What to do, what to do...

I have a gripe that I wanted to talk about and possible get some advice on, it deals with our babysitter/nanny. Just to fill everyone in, approximately two years ago, Teri and I became pregnant with our second child.Now this was a little bit of a surprise because our eldest was 17 and although we had talked about having more kids, Teri had gone back and finished her schooling and was in the midst of her career as a teacher and had decided that she was "done". Anyways, long story short, we welcomed our second son into our lives and among the happiness of a new child we addressed the pragmatic aspects by getting Teri's Mom to agree to babysit while Teri and I were at work. This was to last for about a year until soon after Jacob's first birthday when we were surprised by her parents telling us that they couldn't handle watching him any more due to Teri's Mom's failing health. Well at this point we made a monumental decision and checking our finances and scouring the valley we hired a part-time nanny for Jacob at the cost of every bit of our surplus cash plus a little, namely around $800 a month; $40 a day for watching him during school time. Well this worked out fine for about a year, even through Teri's Mom's passing and into this school year, until just a few days ago when out of the blue our nanny decided that she wanted a raise - $50 a week more or $200 a month, ouch. Let me back up a little bit and say that the situation has slowly changed, originally the 27 year old woman that we had found was looking for a job/extra income as her husband was a teacher and they were having problems making ends meet. She agreed to watch him at out house and flew through our interview with flying colors. Six months later, she meekly asked us if it was alright to watch Jacob at her house as they only had one car and were having some difficulties with transportation. Since they only lived a couple of miles away we agreed to this. The next change came a couple of months after that, at the beginning of summer, as she let us know that she has a friend who was pregnant and wanted her to watch their baby after he was born also, so Jacob would not be the only child she was watching starting in October. Her next news came only a couple of weeks after that as she proudly announced to my wife one day that she had finally gotten pregnant a couple of weeks before (which is something they had been talking about for years). The trepidation set in at this point as Teri and I were worried about Jacob just being one of a bunch of unrelated kids and the absence of one-on-0ne time which was one of the main selling points of getting a nanny in the first place. We continued on and decided that we would just wait and see how the situation unfolded. That was until this week when 'our nanny' announced to us that everyone else was paying her $50 a day or $250 a week and she felt that we should also. Well we can't afford to give the nanny this raise and we are trying to decide what to do and our having some difficulties coming to a decision. Teri's Dad has offered to chip in the extra $250 a month we would need, but I feel like we are being extorted and what is to say that she won't raise it up again in a year or whatever. Teri has also looked into daycare and Merryhill - a private school with an early childhood curriculum, basically they take children of any age. What to do, what to do...

Only in Vegas

Ok I admit it it, sometimes I am just clueless when it comes to things, or as my wife likes, no loves to say, I have no common sense. I just wonder if that is in itself a bad thing? I am an extremely intelligent person and sometimes wonder if the people who think I am clueless just do not understand my thought processes because I am thinking at a higher level. Yet, there are other times when I find myself looking at something and just wondering what the masses of people must be thinking as they do something that I cannot understand. Case in point, here is an ad that flashed up tonight while I was on Facebook advertising a HUGE Las Vegas party. http://www.strippersandhustlersball.com/ Ok now I get the reason someone might want to go and gawk, but from what I remember the news saying last year, ordinary people love dressing up and going to these things. Help me to understand, is this just some form of debauchery that I do not understand? Maybe its some childhood repressed fantasy in playing dress-up. Please comment and let me know.

Curve balls

Life occasionally throws you a curve ball as you sit watching the zone waiting to hit another hard and fast one out of the park. My wife's life was just turned upside down, and hence my own, as her Mother passed away while on an Alaskan cruise. Needless to say, what had started as a nice recuperative summer metamorphosised into a Twilight Zone episode. What do you say to your wife when she has this hole in her heart and you just can't seem to fill it. Otherwise life seems to be good, my eldest son graduated from high school and starts college here soon. My nearly two year old is walking and talking and doing the precocious things that just make parents say "ahhh". I have a week left before my Fantasy Football draft and I have started my yearly football research. Also, my brother talked me into doing this Facebook thing and I just signed up and created my profile, but more on that later...

Another blog post.

Its amazing what having a young child will do for your life, everything that had once been dull and dingy takes on a shiny new feel. Having a rabbit visit your backyard to munch on the grass becomes an adventure in exploration. Finding out that a bird has started to build a nest on the perigo that you built three years ago in the yard turns into a two hour odyssey with your toddler who becomes fascinated with the birds walking on a fence and stares off into the sky and tries to launch himself into the air after the birds. Fruit on trees gets picked and tasted, whether ripe or not, flowers get picked also and breathlesly brought in to 'Mama' for her approval. The sky is filled with wonders, airplanes flying mysteriously across the sky, birds darting around, even the moon smiling down from above. Bugs are to be chased and giggled over, rocks are magical items to be picked up and handled. The littlest thing can turn into a big event bringing smiles and laughs to all. Blowing bubbles in the lawn eats away all of the evening while childhood cartoons are a family event again. I can't wait until Disneyland becomes the Magical Kingdom again and goes from just a place to vacation at to a land filled with fun and adventures.

The book of life...

I have a vivid imagination and always cause myself to smile with the images that my brain throws out when I think of things. I looked at my blog today and saw the X-mas pictures and immediately thought of this old house with cobwebs hanging all over the place, dust an inch and a half thick on the furniture, and a couple of broken windows where someone had tried to break in. Such is it when you don't blog for over six months and everyone abandons reading your blog cause they just know that you won't post and even if you do, you won't string more than two posts together before wandering away again. I have vowed to try to be better with this, but I just can't get excited about it when no one comes to visit, and no one does cause I don't post enough, a classic catch-22. Oh well, here is a life post as I actually have some things to talk about or at least mull over. My older sister lives in Mississippi and constantly posts on our family site about her house on an acre of land with the forrest in the backyard and all the wild animals that visit there like the snakes that they kill and the coyotes that are killing the chickens in their hen house or maybe she will ramble on about the bee hives that they have or my nephew hunting and killing his first deer. Its a country slice of life that I would enjoy, but will never leave Vegas to find so I don't cry over what I miss. Yet, I do what I can here in the dessert, planting tomatoes and peppers in my back yard garden, and raising strawberries and lemons in containers on my patio. People who know my wife and I know that we have been putting some money into finishing up our backyard, as we have recently roofed over the slab of concrete that was our patio and we finally got the rock put in and we are going to have several more large shade trees added to our oasis. I guess it is all starting to pay off as I was outside this evening filling up the humming bird feeder with water and I glanced up and noticed a rabbit staring at me in from across the yard. I frantically scrambled into the house and got Teri to look at the 'wild animal' that was exciting me before it hopped away through a drainage hole in our cinder block fence. I was joyously reliving Watership Down in my head for the next hour as I sat on our outdoor furniture wondering where the bunny came from and if it would ever be back.

Random X-mas pictures2

Here are some more that I snagged from my sister...

Random X-mas pictures

Figured I would just throw some random Christmas pictures here: