Huskies4all: 12/1/05

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Is this still a blog?

Gosh, it seems this has become a "Nolan's Picture Album" site.

So consider this the update!

Parenthood is something else. It seems like Nolan does something new every day. His latest tricks include a few tentative steps, and refusing to eat anything but "num-nums", a bottle or fingerfood. None of this baby food spoon-feeding for him!

So far, we haven't made any mistakes that seem like they'll permanantly scar him; he's taken a header or two, but those have been mostly unpreventable...like when he was climbing on daddy and took a dive right into the floor. His new nickname is "Lawn Dart" He likes to climb up on anything...the chair, the dog, Daddy's head. He just hasn't figured out how to *stay* up yet.

He crawls like a maniac and it looks like he might skip the walking and proceed directly to run. His few steps that he's managed to stay upright for have been all out. He seems surprised when he takes more than one and he stays up. He pauses, and looks around like "What the heck am I still doing up here?" And then goes back to heading in whatever direction he was aimed at. When he falls, it's usually one continuous motion...walk to fall to crawl.

He's learned to play "chase" now, too. I point at him and ask "What's going on over there?!" He laughs and turns away, then I say "Am I gonna hafta get you?" - which is his cue to scream at the top of his lungs and take off.

As for Jerry and I, it's fun. Nolan's a hoot, and we have a ball. Jerry'll have a couple of weeks off over Christmas (ah, the benefits of working at a college - Christmas vacation and health insurance!) so we'll probably ski as much as we can find someone to come with and sit in the lodge watching the child. I missed skiing last year while I was impersonating a beached whale. I think I'll have to relearn everything. It's always a challenge trying to keep up with Jerry, and a winter off isn't going to help matters.

I'm done with school; had my Biology final on Monday. I'm pretty sure I got an A in that class; the last time I checked I had a 99% average, but that was before the term paper was due and bthe final happened. American National Government, I'm not so sure. I've gotten an A and two B's on the first three tests, and I submitted papers on the two tests that I got the B's on to raise them to A's. However, the final test I've not gotten results on, and the teacher has not emailed me back to tell me if I need to do a paper on the last test. I do not want to ruin my GPA on a class that is "required"... it's funny, I'm not going to have a 4.0, because some of the classes I will use toward this degree come from Gracleand College and I didn't care so much about my GPA then, but now, anything less than an A feels like I don't know the subject matter well enough. Especially in the science classes. It feels like if I get less than a 100% on a test that it's a failure, since it's all "fact", and no abstractions. Facts are facts, either you know them or you don't.

At any rate, I'm done with this semester; next semester I'll be taking Chem 111 and Educ 203; the chem class I'm really looking forward to; I just like science! The Education class is a work-for-credit class; I'm going to be getting 2 credits for my past experience as an assistant coach for the Wendell High School track team. And, I can take it again so I'l have 4 credits total. Hopefully they transfer to BSU! It seems like it's going to take forever for this degree.