MORNING
Sometime just after dawn: Nicolaus wakes up in his crib and cries. I change him and bring him to bed with me, my way of getting a little more sleep.

2-4 hours later: Nicolaus is starting to wake up for real. That’s okay because I have to pee. I make Kevin hold him while I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth.
I come back and make a bottle while the two of them make faces at eachother. One of us feeds Nicolaus and we both read the morning news, politics, boards, etc on our laptops in bed. Mouse patiently waits under his blanket for someone to take him out.

After his 8-oz breakfast we get up and get dressed. Nicolaus spits up on Kevin 2-3 times before we make it downstairs, take the dog out and eat something. That’s morning.

DAYTIME
If I have work to do I do it while Kevin takes care of the baby. If I don’t have work to do I surf the web and wish I had work to do.

Kevin always has work to do so at some point he realizes I’m not doing anything important; he goes to his studio and works. The baby gets fussy and we spend a few minutes trying to guess what’s wrong before someone finally looks at a clock. Time to eat! One of us feeds the baby.

By this point I become overly concerned with the fact that Nicolaus hasn’t pooped yet. I give him juice and water or add an ounce of juice to his next bottle.

The rest of the day is just those things repeated a few more times – work, mysterious fussing, bottle, hmm no poop, bottle, woah! there’s the poop! Poop is always my job because Kevin hates it and I don’t mind. Big points for me. :thumb

EVENING
5:00pm: At 5:00 the dog starts begging for his dinner. It drives me crazy. Who ever said dogs get fed at 5:00? For that matter, who taught the dog to read the clock on the microwave? He just decided on his own one day last year. But at least it reminds me to turn on channel 6, Dr.Phil’s on. Tell it like it is, Dr.Phil!! Yeah! Argh -w hy the hell is the dog pestering me and whimpering? Can’t he see I’m trying to watch a show here?

Oh yeah, food. So finally I feed the dog by putting food in a plastic ball and letting him roll it around to get the food out. Watching him eat reminds me I’m getting a bit hungry so we go to the store and get stuff to make dinner. On the way home we might drive around for a little while just to say we got out of the house. Otherwise it would just be embarrassing.

NIGHT
Maybe friends drop by, usually not. If the weather’s nice we go for a walk or a drive. We watch tv and surf the web, while Kevin talks to his parents on the phone or pays bills. We clean house in case realtors want to come by tomorrow. Around 9:30 Nicolaus falls sound asleep but we don’t put him to bed yet. My mom might call, but usually not.

Around midnight: Sometime between midnight and 1 AM we feed Nicolaus again and sometimes give him a bath. I claim that I’m going to bed but then for some reason or another I stay up for another 2 hours. Kevin stays up working until around 3.
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That’s it, although of course some days things are a little different. Like I might want to take a shower, or Kevin might have 37 stomachaches, or someone might come into town and need to be picked up from the airport. On nice days when I get my way we go to my favorite Mexican restaurant and sit on the patio overlooking the highway and eat chips and queso, and talk about all the cool stuff we’re going to do once we move to Texas. Like today. Yum.

Have you ever had a meal where you eat and eat and eat and then you look down and there appears to be exactly as much food as when you started? Meals that consist of mostly rice or lettuce have this way of expanding.

Well, packing to move is just like that. We’ve been packing for weeks. We’ve gotten rid of at least four truckloads of stuff. We have another truckload of boxes and bags marked goodwill stacked in the dining room. A ton of stuff to keep is stacked in the sunroom.

So why does the rest of our house still look like people live here? There’s crap i>everywhere. It’s unbelievable. Unless you know us, I guess; then it’s entirely believable and maybe even funny.

Meanwhile, poor Nicolaus has been so neglected this week. We put him in one of our many baby-holding devices and beg him for a few minutes of peace while we pack or call the realtor or clean or work on a project or watch an episode of Friends that we have only seen 347 times before. Oops, ahhh… hahaha. Just kidding! We would never ignore our child to watch a mindless tv show. Certainly not. Especially not the one where Pheobe tells her mom that she’s going to be a surrogate mother for her half-brother’s child so her mom gives her a pug puppy that she has to give back in three days so she can see how hard it will be to give up a baby, only Pheobe gives the puppy to her half brother and it makes her happy so she decides to get pregnant right away like the very next episode.

Ahem.

Anyway we’re trying to do all this important stuff, but Nicolaus does this really annoying thing. He says, WAH. He really says it just like that. It isn’t crying exactly, just saying the word Wah real loud. Like he read a book on how to be a baby or something.

DUDE we implore him i>please be quiet.
WAH. he says back, which means “Screw you guys. This is boring. I’m bored. Entertain me.”

So we put him in the bouncer seat and turn on the Baby Einstein video. Have you seen these things? It’s a 30-minute-long series of simple images juxtaposed with unrelated songs and nursery rhymes spoken in a variety of languages. It’s designed to stimulate a baby’s brain and make parents feel less guilty about parking their infant in front of a television for half an hour. He freaking loves it. There’s one scene that’s just a cat laying there, looking around. Nicolaus is *crazy* in love with that cat. And the one where they show different scary-looking doll faces, that’s apparently hilarious. He squeals and talks to them. Oh and the part with the lava lamp with the german singing.
Trust me, it’s all very educational.

We have learned that they are perfectly designed for a 3-month-old’s attention span. He will watch it once. That’s all you get. Try to rewind it and fool him into giving you 15 more minutes and you will pay the price. Then it’s back to the “Look at me, I’m a baby see I’ll prove it: WAH.” routine.

Luckily my mom’s coming into town to entertain him on Sunday so we can get some serious packing done. Eeep! One week from now we’ll be sleeping in a cheap motel room somewhere between here and Texas.

We got an offer on the house. The guy wanted to pay us like $5 for it, plus he wanted the baby and the dog. And one night, no questions asked, with me. I think to help him pack.

After some negotiating, it looks like we will be able to keep Nicolaus and Mouse (but we’re giving up the washer and dryer – not sure about that tradeoff from a financial perspective), and walk away with $7000. Which is about $3000 less than we wanted but the nice thing is he wants to do this all very quickly. So if all goes well (which everyone says it won’t but I’m saying IF it does) we could be on our way to Texas in three weeks.

Holy crap.

He breathes.

He also laughs, squeals, scoots, pretends to cry, and thinks it’s funny that we eat.
He sweats all over and fusses in loud little bursts that sound exactly like a cat with a problem. He grins at Mouse.
He sprawls across your belly and sleeps harder than anything. He blows spit bubbles, some milky and some regular. He coo-hoos during a yawn, and right after a sneeze.
He hiccups a lot.
He gets heavier and lighter depending on the day. He snores. He looks around and smiles at – what? something – in his carseat while we drive.
Yesterday he laughed at a little boy who was trying to play with Mouse.

And… he breathes. It’s warm and wet on my arm. Sometimes it stops for a second then… Ss-s-sIGH. The soft rhythm is back again and he breathes.

That last post knocked the last pregnancy post off this page. It’s officially all AN (After Nicolaus) unless you click “back 20 entries”. Neat!

This post is entirely not about Nicolaus.
We’re almost out of money. For real. Yeah, we got back a huge pile of money from our tax returns (it turns out that poor people don’t pay taxes!) but we want to use that to pay off the car, not to live on. But it’s already disappearing. Sigh. People keep wanting to hire me to do stuff but then they don’t as it turns out have any money. Start ups, you know. Who starts up a company in this kind of economy? Lots of people apparently.

I’ve got a couple of small things. Doing a logo for a friend’s new company, did a real estate flyer for our agent. I’m thinking about calling all these other agents and offering to do some for them too. Shrug. It ain’t glamorous but it’s money.

I’m working on a sales letter to send out to sales people offering to help them with their powerpoint presentations for ridiculous amounts of money. I should know better than to try to sell to salesy guys but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m also working on a postcard that I can send out to prospects selling myself as a fantabulous copywriter that they should definitely hire for their sales and marketing materials. People don’t seem to buy the “I can do it all” concept, so I’m focusing a bit.

Meanwhile, Kevin has several commissions and he’s also working on this new line that is just beautiful. The pieces are blue steel with gold accents. Really cool. I need to update the website and make some postcards to send out to galleries and boutiques. These pieces will hopefully sell for around $100 each wholesale so all he has to do is make and sell 3 or 4 hundred of them and we’re good. Hey, it could happen. They’re< i>really cool. But nobody knows about them so I need to get off my butt and do some serious marketing.

No bites yet on the house, although we’ve had lots of people come and look. I suspect the funky colors scare a lot of people off. Stupid cowards. Between an earthquake and tornadoes in the Atlanta area you’d think the place could just get demolished by some act of God and we could get a check and go back to Texas. Wish us luck in that regard.

So there you have it. Things aren’t exactly trucking along but every day we wake up and we still have electricity and water, and frozen pizzas so how bad can it be? Right?

Right?