Introducing Jack Dalton

This is what our awesome little dude looked like about two and a half months ago:

And here is his adorable little foot:

Out of respect for his privacy, I am not including the pictures that specified his gender. His name is Jack Dalton, and we think he may be destined for heroism (or at least, to one day grow a really big mustache and serve as the trusty sidekick to some Macgyver like character . . . ).

Jack is due to make his grand appearance on the earth around April 4th, and we are very excited to meet him and see whose genes won out. The physical possibilities are intriguing: if he gets the McDonald length/height and the Dalton musculature and athleticism, Jack could have the makings of a demigod. As for hair, if he gets my curl and Josh's body, he could rival any hobbit's head in Middle Earth. If he gets Josh's eye shape and my eye color, he would be one tricksy little ninja. I tend to imagine him most as a little Mowgli baby, loin cloth and all, with rather wild hair and mischievous glints in his eyes.

All supposition at this point, of course. I am prepared, however, to make some preliminary assessments of Jack's character and disposition, based on the only sources I have available to me: doctor's visits, fetal movement, and lots and lots of weird dreams.

Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick

Granted, this is my first child. I have no basis of comparison. But I'm pretty sure I have one squirmy little dude in there. I have a feeling this child will be an energetic one, payback for what I did to my own parents as an infant. Apparently I was a pretty fussy baby until I learned to move on my own. Dad says he remembers walking in the door from work and Mom greeting him by way of passing my squirming self into his arms. Once I learned to crawl and walk, however, my disposition improved and I became a much happier child.

I even had a dream that I was holding him in my arms and it was all I could do to keep him from flying out because he was kicking around so violently.

He also has an irreverent streak with his movements. He likes to kick really hard, with no warning, during church. It startled me so much the last time he did it that I fairly jumped in the pew. He also starts going a bit ape when I am working in the temple, as I do once a week. I seriously wonder if the patrons ever notice the way the big pregnant lady's belly starts writhing and bouncing during what should be very quiet, reverent moments. Hopefully this is just a phase that he will grow out of in a decade or two . . .

Ginger or Afro?

Josh and I have both had dreams that Jack had red hair and blue eyes. I also had a dream where I had just delivered him and was trying to get my first look at him through the nursery curtain, and suddenly he had a huge Afro. And his skin was black. I was pretty sure there had been some sort of mix-up....

Precocious Verbal Genius or Creepy Talking Baby . . .

In Josh's same dream where Jack was sporting bright red hair, he also demonstrated astonishing verbal prowess. Jack was about 2 days old, and Josh went to go get him from his crib. Jack looked at him and said: "Hi Josh!" Josh wasn't sure if he was encouraged or creeped out by the dream.

A Rogue in the Making

One thing I am quite sure of is that Jack is bit of a rascal. He likes to be evasive, especially where intrusive technology is concerned; he instinctively resists it. This could be a good thing if he is destined for a career as a spy or special forces operative.

For example, it has always been a bit of an ordeal getting his heartbeat at my OB check-ups (not good for my nerves/motherly anxiety) because he starts moving and flipping around as soon as she starts rubbing the machine over my belly. The nurses usually end up muttering something like: "You've certainly got a mover" or yesterday she just turned to me and said: "I really don't think he likes this thing," gesturing to the heart-rate monitor.

Our ultrasound took a good 45 minutes because he kept flipping over and refused to move his arm and show the tech his right aortic valve (mind you, he had no qualms about displaying his manhood . . . that was revealed within the first minute or so of the ultrasound. Not sure what to make of that one yet).

Whether or not Jack ends up with uncanny savvy to evade the surveillance technologies of foreign governments or terrorists, I do think he will have lots of fun playing Hide and Seek with his dad. If Josh and I are sitting on the couch, and Jack starts in with the acrobatics, I will grab Josh's hand and put it on my stomach so he can feel him. Sure enough, the lad goes completely still, so Josh will move his hand away and go back to whatever he was doing. As soon as he does so, Jack will deliver a quick roundhouse or left hook, and then of course fall silent again as soon as Josh puts his hand back on my belly. I imagine Jack having a good chuckle over these antics, snorting little bubbles of amniotic fluid as he flip-flops back down onto my bladder.

Josh loves him more for his roguishness, of course, and gets this gleam of fatherly pride in his eye whenever Jack pulls an evasive maneuver.

Truth is, we are mostly just excited to meet the great Jack. Even if he comes out with a Ronald McDonald red Afro, addressing us both by our first names, and karate chopping the nurses who try to measure his vital statistics, he will be our little hero.

The Return of the Unemployed

As you can see, I have been blog-absent for half a year--only making it to day 3 of our 10 day Scotland trip, and then dropping off the face of the blogosphere in July.

In my defense, two significant (but unrelated) events happened in July that brought this about:

(1) I got pregnant

(2) I got "unofficially" promoted at work. This means my boss departed, my work load doubled, and I received no recompense in salary or title.

What did happen is that I got unhealthily busy at work at exactly the moment when my body was working on building another little person. The end result is that for the next several months I worked, ate, took some Tums, worked, and went to bed. Thus, my disappearance from our fledgling blog.

Happily, something else happened in early December that brought about my return, and I have politicians and revenue-hungry executives to thank for it (literally--I am probably the only person in my company to be grateful for it). The war in Iraq ended, our troops pulled out, and my company reduced its corporate staff by 60%, and gloriously, I was among the reduction.

Before the cuts came, I had pulled my boss aside and let him know that if I wasn't on the list, I should be, as I was going to resign in a few months anyway, so would he please take that into consideration. It was an odd conversation . . . essentially: "Sir, could you please fire me?"

And this is how I found myself, one beautiful December morning, eating a donut on my couch at 8am in the morning, blissfully inaugurating my unemployment.

The transition from dashing around as a frenetic, over-worked defense contractor to a puttering housewife has been shocking easy and exceedingly joyful. I thought that maybe I would feel a sort of "ghost limb" connection to my missing BlackBerry, which had been my faithful, around-the-clock poltergeist for nearly three years. I felt no such thing. It was near immediate mental liberation, and mostly I was left to wonder at the luxury of being able to take my time with activities that I had normally rushed through in order to get to work on time, make dinner before 7:30 at night, and get to bed in time to get up and start it all over again.

All that, and the fact that my head feels miraculously uncluttered, leads me back to here. Josh's two conditions for my unemployment were (1) that I write; and (2) that I have dinner on the table by 6pm every night. So far I have failed at both, but thus begins my effort to accomplish the first.

My Wife's Weakness

AM is a lady of steely resolve and iron character.

She does, however, have a weakness (this of course excludes her insatiable obsession with Disney movies, DisneyWorld, and all other things Disney). That weakness is holiday/seasonal marketing. To say that she is susceptible to marketing and advertising is like saying that Kurt Cobain was prone to suicidal tendencies. I suppose I always knew this because every time we go to the grocery store she almost invariably rushes excitedly to the seasonal candy section, unconsciously gravitating to whatever candy is being peddled for the next holiday.

My wife, worshiping at the altar of the Marketing gods

"I'm a sucker," she just readily admitted, sitting next to me while she cross-stitches her Halloween-themed pattern and I type out this blog.

I guess I never realized the extent to which she is susceptible until last week when she started asking if we could go to Wendy's and get the Caramel Apple Frosty Parfait. I thought it was a random strange craving, but in the end, I really only have myself to blame for her demand: I have been obsessively watching college football on ESPN3 (not as good as "The Ocho", but still pretty awesome) and they play the same three commercials over and over...one of which is -- you guessed it -- for the Caramel Apple Frosty Parfait. We went last week but they were out of the vanilla ice cream so they couldn't make it. She was VERY disappointed. At long last, we finally got her one tonight.

The assessment: "The apples were crap, but the rest was good."

I have decided to roll with this weakness and use it to my advantage. Starting now, I am launching a marketing campaign to name our first boy "Scotch" (Scotch Dalton -- how strong of a name is THAT?!?). Who's with me?

Scotland Recap: Glasgow & the Bonny Bonny Banks

Day 3 of our Scotland adventure was spent (1) resting our feet from the previous day's mighty hike, (2) doing a whirlwind tour of Glasgow and (3) worshipping with the Glaswegian saints, AND (4) singing "The Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond" over and over again.

But first, the magnificent and sizely Glasgow Cathedral, built mostly in the 15th century, and Scotland's only cathedral to have weathered the Reformation:

A shot of the quiet interior, moments before a band of middle-aged American tourists invaded:


Beneath the choir (shown here) was my favorite part of the cathedral -- the darkened, creepy crypt, which holds the ancient tomb of St. Mungo (a 5th or 6th century bishop who founded a monastic community here). Not only does he have an awesome sounding name, but apparently it was a miraculously powerful one as well, as medieval folks would make pilgrimages from all corners of the land to be blessed at his tomb.

Overlooking the cathedral (and all of Glasgow) is the Necropolis, a veritable city of the dead. It's a steep, grassy hill shooting up with spires, angels, mausoleums, obelisks, and other stony monuments to expired Glaswegians. The day was far too cheerful and sunny to do the brooding grey stones justice, however:



Before leaving Glasgow we hit up the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which, among other things, boasted the creepiest grand lobby decor of any museum I've ever visited:

Yes, my friends -- disembodied heads floating ghoulishly in the air!  E'en so, we turned our embodied heads towards the north and west, leaving Glasgow behind.  We had a rather tense 8 mile drive from the loch-side village of Balmaha to Rowardennan, dodging Scottish road-hogs on a windy one-track lane, wincing as we scraped shrubbery on our left side and prayed not to scrape Fiats and Minis on our right.  In the end, we arrived here, at the Rowardennan Youth Hostel, where the road ends along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond

(You can't tell, but AM is, of all things, flossing her teeth. You'd think that during a possibly once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland together we'd be doing something not-so-mundane, but the girl does floss 5 or 6 times a day)
 
Rowardennan sits in the shadow of Ben Lomond, and is the point at which intrepid hikers head off into the wilderness of the West Highland Way.  This was our view:

Oh, the bonny, bonny banks! We strolled along before dinner, warbling to ourselves, cooing over bluebells (me), skipping rocks in the loch (Josh), and generally feeling like we'd found paradise:

The sky set beautifully over Loch Lomond, and took its sweet time about it.  Josh snapped this picture around 10pm:

And sunrise the next morning was just as lovely.  I took the below picture of Josh on the dock moments after a rather astonishing revelation from my English roommates.  This hostel only had same-sex dorm rooms, and I shared mine with 5 very cheery middle-aged women hiking the West Highland Way (hard core).  We all woke up around the same time, and the lady in the bunk above me was checking her BlackBerry. 

"Oh dear!  Do you know who's died?  Henry Cooper!" (All the British ladies exclaim mightily with grief and shock; the cheeriest of the lot informs me that Henry Cooper was an English boxer who once knocked down Muhammad Ali).  Then the lady above me speaks again, sort of as an afterthought:

"Huh.  D'you know who else has died?  Osama Bin Laden" (with the "Laden" part pronouced with a short "a" like in "lad"; very English). 

I nearly fall off my bottom bunk in astonishment while the ladies merely make a disinterested "oh" or two in acknowledgment, still reeling from the news about Henry Cooper.  The English and national loyalty.

At any rate, this is Josh down on the dock, moments before I told him my news, initiating a good 12 hours of him trying to read news about Bin Laden on his Kindle: 

Scotland Recap in Pictures - The Borders

On our second day in Scotland we headed south, to the lovely but often passed-over Border country.  This is the region where Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott hail from, and most tourists skip while scurrying off to the Highlands.  The gently beautiful scenery of these counties belie its turbulent and bloody history--it was sacked, pillaged, and burnt time and again during the Wars of Independence with the English.  All that, combined with lame-o King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries campaign, has left us the ruined skeletons of Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso, and Jedburgh.  We went first to Melrose Abbey, built of red-sandstone and originally founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks:    

Apparently Robert the Bruce's heart is buried here (the rest of him is buried at Dumferline Abbey--medieval folks had no qualms with splitting up their bodies if they wanted to be buried in more than one place).  The Bruce had always longed to go on a Crusade, so he asked that his heart be taken by his knights to the Holy Land after he died.  The knight and the heart only made it as far as Spain, where apparently it got lobbed at the murderers of the knight in his last ditch attempt to . . . defy the thugs by throwing a dead king's heart at them?  I didn't really get that part of the story.  At any rate, somehow the heart made it back to Scotland and it now lies in ye olde leaden box beneath the abbey grass.

I was sprawled on the grass, taking pictures of awesome old tombstones, and got this awesome view of the abbey and Josh's hair looking suspiciously like a bowl cut.

The exterior of the abbey was designed by a French master mason whose name I've forgotten, but it is delightfully and quirkily ornate.  Dad would have died over all the gargoyles--men, dragons, angels, saints, and all kinds of strange beasties.  I liked these two guys:

This fellow is one of the most famous gargoyles in Scotland.  It is, indeed, a pig playing the bagpipes:

After lunching in the shadow of Dryburgh (we didn't feel like paying for two abbeys in one day), we drove to Kelso, where we saw the humble remains of the abbey there (not enough left for them to ask people to pay), parked our car and began our 13.5 mile trek to Jedburgh.  Here I am, looking cheerful around mile 6 or so:

The country was fairly idyllic--the Teviot on one hand, and all this on the other hand:

And this:

And this:

And this!  Oh glory:

And this is how we started looking around mile 10, until we finally limped into Jedburgh, caught a bus back to Kelso, lurched into a pub, and then inhaled our burger and salmon in an ungodly amount of time:

Scotland Recap in Pictures - Edinburgh

Now that we have returned to humid Virginia, we would like to relive our trip with all of you with some choice pictures. First, we'll be recapping our Edinburgh days, which were days 1 and 10.

This is the view of Edinburgh Castle from Princes Street in New Town, about an hour or two after sunrise. Meanwhile, we had been walking for about an hour trying to find an open bakery at 7am on a Saturday . . . no luck.

The castle from the same vantage point, taken the day before when it was cloudier:

The front entrance to the castle, looking formidable. Almost as formidable as Josh's hair would have been if he weren't wearing that thing on his head:

Another view of the castle coming down from the Royal Mile toward the National Gallery of Art in New Town:


In the gardens on Castle Hill, looking back on the spires of the Royal Mile:

This is a sweet two-tiered, colorful street leading down from the Royal Mile to Old Town via Victoria Square:

Saturday morning we got up before the crack of dawn to be at this place in time for the dawn. We are standing on Calton Hill at the Dugald Stewart Monument, looking out over Edinburgh toward the castle, which you can see in the distance:

The skyline of Edinburgh, taken on our final night in Scotland while hiking Arthur's Seat around sundown. Arthur's Seat is a gorgeous hill that rears up out of Holyrood Park at the end of the Royal Mile, at Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament. Local legend says that when King Arthur returns, he will come to this hill (basically every corner of Britain has its own legends and myths surrounding Arthur). Less fanciful but perhaps more important, Arthur's Seat was the site where Orson Pratt dedicated Scotland for missionary work in May 1840. He asked the Lord for 200 souls and when he left 9 months later, there were 229 members in Edinburgh. Not bad. Neither is the view:

And to close it out for Edinburgh, here is a very hungry and excited Josh with a Scottish lamb shank, served with mash and drenched in bacon and mushroom flavored gravy:

Clumsy Adventures by AM #2

Apparently one should keep an eye on the spoon while eating chili. I was multi-tasking at work (staring at my screen, clicking the mouse with one hand, and shoveling chili into my mouth with the other), which has been known to bring about calamities. Eyes fixed on the monitor, I assumed the chili would go where my blind hand was guiding it: into my mouth.


I was surprised to feel something thunk against my stomach, then strike me in the thigh. Sure enough, it was a ping-ponging, renegade garbanzo bean, leaving a smear of tomatoey chili sauce on my shirt AND my pants. Discombobulated by the thought of all my impending meetings with chili stains all over my clothes, my body decided to leap to action before checking to see if my hand was properly disengaged from in-between the arm of the chair and the desk. It was not.

Sure enough, I stood up while my hand remained lodged between the chair and the desk, resulting in a lovely red welt along one finger to match the lovely red splotches on my shirt and pants. The only good thing about the whole experience is that this time in didn't happen in front of the guy who works in Contracts.