nano what?

and here i thought having a blog meant i was catching up with the times. as of tonight i am REALLY feeling younger...i now have an ipod nano! well, okay, so *i* is not exactly the word to use...it was won and the name called was technically "michael case haub," but you married folks know how it goes, with the "what's yours is mine" etc. etc. so anyway, WE have an ipod nano. all i need now is a myspace account and i'm as good as 20 again. i'm pretty pumped to have a little music to keep me going at my jogging attempts. our stroller also has built in speakers and a place to hook-in an ipod or other mobile musical device, so it will be sweet to put that to use, too (although we use the Ergo at least once a day, and the stroller only once every couple weeks). so the thing is...i have NO IDEA HOW TO USE IT. i mean, it seems self-explanatory enough. but i'm pretty ignorant of this stuff. every person i saw on the subway in NYC seemed to have an ipod, but i never thought it was something i'd want or use. a free one, of course, is a different story. so before i go searching for answers to the following questions, i figured i'd pose a few inquiries to you seasoned ipod users:
1) is itunes the best/only place to download music? what other sites are good?
2) is 99cents the going rate now no matter what site you use?
3) what else do you use this thing for? i see you can put contacts, a calendar, and
other things on there, but i'm not entirely sure what the range of abilities is
for these gadgets.
4) what the heck else should i know about having and using an ipod?
i need to figure out if it will sync well with windows vista, since the nano box says to use windows xp or 2000. hopefully it will. it's pretty cute though, and smaller and thinner than any cell phone i've ever had. the good thing about this is that i no longer have to drive around the surburbs listening to the black eyed peas a little too loudly for someone driving a prius and who obviously looks like a Mom. now i can keep my west coast funk fix to myself while jogging, and the passers by (in their Hummers and other such SUVs here in suburbia-land) can assume i'm listening to jason mraz or some other poppy snazzy diddy. i'm giddy with the anticipation!

he's sleeping. wow.

hi everybody. i've been wandering around for a couple hours now, not knowing what to do with myself because jack has been sleeping since 8:15pm. that sounds like a late bedtime for a baby, but jack has been pushing the past few weeks to 9:30, 10...even 11:30 the other night. it has been trying and frustrating. i'm against the "cry it out" approach for many reasons, but i realized we needed a little guidance. so i picked up a copy of "the baby sleep book" by william and martha sears yesterday and have been picking up a few tips on finding his perfect individual sleep routine. we tried to follow the advice tonight on following his tired signs and it ended up in a much earlier bedtime. happy happy happy. as long as he doesn't get up at 4am to adjust for it. anyway, this leaves me with some extra time to blog, now that i just finished watching the premier episodes of "the two coreys." hmm, much like a boy-boy version of the newlyweds on MTV. i can see why they were left in the '80s...

this past weekend we made a trip to indianola to visit the warren county fair (which mike summed up by saying, "we saw pigs, we ate pigs."), and to see the nightly lift off of the hot air balloons in the Indianola Balloon Classic. i left my camera at home, but it was so beautiful that i had to find a few photos on the web to post for you all to see:





lest i rip off another's photos without assigning credit, i found these on the following site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoncross/sets/
this guy is an incredible photographer.

other than that, it has been a pretty low-key week. oh, and our little clown tried beets. jack loved beets. for two nights in a row now, he's eaten pureed beets and pureed brussel sprouts. this would be the last meal on earth mike would ever eat, and that would be only if he were literally starving to death.

Birthdays, sore thighs, and democrats--oh my!

Hello all. I'm having a hard time figuring out what day it is, as our schedule has been a bit here and there this week. Jack's and my schedule usually revolves to some extent around Mike's, and his this week was to work the whole weekend, take Mon. and Tue. off, work Wed. and Thur., take Friday off, then work half of Saturday and have Sunday off. It's now the Wednesday he is back at work and I can't keep from asking, "now, what day is it??" We had a nice but way too quick visit to Iowa City on Monday to spend more time with Sarah and Orion during their visit, and to meet Carrie and Rob's new darling, Eleanor. Here are some photos from that all too short day:

Eating lunch at Atlas


Mike's talking drugs, can you tell?
It was a fun trip and we are now reminded that we wish we could see everyone more often.

On Tuesday, I finally broke out the new jogging clothes I bought to inspire me to start running again. Since Mike was off work that day it worked out that I could bust a move in the morning, before the 90-degree weather hit. I can tell you that my legs were verrrry jello-y by the end of that jog. I'm hoping that I can figure out a schedule when I can go regularly. My only options seem to be: 1) get up at 5:45 and go before Jack wakes up to eat at 6:30am (um, if only I was that much of a morning person); 2) go at 4pm when Mike gets off work (HOT, and the best time to work on diss. stuff); or 3)go after dinner or after Jack's last feeding of the day while Mike puts him to bed (if only Jack's schedule was regular and I could count on this time...). So... at this point there is no plan other than to attempt to plan to jog. Sometimes. Hopefully at least 3 times a week. Later on Tuesday we also made a trip over to our local Creative Kidstuff store to check out activity tables for Jack's 1st birthday present. Now it turns out I no longer have just one thing I'm coveting for his birthday, I have two. We are most likely going to buy the Nilo activity table and put it in our living room/playroom for him. This thing is great, and they had one on display for him to try out. Perfect size, two-sided table top, great for trains, legos, crafts, you name it. We found it online with free shipping for $30 cheaper than in the store, but the store has some of the remaining block chairs no longer available online since they are discontinued. This will be an expensive, but totally worth it, gift. I'm also wooing about the Mio trike I saw there, which has a handle for parents to push and steer and a surround-the-seat bar for toddlers who can't yet peddle or figure it out. Then you can remove those things after they are old enough to use it as a trike. He loved it in the store, but at $80, it's a pricey trike. I'm hoping for birthday money from grandparents ;)
Oh yes, and on Monday night we watched the Democratic You Tube Debates on t.v. Watching the debates usually results in a lot of soapboxing from Mike and I, even though we agree on what we soapbox about. I'm pretty impressed with a few of the Democratic candidates this year, although they all annoy me in the traditional ways. I stand firm in my registered independent status, but I nearly always vote Democratic (with the exception of a green party/independent candidate here and there). I want very badly to like Hillary the best, although she still tries hard to tread a thin line sometimes. I feel Obama seems to be the most genuine, along with Edwards, but I think Obama would institute more real change than Edwards. I LOVED Dodd's idea of instituting mandatory service (well, I need to look on his website for the details) for all citizens. I think this is just an awesome way to make people aware of their citizenship and also to get them to serve the people in ways that matter (i.e., non-military ways like community service and social justice action). I realize Clinton started Americorps, but it seemed to me that Dodd was suggesting the idea of getting (making?) all people the option(?) right? to offer some sort of service to "their country" during their lifetime. I'm envisioning this to be like the 2 yrs. of evangelizing Mormons perform, although hopefully this would be shorter and with wider options. Hmm.
Well, enough for today. Have a lovely evening. And all of you dears out there who said you've been reading, please leave me a comment occassionally so I know you're still out there. Betty, that means you!

S&O bring goodies for all

Yesterday "Aunt" Sarah and "Uncle" Orion (you can never have too many aunts and uncles) came to meet Jack for the first time and brought lots of fun goodies. Two new Sandra Boynton books (we love love love her books) and some good fortune blocks. The blocks are just too cool for words. According to the little note with it, it's a Korean tradition that on a baby's 100th day, families have celebrations and place different objects in front of the baby to represent different professions. Whichever one the baby touches first is said to fortell their destiny. I'm reading this as I've already given the blocks to Jack to play with, so I walk over to see what he's playing with out of curiousity (okay, it's way past his 100th day and I probably didn't see the first block he grabbed, but I wanted to see nonetheless). Want to know which one he was avidly chewing on and grasping tightly? Queen. Yep, that's my boy. Jack thought Sarah was very pretty and liked sitting and cuddling with her.


and he quite enjoyed being entertained by Orion. We are all looking forward to spending more time with them next Monday, and also meeting Carrie and Rob's sweet new baby, Eleanor.

Greens (or not so green) and things

Hi all. I've been thinking a lot about, and mourning the devastation of, my garden and bulb plants. I've never been a green thumb, but since buying our first house two years ago, I really wanted to have a vegetable garden and try my hand at a few landscaping flowers. So far things are not going so well. Let's start with the garden. Last year was the first year we planted it, and it required a LOT of work. We had two puppies at the time and had to not only dig up the lawn to make room for the garden, but also put up a full-scale fence to keep the dogs out (cementing posts and everything). Last year things actually did well, and I had WAY too many tomatoes, and various types of peppers. Much of it went to waste when Jack was born early. This year, I had high hopes of growing not just veggies for us, but plenty of organic veggies for Jack's baby food, too. So I planted Kale and eggplant in addition to the usual tomatoes, onions, jalepeno/bananna/red bell peppers, sweet corn, and basil. Here's a quick view:

At first glance, it may not look too bad. But did you notice how small the tomato plants are? And the first row of peppers? And have you ever seen more spindly, yellow corn? Sigh. At first I thought I was underwatering, then I thought I was overwatering, and then my mother gave me her experienced opinion that it wasn't the watering at all, but it's the soil. She feels it's way too nutrient-deficient and crappy to grow anything. She decided this after finding out that I only weeded the garden twice this whole season (I planted in early May). Here's a closer shot of said soil:

So next year's plan is to haul in a few dozen bags of top soil, and maybe some potting soil, to mix in with the existing soil to start a trend of creating "better" soil for the garden. The compost should help, except that we are really bad composters. The bin you probably noticed in the last photo has been going now for a year or so. We turn it occassionally, but since we keep adding food scraps to it, it's never "finished" enough to add to the garden. It had to be dumped a few times into the city's composting bags after we learned some vital lessons about composting. #1, just because cow manure can be added to compost on farms, dog poop cannot. Dogs are carnivores and apparently food-borne illnesses can develop in garden veggies from bacteria in pet feces. #2, some things just won't compost fast enough for a small, home-owned bin: cobs from sweet corn, fruit pits, branches, etc.) So we are giving the composting a 3rd and perhaps final try. We are now trying to start a second pile to the left of the bin, so that stuff actually in the bin can work on decomposing.

I planted several dozen gladiola (gladioli?) bulbs in April with the hope of having some beautiful and colorful landscaping around our trees this summer. Thanks to the baby bunnies, most of them have been eaten down to near nothing and are not blooming. The ones that are don't look too good:



and these here I think are in too much shade to bloom. I planted them in April when the leaves weren't fully on the trees, and this was a sunny spot. Now it's nearly all shade, all the time. The bunnies and the shade combined seemed to have dwarfed them. And then there's perhaps the saddest gladioli of all:

These are in the backyard, and the rabbits went to TOWN on them. No flowers this season, I think. Then there's the final tree in front, which I surrounded with begonia bulbs, since they are supposed to grow in full shade. As you can see, only 4 of the 10 I planted have come up, and only one (which you can't really seen) has a tiny flower peeking up. I'm pretty bummed with my flowers this year!


So next year I'll have to keep up with spraying "Deer Off" and other rabbit repellants on the flowers. It didn't seem to work too well this year, though. Anyone have any good suggestions on this?

Our next big outdoor project is to do a bit of landscaping. Yuck. We're putting it off since it's hot and hard work. Nothing too fancy, though. We are going to move all the rocks around and under our deck (after washing them off to spruce them up a bit) over to the play area, which needs more rocks under it. Then we're going to plant some bushes/flowers around the deck and surround it with cedar mulch. Then we're going to get some landscaping bricks and edge around the play area/shed to try and keep the rocks IN the landscaped area, instead of out in the yard as they tend to do now when Hawkeye runs through them or children play on the swingset. It's going to be a lot of edging for us, amateurs:

Hopefully after that, there will be fewer outdoor projects to do other than tackling that garden again next year. I can't indoor plants alive for the life of me, so I'm stuck with the garden and outdoor flowers for now. I hope they fare better next year!

You're Invited!

I'm taking the easy way out on sending invites to Jack's birthday party; I'm blogging them. Consider yourselves cordially invited! His party will be right smack in the middle of the Iowa State Fair, so for you dedicated fair-goers, please stop by and have a burger and some cake with us that afternoon. I can get you directions, or you can type them into mapquest using our address (the park is at the end of our block). Hope to see some of you then!

the search for the perfect chai

I'm a chai lover. 99% of the time, when I'm in a coffee shop, I'm ordering chai. I do love coffee, but ever since I swore off caffeine during pregnancy, I'm super-sensitive to caffeine and I try to avoid heavy amounts of it. So I've refocused my energies on teas, and chai is one of my favorite ways to get a glass of milk in. I've recently tried to get away from frequent trips to the coffee shop since they really add up in the pocket book, and it's also a pain to lug Jack out of the house just for a tea. So I've been buying chai mixes. We shop at Hy-Vee (you know, gotta love the hand that feeds you, sort of a thing) and the Health Market Area at Hy-Vee sells Oregon Chai liquid mixes--Organic black, caffeine-free red, and "slighty sweet." I've tried them all, but am not completely satisfied. The regular black is too sweet (like warm milk with a scoop of sugar), the caffeine-free red is fairly spicy but still too sweet, and the "slightly sweet" is not sweet enough--just like warm milk with a dab of honey. Back in the days when I worked at the Dutch Chocolate Shop, Chocolaterie Stam, we sold Pacific Chai powder mix. It was fine, but the powder didn't seem to ever completely dissolve into the milk. Our local tea spot downtown in the East Village (yes, Des Moines has an East Village, and no--it's nothing like the real East Village), Gong Fu Tea, sells a couple nice varieties of powdered chai, though also a bit on the sweet side. So I'm wondering if any of you fellow chai lovers out there have suggestions on good brands to try, or ways to make homemade chai? I could probably do a google search, but figured I'd start with friends first. I'm looking for a brand I can buy to make at home for the perfect, spicy, sweet but not too sugary chai. I love the chai options at one of my favorite local coffee shops, Java G's. They have four types: Himalyan (a spicy, cardamon laced chai), Kashmir (almond and spices), Sri Lankan (orange and cinnamon), and the herbal World Peace Chai (rose hips, peppermint, and other spices). I haven't found any brands to buy that offer choices like that, but I'd like to. Hmm, never thought I could write this long of a post just on the topic of chai :)

In the pool

Today I glanced at the outdoor thermometer and realized it said 101.1 degrees. Holy cow! So into the pool we went.



We put his hair in a nice, spikey mohawk while in the pool, and were delighted to see that it kept its form even after drying...



Yesterday we had a nice day in Boone, visiting Jack's great grandmother and most of Mike's mom's family. They put out a little rocking chair just for him.

He's been quite photogenic lately, so I've taken advantage of the camera (and the blog) to show him off ;)

He's going, going, going...gone

Our lives have changed dramatically here at the Case Haub household in just the last two days. After several months of somewhat stagnant development patterns, Jack has just sort of figured it all out in a matter of days. His 7-month-old buddy, Caleb, was crawling circles around him while he couldn't get out of a sitting position if his life depended on it. People kept asking, "Is he crawling yet? No? Oh, walking then?" Grr. You know in your head that you shouldn't compare children as they all develop at their own pace, and that there is a huge range in what's considered to be normal. Yet you just can't help but notice when the other kids seem to be advancing and yours is, well, not. Because he was a premie he is followed by a lot of health practitioners for developmental screening, and apparently premies have a higher incidence of developmental delays. So he's got a big group of people cheering him on and ready to intervene to help him along since he has been experiencing some delays in the major motor development of his upper half (arms and torso). His first appointment with the physical therapist is on July 18th, though she has come out twice to observe and make recommendations for care. She gave us some tips on things we could do to encourage him to get out of his comfort zone and start building up his arm muscles, and she said she had a feeling that he would catch on fast. She had no idea just how fast-- after a week of urging him to stretch a bit for his toys, VIOLA--he just figured it out. He can now get out of a sitting position, he is pulling himself up on tables and toys, and the big one, he is army crawling across the room. He's still not getting up on his hands and knees, nor can he get into a sitting position, but he is definitely a much happier baby now that he has a bit of self-controlled mobility under his belt. He has left his separation anxiety behind now that he has things to do when left in the living room while I get lunch ready in the kitchen, and yet my life is a bit more complicated now that more often than not he is joining me in the kitchen, trying to pull open drawers and scurrying around underfoot. Yikes! I guess it's true when people tell you to enjoy the times when babies can't get anywhere on their own. Childproofing, here we come! We are so, so proud of him. Every time he learns something new my heart swells with joy to watch his satisfaction level, and to know that he is just so dang smart and cute.

Welcome!

Well, I've finally done it. Two years ago I had never heard of blogs before when a student of mine wrote a paper about them (this speaks to both my relative ignorance of what's going on out there in the real world, and also to the tenacity of undergraduate students in what they feel qualifies as good subject material for final papers), and yet here I am creating my own. At first I couldn't figure out what the pull of blogging was, and I had no idea who in the world would want to keep up with every little silly thing going on in my life, like what I had for dinner last night or what book I'm reading. Yet I've discovered in the last year that I've been checking my friends' blogs more and more to keep up with their lives, and it's those daily, "silly" things that I miss most about living near my friends and being a part of their everyday lives. So thanks to you girls and guys out there who have paved my way into blogging territory, I'm going to give it a go myself. Mike looked at me incredulously last night when he discovered my intention of beginning a blog and said, "When are you going to have time to do a blog??" Silly husband, has he learned nothing of my will to find dozens of VERY IMPORTANT things to do that have no relation to finishing my dissertation? Surely the blog will fit somewhere in between going through my interviews and beginning my chapter writing (hmmm...) Like most things, it's one more activity to fit into Jack's naptimes. Speaking of, this blog will hardly be about my life, but most likely will revolve around the star of the show in our lives, Master Jack:



As you can see, he enjoyed the 4th of July this year. Went to bed too early to see fireworks, though. I have a feeling next year these types of festivities will take on a whole new meaning. So, with that, I'll end this little welcome message and get back to adjusting the settings and such on this page. Hopefully those of you who are interested in keeping up here and there with new photos and updates of Jack and our lives will find it useful!