Gwen (and Luke and Jenn)

Thursday, April 14, 2011

6 months

Gwen is over six months old now--time flies!

She went to her 6 month check-up a few weeks ago. Here are the relevant details: 11lbs and 15oz, 23" long. This keeps her in the powerful ~3%. The doctor is having us come back in for another check soon, to check Gwen's weight. She didn't gain that much since her four month check up. Everything seems fine, but we're keeping an eye on things.

She also went to the pediatric eye doctor yesterday. Her eyes seem to be good! They feel the retinal hemorrhage at birth was just really bad newborn retinal hemorrhage. She can see, and doesn't seem to have any problems. A recheck in 6-8 months was suggested. Someone remind me in Octoberish! ;)

She had her second bad cold, and true to form Luke and I both got it. Luke ended up with it much worse and got a sinus infection on top of it. So he's taking antibiotics. This is another reason we're having Gwen get a recheck, as she was sounding stuffy and had increased lung sounds while at her check up.

Luke has the pictures and stuff to post. I always end up with the boring posts!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Sleepy baby

Just 1 pic today.

She often falls asleep on her way home from Davina's. Then she wakes up MAD! Every time...

Cake!

I made a cake for work. As most of you have figured out by now, I am completely incapable of making food attractive. This one turned out to be the ugliest cake I've ever made. Jenni didn't believe me when I told her so; her exact response was "it can't be THAT bad".

Once she came downstairs and saw it, her response was "OH! Wow...". Not in a good way.

It was that bad. But extremely tasty.

I had a series of problems on this one:

I have no 8" cake rounds. The best I've got is 2 mismatched 9"-ish rounds.
Since the cakes had a larger radius, they ended up fairly short. They're also mismatched, with one being wider and shorter.
Like most cakes, you get a mound effect as you bake it, where the center ends up higher than the edges.
When you make a layer cake, you cut off these mounds so you have a reasonably flat working surface. Since I needed to cut each of these cakes in two already, I determined that there wasn't going to be enough cake left to bisect if I trimmed it first. So we end up with two nice flat half cakes and two domes.
I decided this wouldn't be a big deal if I ended the top layer with one of the domes and mortared the other one with enough frosting to somewhat level it off. I like frosting. All the edges have frosting on them too.
In the process of building the layers, I forgot about my decision in the last step and plopped both domed pieces in the middle layers.
Since I'm frosting everything as I go, there's no way I can remove a layer. I determined that this cake will look horrible, shrugged my shoulders, and went back to work.
I had to mortar up two layers with frosting now, and the topmost dome was sliding around sliding around.
I finally put the top (flat) layer down and it listed sideways. I couldn't convince it to straighten up. And this is the least wide of all the layers, so it looks quite odd perched up there. Again, shrug shoulders, but this time start giggling. "Bonjour! I am un French cake, see, ah have un beret!"
The recipe called for chilling the cake until the frosting firmed up. Two hours later, it's still not there and I have to go to bed. -Shrug-
I then took the chocolate glaze and started "applying" (i.e., dumping) it to the top layer. The idea was for it to coat the top and sides and then harden into a shell. The mismatched layers really didn't let it work that well, and since it wasn't cold enough the chocolate started melting the frosting.
I had the cake on a cake board and then on a plate, but I hadn't counted on the glaze to pour off the cake in such copious quantities. Right onto the counter. You can see a partially cleaned-up version of that below; I wanted to clean it up entirely before taking pictures but Jenni wouldn't let me.
I had some glaze left over so I thought I'd dump more on it to fill in the holes, but it had hardened up enough that I got ribbons instead. -Shrug- Couldn't stop once one was down. Ribbon time!

The result:

And from another angle:

Again, this was an extremely tasty cake. And it looked much better by the morning when it all firmed up.

Recipe is here. My only modification was to use evaporated milk for some of the milk required just so I could use up the can.

The Luke, signing off...

Friday, March 18, 2011

A trip to Wichita

Gwen hadn't gotten to go to Wichita to see Jenn's side of the family in quite awhile, and we used Megan's fifth birthday party as an excuse.

We had to pack her in SOMETHING.

All right, enough already! Let's get moving!

Megan, Gwen, Maddy, and Morgan

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Small anecdote

I know most babies give you lots of anecdotes, and for most of them you probably have to be there to really get the full feeling. And I know no one is likely as interested as Luke or I. But, I still want to remember this, so I'm making a little post.

Yesterday night, when I got home late, Gwen had already been put down for the night. Usually she stays asleep. Occasionally she'll wake up a little fussy or to eat. Luke and I were eating dinner together and the monitor goes off. Since I haven't seen her all day, I volunteered to go see what was up.

I go up to her room and listen at the door. She's been coughing a little, so I didn't want to bother her if she was just coughing some and still basically asleep.

Instead of coughing, I hear laughing. A lot of it. So I go in, and there she is, just haaaaaappy and laughing for no obvious reason. I start to laugh back. Then she REALLY gets going. Taking her downstairs to see Luke, she continues to laugh and starts to laugh enough to start making little baby laughing-so-hard-I'm-snorting noises.

It was probably the cutest thing ever.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Just some pics

Random pictures 'n stuff.

Gwen visiting Cassandra for the first time:

Jenni found out that if you hold the button on the camera down, it takes a string of photos. Generally pretty bad photos due to the lack of a flash, but nevertheless... Time lapse! And yes, burp rags are her favorite toy right now. It probably would be potato chip bags if we'd let her have them though...