Based on real events of the morning of Nov. 1, 2008

What’s this? I’m awake all of a sudden.   Judging by how dark it still is, probably about 4:30 in the morning.   So long as I’m up, the rest of the family might as well be.   Let’s start wailing to see if it’s Mom or Dad who’s lucky enough to come visit me.

Hello Dad!   Thank you for picking me up and holding me.   I like it when you stare me down like that.   What do you think you’re doing, putting me back in bed?!?   I may be infantile, but I’m not an imbecile.   You didn’t give me what I wanted: FOOD!!!   I’m just going to yell until I’m not hungry anymore!

What are you trying to put in my mouth now?   Oh, a sippy cup with formula in it?   I’ll give it a few sucks out of mere curiosity, but I’m more interested in looking around the dining room.   I might remind you that I already rejected this sippy cup earlier this morning, until Mom finally relented and gave me her milk instead.   You should remember, since it was you who got out of bed and brought me to Mom.

Back to the crib?   Are you really going to play this game with me, Daddy?   I’m hungry!   Oh good, into bed with Mommy.   More real milk for me!   Good night everyone!

My family’s always had an affinity for the film Young Frankenstein — we’d always get a laugh by saying “What knockers!   Oh, thank you!” or “Frau Blucher {horse whinny}”.   I even caught myself mentally referring to a kid dressed up like Frankenstein’s Monster as a “little zipper-neck” at our ward party the other day.

So it comes as no surprise to me that when Nathan started playing with Audrey’s magic wand the other day, holding it in both hands and bouncing it up and down in front of him, that the first thing that came to mind was the song from the Monster’s debut: “If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to…”

After more than 5 years working graveyards and weekends in news, I decided that I was ready for a more family-friendly schedule.   I started looking for a new job, either in or out of the journalism industry, and last week I found it through a Craigslist ad.   It was for a PHP/MySQL developer position (Web programmer for you non-techie folks) at an Orem company called Rocky Mountain Printing.   I interviewed with them on my day off last week, took a little programming test for them, then this week they called to let me know they wanted to hire me.   It felt like the right fit from the first moment, and after sorting out a few HR-related items and talking to the brass at ABC 4, I officially accepted the job.

I’m very excited about this new opportunity.   I think it will be good for my career and help me develop even better tech skills.   It also means a little bit better salary and a much better schedule, but it also means a move down to Utah County.   (Sarah doesn’t want me to commute full-time, since that means more time away from the family.)   We like our home here in West Valley City, but we think we can find something great in American Fork or Lehi or whatever, since home prices down there seem much lower than here in the Salt Lake valley.   We haven’t officially listed our home yet (all of this just came together in the last couple of days), but Sarah has already posted a description of our home at westvalleyhomeforsale.blogspot.com if you’re interested in buying it from us.

My last full-time day at ABC 4 will be Sept. 29, but my boss talked me into working an extra couple of weekends so they have a little more time to replace me.   So I’ll be working seven days a week for at least a few weeks.   Wish me luck with both jobs!

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Update 25. Sept 2008: “Change of Career” wasn’t a very interesting title.   Informative, sure, but not interesting.   I like spicing up my blog posts with movie or song titles, so I’m going with Sheryl Crow for the new headline on this one, but you could also argue for Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes by Jimmy Buffet or Take This Job and Shove It by Johnny Paycheck.

You’ve all been asking yourselves, “Where’s our 7 and a half month old update on Nathan Gibby?”   Right here, that’s where.

Nathan has become a very busy baby.   He got into the commando scoot about a month ago, but now he’s full-on into crawling, and he’ll go anywhere in the room if you let him.   He’s constantly pulling himself up on things.   (And of course, falling down onto the floor when he loses his balance.) He even made it up one of the stairs from our family room to our dining room.   He hasn’t hurt himself too badly yet, but I think this kid will be an adventurer and we’ll be rushing him to the emergency room a lot.   I think he could sit up by himself if he sat still long enough to do it.

He’s also moved beyond the world of just breast milk — he likes eating baby carrots, squash, etc. as well as baby puffs and teether cookies.   He does have a couple of little teeth poking through his bottom gums, but I haven’t seen them yet with my eyes.

He loves to watch his big sister Audrey — she’s the most entertaining thing in the world to him, and she loves to comply by talking to him and acting goofy around him.

Since Audrey was a very young baby, she has sucked her thumb.   It was great for us when she was tiny, because it meant she could comfort herself and stay asleep all night.   No 2 a.m. feeding for that 7-month-old!   (You hear me, Nathan?!)

But for the last year or so, it has troubled Sarah and me — we were sure it was going to ruin her teeth.   In fact, in the last several months, we’d seen her lower teeth grow little gaps between all of them.   We decided it was time to cut her off.

We started by taking away her “lellow blankies” — the little yellow blankets that she used at night to go to sleep.   They had brought about an almost-Pavlovian response in her — when the blankies are in your hands, the thumb goes in your mouth.   Unfortunately, she had started using them throughout the house, at all hours of the day, even when we told her they were only for night-night.   So when we took a weekend trip to my family’s cabin earlier this summer, the lellow blankies somehow got “lost” on the way home.

Of course, that didn’t cure the problem.   She found other blankets (even resorting to thievery, taking her little brother’s blankets) and in went the thumb.   But a couple of weeks ago, Sarah bought the bad-tasting Thum liquid to paint on her thumb. Audrey was very cooperative in the process and even wanted to put it on by herself.   Sarah told her to taste it, so she popped the thumb in her mouth once, and immediately spit it out.   She never even tried to go back to her thumb

That night, Sarah gave her a baby binky to suck on while she went to sleep — since she hadn’t gone to sleep without sucking something for the last 2 and 1/2 years — but since then she’s done very well at sleeping on her own and not sucking on anything.   We’re very proud of Audrey for quitting cold turkey.

Thum also played a part in my own little struggle with thumb-sucking when I was a very young child — I hated it so much that I tried to wash it off and even suck it off so I could have my thumb back.   I think I was a little older than Audrey when my parents broke me of my habit, and my teeth turned out all right, so I hope she won’t need major orthodontia because of what she gave up when she was three years old.

* Today’s blog post title was brought to you by Linkin Park

We had a great time camping with the Gibbys at Box Elder Campground near Mantua this week.   Audrey had a ton of fun running around with her second cousins the Shaw kids.   This was her first-ever camping trip. I realized that I’m raising a city girl when we were walking down a little trail and it branched off.   She said, “Let’s see what’s down this aisle.”

I added a new feature to my picture pages last night — a listing of related photos.   Now when you click on the photo of me with a parrot on my shoulder in Machiques Venezuela, you’ll also see a thumbnail version of me standing on the model of the solar system in the same town.   I had the idea at about 6:00 last night, and by midnight I was heading to bed with it live on the site.

Sarah has another new web site!  This one is called HappyHeadbands.com — and as you may have guessed, she sells headbands.   They’re really cool, with velcro on the back to keep them from slipping.   She sells her head bands online at http://www.happyheadbands.com for just $5 each!

And another client web site to mention — this one for someone who actually paid me!   (Assuming the check clears — I’m watching you Atwood.)   Jill Atwood at ABC 4 is not only a very good reporter, she’s also an entrepreneur, making scrapbooks for people who don’t have time to do their own.   Her site that I set up is called WeScrap4U.org — it turned out really well.

Sarah has launched a web-based business called Buzz About Baby, selling crafty things that she has created — nursing covers (a.k.a. Hooter Hiders or Knocker Blockers), binky clips, grab-and-go diaper holders, taggy ribbon toys for babies, and no-slip headbands. Her prices are much lower than any other place she’s found online.

Her web site is at http://www.buzzaboutbaby.com, and I’ve been her technical support in getting blogspot running, uploading photos and editing product descriptions, and integrating PayPal. (I haven’t been terribly supportive at times — I get a little bit distracted on the computer.)

Now we’re at a point where someone could actually click onto the site and buy something from her. So go do it! Here’s another link to Buzz About Baby, so you don’t have to scroll all the way up to the previous paragraph. (We’ll see if she can actually break even on the money she’s put into the materials so far — she’s already made more money than I did with my now-defunct West Valley Web business that I let expire last week.)

This week, our vacation is driving to Sarah’s sister Lynn’s house in California to pick up her three kids for the summer. They’ll be staying at our house and with their other Utah relatives for a couple of months. We borrowed Judy’s van and packed up our kids on Tuesday morning for the ride.

Tuesday, 06/10/2008 – West Valley City to Reno, NV

What’s with the letter W on this trip? So far we’ve stopped in the towns of Wendover/West Wendover, Wells and Winnemucca. If we weren’t staying in Reno tonight, I’d think we were cursed to see only Ws through the whole trip. Walla Walla, Washington, here we come!

We grabbed dinner at an Indian place a couple of blocks’ walk from the hotel. The food was plentiful and cheap, but Audrey wouldn’t touch most of it. (What else is new?)

Our room at the Atlantis casino and resort is pretty crummy — small, a little bit dingy, and there are at least three different kinds of flying bugs in there — one of which bit me. The pool area was undergoing construction, but we still had fun playing there tonight.

Wednesday, 06/11/2008 – Reno, NV to Crescent City, CA

We stopped at the McDonald’s in Susanville, California for Sarah to feed Nathan. Audrey saw the playland and said, “This place is amazing!”

We’ve worked our way through just about all of the music we had on CD and now I’m playing music from the laptop out through the tape deck adaptor. We’re going to mooch some blank CDs from Lynn when we get to her house tonight and I’ll burn more music for the trip home.

Lynn’s house in Crescent City is just about 20 minutes down U.S. 101 from Redwood National Park. Just before we got here tonight we stopped to take a couple of photos of us by the giant trees. In the one of me, I’m barely a speck next to this massive pillar of wood stretching into the sky. (When we loaded it into the computer and copied and pasted me a few times, we found that it went 13 Curtii high before it went out of the frame — meaning the tree was at least 78 feet tall, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was double that or more.)