Getting my voice back

This is going to cover about a month's worth of blog posts that have been rattling around in my head so bear with me. First, I'm writing this from the Panera Bread near our house. I'm doing this because if I am in the house with my son he tends to fuss if I am not in contact with him. Everyone said the newborn phase would be hard, but that was a cake walk. This phase is harder for me. My baby weighs 21 freaking pounds and wants to be held by Mama and only Mama. He claws at my shirt for milk and cries "MAMAMAMAMAMA" if I'm even standing two feet from him.

So I have arranged at least one day a week where I leave the house and get some alone time with no one clawing at me or pulling my hair calling my name. I have missed this.

I'm also writing this on my new iPad. Rich got it for me for Mother's Day and the idea was that my work laptop could stay at work and I would use this for puttering on the Internet at home. It is a neat little device but I am certainly not in love with it. I keep trying to use it like a real computer and keep running into roadblocks. Flash compatibility is a pain. I'd like to be able to multi-task apps. I'd like to be able to hit the damn tab key on my docking station's keyboard and have it tab to the next field and not randomly send me back to the home screen. Grr.

But it's lightweight and it's fun to play Angry Birds in high def and it's nice for showing photos to my parents. The battery lasts forever so I'm not hunting for power plugs and I know how most stuff will behave because of my iPhone. But if I had to choose between an iPhone and an iPad, I'd pick the phone.

I had written this whole quaint entry just a few minutes ago but my iPad ate it when I accidentally went to the home screen and a bug in the notes app I was using didn't save my entry. So ... yeah ... a little frustrated with my "revolutionary device" right now. But my entry wasn't the next great American novel. It was a post about how Ian is starting to crawl and I got all jealous that another baby that's three weeks younger is a better crawler than he is. The point is I need to chill out and be as non-competitive with my baby as I am with my own stuff and realize there are no Crawling Olympics and everyone can get a trophy and be just fine.

Ian and I have had a horrible cold recently. It's apparently the same horrible cold that lots of other people have had, but it sucked the life right out of me. That combined with clingy snotty baby was really cramping my style. Well, that and waking up at 3am with an intense ear ache that Sudafed couldn't put a dent in and putting hot compresses on my ear and worrying that if I took too much Sudafed (that wasn't really doing much good anyways) it would reduce my milk supply (thank you for that worry point, Dr. Google!).

Funny, an older guy just came up and asked me if my iPad was as cool as everyone said it was. So I guess it is a nice way to meet people.

Oh, right, so this horrible cold. In addition to causing my ear to feel like it had an ice pick in it, I also lost my voice. I lost my voice the day before I had my new employee start work. So in addition to explaining to her how to get on SharePoint and where her virtual server was, I felt like I should be asking her how she wanted her hash browns as I did my best truck stop waitress impression.

Holy shit there's a guy in here wearing a t-shirt with a giant wolf head on it in a non-ironic way. He also has a handlebar mustache and a camouflage ball cap. Again, all in non-ironic fashion.

So, right, so my voice is mostly back and Ian's cough is mostly gone. And our pool is open and it's sunny and 92F. And we have friends in town and plan on grilling dinner on our new deck. So life is pretty good these days. I still have more to fill you all in on, but I think I'm ready to go back home for a bit and enjoy the weekend.