• Doesn’t it seem like I’m complaining every week about how I’m sick or the Lovely Tess is sick or the Lovely Suse is sick? Well, I was sick again last week with a nasty stomach virus that knocked me on my ass for two days. Tons of fun. Before Tess came along, I would get exactly two colds a year. One at the start of winter and another at the start of spring. Obviously, the Lovely Tess is an oozing bucket of germs that she brings home from daycare, and the incredible goop that she’s constantly sneezing out is evidence of that. Luckily, she’s extremely cute, so I can forgive her for my sickness.
• I learned during my sick time in bed watching daytime TV that the Today show is on for approximately 13 hours a day, and each segment is about 45 seconds long. They’re constantly running short on time and have to cut guests off, but they have 13 frigging hours of showtime? Can’t they let the cooking guy finish up his dish for once?
• Nothing makes for a good party like Guitar Hero. Sure, it’s fun to stand around and have some food and drinks and talk to people for a while, but the real fun starts when people start rocking out. I would have been happy to play about 20 games in a row, but that would have been a little rude. What really surprised me was that some people didn’t want to or were embarrassed to play. They’d say things like “I need a few more drinks before I can play”, as if it was karaoke or something. All you do is stand there and press buttons, although I try to jump around and put on a good performance. I think I might need to own this.
• We finished up every episode of Weeds in record time. We would average about 2 episodes per night, with the occasional 4 episode night thrown in. And I want more. With the writer’s strike it might be a very long time before we see any new episodes, which I am not ok with.
• The Lovely Suse and I got into a discussion about our alarm clocks last night. We each have our own, and each has its own quirks. Mine is about 20 years old, and the radio reception isn’t the best. Many mornings, I wake up to complete static. But I like that it’s small and doesn’t take up a lot of room on my nightstand. The Lovely Suse has a curious habit of resetting her alarm when it goes off in the morning rather than hitting the snooze button. It sounds like Mission Control over there as she’s flipping switches and pressing buttons. She told me that she “doesn’t trust it.” For years, so was convinced that the time between snoozes changed a little bit every day, with it starting at ten minutes and over the span on months would stretch out to ten minutes. She finally realized that the snooze time was actually programmable and she unknowingly was changing the snooze time little by little every day. Last night she set it for 5 minutes, and of course, it actually went off after 7. I think it’s time for us both to get new alarm clocks.
• We’re hardly ones to eat the same thing week after week as we like to keep things interesting and have some variety in our meals. But we’ve eaten Whole Foods Roasted Tomato Basil soup for lunch three weekends in a row. Tomatoes, onions, leeks, basil, and some spices and that’s about that’s all that’s in it, and it’s just simple and tasty. Hell, I’d be happy eating that again today for lunch.
• My bro hooked my folks up with an HDMI cable for their HDTV and it was the first time that I’ve been just plain astounded at the quality of the HD picture. My dad was watching golf and you could see every blade of grass, every detail of the course, and every ripple and reflection of water. Until now, I’ve just never been that impressed with most HD pictures, so who knew what a difference a little cable made. Ok, this will be the year that we finally get one. Maybe.

Everyone loves to give baby advice. Everyone is an expert. And course, everyone is batsh*t insane. Seriously, it’s impossible to wade through all of the advice that various online sources, family, and friends offer, and it’s enough to make a person feel completely overwhelmed. When it comes to baby equipment and supplies, this is no exception. I’ve had a bunch of emails from people recently asking me about various items, and with a bunch of our friends jumping on the baby train, we figured we might as well share some of our own experiences. Take these for what they are: our own experiences and situations. These won’t work for everyone, but they work for us. As a general rule, we tried to be pretty minimalistic with space-saving and eco-friendliness in mind. I’m no expert, so if I have some facts wrong, just ignore them. So without further ado…

Strollers: Obviously, there are tons of options to choose from. Many people feel inclined to get the biggest and baddest around for attacking the harsh city streets. Something to keep in mind, however, is that you actually have to carry the thing around. Up and down stairs, on to buses, etc. Before you buy anything, try picking it up and walking around with it. Strollers like the Bugaboos are also not the easiest to fold up, which is another consideration (not to mention the cost of add-ons and accessories. I got over my Bugaboo envy in a hurry). We personally went with the Peg Perego Aria, which weighs in at 9 pounds and can be folded up with one hand, and takes up almost no room in a closet at home. The next model up was 10 pounds heavier with not a whole lot of added features, as far as we could tell. Some of the expensive ones are well over 20 pounds and take up a lot of space at home. The “travel systems” combine the stroller and carseat into one package, but they’re more of a ploy to you to buy both from the same company. Many carseats are interchangeable with various strollers, but it all depends on the stroller. Most will only take a few different other brands. Much of the choice will come down to how you plan on using it and how much you plan on using it. We’ve ended up using ours very little as we mostly chose to use a sling when Tess was younger. If we were in a city where we were walking around outdoors all the time, we may have chosen a different one.

Carseats: Despite what some people think, infant carseats are actually used for the first year (or until 20 pounds, i think). No baby is outgrowing one in four months. At that point, you move up to the bigger, forward-facing carseats. They make some that are convertible that do both jobs, but then you lose out on the whole snap-into-the-stroller thing. Again, we have the Peg Perego, mainly because it snaps into our stroller. It weighs a ton, but for compatibility reasons, we had no choice. There are certainly lighter and smaller ones out there that most people use.

Carriers: Baby Bjorns and slings are a great thing to have, especially when moving in tight spots where you don’t want to use or lug the stroller. Plus, they’re good for that whole bonding thing. We got a hand-me-down Baby Bjorn from my brother and never used it. We could hardly figure out how to put it on, and it pretty much required two people to make it work. Other people love them. We both got Hotslings which are fantastic. They’re light, compact, and easy to throw in a bag, and they’re simple to put your baby in it, even by yourself. The great thing about them is that your baby is close to you, and they can either choose to face outward and see what’s going on or get snuggled in and go to sleep. There are many similar brands out there that all do pretty much the same thing. We’ve had great experiences with these though.

Diapers: If you’re planning on doing cloth diapers or something like the gDiapers, that’s great. Those weren’t really an option for us, but we quickly latched onto the Seventh Generation diapers. Non-chlorine, no nasty fake baby powder smell, great fit, no silly cartoon characters, and no real difference in price. Seriously, you can barely smell a poop through these things. While you won’t find giant boxes of them on sale, they’re consistently priced competitively at places like Babys R Us. While they might be $13.99 or more at Whole Foods, they’re $10.99 at BRU. I don’t know how your options are
limited in the city though.

Bottles: We started with the Dr. Brown’s bottles, but once the whole BPA stuff came out, we made the switch to Born Free bottles. They use the same Dr. Brown’s nipples, which is convenient.

Diaper Pail: You need a diaper pail. You really don’t want an open container of dirty diapers lying around. Those things stink. People tend to choose between the Diaper Champ and the Diaper Genie. We chose the champ based solely on the fact that it takes normal kitchen trash bags. The Genie requires that you buy special bags, which is just a pain. We love it.

Activity Mats/Saucers/Seats: We mainly used 3 or 4 devices to keep our hands free and the baby occupied. Some sort of musical bouncy seat was key. Volume controls are a must . We used it mainly in the kitchen so that we could make meals and eat together. We’d just pull the chair right next to the table so Tess could hang out with us while we ate. Along the same lines, a swing was a good thing to have. They’re great to putting fussy kids to sleep and keep them calm, if need be. As she got older, a Bumbo came in handy. Some people love the activity mats that have the stuff hanging overhead, but we didn’t use it a ton. We got one as a hand-me-down, and it did the trick every now and then. One final thing that we originally said that we didn’t want but quickly came to realize that it’s a life saver is an exersaucer. We figured that they give kids ADD, but they’re actually great for keeping kids entertained for a while, helps them work on their motor skills, and if you get one of the smaller ones, they don’t take up much space. For us, the fewer bells and whistles and blinking lights the better, and we’ve been happy with ours. A doorway jumper is also good, but it didn’t work with our house.

Cleaning Products: Method, Method, Method. I can’t say enough about how much I love all things Method. From our laundry detergent to our kitchen mop, I’ve totally drank the Method Kool-Aid. We’ve tried to remove all toxic cleaners and chemical from the house, and this was an easy and inexpensive way to do it. We’ve never used any baby-specific laundry detergent or cleaners. The Method stuff is non-toxic and works well and if your kid happens to be licking the floor where you just mopped, it’s ok. Remember that kids stick everything in their mouths and are on the floor all the time. Do you want stuff covered in chemicals?

Babys R Us Credit: Remember, just like when you got married and registered for stuff, everything can be returned for credit. And BRU will take back ANYTHING. Everyone will want to buy you gifts, so that more you register for, the better. Give everyone low-priced options and then you can return whatever duplicates you don’t need. Rather than relying on people to pony up the cash for expensive car seats and strollers and the like, know that the credit will quickly accumulate. We quickly got enough to buy our carseat and have enough leftover to buy the next sized up carseat and still have lots to spare. However, if family or friends offer to buy some of the big ticket items, even better!

For all of this stuff, we’ve tried to limit the amount of plastics/lights/annoying sounds as much as possible, but with some of this stuff, you don’t have a whole lot of choice. You’ll quickly realize what stuff is just crap and what is good. Use hand-me-downs whenever possible. Why spend more money and add more junk to the environment? I appologize if I’ve offended anyone’s personal choices or parenting style, but like I said, this is just what we’ve chosen to do. Take it all with a grain of salt. I’m barely scratching the surface when it comes to baby gear, but this is at least a start. Any questions? Ask away!

• I finally joined the cult of Apple last week with the purchase of my shiny new black MacBook. Or as Susanne calls it, my “girlfriend”. I’ll admit that I’ve been spending a lot of time with it since I got it, but I’m just trying to get everything set up to my liking as well as installing Windows XP on it with Boot Camp. The best of both worlds. And yes, I love it.
• The Pats are in the Super Bowl, again! Tess is going to have a skewed view of the Boston sports world with the Sox winning the World Series, the Pats running the table, and the Celtics in first place. The Bruins? Who’s that? I don’t recognize them as a professional sports team anymore. They’re dead to me. Go Pats!
• I haven’t taken my boots off for the past week. They’re so warm and comfortable that I can’t wear anything else. One word: sheepskin. That’s one word, right?
• We had a terrible dinner again last night. Twice in two weeks! It wasn’t my fault this time. I followed this recipe (although I substituted tandoori paste for vindaloo paste because I couldn’t find any), but the chicken came out with this really weird texture. It was fully cooked, but was almost gelatin-y. It was gross. It’s one thing to screw up a weeknight dinner, but it’s something entirely different to mess up Sunday chicken. Boooooo!
• The lovely Suse worked something like 13 days in a row and it enjoying a much-deserved day off today. I’m very jealous.
• I got suckered into buying Girl Scout cookies last week at work. Seriously, when a guy sends his 8 year old daughter into your office to sell you cookies, how can you say no? I bought two boxes of thin mints, just like last year. And I still have mostly full boxes from last year. The frightening thing is that these cookies never seem to go bad. I can only imagine the crap and preservatives in them. But they sure are tasty.
• For some reason, our neighborhood smells like maple syrup. It’s smelled like that for the past 24 hours. I can’t explain it, but I like it.

• You know what sucks? Being sick. You know what sucks worse? Being sick on the weekend? You know what’s worse that that? Being sick on a weekend when the Lovely Suse works both days. It was not a fun weekend. I’m all for all-natural homeopathic remedies for sicknesses, but sometimes, drugs rule. Gimme some pills and lozenges and sprays and make me feel better ASAP.
• Sometimes when you’re sick, there are certain foods that remind you of when you were sick as a child and make you feel better. This weekend I had tomato soup and grilled cheese one day and a fluffernutter on the other. I really wanted a peanut butter and jelly but the only jam/jelly we had in the house was an unopened jar of Stonewall Kitchens Maine Wild Blueberry Jam that expired in 2004.
• If anyone who watches Weeds knows how to get the theme song out of their head, please let me know. I’ve had “Little Boxes” in my head for two weeks straight. I swear, I sang that song in elementary school. Is that possible? I distinctly remember a song with “ticky tacky” in it, and I can’t imagine that’s a popular song lyric.”
• I’m a little more excited about the speculation of what will be introduced at MacWorld this year as I’m actually planning on buying a Mac in the next few weeks. Hopefully, they’ll introduce a new macbook that can vacuum my house, floss my teeth, do my taxes, fit into my back pocket, and costs $10.
• For the second time in two weeks, one of my waffle-knit shirts caught on fire after lighting a match. A spark hit the shirt and small flames ripped across my chest and shoulders. It quickly went out, leaving a bad smelling burning odor. But what are the fricking odds of that happening twice in two weeks? I guess these shirts are highly flammable?
• I was so out of it on Saturday night that I barely remember watching the Pats playoff game. They won, right? I’m pretty sure I ate some ribs, too, but again, I can’t confirm this.
• The dinner I made on thursday night was just plain bad. I was attemping to make thisnoodle soup and I couldn’t find the ginger-soy broth that I used last time. Instead, I took vegetable broth and added ginger, soy, garlic, chiles, cilantro, and scallions and let it boil for a while. In the end the broth was terrible. Pretty much inedible. We managed to eat the noodles and shrimp and call it a day, but I didn’t bother taking the leftovers for lunch the next day. Hey, they can’t all be winners folks. Even I have off days.

I’ll be honest with you. I”m not the biggest fan of meetings. Let me clarify that. I hate meetings where I have no input, don’t care about the subject, and frankly don’t need to be there. I’m lucky enough that these meetings are few and far between, but in most cases, I struggle to stay awake. It’s really bad. It’s not that I’m necessarily tired, but just bored out of my skull and have employed every technique I can think of to keep my eyes open. Sometimes, I try drinking a lot of water or tea, but that just makes me have to get up and go to the bathroom. In extreme cases, I’ll put my hands into my pockets and rip out leg hairs.
Seriously.

I recently came across another attempt of mine from about a year ago to stave off boredom. Writing random, stream-of-consciousness, insane crap. In the back page of a notebook that I just finished, I found the following entry:

“I like to eat fudge. Fudge is wicked tasty. You know what else is tasty? Cheese. I love cheese. I could eat cheese every day. That would rule. I should go get me some cheese to eat right now. A nice big hunk of it for lunch. That would be tasty. You know what else is tasty? Ice cream. I like all sorts of different flavors. Mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, black raspberry, malted vanilla chip, really anything with chips in it is good in my book.”

These, my friends, are the ramblings of a mad man.

I don’t know why I’ve had such a hard time writing the year-end best-of list this year. Maybe it has something to do with the year being dominated by a little thing called Tess, and I don’t really remember anything else that happened last year. Let’s try anyways, mostly because I’m sick of the Lovely Suse pestering me to write it.

• I was home with a sick Lovely Tess for most of last week, so it was a pretty uneventful one. On the bright side, I got to spend most of the days watching daytime TV and daytime cooking shows. God, there are a lot of terrible ones, but they’re almost more fun to watch. I just get angry and curse at the TV. Sandra Lee, I’m talking to you.
• In the wake of the writer’s strike and our Tivo being completely empty of any new shows, we’ve started watching Weeds. We’ve just finished up season one, and what a fantastic show. I think we’re going to churn through seasons two and three in a hurry.
• The most exciting part of my work week was getting one of those mice with the click-wheels. Yeah, it doesn’t take much these days.
• I finally have some warm winter boots. I’ve had warm boots for the past few years, but they were big-ass things that I couldn’t really wear around indoors. I needed something that I could wear everywhere so I didn’t have to carry my shoes to work in a separate bag and constantly be changing footwear. The folks at Nordstrom now know me by sight since I had to go there three times to find the right one and in the right size. I’m a big pain in the ass, obviously. But I love my boots. I’ll be living in them for the winter.
• It’s blood orange season, people. Get ‘em while you can. We keep eating them until we finally OD on them in a couple of months.
• Our family has taken to using Skype to contact us instead of using the phone. It’s sort of weird. I think there are about 2 people who call us on our landline at this point. Good thing we pay $50/month for those 2 people. Grrrr.
• After a stellar run, Robert has left the building. Our favorite cheeseman and good friend has packed his cheesebags and is moving on to bigger and better things. We’re going to miss him on our Saturday visits to Formaggio, but I’m sure we’ll still be seeing plenty of him. Still, it’s the end of an era and long overdue.
• I love having the Christmas tree, but as soon as New Years passes, I’m ready to get that thing out of my house. It was so dry I’m pretty sure it was a fire hazard anyways.

• Well, I guess it’s been a couple of weeks, hasn’t it? I don’t know where the time went. It certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been off for over ten days. What have I done over the past week and a half? Um, I’m not really sure. Let’s see if we can piece if together…
• Everyone had a lovely Tess’s First Christmas. She got lots of stuff, of course, and the rest of us also got lots of nice stuff. I like stuff. This child now has a wagon and a sled and I’m pretty sure that she’ll get a helicopter or a G5 next. She is quite the jet-setter.
• On the way back from Christmas, we stopped at Frank Peppe’s, which I think it our favorite all time East coast pizza. We’d been to the original in New Haven a couple of years ago, and since then, they’ve opened two more, one in Fairfield, and one in Manchester. You’d think that they wouldn’t be able to duplicate the charm and character and deliciousness of the original, but somehow, they’ve done it. They made the place look exactly like the original, right down to the giant oven and subway tiles. We’d been looking forward to this visit the entire weekend, and as soon as we sat down, we made our order. Small white clam pie, small mozzarella and tomato pie. I think I had been dreaming about the white clam pie. The waitress cuts us off, “We don’t have any clams. The delivery hasn’t arrived yet, and we didn’t save any from before Christmas.” That’s like going all the way up to the Clam Box in Ipswich and they don’t have any clams (oh wait, that did happen to us). After that shot in the heart, we made a quick recovery and went with a medium mozzarella and tomato pie (these things are huge). And it was everything that we had remembered. Nice and charred and beautiful. I think we’ll be making many more stops there in the future. Like every time we drive down to CT.
• After, I don’t know, five months of having big patches in our hallway ceiling from the moving/installation of lights, I finally sanded, primed, and painted them. Expecting an all day task, I think it took me about two hours total. Please disregard the fact the you can still sort of see where one of the patches is. I’m not fixing it.
• After all of my searching for an easy and effective knife sharpener, Cook’s Illustrated turned me on to the Accusharp Knife and Tool Sharpener. It costs $10, you can find it at your local True Value hardware store (on on Amazon), and it works like a charm. Just drag it across the knife blade a few times and you have a razor-sharp edge. It also does serrated knives. I’ve since sharpened everything I can get my hands on. Me likee.
• Speaking of Cook’s Illustrated, I finally have a subscription to it after wanting one for years. For some reason, I would always just forget about it. Well, when it comes to just nuts and bolts cooking, Cook’s leaves the other food magazines in the dust. I can read it cover to cover and learn so much from every issue. I love how they write up the recipes, talking about how they go about figuring it out, what they tried and what did and didn’t work. Rather than just seeing a recipe and not knowing why they do certain things, you know why every single step is there. It’s awesome. Plus, there are no ads and the pages are easy to turn.
• We thought we were going to have to buy a new dishwasher last week. Suddenly, ours stopped draining the water out of the bottom, and even after making sure the drain hose was clear, it still wasn’t working. I spent a morning taking the thing apart (dishwashers aren’t the most complicated of devices) and putting it back together, it somehow started working again. I’m not holding my breath as I expect it to die sometime soon, but hopefully, it can hang on for a little while longer. I know we should probably just repair it if it breaks, right? But not knowing exactly what’s wrong, and by the time you pay some one to come out and fix it, it’s already half the price of a brand new one. It’s about 12 years old, so no need to put any more money into it.
• I inadvertently downgraded my home PC from Windows Vista to XP. And by downgrade I mean that I accidentally wiped out my hard drive and had to reinstall everything. Good thing I back up my important data, huh? I have to say, having upgraded the hardware after first installing Vista, I now realize how much faster XP is. Seriously, Microsoft is insane. I don’t miss a single thing from Vista, and now my machine is literally twice as fast. Nice going there.
• We had lunch at the new Sel De La Terre at the Natick Collection (don’t you dare call it a mall!) and it was outstanding. Every bit as good as the one downtown, you would never know that you were smack in the middle of a mall (I mean a collection). They’re pomme frites are the best we’ve every had, hands down. I don’t know how they do it. They’re super crispy and salty and perfumed with rosemary, and they stay like that even 20 minutes later. They must be deep-fried in crack or something.
• Our New Years Eve was rocking as always. Dinner at home. Baby asleep. Bottle of champagne drunk. Same menu as two years ago: olive-crusted rack of lamb, lemon braised artichokes, fennel gratin, chocolate mousse for dessert. Asleep by about 12:05.
• Please some one make Dick Clark stop doing New Years Eve. I mean, I know the guy had a stroke and he’s probably still sharp as a tack, but it’s just sad watching him try to do the hosting duties. No one wants to see that when they’re trying to celebrate. Seriously, just set him up in a booth and point a camera at him and just tell him that he’s broadcasting, but don’t air it. Everyone wins.
• New Years day involves plenty of naps and not getting out of your pajamas. Please, don’t even bother trying to invite us to a New Years Day brunch.
• I know I owe you a year end best of 2007 list. Don’t worry, it’s coming.
• The Pats go undefeated. And how about this stat: “Since Game 4 of the ALCS, when the Red Sox were down 3-1 to the Indians, the Sawx, Pats and Celts have a combined record of 43-3.”
• Three words: Root Beer Float.