Friday, 25 May, 2001

Chris has been gone to Colorado since last Sunday afternoon working for IBM, and we have certainly missed him a lot.  Amy wakes up in the morning and says “shhhh” as we walk back into my bedroom.  Then she notices that her daddy isn’t even there.  It will be a surprise for her tomorrow morning to find that he is sleeping in his bed.  We have talked every night on the phone which has helped.  The first couple of days at IBM were general training days.  From Wednesday through today he has had more specific training on what he will actually be doing.  I think it is pretty overwhelming for him, but I am sure that he will learn things quickly.  He will work from home for the next two to three weeks and then fly back out for another week on site.

On Wednesday after he finished work, Chris had a pre-construction meeting out at USHome for our new house.  Everything is set to go now and we are just waiting for the road to be paved for them to begin construction.  From there, the foreman says it will take about 100 days.  We will still have to rent for about 6 to 8 weeks, which I am not looking forward to, before we will be able to move in.

Amy is now pacifier-less.  I had originally thought that I would wait until after the baby was born before I took it away, but we all seemed to be getting rather dependent upon it.  It actually wasn’t that bad of a transition.  She was pretty mad at me the first couple of days–especially when she would wake up.  She didn’t have any problem going to sleep without it and now it’s no big deal.  I gathered up all of her pacifiers, put them in a zip-loc bag so that she could see what I was doing, and told her that the pacifiers were going bye-bye.  Seemed to work pretty well.

Amy is learning new words all of the time.  She now says thank you, which comes out sounding kind of like “date do”, and says it at the appropriate time.  She is working on “excuse me” as well.  I must admit it has been rather tiring this week being the only parent around.  I am so grateful not to be a single parent–I think that I would go bonkers and my child would definitely suffer.

Chris had some graduation pictures taken and we took the opportunity to have some family pictures taken as well.