Yawn...

I am so ready for Ethan to be sleeping through the night. Heck, I'll take anything over 4 hours. I'm tired.  I love this kid to death but he doesn't sleep. We're up at least once a night but most of the time it's twice. I'm exhausted. I was hoping that I would get lucky with Ethan and have a decent sleeper but no such luck. BLAH! Ahh, but on the bright side, he is SUCH a love and so snuggly when he wakes up in the middle of the night.

Rian's race was awesome! I was so proud of him. He was pretty excited about the whole thing and wants to run another "marathon".  

I ran my half-marathon the day after Rian's race. It was really fun. It took me longer than I had hoped but I did it! I can't wait to do it again. I seriously have to lose this baby weight though. I'm pretty sure it's the extra (gulp) pounds I haven't lost since having Ethan that slowed me down. Errgh! Anyway, I'm glad I did it. 

I love this time of year. Rian, Ethan and I went to the park yesterday after we picked Rian up from school. We played in the leaves and came home to make apple cider. After drinking half a mug of apple cider, Rian pushed it away announcing that he didn't like it. He told me it was an "only for adults drink." 

       

   

Happy Fall!

Oh my gosh, October has turned out to be such a crazy month! I can't believe it's almost over. Rian is literally counting down the days until Halloween and letting me know each morning. He's so excited about it. I love having kids! 

We all went to the pumpkin patch with Rian's school. It was really fun. We'll post pictures soon. 

My best bud from California and her husband came to visit. We haven't seen each other in about two years. It was so much fun! I miss her like crazy. Thanks, Jennie!! 

Rian had his last soccer game and most of Eric's family was able to come see it and hang out with us. (Thanks guys!) We found out that Eric's sister is pregnant. We're so excited for you Amy! I loved watching Rian's soccer games and cheering for him but it'll be nice to have our Saturday mornings back. I'm looking forward to making french toast, watching cartoons and staying in our pajamas all morning. 

Tomorrow Rian runs in his kid's marathon. A teacher at his school has been keeping track of each mile they run. She has been commenting on how enthusiastic Rian is about running and how he just keeps running laps even after the other kids are done. So anyway, she gave me Rian's running log this morning and he has run over 34 miles in two months. I was like dang, he's pretty good. I'm so proud of him!!

Sunday is my race. I'm feeling so nervous but crazy excited too. It'll be fun. Eek! My stomach is doing flip-flops as I'm thinking about it. 

Ethan started clapping! It's the cutest thing. Oh my gosh, I love it. Another thing he started doing is pulling himself up on things. First it was the living room table. I left the room for like two seconds and came back to find him standing at the table, a huge grin on his face. That was it. He's pulling himself up to stand at anything. It's so exciting and yet I can't help but feel a little sad that my baby is getting more and more independent. And I was just thinking how I couldn't wait for him to start doing this kind of thing. Sigh. 

Teeth!

Ethan's teeth are coming in! It's a good thing as he's been a little chew-crazy these days. Poor guy, he's just trying to get some relief from those aching gums. 

He's almost crawling. He gets up on his hands and knees and rocks back and forth but then does the army crawl thing to get around. It's so funny. He moves pretty fast for a little guy and if I head into another room he'll soon follow, protesting loudly about being left behind. 

I'm running a half-marathon this year. I had this big, lofty plan when I was still pregnant with Ethan that I was going to run a marathon within a year of having him. Ha. I obviously forgot about how hard it can be to find time or energy to do the dishes some days, much less run. (Oh wait, maybe that's just laziness...) I don't know what I was thinking. 

Anyway, I finally found a teammate (about a week ago) to run half of our area's big marathon with the last weekend in October. I'm really excited!

Rian's running in a kid's marathon. He's so funny. "Mommy, I love marathons." He runs everyday at school and they keep track and then I keep track of how much he runs here at home. The kids have two months to run 25 miles in half-mile increments and then on the 25th of October they participate in a 1.2 mile race. Rian is pretty excited. He calls it "my marathon". I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk/run the other day and he said no. I then asked him if he wanted to go running for his marathon and he jumped off the couch and got his shoes on. 

Kids Say the Darndest Things

Rian says some of the funniest things. He can make me laugh almost as hard as Eric can. I love his little voice and hearing what he thinks about things. Lately though, I just get annoyed and frustrated that he never stops. Seriously, he doesn't. He even talks in his sleep. I'm really trying to work on being thankful for his talkativeness. The things he says are so precious and special. I'll be longing for it when he's a a teen and I'm dying to know what he's thinking about and the last person he wants to talk to is his mom. He's growing up so fast and I don't want to look back on this time with regret that I wasted so much time being an impatient or annoyed mommy.  

ANYWAY, here are some of the funny things he's said lately...

A friend watched Rian and Ethan so that Eric and I could go to the parent orientation at Rian's school. When I picked up my monkeys it was dark outside so I flicked on the headlights. Rian started giggling in the backseat. I asked him what he was laughing about and he said, "Mommy, why are you turning on those flashlights?"

Rian: "Mommy, are Coach Kelly and Coach Scott married?"

Me: "Nope. Coach Scott is married to Miss. Marci. Coach Scott and Coach Kelly are friends."

Rian (after thinking this over for a minute): "Mommy, I'm going to marry you."

Me: "Oh sweetie! That is so precious. I'm married to daddy."

Rian: "Oh yeah, I marry daddy too."

Me: "What about me?"

Rian (hugging himself and smiling): "Yes, we all married. Mommy, daddy and Rian."

I had a doctor's appointment and had to take Rian and Ethan with me. The nurse had come in to take my blood pressure so I was holding up my arm while she got the cuff ready. Rian, sitting in the chair next to me, suddenly became very interested in my arm. He stared at it for a few seconds and then poked it a couple times. 

Rian: "Mommy, why does your arm move?"

Me (starting to giggle and feeling my face turn red): "I don't have enough muscle so it jiggles."

Rian: "It's very jiggly."

Me: "Yup."

Rian pokes it again and then starts singing, "I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it. I like to MOVE IT!"

Guess it's time to start lifting some weights. 

Rian: "Ethan, no! Mommy! Oh no, Ethan is playing Brain Quest!"

Six Months

Ethan turned six months last week. In a way it seems like the time has gone by quickly, but at the same time it's hard to imagine life without him. I think he has made a pretty big impact on us in a relatively short amount of time . So far we like him a lot.

At his six-month checkup, he weighed in at a little over 20 lbs, which ranks in the 93rd percentile. He now stands (kinda) at 2 feet, 3 1/2 inches, which puts him in the 80th percentile for height. So he's slowing down a little, but he still routinely draws raised eyebrows when people find out how old he is.

Last night he was sleeping in his crib and I thought he looked pretty cute, so I started taking some pictures. After a few minutes of playing with lighting and moving some things around, I was staring through my lens and all of a sudden he started smiling. This isn't the first time he has done this. In fact, the first time he smiled in his sleep was at the hospital when he was about 15 minutes old. It makes me wonder how many nights he's been in his crib all by himself in a dark, quiet house, smiling to himself for no one to see.

GRE

What a crazy few weeks this has been! We took a trip down to Newport Beach in sunny California (See pic of where we stayed. It was gorgeous.) and had a fabulous time visiting with Lacey's family. We got back a few days before the 4th of July. Our neighbor had a little party so we hung out over there for a while. But before the weekend had finished, it was time to start studying for the GRE! The GRE, if you don't know, is a standardized test, similar to the SAT, that is required for admission to grad school.

I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I started looking around on the intertubes and found out that some people take studying for this test pretty seriously--like, studying-for-several-weeks-and-memorizing-hundreds-of-vocabulary-words serious. I started to panic, as I had only given myself about a week to prepare.

I calmed myself down long enough to review some Math problems like I hadn't seen in 10 years. Someone at work recommended that I get a book on how to study for the GRE. I think it's kind of ridiculous that they sell books on how to study for this single test, but I guess that's just how it is these days. I got one on an inter-library loan (W. Richland library is crap), but it didn't arrive until the Friday before the test, which was on a Monday.

So from Friday night when I got home from work until Sunday night when I went to bed, virtually every waking moment was spent reading that book, memorizing vocabulary words, and taking practice tests. I managed to memorize about 150 new vocabulary words over the weekend, so if anyone needs to know the definitions for useless words like enervate, penurious, perspicacious or magnanimity, I'm your guy.

So after a week of intense studying I felt fairly well-prepared. I took the test and scored above the minimum goal I had set for myself, but when the computer showed me my scores (they are scored instantly) I made an error adding them in my head and thought I had done a lot worse than I did. Dejected, I called Lacey to tell her the bad news. I told her my scores and what they added up to and how they didn't add up to my goal, but she corrected me and informed me that they *did* add up to significantly more than my goal. Hooray!

Dual Booting with Wake On Lan

I don't usually talk about technical stuff here, but I'm going to take a little break from gushing about my kids to explain part of how I solved my problem of too many pictures. To quickly summarize, I found that my digital picture library was too large to continue storing on my laptop, and even if I upgraded the hard drive in my laptop to a 320 GB or possibly a 500 GB drive, I would just be delaying the inevitable as my library is growing very rapidly. The crux of the problem is that only one hard drive will fit in my macbook pro (I have the 15" model which doesn't support this crazy option, even if I wanted to).

To solve this problem, I am now storing all of my original photos on a desktop computer running Windows. This computer has multiple hard drives and provides plenty of space for my pictures. I use Lightroom on my laptop, which is smart enough to only store reasonably small previews of all my photos, drastically reducing the amount of space required on my laptop.

This setup works fine when both machines are up and running, but I usually keep my desktop turned off to conserve energy. I often find myself in a situation where I am in another room and don't feel like walking down the hall to turn on the desktop, just so I can import photos from my camera. Wouldn't it be nice if I could remotely boot my desktop and import my photos without getting off the couch?

It turns out I can. I poked around in my BIOS settings and enabled a feature called Wake-on-Lan. Then I installed a Wake-on-Lan Dashboard widget on my laptop. Now I can boot my desktop from another room at any time with 2 simple clicks.

This worked well for a while until I decided to install Ubuntu on that same desktop and dual boot between that and Windows. Now things are a little trickier, because sometimes I will want to remotely boot into Windows, but other times I might want to remotely boot into Linux. Unfortunately, Wake-on-Lan doesn't have the capability to choose an OS when the computer turns on.

The solution I came up with (read: found on the Internet) was to use Wake-on-Lan to boot the computer and let Grub boot into whichever OS is set to default, then use a shell script to change the default OS to one of my choosing, then reboot the machine. It's a few more steps than I'd like, but it sure beats getting off the couch!

Here's everything you need to get it working yourself.

Requirements:

1. Grub bootloader. This solution could be adapted to work with other bootloaders, but right now it only works with Grub.


2. Ext2 IFS. Allows your Windows partition to access your Linux file system.

To get started, create two copies of /boot/grub/menu.lst in Linux. Name one menu.lst.win, and the other menu.lst.lin. Then edit each one to boot into the corresponding OS (Windows for menu.lst.win, Linux for menu.lst.lin). You will probably only have to change one line like:

default  0

to something like:

default  4

But there are instructions for doing this out on the web if you need help.

Once you've done that, create a file named grubEdit.sh with the following.

grubEdit.sh

usage="Usage: grubEdit [win | lin]"
grubHome="/boot/grub"
menuLst="/boot/grub/menu.lst"
menuLstWin="/boot/grub/menu.lst.win"
menuLstLin="/boot/grub/menu.lst.lin"

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
 echo $usage
 exit 1
fi

if [ $1 = "win" ]
then
 rm -f $menuLst
 cp $menuLstWin $menuLst
else
 if [ $1 = "lin" ]
 then
  rm -f $menuLst
  cp $menuLstLin $menuLst
 else
  echo $usage
 fi
fi

Now boot back into Windows and create a file named grubEdit.bat, and copy in the following.
Disclaimer: I think this is the first time I've used goto's in a real script. I don't write many shell scripts, but I think this is how it has to be done.

grubEdit.bat

@echo off
set grubHome=L:\boot\grub
set menuLst=%grubHome%\menu.lst
set menuLstWin=%grubHome%\menu.lst.win
set menuLstLin=%grubHome%\menu.lst.lin

if "%1" == "win" goto win
if "%1" == "lin" goto lin
goto error

:win
del %menuLst%
copy %menuLstWin% %menuLst%
goto end

:lin
del %menuLst%
copy %menuLstLin% %menuLst%
goto end

:error
echo Usage: grubEdit [win ^| lin]
goto end

:end

Now from either OS, just run:

grubEdit win

to boot into Windows, and

grubEdit lin

to boot into Linux.

It's that easy!

(Note that you'll need to prepend sudo to either command on Linux, and I've left out instructions for editing your PATH to make sure the shell can find your new scripts.)