Betsy Bailey

It’s Labor Day weekend and given how hectic life has been for the past 10 days, I’m really looking forward to the leisure of sitting on my butt as much as I’d like for next three! I didn’t need to travel to an amusement park to experience a rollercoaster… but I’m sure glad I did!

Universal Studios and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter

A week ago today, just ONE day after Bailey’s orthopedic surgery, HM and I were packing for our all-expenses-paid trip to Universal Studios Orlando. We were specifically excited to see the brand new Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park – and it did not disappoint. We had absolutely the best time. Universal really took care to ensure that we experienced some of the best they have to offer at the parks and resort.

Highlights for me included Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride in the Harry Potter park (Wow!!! We rode it twice! And when we dive-bombed the Quidditch field it took my breath away!) and the Blue Man Group performance. And butterbeer. Butterbeer is highly recommended. We tried it both frozen and unfrozen, and we tasted pumpkin juice, too.

But there was ever so much more – it was a fabulous trip and it increased my travel savvy, especially when it comes to theme parks, by several notches.

Miraculously my laptop (Dell Latitude) survived various travel misadventures (first, it was checked – long story; then I dropped it down an escalator). I was a terrible steward of its care. Of course, it could crap out any day now, too. Obviously I’m not feeling all that secure about its reliability. Scott will probably open it and tighten up the various components for me. ♥

I’m in the midst of writing up all the details of this adventure for the SheKnows travel channel. Stay tuned!

Bailey’s recovery progress

Bailey spent the first five days after her surgery doing a lot of digital drawing and resting. She was pretty doped up on painkillers. She did a little schoolwork here and there (she is enrolled in the Arizona Virtual Academy’s high school program, so all her school is at home), but she didn’t have a lot of focus. I want to feature her digital artwork here; she was very prolific during her downtime – hopefully she’ll give me permission.

By the time I returned home from Orlando Wednesday evening, she was feeling tremendously better and was mostly weaned off of the painkillers. Thursday morning she dived back into school, making a determined effort to start catching up.

At her follow-up x-ray on Thursday morning, we learned that her healing is progressing remarkably faster than the surgeon expected. He told us that you often see this when the fracture is on the growth plate and the child is in the midst of growing – those cells are extra-fast at repairing the damage. She is on track to have the pins removed a full week earlier than the surgeon had anticipated. He offered the option of removing the pins in-office or in the surgical center under anesthesia. When he said he wouldn’t know how much pain it would cause her until he tried to remove the pins (apparently they can be sticky) there was no question about how we would proceed! The procedure is scheduled at the surgical center this coming Wednesday.

I’m not sure how much longer her shoulder will be immobilized, but for now her mobility is pretty inhibited. For example, her shirt choices are currently limited to oversize button-downs. If she leaves one of the middle buttons undone, she can forgo the sling and rest her hand in the shirt opening. That has been much more comfortable for her.

Bad blog news

I started this blog on Vox in January 2007. For that entire year, I stored and accessed my blog photos on Vox – before I wised up and started storing/accessing from Flickr. Some of those 2007 entries are very photo-heavy, especially the ones from after Jake was born.

Yesterday, Vox announced they are going out of business and shutting the entire service down by September 30. They made it easy to transfer all my Vox-stored photos (498, precisely) over to my Flickr account (boy did that FUBAR my photostream chronology, but whatever) and I immediately took advantage of that.

A couple years ago, I set up this domain and WordPress installation and transferred all of my entries. Of course, all the image paths in the relevant entries still resolve to Vox, so I am now faced with the distasteful choice of letting the images disappear from those posts or undertaking the tedious chore of swapping out Vox image paths for Flickr in entries made during one of the most conscientious blogging periods of my life.

Noooooooooo.

Shoot me now, because you know what I have to do. Before September 30.

Wow, my first blog entry in over a year. I sure have fallen out of the habit. Well, no promises that this is a reversal of the trend. I’m just in the mood for blogging today. We’ll see where it goes from here, if anywhere.

Without further fanfare…

So speaking of habits I’ve fallen out of: Working out. This lack of working out has been stressing me out. My job and life is soooo sedentary, I really need to be making a more concentrated effort for the sake of my heart and longevity. Plus, I know I need to be setting a better example. Rather than endure this burden of guilt and obligation, it really would be less stressful to just get off my duff already.

Mira (now age 10) has really been pushing me to go on bike rides with her – she even took the initiative and pumped up my bicycle tires and washed down my bike! Sweetie. How could I procrastinate in the wake of that effort?

So last week we started regularly biking. Ouch, my butt. I knew I’d have to suffer through that a few times (right?) before it would get better. But it’s not been getting ANY better. We stopped by REI in Tempe last weekend for the express purpose of purchasing me a pair of padded bicycle shorts. Nope, no improvement.

Today I googled (<< it’s time for spellcheck to consider this a real word already – oh, and “spellcheck,” too) to see how long it would be before I’m, erm, toughed up. Two weeks, one person said – apparently it takes about two weeks to get used to it. Maybe.

But then I found some suggestions about angling the seat so it’s tilting slightly down in front. I thought about that and the physics make sense… that way more pressure is put on your actual BUTT (instead of the pointy sit-bones and other tender tissue I’m euphemistically calling “butt” in the title of this post but you know that’s not really what I mean).

Tonight Scott dug out his Allen wrench and adjusted the tilt on my bike seat. The difference? It felt like MAGIC on my little test run – no uncomfortable pressure at all! We’ll see how it holds up on my next real bike ride, hopefully tomorrow. No promises that this is the reversal of a trend, or anything. I’m just in the mood for bike riding right now.

Twitter: 3 reasons to check it out!.

Just put a new article about Twitter up on SheKnows…

Check it out!

What is Twitter?

Twitter describes itself as a microblogging service where you simply answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. But of course, Twitter is so much more. Major news outlets and trendy magazine sites (follow @sheknows and @pregnancybaby!) feed their headlines via Twitter accounts….

More: Twitter: 3 reasons to check it out!.

For the past 10 hours or so, this entry was dated December 29, 2008 – rather than its rightful January 25, 2007.

I have a lot of interesting email this morning – sorry for the scare!!! I am so completely not pregnant!!! <knock wood>

But I AM almost done porting over my old blog entries from vox. Yay!

No need to be impatient about it; there’s always a predictable outcome here.

And that’s me behind the dog, hunched over my computer working on the neverending blog transfer chore. Kind of obsessive about it at the moment, in fact.

I’ve blogged at vox for two years. Time to cut ties with blogging services and have my own, fully customizable blog.

Working on backing up and importing my vox entries via BlogBackupOnline as I type this. Hope it works!

ETA 7:14 pm: SIGH there will be no easy backup – I need to slowly (manually) port over my old entries. Ugh. Exactly the reason I’m motivated to get the database of my blog entries under MY management.

In good news, I was able to quickly import the 10 entries I’d made to the homeschool blog I had hosted on blogger. I wish I’d done my original beba blog on blogger – grrrr.

Anyway, everything prior to this entry is from beba 1.0.

ETA 11:23 pm: I’m done copy/pasting for the night. I’ve got half of 2008 copied over, including our traumatic hospital experience with Jake in mid-August. But, for now, to bed!

If I tagged you it’s because I want to know more about you. So write 16 random things about yourself and tag me back — and pass yours on to 16 other people (and ask them to tag you back).

1. I love food and cooking.

2. I taught myself to knit from a book. I haven’t done anything too complicated, but have made a bunch of stuff, including a couple simple sweaters. Someday maybe I’ll have time to pick it up again – it’s a very relaxing activity.

3. I am an avid reader. I read a ton of fiction and I read it FAST – usually at a rate of a book per week. I rarely go to sleep without reading first. It’s also a great way for me to recharge.

4. I am an introvert and homebody. I could be at home for a week and not leave the house and not feel even the teensiest bit of cabin fever.

5. I do 90% of my shopping online, including groceries.

6. I’m a fan of pedicures. But I rarely wear makeup, do my nails, dress fashionably or cut/color my hair.

7. I don’t have cable. Pretty much the only thing I watch off TV these days is American Idol. Mostly we netflix movies and TV shows that interest us, if we watch TV at all. Lately, the whole family is addicted to BBC’s newest Dr. Who, though.

8. I am addicted to potato chips. Lays Classic, preferably. VICE. It’s best to not have them in the house.

9. I don’t hold grudges, but when I get mad it takes me awhile to cool off. Like a couple hours sometimes. Mostly only poor Scott has to deal with that aspect of my nature, though. Bless him for his patience.

10. My baked beans (grandmother’s recipe handed down) are nationally famous.

11. I was on reality TV once. After knowing each other online for 6 years (and being virtual business partners for 4 years), Nancy and I finally met in person. Our first in real life meeting was filmed in San Francisco for Life Moments – a syndicated NBC reality show (now defunct). It was very painful to watch. I rarely like photos of myself and video – ack! I have a great face for radio.

12. My kids do their own laundry – even the 8 year old. I don’t make Jake do his (yet), though. They have quite a few other daily chores as well. <crack> goes the whip!

13. I wish I could sing, dance and figure skate.

14. I’m a better editor than I am writer. In spite of that, I dream of writing a book someday. I read such GREAT fiction, though, that my performance expectations are incredibly high. I don’t know if I can match them!

15. I am a damn good editor. Gifted, even. (However, I’m not editing THIS for typos, etc.

16. I used to think I was a dog person, but now I think… not. Maybe the problem is I’m just too overwhelmed with the demanding human creatures who are dependent on me at this stage of my life. Love cats; hate the shedding.