Picture time..

So I've been slacking the last month with the blog, I know, I know.

There's actually been quite a bit happening, I just haven't had a chance to sit down and go through it all.

Where to begin, where to begin...


I'll start with school. That's always a good choice.









School is going as well as can be expected; our Supervisor Ole either had a senior moment or forgot what we had discussed when we set up the experiment but he realized that we were essentially MISSING half of the setup. Naturally, neither Marietta nor myself were thrilled to hear that, but we busted our asses (as well as our husbands') to get what we needed for the other half of the experiment.

Hopefully it won't impact our grade, since it wasn't our fuckup, you know?



Mom's birthday was uneventful - I sent her a gift card from Newick's - not that she can USE it since she's having more trouble with her teeth, but I know at SOME point she'll be able to, and I suppose that's good enough for me.













Matthias is now officially in nursery school, and doing well. He eats like a horse while there and pretty much sleeps for 2 hours over noon and then is a bundle of energy again (after eating again, of course). He's pretty much off baby food (still gets 1-2 bottles a day) and is eating our table food and drinking whole milk. (Babies need the higher fat content for their little brains - they develop so quick between 1-2 years).





My ex-fiance Michael is now married. Today was the big day for him, and I wish him the best in the world with his new wife. Even though he and I didn't work out; he'll always hold a special place in my heart (and he knows it). I did nag at him to remember a hat and sunscreen for his honeymoon in the Caribbean though.

Some things will never change.






This was after he'd been at nursery school the entire day, and had played outside in the dirt (all of the dirt), and managed to get himself completely dirty.

A nice long soak in the tub occurred shortly after this picture was taken, which resulted in a flood in my bathroom and Hubby being drenched from head to toe.

Good times.

...and we're off!

Matthias is now officially crawling.

He's up on all 4's and on the move.

Life as we knew it is over! (ha!)

Playground fun

Since the nice weather's been holding out, we decided to take Matthias out to the playground that's behind our apartment.

On the plus side, there's plenty of things that he can use and play with when he gets older.

On the down side, our neighbor's cat apparently thinks it's a large litterbox. If we catch the cat in the gravel doing its business, we're going to report it to the homeowner's association and make them keep the cat indoors (they're supposed to anyway).

I mean really - who wants their kids playing in cat poop? Not me!

He's such a little charmer, isn't he though?

Gram Chase would say he was cunnin'!

Rubber Ducky, You're the One...

You make my bathtime SO much fun!

Or, in lolcatspeak, "I HAS A RUBBER DUCKY!"

See Mom??!? See!?!??! I have a rubber ducky!!











We were having such a good time in the tub, I had to grab the camera and take some more pictures.

You can see the bottom teeth now too!!

"Aren't I handsome, Mom?"

As you can see, he's been splashing around too!











"What do you mean, duckies aren't for tasting?"

"Mmmmm... duck"










...and after the bath, into the Batman Jammies.

Some of the 18 month outfits are getting short on him.

He's growing longer and longer by the day, it's incredible.

More proof that my ex's current wife is an idiot.

There was a shooting in Copenhagen the other day - I heard just a snippet about it on the news, but hadn't thought much about it. Shootings are rare here, as there's a strict gun control policy here.

Today I get an email from Amy:

"I read today there was some shooting in Copenhagen Denmark in front of a cafe. Possibly gang related. Was that near you? Did you know any of the individuals involved in the shooting? Hopefully no one you knew were the ones shot. Have they caught the people that did the shooting. I read they four that were shot were rushed to the hospital. I guess one has already died due to this shooting....I hope the other three will be alright. Let me know!!!"


First:

I don't live IN Copenhagen. I live in the suburbs. It's 20 minutes away if I'm driving. It's like living in Boston or living in Quincy. It's a burb, it's not the city itself.

Amy knows I don't live IN Copenhagen.

Second:

There's almost 6 million people in Denmark, and 3.7 million in the greater Copenhagen area. I have no fucking idea who the people were that were shot, who their assailants were and who their doctors are or what hospitals they're in.

I'm not about to go to the hospital and ask how they're doing - she should be able to google the shooting and find out for herself.

I don't ask her about shootings in Wichita or Kansas City, why the hell is she asking me about a shooting here? I guarantee that there's more shootings there than there are here.

Shovels and rakes and implements of destruction...

Today we had an early meeting with Ole, our supervisor for this semester. We've been designing our experiment for our Bachelor's project and trying to define the parameters we're going to set it up under.

We decided that we were going to go with larger buckets with roughly 15 cm of sediment, covered with 10 cm of seawater and 5-7 worms per bucket. We'll be having 14 buckets in all I believe with a varying amount of pollutant (used motor oil and diesel fuel at a 1:1 ratio).

We're going to have from 10,000 ppm (parts per million), 3000 ppm, 1000 ppm, 300 ppm, 100 ppm, 30 ppm and a control with no oil/diesel.

The highest concentration will pretty much be a basic toxicology study - how many worms die from the pollution. We anticipate that we'll have the most biological activity in the 30-1000 ppm range, but the higher the amount of pollutant, the harder it is for the worms to survive.

Not too difficult to follow along, I hope.

So today before Animal & Plant Physiology with Hans (the 'fucking shit' guy, if you recall me mentioning him before), Marietta and I ran around the buildings to gather up hardware for our project.

I really feel bad for Ole at times - he'll have gathered up supplies and set them aside for his projects in one of HIS storage rooms and it seems that everyone else comes by and borrows (read: steals) all his gear.

So rather than a simple run downstairs to get buckets and tubing and airpumps and whatnot, we had to chase down buckets, tubing and airpumps and a sediment sieve and all the other things we're going to need.

After 2.5 hours of crawling everywhere to get almost everything (we're still missing airstones which will have to be ordered), we've got it together and are going to pack it into the van tomorrow to end up out at the coast somewhere at a marina to go digging up the worms we need.

We're going to go after Nereis diversicolor and Marenzellaria viridis. The nereis is the native species of worm, and marenzellaria is actually an invasive species which is outcompeting nereis. So we'll have to work a bit harder to get the Nereis, whereas the Marenzellaria is pretty much everywhere.

Both Marietta and I have enlisted our Hubbies to help us with the digging, sieving and carrying of water and sediment for our project, and we'll be having Matthias out there with us, since we don't have anyone that can babysit for that time. It'll definitely be interesting, that's for sure.

We've estimated that we'll need roughly 320 pounds of sediment and roughly 200 liters of seawater.

Fun times ahead!

Sunday dinners...

So today was dinner at Hubby's mother's house.

No biggie - she'd been planning on us coming with the baby, as well as Jonathon and Camilla and their partners.

We went over there earlier this time (we'd had a visit from Steffen and Marietta) and Matthias had been up a little longer than usual before he had a power nap just before we left for Vivi's. This time around we also packed up the high chair, since Matthias has been wild about eating with us and that's kept him from being crabby about being in the playpen while the rest of us eat dinner.

(As you can see, he's gotten into eating 'big boy' food)

This is his bread. There are many mini-loaves like it, but this one is HIS.

All you heard was *slurp* *scrape* and 'mmmmm' from him.




Here we're having (or had) broccoli, corn, carrots, greenbeans and hamburg (97% lean, with onions, garlic, sweet red peppers and orange peppers)

He thought that was nummy enough, and surprisingly didn't start throwing any of his food on the floor.

He'll toss toys down to make us pick them up, but not food - apparently food is too important!


Hubby and I took turns today trying to catch some wonderful candid shots of the baby.

He's got the bluest eyes, doesn't he?











Daddy took this one.

"I has an apple"


"Mmmm, apple!"


That quarter of an apple kept him entertained for a half hour.

He ate about a half of it, without choking on it. He's gotten MUCH better with chewing and swallowing, as opposed to just shoving food down his throat.

Yep, we've learned that the teeth DO help!


So I got distracted by the wonderful pictures of the baby while talking about Vivi's dinner. Apparently both Jonathan and Camilla left SMS's on her cell phone saying they wouldn't be coming to dinner, and Vivi had made 2 meatloaves plus potatoes and veggies, etc. Ordinarily I really like her meatloaf but sometimes she gets a little funky with the ingredients.

Tonight's meatloaf had apples and prunes in it, and was covered in bacon.

Needless to say, this was not my expression:

Has it been that long?

Heh, today's been one of those 'sit back and remember' kind of days.

Today would have been my 18th wedding anniversary with Daniel had we stayed married.

18 years...

There's no way. I'd have killed him long ago I think if we'd tried to make a go of it.

But, thankfully it's not and I didn't.

I'm in a MUCH better place now, most definitely.

Seriously - how can you not love those cheeks???

Matthias has found out how to use his teeth now for things like wheat bread and whatnot. We gave him a roll yesterday from the bakers and you'd be surprised how much he could actually shove in his mouth before he tried to bite it off.


Before you wonder, no we don't pack him in the crib with all the stuffed animals.. there's only 1 at his head when we lay him down to sleep.

He wiggles around and grabs the rest and snuggles down into a happy nest of love.

Course, if he'd sleep longer than a half hour at a time, we'd all be happier -but he's sleeping longer at night which is (in my opinion) MORE important.

At least for my sanity it is.