Long Enough For the Clouds…

Lacey’s family has a timeshare that they use every year and this year they decided to use it at a small “resort” on the oceanfront in Hollywood, Florida. That is our current location. I’m typing this journal edit at almost 7 am outside a library. Everyone else is passed out. I woke up to work on stuff for my two classes at the Academy of Art University.

Navab is really digging the beach and the pool. Yesterday at the beach she got into an hyper excited state that I’ve only seen her do a few other times where she purses her lips and shakes her head back and forth really excitedly. She really loves the beach!

She is now calling her Grandpa Graves: PaPa which is really cute and neat.

Unfortunately her love of dogs has had a unusual outcome. Lacey’s Mom Suzie is very close to her dog “little girl” and Navab has noticed this and thus the pair have become synonymous Now, unfortunately and she usually asks for “Dog” when she sees her Grandma Graves. This is causing a little unrest for my poor Mother-in-Law because it almost appears as though Navab is calling her Dog when in all actuality she just thinks of her pet dog and wants to know if it’s around. Gavin Lacey’s brother is having a good time at this and trying to egg Navab on saying “Go give this to Dog”. Or “Where’s dog” when referring to his mother to Navab. He’s quite the kidder.

One really cute thing to note is that when it’s quiet time and Lacey and I are whispering sometimes Navab will imitate us and “whisper” although it’s usually just random sounds that she makes in a whispering tone. It usually goes like this “bedebebebet betebdebebedebet”.

Navab has also started saying “three” when you say one, then two. One of her favorite things to have is ice. She asks for it by saying Iiiiiiiiiiii… because she still has a problem with c’s and s sounds… although sometimes she will say “ice” or “ish”.

Right now I think her favorite food is spaghetti. The other day I was making some and she just couldn’t understand why she had to wait while it was cooking and was getting really upset.

It will be just me and Navab during the daytime this summer. You can expect much more of this.

I saw someone’s blog with a 100 things about me post…. I figured.. Wow.. that’s a challenge… and I’ve been slowly getting mine done… But for now a post that will be much more popular and quicker to write… 20 things about Navab!

1. She is named after the wife of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith. Her name means Highness or close to God. We spell it differently from the commonly used version to make a distinction from the original Navváb. Her middle name Celestine means heavenly which is similar in meaning. Gerard means “spear-brave”.

2. Her hair is a honey color now, but will most likely be dark brown later (since it seems to be the same hair I had at her age).

3. Her eyes are currently a grayish hazel with a dark ring around the edge.. I believe eventually she will have a similar hazel color to her Mom’s eyes.

4. She loves to dance to the theme for the Show “Backyardigans”, but doesn’t usually sit around for more than that. From watching the show’s intro she learned how to twirl around all by herself.

5. She is a vegan (yes, drinking human breast milk is a natural part of a vegan diet for a baby) for the most part (can’t control everything people give her).

6. Her current favorite things are Dogs and babies.

7. She has only one true living Uncle, and no living aunts but she has quite a few adoptive Aunts and Halehs.

8. Navab’s vocabulary words as of this writing are: mimi (milk), Go (ball), dog (sometimes pronounced “ga”, sometimes “daa”), flower (flowa), water (wawa), hi, bye, tree (tee), sock (gaah), Elmo (melmo), nana (food of any solid form and also banana), wow, mommy, momma, daddy, dada, and she also growls and today learned how to bark and meow, and now calls Cat’s “meow”. She has also used other words but too infrequently to list here.

9. Navab is fully capable of climbing up the steps and sliding down a slide, climbing up a flight or more of steps, getting down from a couch or bed, walking, dancing, twirling, and she can do some singing with apparant attention to actual notes.

10. Navab hates taking vitamins and is so strong that it often takes both parents to administer them (doctor’s orders).

11. She is allergic to hummus.

12. She has yet to spend a whole night sleeping away from her mother. We are co sleepers.

13. You can usually instantly calm her by turning her upside down.

14. She loves books.

15. when she gets tired she often rubs her eyes and if you are holding her she will rub her nose on you.

16. She can make rasberries, click her tongue, and bbbdddbbbddbbddbb her lips with a finger… all useful things.

17. The jury is out on whether or not she will be able to tan (like mommy) or burn (like daddy), but this is a good thing… Yay sunblock!

18. At one, Navab has probably been on more plane flights than half the people in the United States.

19. Over 10 people have told me they honestly believe she is the cutest baby they’ve ever seen.

20. She has extremely long eyelashes that she gets from her daddy (yeah.. they make me feel very manly… lol) and Her hair is finally long enough that everyone that sees her knows she is a girl right away. Originally that was not always the case with her short hair and neutrally colored clothes (Lacey is very much against the pink and baby blue brainwashing that we do as a society)

“I will NOT be outworked. Period… You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: Either you’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple.”

-Will Smith

Will Smith is good people.

hopefully George doesn’t mind my use of his image for the blog.

It’s not easy being green… In a nod to Kermit. I’m jumping back on the green food bandwagon. I had eschewed my veganism for awhile, but now I’m the mean green vegan machine again.

One man’s religion
another man’s mythology
one man’s circumcision
another man’s genital mutilation apology

Can we clash our worldviews into one
can we mix our milk and our blood
comparing contrast piercings, utensils, types of smiles
Is it pedagogy or abusive education styles
Do I flog my food
Do you wield a knife
is there equality with you and your wife

is this flesh an altar
or merely a sack
Do I eat 3 meals
or 6 well rounded snacks

do we partake of all things
kill all the swine
do you cut out the hoofed animals
refuse the brine

Does one’s opinion matter
will we keep our mouths shut
Are we sensitive to language and slander
Do we seriously give a ______

I think I need to take a break from searching for MYSELF.

“The more we search for ourselves, the less likely we are to find ourselves; and the more we search for God, and to serve our fellow men, the more profoundly will we become acquainted with ourselves, and the more inwardly assured. This is one of the great spiritual laws of life.” -Shoghi Effendi

one of the funniest things about having a 1 year old is her penchance for putting new sounds together to make “words” sometimes it sounds like our toddler speaks another language altogether. At times she sounds like she is speaking in Hindi. What’s even funnier is that sometimes the sounds she puts together make real words. She spent about two minutes today saying Taco with no prompting. Her mom was like “she definitely grew up in Texas”.

John Ruskin: “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.”

Navab turned one! Both grandma’s were there. Her great aunt, and uncle and her uncle were there.

We went to the Houston Aquarium yesterday…. It was pretty keen. Can I just say that I think I’m going to enjoy the rest of my life more now that I can share new things with Navab.

facebook killed instant messaging…

is twitter killing blogging?

In this day and age the at home pregnancy test has gone through some new technological advances. Now they have digital readouts that say you are pregnant or you are not, just so there is no confusion about the plus or negative or whatever it used to be.

All I know is that If men had to take pregnancy tests…the tests would be in the shape of little boats and you’d let them float in the middle of the toilet and the guy would try to sink it.

I’ve spent most of the past 13 years of my life outside the state of my birth: Michigan.

In this time I’ve had numerous Michiganian accent and verbal idiosyncrasies pointed out to me by my friends and constituents (I refuse to use the term Michigander no matter how much my spell check lights up). When I first moved to Philadelphia in 1997 my new friends jokingly called me a Canadian because my Michiganian way of speaking was pretty much Canadian to them (even more so probably than a traditional Michiganian due to the fact that I went to a community college months prior where a third of the students were Canadian so I had absorbed of their speech patterns like “Ay”… especially since I deejayed on the radio with many of them). I also have some leftover ebonic-like patterns of speech from my childhood in Detroit. If I’m not paying attention I will say “Wif” instead of “with”.

Tonight I found a site that tries to categorize Michiganian verbal isms… It’s kinda of interesting… It explains a lot… like why people from Michigan add and S to the end of every store name. “I’m going to Kmart’s”….

Here it is:


http://www.michigannative.com/ma_about.shtml

Although, since I have lived a third or more of my life outside of the state, and that is pretty much all of my adult life I have absorbed other things into my way of speaking. I say “yo” a lot as a relic of my 7 years living in Philadelphia, and my test results here say:

One thing that is kind of funny is that I am kind of out of place in Texas. I’ve never been interested in Southern or Western Culture… and here I am… in Houston of all places…. Oddly enough, no matter what… My daughter is a born Texan. Wow!

This morning I woke up next to my wife and daughter. Navab woke up and put her head on my head. She then leaned over and kissed me.

Today Lacey was kind enough to grab my health insurance card and find a Doctor who would see me on short notice. This led to me getting some medications for the flu (tamiflu) and possibly something else in case it wasn’t (antibiotic). Next up was some blood testing just to be safe. I haven’t had much of a sense for hunger lately being so sick. So I hadn’t eaten anything… This is usually a good thing for these types of blood tests… but They actually took quite a bit of blood for these tests. First they filled up a tube, then they filled up these two culture bottles. They looked like little wine flasks or something… Well, my brain wanted all the blood sugar/pressure I had apparantly.

After the last one was full I could feel my consciousness slipping…

I told the phlebotomist that I was feeling like i was passing out and she told me to cough and I started to cough but it wasn’t doing it… Suddenly I saw many pictures flash before my eyes like in a movie or something and then it was all black. I felt very peaceful. Some time passed. At some point I started hearing muffled voices and I tried to open my eyes but it was really hard. I did and I was surrounded by 6 panicking women who were all there trying to get me to come to. One had an ice pack on my forehead. I had to struggle to come back to and not slip back into the blackness…. Strangely enough, passing out felt particularly good after not sleeping all last night. I had taken nyquil and instead of knocking me out, it gave me racing thoughts that kept me up all night.

The clinic workers gave me some sugar water and monitored me while I waited for Lacey to come. I am very thankful that they took such good care of me when I passed out at the clinic. Lacey came and brought me some apple juice and a couple of granola bars and we left for home.

Man.. I’m sick… It might be the flu. It may be something else. nyquil/dayquil have become necessary for my functioning at this point… One odd thing now though is that my ears keep popping… so bizarre.