift giving if you just send someone a direct link to the item you want. Hell, if we're gonna do that, then let me just go buy it for myself, you go buy your own gift and we'll drop all the pretense that we're being thoughtful and call it even.

It's a bad attitude, I know. And people want to give gifts that you want and will appreciate, and are asking for my help. But if you know a person well enough to feel like you want to give them a gift, then shouldn't you also know enough about them to make a thoughtful decision for yourself on what the gift should be?

I guess the root of my attitude problem is this: last year was Trent's first xmas, and my parents were with me on xmas day for the first time in over a decade, and it was magical. And I suppose I'm protecting my heart from the disappointment of not having them here this xmas by copping a 'tude and setting my expectations low, which consequently makes me grumpy.

I want to shake it, really I do. Last year I even put lights up. This year I can't be arsed to do it.