ace’s blog

On Tuesday, 3.28, Meri took Aaron to Jen’s house in the morning.  Jen is the wife of a coworker here (who was also my coworker in Jacksonville).  She has been watching Aaron for about 3 months and Aaron seems to like going over there a lot.  Well Tuesday morning, when Meri was dropping him off, Aaron would not let Meri walk away.  He started saying “Aaron afraid” and “momma no go bye bye” and “Aaron go bye bye” and he would get his jacket and start to walk out the door.  Meri finally left with him screaming and crying and she was nearly in tears.  I would have been as well.  She called me and told me about it and we decided that something had to have happened the last time they were together, be it a spanking, something scary on TV, anything out of the ordinary.  When Meri asked Jen about it while picking Aaron up in the afternoon, Jen didn’t directly answer the question until Meri asked a second time.  Her response was “we didn’t even watch TV last friday” and that was it.  She didn’t say anything about a spanking or deny doing it either.  I have a big problem with other people spanking my son.  Putting Aaron in the corner works well enough that generally that does not even need to happen.  You can usually just say “do you want to go in the corner?” and Aaron will immediately calm down.  Aaron hasn’t had a spaking in a while thanks to the corner.

So since we could not get a good answer from Jen, we found an awesome day care to put Aaron in.  It is called Sports Care Day Care and it is somewhat near the house.  The focus of the day care is sports and activities.  They have several rooms that kids rotate in and out of  in 30 minute increments and a few outside areas for kids to play in too.  Aaron seemed to really like the place a lot.  We have decided to put him in there and we’ll see how he reacts to being in there.  We’ll see how it turns out but I really liked the place.  All the kids in there seemed to be enjoying themselves.

I spoke with the Department Manager (Gaby) about Jeff’s soon to be vacant position. I told him I was interested and he told me to hold back a bit and that there would be an announcement this Thursday or Friday. I am very disappointed to hear that the position probably won’t be filled (by me) but am also somewhat worried about what the announcement will be.

We got our hardwood floors installed Saturday, 3.25, and they look freaking awesome!  I will post some pictures later.  I don’t think we have any old pictures of the carpet.  Seeing how good they look makes me want to hurry up and do Aaron’s floor and then our room.  We’ve decided against the parquet floor for Aaron’s room.  We’re just going to buy some cheaper hardwood flooring (about $2/sq ft) and put it down ourselves.  I’ve seen the flooring put down twice now and it doesn’t look difficult at all.  Just takes time (and money!).

Yesterday was Meri’s birthday.  She turned 25!  She said she was having a hard time with 25 since it meant she was officially half way to 50.  So to make herself feel young(er), she went and had her belly repierced.  =)  I love belly rings!  It’s been about 3 years since she’s had it pierced and damn, it looks good! 

I was up a lot last night thinking of the possibilities of my being a manager.  I think I am going to talk to my boss about him vacating his position and what my chances would be of taking it over.  I don’t think I have even a good chance of getting it since I’ve only worked here for about 9 months and don’t know a whole lot about the system nor have I ever been a manager before.  I think it would be kind of cool though.  It would also be a lot more work for me as well.  I’m going to ask Jeff what kind of responsibilities he has and what his day-to-day pressures are and also if he thinks I would be a good manager.  The last manager they brought in to replace Martin and head up development for the sales team didn’t even have Lansa experience!  I don’t know if she had management experience before but I think she did.  I’ll see what Jeff says and then think about it some more.

My team just found out that Jeff is leaving and going upstairs.  He will still be at Terminix but not as our group manager anymore.  That really kills my plans of taking his job after he left because I thought it would have been in about a year or two.  That sucks big time, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get a manager position here now or when it would be.

Since we found out that Aaron is allergic to mold, we’ve had another reason to rip up as much carpet as we could afford to do.  We already wanted to put hard wood in our living room with our tax return money but now we have a better reason than “we just don’t like the carpet”.  Now that he is allergic to mold, we had another dilemma: carpetting in his room.  To make a long story short, we looked for alternatives to the expensive ($5/sq. ft.) matching hardwood in our dining room and entrance way.  What we ended up finding is that parquet floors look pretty good and they are pretty straight forward to put down.  So we are putting parquet floors in Aaron’s room.  They will run us about $1/sq. ft. instead of $5!  I got to buy a miter saw in order to make putting the floors down ourselves that much easier.  Yay new tool!  Meri ordered the flooring for our living room yesterday as well!  It should be ready for us to pick up on Friday (3.24.06) and should be installed on the next day (3.25) or maybe the following Saturday (4.1).  All that new floor and we can still afford to go on our cruise!  Yippee vacation!

So this past weekend we had a pregnancy “scare”.  Now I may not have said this before so here it goes: we’ve talked about having another baby before and can’t decide if we do or don’t want it.  We like being able to focus solely on Aaron all the time and like that we will be able to send him to private school and also that Meri can start her nursing career (she’s in school now) soon since she had to put it on hold because we got pregnant before.  Now having said all of that, I took it really hard that we were not pregnant again.  Even though neither of us had made up our minds that we even wanted another kid, we both were kind of depressed that Meri got her period yesterday.  I took it a lot harder than Meri did.  Maybe it is because I’ve been so emotional for the past few months, I don’t really know.  I now know that I truly want another child.

It is a lot more feasible for me to want another child now because I am the one that Aaron looks to for play time.  He and I are good buddies and I think that he views me as his friend 99% of the time and his father the remaining 1%.  Meri does a lot of the parent-like things with him: most of his cooking, cutting his finger and toe nails, discipline, doctors appointments, carting him around to mothers day out and the babysitters house, medicine scheduling, etc.  I’m sure there are more but that is what I can think of off-hand.  I do his baths and put him to bed most nights and play with him from the time I get home until his bedtime.  Meri has to do all of the parenting things and go to school.  She is trying to get her career on-track and I’m just around to play with my little man Aaron.

As Meri was telling me that she was not pregnant, Aaron was in the playroom talking up a storm and laughing.  It made me wonder how could I not want another child when he or she could turn out as great as Aaron!  He’s such a joy to be around most of the time, he has his moments like most children do.  I can’t wait till we have another kid just as great as him.  Double the fun!

Aaron had a great weekend, we all did! We took several bike trips around the neighborhood. We took Aaron to the zoo this weekend and had a lot of fun. Aaron loved the new polar bear exhibit. He was so cute pointing up and yelling as the polar bears swam around (and above) him. It was so nice out this weekend that we had 2 days of nothing but outside fun! It was great. Weekends like that make me so thankful that I’m the father of such a wonderful kid like Aaron.

It’s been almost a year since Aarons last allergy test so it was time for him to have another. The first allergy test was pretty simple from Aaron’s perspective, draw some blood, get a band aid and some cotton, see ya later! This time it was a lot different. Aaron was tested for 50 different possible allergies…that means there were 50 needs involved…all in his back. Meri said he was in a lot of pain. I feel bad for him. Poor guy. We did find out he was allergic to mold though. That mean that we are going to pull up his carpet and he gets some nice hardwood floors! Yay Aaron! Poor kid, yesterday was a big day for him.