The submission period for ditl November 9th has ended!
Please vote for your favorite by following the link that is displayed in the first comment to each entry, read the rules and then write in.
You have until November 16th to get your votes in! November 17th is the next ditl day. The theme for that day is "Fantasy", theme participation is optional.
Remember that if you friends-lock your entries, non-members who normally vote will not be able to see them.

Entries:
beatlescowgirl's entry.
stalkingsilence's entry.
bernthewitch's entry.
4tsandgrowing's entry.
theprophecygirl's entry.
csamara27's entry.
zipher's entry.
madamemama's entry.


Moderator and maintainer entries, not eligible for voting
babyslime's entry.

Curtis is home now.
His incisions look really good - none of that oozing, grossness that would indicate things gone wrong. In fact they hurt him the least out of everything. The worst he's gone through was the gas pain. Not gas like gas - gas just floating around in his abdomen. They inflated him with air to do the surgery, and the gas moved about in a very bloated stomach for two days before finally being reabsorbed, or something... the sheer amount of neck and shoulder pain he was getting from it reduced him to tears. There were periods where it hurt him so much to move that I almost took him to the hospital for stronger meds; I was really scared for him. The nurses said they can't do anything about that pain and he just has to sit it out.

It took us 15 minutes to get out of the car, another 20 to get in the house (up three steps). Going from sitting down on the bed to laying down in bed the first night took almost 45.
I said a thousand times, "I can take your weight" before he finally leaned on me while I helped him through the house.
It's very humbling, he said later, to have me help him up and down off the toilet. In our house we normally enact what we call the "Elliot Rule": no one is allowed to speak to someone on, or while you yourself are on, the toilet. This is due almost entirely to my intense issues surrounding the bathroom, and only a little bit because it's also a weird thing to do. He said he felt guilty, but... honestly I like taking care of him. Even that stuff.
I would have helped him use a bedpan and caught his vomit if I needed to... because he's my love. It makes me happy to care for him.

I did end up doing my DITL, even though there are big parts missing. I posted it in the community without commentary, but you guys get the extra stuff.

(Trivia: the font used in this is the font I made from my own handwriting. It's a little bit sloppier than I normally write because it was hard to keep everything straight when I'm writing letters in separate boxes without a real guide to let me know if one letter is going to be rendered higher than another. Still, it's kind of cool to see it on a DITL).

( DITL of Curtis' surgery )

I believe the last DITL I did and posted was the day my boy Beckett was born. Four months later, here is a very typical, highly uneventful day.

Midnight rolls around and I am sipping wine, wasting time on the computer.


( Warnings: unabashed nursing shots (but no nipple), other people's children, Farmville and a bit of retail therapy )

Notes augmented

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Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

My husband undergoes surgery for a blood clotting disorder, and has complications following. Meanwhile, I muddle through a healthy dose of hospital-related PTSD and bring a camera along to distract myself.

Warnings for language, naughty cartoon imagery and innuendo.

( I hate hospitals )

I tried my daughter(6 lbs.) in a Sleepy wrap for about half an hour last night and towards the end I started feeling achy in my back and chest. I also started feeling a little nausea, and hungry...

Is this a normal first reaction? I was thinking perhaps her weight being suspended there might be new for my body or something? Will this go away the more I carry her in the wrap?

I finally got up the courage to try out my Moby with my daughter last night. I had some issues yesterday, first I tied it too loose then too tight, but tonight I think I did much better :) I'm trying to build up some confidence before I wear her out into the world. Maybe on Friday for her 1 month birthday, haha.

( One picture! )

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

This is the first year that we might actually have a Christmas tree and I just realized that we don't have any ornaments for it. We don't have money to buy any, but why should that stop me? :D

I'd love to hear everyone's favorite cheap, homemade, or recycled tree ornament ideas. If you've just got links, that's good as well. I am especially interested in things my toddler (19 months old) can help me make.

Did anyone see the new Mothering issue? There are some great handmade ornaments in there that are pretty much just little pillows with a ribbon loop sewn in the top. The cloth is white and the kids just took markers and decorated the outside of the pillows. One I am planning on doing this year for family is to make some salt dough (with cinnamon so they smell nice) and have my daughter make hand-print ornaments to send to family.

Rules:

1. Return to this entry over the course of the submission period to vote for as many entries that you felt were particularly good/moving/touching/funny/unique/interesting, but please no "Ballot box stuffing". Any double votes will be discounted.
2. Votes are hidden, so you can feel free to NOT vote for your best friend. They'll never know.
3. Votes for yourself will not be counted: don't throw your vote away!
4. Non-members can vote.
5. Each submission will have a comment left by a mod that links back to this voting entry so you can vote instantly. The submission period will still end after a few days to make sure even the late entries have adequate time to be viewed and considered. Results will be posted on Monday, November 16th.
6. The winner of last week's DITL (yoursoulkitchen) cannot be voted for, however they can still submit this week and you can feel free to leave them comments.
7. Moderators cannot receive votes. Mods are babyslime, jesamin, sequiro, muliebrity, imbroglio, sweetpea_girl, and thejoysofjess.

When you vote, the text box you used will no longer be available: to make sure you get adequate space to vote for your favourites, I've offered five polls. Overflow can go into screened comments.

( Vote! )

Hello :)

I'm Nikki, I live in Brisbane, Australia and have two beautiful children, Cobey who's 3 and Eva who's 5-and-a-half-months. With Cobey I didn't really know about BLW, but I pureed his food for maybe a month before I started giving him finger-table-foods - mainly because I'm lazy ;D (Why is it that all the 'attachment parenting' type things are really lazy :p I mean really! Why do I co-sleep? Because stuffed if I'm getting up at night!) ANYWAY... so yeah, it's not a foreign concept to me, but I do love explaining it to friends and glad it has a name I can refer them to.

Anyway, onto my daughter, she's 5.5 months, very very keen (I know, just because they grab doesn't mean they're ready...) all the right signs are there, so lately, maybe once every two days she gets a taste of something, maybe what her brother's having if I've cut some fruit for him, or what Daddy's having because he LOVES to give her food...

Today at dinner she was all "WANT WANT HAVE WHINGE WANT GIMMIE" so I broke up a rice cake in half and left her go for it, she loved it, and - of course, hit the gag reflex a few times, but then without warning (like a couple of minutes after she'd last hit her gag reflex) she did a complete water-fall style vomit. Quite pleased with herself, but yeah. Is this normal for the beginnings of BLW? It was quite the vomit!

(And yes, I know she's ONLY 5 months and she has the rest of her life to start solids... I'm a bit keen, she's a bit keen...)

(also, any recipes for teething biscuits?)

I have spent 12 straight hours at the hospital, most of which was sitting on the floor outside the ICU crying my eyes out while they would not let me in to see him and very carefully skirted the, "If he's doing fine then why isn't he out yet?" question.

More later, but for now here's the reader's digest version:
Out of surgery and stable following an absolute clusterfuck. They fed him tons of morphine - then OD'd him. The man has the constitution of a five year old, but is 6'4" so everyone thinks he can take ten times as much.
He wasn't breathing well, they kept having to wake him because every time he fell asleep he'd stop breathing entirely. When I finally saw him he was on oxygen, with a fever, high BP and totally delusional - but, better by the time I left. If he does well he can come home tomorrow evening. If not they'll keep him until he's stable and as long as he keeps breathing.

Of note: while high as a kite he tells great jokes. None of which he will remember.

Hi everyone. Hope you're doing well. I have a question for everyone. My nephew is teething something FIERCE right now with FIVE teeth coming in at once. Both my sister (his mom) and I ran low grade fevers with diarrhea when we got teeth like this at that age and lo and behold...poor kid is hurting, has a low grade fever, and diarrhea. I had heard that chamomille tea can help soothe teething pain and I know it tends to help my stomach when it's upset like that. Is it a bad idea to give chamomille tea with diarrhea? I would think it would help fluid intake. I also worry that he won't take the tea by itself (we've never tried before...) so I was wondering at what age is it OK to give kids honey. He's 15 months old now. I've heard 1 year old and over is safe and other places have told me not under 2 years old.

Poor kid is with his parents tonight (a rarity, I know) while I work my "short" overnight shift and my sister is so overwhelmed. Any thoughts or experience?

I went to visit a friend and her 12 day old baby today (OMG TINY!).
( Tiny baby cell phone pics! )