How a sleeping person interprets directions...
3:42 am
Catie: Can you roll over onto your side? You've been snoring.
Ken rolls/scoots over onto his side...of the bed.
Catie: Nooo...the side of your body.
Maybe he thought the reason he was snoring so much was because he was sleeping too close to me?
2.09.2010
2.04.2010
Superbowl ad...
I just read this article about the pro-life ad, paid for by Focus on the Family's James Dobson, that Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow has airing during the Superbowl this Sunday. What I love about this article is that it's finally a pro-choicer stating something that speaks in favor of something a pro-lifer is doing. Take some time and read it...you won't be sorry :)Some snippets I liked:
"Apparently NOW (the National Organization for Women) feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision."
"Tebow's ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it's apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life." This is what NOW has labeled "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning.""
2.02.2010
bump update...
Just a quick distraction from work, then I'll get back to it. I guess this is more for the non-facebook-ers who read the blog, since I put up the same photos there, too! As one of the little girls I work with said: "Oh good, you're finally growing!"
25 weeks:
24 weeks:
25 weeks:
1.28.2010
tales from my day...
I was right...kids starting noticing the baby bump! Which led to questions I wasn't prepared for, like "Well then where do babies come from?" ...
I also wasn't prepared for the first time someone asked, because I was in the middle of leading group therapy. When a little 9 year-old asked if I was pregnant, one of the girls I see individually covered her ears...she said later that she had been embarrassed for me. I think she thought I was just getting fat and felt bad for me!
Even compared to the exhaustion of the first trimester, driving to Rhode Island with my eyes barely staying open, getting through the day with a very fuzzy brain...that was nothing after yesterday's whirlwind. I started off the day feeling great, but by 9am, it was apparent that the acute inpatient children's unit was quite...acute yesterday. Multiple kids getting restrained multiple times by 10 am (for their safety and the safety of others, not a straightjacket kind of thing), which always entails a lot of yelling and slamming doors, which tends to put all the other kids on edge, of course. Half the kids in my group therapy session were set off because of the noise and couldn't hold it together to stay in the session. One left shortly after staring at me challengingly while stabbing the chair with a sharpened pencil. Throughout the day, I was flipped off, called a liar, and someone flagrantly cheated while playing Go Fish with me. Although the blow of that was diminished by how cute I thought it was that he continued to say "Gold Fish" instead of "Go".
There was a golden hour at 3 when I thought I had time to hide in the staff room and catch up on therapy notes, but ended up volunteering to be a stand-in staff member to hang out with a teeny 5 year-old who was shaken up by all the commotion and needed some quiet away from the rest of the kids. So we danced around to some music for a while...and I suppose it wasn't so bad to give up my free time :) Maybe it was a small taste of parenthood--even when exhausted, there is no rest, but it's still rewarding.
I also wasn't prepared for the first time someone asked, because I was in the middle of leading group therapy. When a little 9 year-old asked if I was pregnant, one of the girls I see individually covered her ears...she said later that she had been embarrassed for me. I think she thought I was just getting fat and felt bad for me!
Even compared to the exhaustion of the first trimester, driving to Rhode Island with my eyes barely staying open, getting through the day with a very fuzzy brain...that was nothing after yesterday's whirlwind. I started off the day feeling great, but by 9am, it was apparent that the acute inpatient children's unit was quite...acute yesterday. Multiple kids getting restrained multiple times by 10 am (for their safety and the safety of others, not a straightjacket kind of thing), which always entails a lot of yelling and slamming doors, which tends to put all the other kids on edge, of course. Half the kids in my group therapy session were set off because of the noise and couldn't hold it together to stay in the session. One left shortly after staring at me challengingly while stabbing the chair with a sharpened pencil. Throughout the day, I was flipped off, called a liar, and someone flagrantly cheated while playing Go Fish with me. Although the blow of that was diminished by how cute I thought it was that he continued to say "Gold Fish" instead of "Go".
There was a golden hour at 3 when I thought I had time to hide in the staff room and catch up on therapy notes, but ended up volunteering to be a stand-in staff member to hang out with a teeny 5 year-old who was shaken up by all the commotion and needed some quiet away from the rest of the kids. So we danced around to some music for a while...and I suppose it wasn't so bad to give up my free time :) Maybe it was a small taste of parenthood--even when exhausted, there is no rest, but it's still rewarding.
1.17.2010
update...
23 weeks...I think I'm starting to actually look pregnant to the outside world! People at work are finally asking me about it, which means the kids I work with will probably start having some interesting comments about it soon... (Keep in mind, among these kids is a girl I work with whose New Years' Resolution is to "stop biting people").And I've got a pregnancy waddle going on...which actually has very little to do with the pregnancy! It's because I'm stubborn :) I took the trash out on Thursday, even though Ken kept saying for me not to, and while it may have been carrying the trash that tweaked my back (though I doubt it), I think what did me in was that the bins were frozen to the ground. Tugging them out of the ice did a number on my lower back, and I can't get comfortable for the life of me. When sleeping was already starting to get a little difficult, it's been hard to just not be able to find a comfortable spot. C'est la vie...I will now abstain from household chores that involve lifting things :) Sorry Ken.
We've been able to see the baby kicking and punching, which I think scared Ken at first. Just wait until we see an arm swipe from one side of my belly to the other...thaaat'll be freaky. Baby's definitely growing too...I can feel simultaneous kicks/punches from both one side of my belly and the middle, or way down at the bottom and at my belly button. Fun! I think the funniest thing right now is waking up and realizing the baby's been kicking away in the middle of the night. It seems like the first sign of independence...I'm doing one thing, and baby's doing a whoooole other thing. Pretty soon it'll be going off to kindergarten, packing its own lunch, going to sleepovers, getting a driver's license, going off to college and... ohmygosh brrreaaathe.
1.13.2010
A Father's Mix Tape
The countdown is on until May 15th. Yep, that's the day that Baby Kraper arrives. He or she is most anticipated, but I have to say that I have a slight bit of anxiety thinking about all of the things that 'Dad' is supposed to do to get ready. I haven't built anything, moved anything, read enough, purchased any goods, learned to burp, feed, or get him/her to sleep. I don't anticipate having to change diapers though. Hopefully he or she will be potty trained on arrival. Hey, a man can dream, can't he?
In addition to our baby book (the one that the kid can look back on and read about how his mom couldn't get enough Mexican food, or how spinach leaves in a salad were out of the question, when she was pregnant), Cate and I each started our own journals to write about what we are thinking/feeling/hoping for, as well as any fun stories that we want to pass along to the kiddo some day. It's a neat idea, and I hope that I am as diligent as I hope to be as time goes on. But hopefully, if it's important to me (which it is), I'll keep writing. It reminds me of the movie "My Life" with Michael Keaton (who is the original movie version of Batman aside from Adam West, and is awesome). It's about a guy who finds out he's got cancer, and then finds out that his wife (played by Nicole Kidman) is pregnant with their first child. I always felt like it was an incredibly powerful movie that really showed the different steps of coping (or not coping) when something traumatic like that happens. It's a good Netflix'er. In any case, throughout the course of the movie, Michael Keaton records videos to his unborn child to talk about anything and everything. A really funny part of the movie was when he was trying to teach his son about how to walk into a room. So he set the camera up on a tripod and pointed it out at the front foyer of his house, and practiced walking in and out, showing how to be assertive when walking into a room of people you don't know, and how you can really mess things up. It was funny in only the way that Michael Keaton could make it funny. What was also really cool about it (I know, it's just a movie), was he talked a ton about his marriage to, and relationship with, his wife. It was all very touching.
You may not know this about me, but my father was a Navy helicopter pilot whose life was cut wayyyy too short 27 years ago when he was killed in a helicopter crash about 6 months before I was born. Back in those days, when you were deployed on a ship (as he was several times), phones were scarce, there was no email, and snail mail was truly that. It so happened that when my older brother was born, my dad was also deployed during the birth to the Persian Gulf (yes, we had a presence there in the '70s-'80s). What a lot of people probably don't know about us, is that my dad began recording cassette tapes at the time of my older brother's birth to talk about all of the things I mentioned above and more. What's the 'and more'? Well, he even went so far as to sing lullabies, and talked about why he was the way he was, how glad he was to be a father since his own father died when my dad was 9, and the kind of man he wanted to teach his son(s) to be. Growing up, those cassette tapes were like famous books to us. We could quote them. We wrote papers for school about excerpts from the tapes. They showed us a man who was humbled by marriage, by the honor of serving his country, and the dream of being a father. There was so much he wanted to do with us: play ball, teach us to drive, be there for our wedding days, and show us that the Kraper name wasn't just a last name, but a way of life that stood for honor and goodness.
In addition to our baby book (the one that the kid can look back on and read about how his mom couldn't get enough Mexican food, or how spinach leaves in a salad were out of the question, when she was pregnant), Cate and I each started our own journals to write about what we are thinking/feeling/hoping for, as well as any fun stories that we want to pass along to the kiddo some day. It's a neat idea, and I hope that I am as diligent as I hope to be as time goes on. But hopefully, if it's important to me (which it is), I'll keep writing. It reminds me of the movie "My Life" with Michael Keaton (who is the original movie version of Batman aside from Adam West, and is awesome). It's about a guy who finds out he's got cancer, and then finds out that his wife (played by Nicole Kidman) is pregnant with their first child. I always felt like it was an incredibly powerful movie that really showed the different steps of coping (or not coping) when something traumatic like that happens. It's a good Netflix'er. In any case, throughout the course of the movie, Michael Keaton records videos to his unborn child to talk about anything and everything. A really funny part of the movie was when he was trying to teach his son about how to walk into a room. So he set the camera up on a tripod and pointed it out at the front foyer of his house, and practiced walking in and out, showing how to be assertive when walking into a room of people you don't know, and how you can really mess things up. It was funny in only the way that Michael Keaton could make it funny. What was also really cool about it (I know, it's just a movie), was he talked a ton about his marriage to, and relationship with, his wife. It was all very touching.
You may not know this about me, but my father was a Navy helicopter pilot whose life was cut wayyyy too short 27 years ago when he was killed in a helicopter crash about 6 months before I was born. Back in those days, when you were deployed on a ship (as he was several times), phones were scarce, there was no email, and snail mail was truly that. It so happened that when my older brother was born, my dad was also deployed during the birth to the Persian Gulf (yes, we had a presence there in the '70s-'80s). What a lot of people probably don't know about us, is that my dad began recording cassette tapes at the time of my older brother's birth to talk about all of the things I mentioned above and more. What's the 'and more'? Well, he even went so far as to sing lullabies, and talked about why he was the way he was, how glad he was to be a father since his own father died when my dad was 9, and the kind of man he wanted to teach his son(s) to be. Growing up, those cassette tapes were like famous books to us. We could quote them. We wrote papers for school about excerpts from the tapes. They showed us a man who was humbled by marriage, by the honor of serving his country, and the dream of being a father. There was so much he wanted to do with us: play ball, teach us to drive, be there for our wedding days, and show us that the Kraper name wasn't just a last name, but a way of life that stood for honor and goodness.
None of us ended up with chance to share those experiences, but I will tell you that in hearing about it growing up, we came close. We laughed with his stories of meeting my mother, we cried with him when he talked about his own mother, and thought about the kind of men he wanted his sons to be. Today we have those tapes converted into CDs and MP3s and stored away in lock boxes. Every so often we still individually pull out those 'letters', when we're down, when we don't know what to do in a particular situation, or have questions about the worth of our character, it's nice to pull out the tapes and hear his words.
Today my dad, for whom I am named, would have turned 63 years old. Our mom has been a rock and carried on his name and tradition to us for 27 years. I'm sitting here thinking about what I should write to my unborn child, and I just hope that I can come close to inspiring him or her in the ways that my parents inspired us.
1.10.2010
musical year in review...
Time to post "The Year in Music"...it's late, but a day earlier than we were last year. It was a little hard to put together, in part because I have less and less confidence that the music I've been listening to is the least bit new or hip or on any kind of "edge". I'm not saying I'd like to find edgier music, but I think in some way I used to at least be aware of some kind of inside edge of up and coming music. I'm just massively out of it now. I sort of blame this on iTunes...I don't commit to artists anymore and buy their whole record and really dig into them. We buy single songs that I think are catchy, but putting together random mix cds doesn't really allow us to get excited about new artists. So on that note, please please feel free to post comments of artists we should check out. The kind you can buy the album and listen straight through and love the whole thing. I miss that...In any case, these are the ones that stick out from the year--both oldies and very new.
1. She is Love--Parachute. Saw them open for someone at Paradise Rock Lounge, and shortly after they hit it fairly big.
2. Forever--Chris Brown. Ok, so he's abusive and not a stand-up individual. But the video of the couple who used this for their wedding entrance just made both of us smile a lot, and we played it a lot this year.
3. Alone--Heart. Yeah Big Hair Bands from the 80s. After Allison Iraheta sang this on American Idol, I had a short-lived rediscovery of my love for 80s bands and power ballads.
4. Party in the USA--Miley Cyrus. Reminds us of some super fun weddings at the tail end of the summer.
5. My Traveling Star--James Taylor. Gave his new cd to my dad, and he pointed this song out to me--so good, and I'd never heard it before!
6. Fireflies--Owl City. Love the video with all the toys from the 80s.
7. Revelry--Kings of Leon. This would not have made Ken's list, cause he hates this band, but I'm a big fan :)
8. Electric Feel--MGMT. Just cause I think it's fun.
9. Hey Soul Sister--Train. Seriously catchy. Didn't think I'd be a fan of Train again after Drops of Jupiter was (very) overplayed.
10. Make you Feel My Love--Adele. A remake (I was gonna say "of Garth Brooks", but I think it's actually Bob Dylan??), but a sweet song.
What makes your list for 2009??
What should we look for this year?
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