GregHowley.com

So it looks like I've somehow survived the week-and-a-half without Linda. Amazingly, so has Lia. The day after Linda left, Lia was sitting in a high chair, snacking on a teething biscuit while I cleaned the bathroom. I did notice at one point that when she'd mostly eaten the whole thing, the small part of it that was left was sticking to the roof of her mouth like peanut butter, and the expressions on her face were priceless. But a minute later, she started coughing and choking on it, which gave me quite a scare. I ran over and picked her up just in time for the teething biscuit to activate her gag reflex. She threw up all over me. But at least she's okay.

The other choking scare came when Lia crawled over to a doorstop and pulled of the small plastic cap. She popped it in her mouth like candy, and luckily I noticed. After that, the plastic caps came off every doorstop in the house.

In addition to the two front teeth that Lia has on the bottom, she's got three coming in on the top. They've been bugging her on and off, so she'll chew on everything in sight. The velcro on her toys, the plastic zipper of her jacket, the top rail of her crib, the foot of my office chair...

I've also come to realize that Lia loves fresh bread. She'd had it once before when Linda baked and we broke off tiny pieces for her, but this weekend I'd gotten a baguette from the store, and gave Lia some of the inside soft pieces, broken up really small. She started ignoring the Cheerios, and crying for more bread.

We were able to Skype video chat with Linda from opposite sides of the planet, although the connection was occasionally lousy, and the fan on my PC is now so loud that I can hear it from the other side of the house. But it was nice - Linda got to see Lia and vice versa, although I'm not sure that Lia entirely recognised that the image of her mom on the screen was anything different than the images she sees on TV normally.

Lia and I spent some time outdoors this weekend, since it was sunny and the temperature was probably in the seventies. I brought Lia down to the Arkansas river, and we sat down together and watched the water. Some people came and their kids walked around in the (ice cold) water, losing their flip-flops in the mud. It was nice. Later we went out in the backyard, and I sat down in the grass with Lia on my lap. I was thinking she might want to crawl around in the grass and check out the yard, but it turns out that the grass makes her a bit nervous. The grass is yellow and dry this time of year, and felt prickly on her bare feet, though it wasn't anything that would have actually hurt her. But she seems to have decided that she doesn't like it, as she pulled up her feet and I couldn't get her to touch it with her hands. She got upset when I tried, so we went back inside.

Aside from missing Linda, it all went by pretty smoothly. But somehow, now that it's me actually dropping Lia off at day care, it's so hard to let her go every day. I can see by how happy she is when I drop her off that she's enjoying her days there, but that just makes me jealous. She's about to start walking, and the likelihood is that she'll take her first steps there, and not with Linda and I. I've only been getting her for about a half hour in the morning while I dress her and we run out the door, and for 60-90 minutes at night while I feed her dinner, give her a bath, and sometimes play a bit before bedtime. At least once Linda's back I'll save those drives to and from day care and get an extra hour or so with Lia every day.

Linda's flight is taking off from Siem Reap as I write this, and will arrive in Seoul, Korea at 7:10AM local time, which I think is 6:10PM Mountain Time. Then she gets to spend essentially all day in the airport before her plane takes off at what I believe is 4:30AM Mountain Time. She'll arrive in Seattle at 11:20PST tomorrow, and land in Denver at 5:08 tomorrow where I'll pick her up.