Being stay-at-home is a little easier now that Liam doesn’t absolutely need me for everything at every moment of every day. Granted, he’s still got some separation anxiety, but now I can leave him on the floor with toys and he’ll poke the buttons on his radio and dump the blocks out of their bucket and generally amuse himself for a little while. I still need to establish a bigger circle of friends in the area; I miss the Tennessee crew pretty badly sometimes. But it didn’t occur to me that I missed my coworkers and professional conversations until a few weeks ago. I found myself posting in reference desk mode, answering questions and sharing a lot of “Facebook is in ur base killin’ ur privacies!” stuff to . . . Facebook. Ironic. Then, I was invited to a meeting of the local ARMA chapter and heard a presentation about the District of Columbia’s 5 year records management plan. You mock! But it was interesting! And humbling. Everyone in the room was (a) employed by (b) some terrifically important company, department, or agency. And there was little ol’ me. Eek. Unfortunately job searches take a lot more time than I’ve felt the ability to invest lately. I really need to step it up, because the little bit of poking around I’ve done has only turned up jobs in Maryland. That’s a little too much daily commute for me.

William and I didn’t do much for our first anniversary. We did some sightseeing of DC, but we didn’t stay long. Apparently, part of the problem with marrying on Memorial Day weekend in this area is the huge number of motorcycles you have to swim through if you want to do touristy things for your anniversary. I did get to see some places I hadn’t before: the National Archives building, the Library of Congress. Also, that day it threatened to pour rain. Which would have been fine with us – there was a torrential storm the day of our outside vows ceremony. It made things interesting, and the pictures are pretty funny. Liam kept us from going out to dinner the night of (we wanted him with us because he’s fun to take out lately), so we went to hibachi the next Monday. Liam got to watch the cook toss things around and make faces at him, and dinner was pretty yummy.

Liam’s fourth and fifth teeth broke through last week, so he’s all snaggle-toothed when he smiles. It’s very cute. He’s also gotten very good at pulling himself up into a standing position if you offer him your hands or if he’s near the couch. That took him less than two weeks to perfect once he figured out how to get onto his knees. The baby gates are up and we’ve barricaded off a place for the cats’ food bowls, so Liam has fairly free reign of the living room, kitchen and hallway. If I’m walking around doing chores he follows me going “rar! rar!” with a big smile on his face. Hard to believe he’s mobile already. . .

Also, there are a lot of places I keep saying I want to visit in DC. I lived in Tennessee for almost a decade and never did half of the trails, parks, ect. I wanted to, so I don’t want to be lazy and not sightsee DC while I live here. If we had been a little more ambitious we could have walked across the bridge and seen the Lincoln Memorial. But the problem with DC is that everything looks closer than it really is. I discovered during a trip I made in highschool that it is not advisable to walk from site to site unless you’re 100% sure about the distance. I want to go to the Air and Space Museum, the International Spy Museum, the Baltimore Aquarium, and the Library of Congress. Liam was really good for this outing, so I think he’d be up for a museum. It’s just amazing to see how full of personality he is now.

Christmas was a bit of an adventure, toting Liam around airports and seeing how well he handled the airplane. He actually did very well, though the unavailability of wiggle space eventually annoyed him on the flight home. (This kid is all movement.) He also had a rough first night while he adjusted to new surroundings. Thankfully we were staying in the neighbor’s house while they were gone, so we didn’t keep anyone awake and Liam didn’t have too much overwhelming him at bedtime. The rest of the time he charmed everyone and got to meet his cousins and other extended family. Gibson had a great time ripping into his presents. (And would not let the Thomas the Train toy carrier we gave him out of his sight!) We had a relatively small crowd at Christmas dinner this year, mostly mom’s family. It was warm outside, but still nice enough to sit on the patio. The Sunday after Christmas Rue’s crew and some of dad’s family came over to meet Liam and William. It was cool enough to have a little fire and make s’mores.

Zeb, Alarra, and Ceika drove down to Johnson City for New Year’s at the New Hippie Hut. We wanted to join them, but we didn’t want William to be that exhausted when he went back to work on the following Monday. Also, we weren’t sure what kind of shape Liam would be in after the trip to Florida. We opted for a shorter trip to visit Kevin and Stephanie instead. We missed hanging out with everyone in Tennessee, but we were kind of right about Liam. He would not have dealt well with a longer trip than the 3 hour ride to Durham. Not after the Florida trip, at least. We’re aiming to go to Tennessee over William’s spring break if all goes well. We didn’t do much in Durham, but we had a nice visit. Kevin and Steph have learned to make candles and showed William and I. Kevin also showed William how to make “bath bombs,” scented and molded bath salts that fizz when you toss them in the tub. Very nice, very nice indeed.

It was all fun, but it’s good to be home. Today we’re back to our regularly scheduled week, though we do have piles and piles of laundry I should be folding instead of updating my blog. Tonight we’re playing Star Wars with Mike via Skype and tomorrow Nick might come over and hang out with us before he has to fly back to Saudi. And maybe I’ll be able to catch up on some sleep, too.

Just shy of three months later, surgery wasn’t all too bad. And the end result is pretty darned cute, though the first month and change of mommyhood wrecked my nerves. Liam would hold his breath and then inhale with a loud gasp. I’m told this is totally normal and he is growing out of it, but holy crap was it unnerving. He still does it every so often, but at least now I’m a little more confidant he’s not really dying. Also, because he came c-section I didn’t start producing milk for nearly a week, so I was constantly worried he was hungry. And of course he cried most of the time he was awake and he woke at weird hours and all that normal stuff. Thankfully my mom and William’s mom took turns staying to help those first two weeks. They made sure I got some sleep and some alone time with William and didn’t have to cook while my stitches started healing.

They say that the first 6 weeks are the hardest, but I declare shenanigans on that. Liam only recently started smiling, so I’ll say things were toughest through about the 9 week mark. It’s still not easy, but at least now he looks around, grins when we’re in the room and munches on his hands when he’s starting to get hungry. It’s a little easier to figure out what he wants when he cries and he makes a funny little squeak when he tries to laugh. He’s napping less during the day, but will sleep for longer stretches at night. He’s also not quite so teeny-tiny, which makes us a little more confidant when we’re holding him. He was born at 6 ponds 14 ounces, and weighed 10.5 pounds at his two month checkup. He’s also grown about two inches.

I miss having coworkers and having an income to contribute, but that’ll come again soon I hope. The smiles and snuggles are a pretty good reward, too. (Though I could do with less spit-up!) I really miss being in the church choir and all the activities I had there. I found a nice congregation, but I’m not 100% sure they’re where I’ll end up. I might try one other place before talking to Little River’s choir director and starting to make that place home. The gaming group William, Mike and I do over Skype once a week helps fight the boredom and missing my friends. And Zeb and Alarra and Cieka aren’t very far. Also, and I almost hate to admit it, messing around World of Warcraft with the Circle of Fear guildies also helps. The cats help, too, when they’re not tearing the apartment down or demanding as much attention as Liam. So I think I’m settling into this new groove pretty well.

Now I just have to get back into a blog-updating groove.

Not that I have issues with other people stating what they believe in their profiles and status messages – by all means do. But when I joined Facebook I worked for a college and was not often sympathetic to their official stance on certain social, religious, and political issues. The campus could be a little bit like a fishbowl, and though I had (have) very few students and faculty on my friends list, I decided it might be better to exercise care in what kind of information I put out there. Also, ideologically, I’ve been a lot of places in my short life and know people all over the spectrum. Maybe it was one part fear that kept me from saying anything that would upset old conceptions of what I think. Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with the inevitable postings calling me an uninformed lemming of a liberal. Or worse, someone ignoring me all together.

Back in college I posted on a forum called The Ooze (no, I won’t link it) that was supposed to be a safe place for discussing the Church in the 21st century, specifically the Emergent Church. A lot of nice people on there, one or two of whom I even met personally a time or two, but eventually the trolls got to me. I couldn’t handle working on what I considered a well-worded and calm post for 30 or 40 minutes just to be brushed off with a “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard all day” ten seconds later. Worse was checking back on the thread a day later and realizing that no one had found my post worth the time to respond to. So I stopped going, stopped posting, stopped asking my questions in the forum and decided sitting around with two or three friends and a chai latte or beer was preferable to sitting in front of my computer agonizing over why some total stranger didn’t think I was worth their time. I rarely posted on forums after that, aside from the Order of the Stick forum’s silly message board games. Stabbity Death really doesn’t lend itself to political debate.

Part of me thinks that keeping my thoughts to myself is a little self serving and dishonest, though. Why should I let people think I’m something I’m not? They knew me once, and they liked me enough to find me on Facebook, so why not let them know me now? So the other day I responded to a status message posting about the health care reform debate. One of the hottest button issues I could have touched. Really, I should have known better. While the guy whose status message is of a similar mind to mine, and one of my old college mates complemented me for my presentation of a view counter to someone else’s in the discussion, I ended up angry and ultimately fighting a very intense desire to make a verbal attack. But this isn’t Facebook, this is my own personal blog. I still maintain that an email from an unconfirmed source claiming to be a congressman doesn’t count as a reliable source. Even if the email is legit, we’ve watched congressmen and women distort the facts of this issue for their own gain. Do your own damned homework. It isn’t that hard. Fox News isn’t a reliable resource, either. Hell, no ONE news or information source is. Cross-reference for crying out loud. This is the digital era. If you’re on Facebook you have the rest of the internet at your fingertips, too. Bills and proposals are easily found online. Lots of respected professionals have blogged commentary on this issue. Google is your friend. If you have issues with my argument, address them. Don’t discount or ignore me because the only thing you zoomed in on was my “liberal” source and not my actual argument.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, last night I posted a vaguely political status message of my own. Now, my big thing in the health care discussion is that no one has been treating it like a discussion. All I’ve seen is a lot of sensationalized coverage of town hall meetings, congressmen and women throwing insults across the aisle, and mass emails sent from God-knows-where about how we’re becoming a Socialist state or a Communist regime. Thank you for your fear tactics, whoever you are, but could we please set them aside now and talk to each other like civilized human beings again? So my status read “Ginger listened to the president’s speech and had some ice cream before bed. Here’s to hoping Obama was able to inspire a more informed, civil discussion about health care.” Maybe the president was able, but it appears I sure wasn’t. Trog posted a very even-handed response about how Obama addressed all the highlights of his critics’ problems with the idea of health care reform. But then an old youth minister of mine chimed in saying “Giving that much to the government is scary.” He’s a smart guy, and I don’t want to discount his opinion, off topic though it kind of was, but that feels like bait to me. And I took it, some. William took it more. He didn’t give sources, which is a little bit of a mistake for folks like William and I, but he isn’t a person who does research of some sort every day like we do (or I did) and probably doesn’t place the weight we do on sources. So again, I don’t want to discount his opinion, but I do want to know what kind of info he’s working off of. Not that it matters, because he shut the conversation down. Without responding to my response trying to tease out his sources, or at least better details on where he’s coming from. Yes, William got sharp with him. No, I’m not going to censor my own husband, though I do think I’ll serve him up a nice ‘I told you so.’

I still think that in both cases I posted a legitimate question that was ignored, and that really irks me. Maybe I should go back to keeping it to the blog, though some angry part of me wants to take every stupid opinion poll and sign every petition on Facebook just for spite. Maybe I’ll just post a link to this rant on my profile.

That said, everything seems to be going smoothly. I still need to find and buy the little guy a dresser / changing table and his name is still up in the air, but other than that we’re mostly ready for him. I think. I have a prenatal visit with the pediatrician this coming week, and a tour of the hospital’s birthing center. Lisa and Paul gifted us (well, the baby really) with the ViaCord service and we should be getting everything we need from there soon.

In non-baby news I called Granma today. She recently bought a laptop so she can email, but being well into her 80s and having never touched a computer before, her learning curve is pretty steep. She’s just now figured out how to log in to Gmail. But today was also the 7th anniversary of Grandpa’s death and we all like to call and make sure she’s doing alright. Mom and Dad took her out to dinner tonight as well. Its our little way of commemorating him, I guess. Today would also have been his birthday. He’s interred at Arlington, so hopefully next year I can make the trip to his mausoleum and leave flowers. At the risk of getting mushy, he really was the best Grandpa I could have hoped for, and I’m sometimes sad that William and my son will never get the pleasure of knowing or being spoiled by him like I was. I think he would really have liked William.

The last weekend of June was the Third Annual “Southeast Trogland” Giant in the Playground Meetup. The group was smaller than last year, but the number seemed to work better. Less chaos, less drama, more fun. Of course, I wasn’t technically a “local” anymore; I carpooled with Zeb and Alarra. (It was the last week of school at the JDC and William had to work.) All in all a great time, and I got to meet a few new GiTP forumites. Which is all the more interesting considering I haven’t really done more than peek at the forums in a year. But Playgrounders are almost always fun, no matter how you meet them. Zeb, Alarra, and Ceika are relatively close to me here in VA, but I haven’t gotten together with them yet. Zeb and Alarra are brand new parents, and I’ve only got 4 more weeks to go, so maybe once baby chaos settles down we can hang out. There’s even a mini-meetup in the works for October.

For July 4 we drove over to Smith Mountain Lake, VA, to spend about a week at William’s grandparents’ house. Apparently the area has become a popular place to build vacation houses since Nana and Granddad built their retirement home on the lake years ago, but they still manage to have a nice peaceful house under the trees. It was my first time meeting them, so I was nervous, but they’re really delightful. They met during the Second World War – he was in the US military and she the British. They wrote letters back and forth for a long while and eventually she came over and they married. And now they’re possibly the cutest little old couple I’ve ever met. Sadly we couldn’t see the fireworks from their house, but we did watch the Washington, DC, display on TV. (Not quite the same, I know, but it had to do.)

The following weekend we drove up to William’s mom’s for a baby shower. Nana and Granddad were there, and so were Lisa and her family. We spent one morning at Hershey’s Chocolate World. The whole place is really nothing more than a tourist trap designed to give you a sugar high and make you want to buy chocolate, but with the kids it was fun and I got to buy some t-shirts for my parents. Jan had tons of really wonderful food and we went to a nice, casual restaurant for the shower. The guys stayed through lunch and some of the silly shower games. Colin even won the game where you guess how round I am. After that I was on my own in a room full of barely-familiar women, but it was fun.

The weekend of July 18th we flew down to Florida for another baby shower hosted by Aunt Rue. It was good to see all the aunts and cousins down there again, even if it was kind of brief. Rue gave a great shower. Amy, Gibson and Alyce flew down, and we got to spend some time with William’s friend Mike and my old friends the Eastlicks.  William also got to meet my grandma for the first time, as well as my Uncle Rick and cousin Cookie. A few of my aunts were disappointed that he didn’t go to the shower, but we’re hoping to go down again at Christmas, so they’ll get to meet then. We don’t want to overwhelm the poor guy; my family is much larger than his.

And that’s pretty much all the travel I’m allowed until the little dude is here. The Florida trip kind of pushed my “no-fly” cutoff, but since my TN doctors never told me what that cutoff was and I had to make plans, oh well. (I had trouble with that office. Don’t get me started.) Four more weeks and hopefully I will no longer have indigestion that keeps me up and blogging until 1am.