Desmond was Here

Sometimes I listen to the lie that my only usefulness is to clean up messes.  Then I feel defeated when I look at all that I haven’t gotten around to yet or guilty when I sit down to relax when the kids are asleep.  I have to accept that messes are a way of life with young children and the cleaning will never be done.  But sometimes the clutter makes me smile especially when it so clearly says, “Desmond was here!”  He was entertaining Kaylynn with all five of his beloved snugglies.

Sweet, Stubborn Girl

I’m running into Kaylynn’s determined spirit a lot lately.  I love her so much, but this girl and I are going to have a standoff on more than one issue.  She’s strongly opinionated on how and where she does things and it makes a mommy’s day challenging.  She’s only five and a half months old!  What will this determined spirit look like in three or ten years?  We need to set up early who’s in charge here.

Sleep: She nearly refuses to fall asleep unless she’s home and then only if she’s in her crib swaddled and sucking on her binky.  The problem is she’s also getting good at wiggling out of the swaddle, flipping herself over, pulling out the binky and therefore crying because things are not right many times during the night.  I think I’m going to wean her off both the swaddle and the binky so she can learn to get herself to sleep wiggles and all.  The next week or so could be really rough.  We’ll see how long I last.  Davin doesn’t want to attempt this at night, just during the day.  Today she took a grand total of three twenty-minute naps.  One of them she fell asleep on her own and it was such an exhilarating feeling.  If she’s tired enough she will sleep!

Eating: Kaylynn is so strange about where she eats.  Today we were out at a doctor’s appointment, the grocery store, and then lunch with Davin.  Kaylynn wouldn’t eat the whole time we were out and she was getting cranky.  Watching a baby at the next lunch table drinking her bottle didn’t influence Kaylynn either.  When we got home she guzzled down six ounces.  I knew she was hungry!  Silly girl.

Every Girl Deserves a Pretty Dress

I have recently developed a friendship with a local mom through MOMS group.  She has a cute nine month old son and was due in January with her daughter.  On Friday I could not get my friend out of my mind and I prayed for her often.  Ultrasounds showed that the baby would have little chance of survival, and on Friday she was born at almost 27 weeks.  After one breath she left this world to meet her heavenly Father.  Now I know why my friend was heavy on my heart that day.

This has hit me really hard especially since I know the pain of losing a child.  At eight weeks I never got to hold mine or kiss his face, but I can still relate to a mother’s grief.  I have cried a lot the past few days.

I had a thought to make a dress for the baby, and my friend said it was okay.  Newborn clothes are too big so I made a doll dress out of some beautiful soft fabric I bought in Salzburg shortly after getting engaged.  I used some of it for my wedding.  I think it is perfect.  Every girl deserves a pretty dress even if it’s the first and last one she’ll ever wear.  I just pray that it fits alright.

In a way this has been healing for me.  I couldn’t give anything to my baby, but it has felt good to carefully craft something for another.  We were never meant to burry our children, but still  God is gracious.  I thank God for the two perfect, healthy children I have, and I ‘m glad my friend has her son to love on and help her heart heal. 

Dance with your Father, Eden Grace, and say hello to Emery for me.  Your moms await the day when we can know you and hold you again. 

My Little Goober

Desmond is turning into more of a big boy every day.  When I get out the camera now he loves to make silly faces, and then we laugh as we look back through them.  I love his silliness and indulge in taking silly pictures because that’s just him.

Sometimes he wants Kaylynn to play in his room with him and then he asks me to leave.  I don’t quite know what to do with myself when I’m not asked to join in the playing, but it makes me smile to see him be a good big brother.

We’re dealing with a fussy stage right now.  He likes to be in charge and have things go his way – don’t we all?  So while he’s still a sweet boy it’s a constant challenge to continue shaping him into a respectful and obedient child.

And potty training?  Yeah, I don’t know.  I haven’t hit it hard again though I’m trying to encourage him in little ways.  I don’t want to deal with the resistance and accidents right now.  I think I ‘d like to send him off to potty training boot camp for a day or two and have someone else do it! 

I’m enjoying teaching Desmond by responding to his naturally inquisitive mind.  I feel like pretty much everyone sends their three year old to preschool, but we can’t afford that and I really think I want to take on his education in the beginning.  This week he’s been interested in Saturn after watching a Disney’s Little Einsteins episode.  So we made Saturn out of a bouncy ball and a glow stick bracelet.  Today we went to the downtown Vancouver library (awesome kid section by the way) and checked out some books about our solar system.  It’s fun looking through the books and answering his questions.  He’s drinking it all in and knows half the planets just after today.  I explained orbits to him by us taking turns being the sun and the earth.  I let him play with Google Earth on my iPod. He knows now that we live on Earth but he suggested that the neighbors live on Jupiter.  Well, at least he’s being exposed to the information.

Five Months Old

Kaylynn is five months old!  She is starting to scoot herself across the floor just a little, and she is being introduced to the world of solid foods.

She shows a strong preference for drinking her bottle in her room so I have started making her eat downstairs during the day.  When we’re away from home she will hardly eat anything at all.  She’s doing great with solid foods and has had rice cereal, mum mums, green beans, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, and bananas so far.  It’s fun having her at the dinner table with us.

As far as sleep goes, Kaylynn has her own preferences on that as well.  If we’re away from home she usually won’t sleep more than a few minutes and only in the Ergo. Her naps vary from 30 minutes to two hours, but one hour is usually the norm.  She’s very attached to her binky and often fusses at night to have it put back in her mouth when she can’t reach it.  I’m thinking about weaning her off it.  Desmond slept through the night around 6-8 weeks so this not sleeping well for five months thing is new to me.  She still likes to eat once or twice during the night, but I’m trying to make some slight adjustments to her bedtime routine to help signal her to sleep longer.  She slept through last night (until 5 am) so maybe soon…

Kaylynn is jabbering more and more.  I’m hearing more consonants the past week or so.  I often ask Desmond what he thinks she’s saying or say she’s telling him secrets.  When he wants her to talk he says, “Can she make more languages?”  Cute.

Not long ago I couldn’t imagine having another baby.  Now Kaylynn feels so much a part of our life, it’s like she’s always been here.  I love my little sweet pea!

The Pumpkin Patch

We had a beautiful day at the pumpkin patch!  We decided to skip the 45 minute drive to the popular Sauvie Island spot and checked out nearby Bi-Zi Farms instead.

The weather was perfect and I was pleasantly surprised at how good this local farm was.  Apparently everyone else in Vancouver knew how great it was because the farm was busy.  They were organized and had lots of fun activities included in the admission price making it a perfect family outing.  We enjoyed pumpkin launching, a hay pyramid, the long corn maze, a rubber duck race, and Desmond’s favorite – a hay ride to the field to find our pumpkins.  Maybe next year we’ll also have time for the hay maze, corn shucking, petting zoo, and pony ride.

My favorite highlight was when Desmond found a frog. He squatted down to study something in the grass, and when I asked him what he was looking at he said, “There’s a hopping thing.” I came over expecting to see a grasshopper, but it was a cute little frog! I don’t think Desmond has seen a real one before. He wouldn’t touch it, but Kaylynn didn’t have a choice when I put it on her head.

Finding the Character Set For a SQL Field

The other day I was working on a project and I needed to know all of the different types of characters contained in a SQL field so that I could make a regular expression pattern that would not fail. Thus, I decided to write a stored procedure that would loop through a range of characters and test if that character is contained in a specified field in any records. From there I can get a list of all of the used characters and then more intelligently write my regular expression pattern.

This could also be handy if you are trying to cast a field and you keep getting errors because of a character that won't cast correctly. An example would be trying to cast a varchar or char field into an int and for some reason or another one of the records has a letter in the field. Your cast will fail and it can be tricky to track down where the issue is. With this stored procedure you can quickly see what the offending character is and then query up all the records containing that character.

Example usage:
exec FieldCharacterSet 'dbo', 'mytable, 'myfield', 1, 0, 255

Feel free to use this if you find is useful, and leave a comment letting me know if it worked well for you.

-- =============================================
-- Author:		Davin Studer
-- Create date: 9/26/2010
-- Description:	This stored procedure will let you
-- know all the characters that are contained within
-- a field of a specified table.  This is handy for things
-- such as creating regular expression patterns and figuring
-- out casting issues.
-- =============================================
create procedure [dbo].[FieldCharacterSet]
	@TableSchema nvarchar(255) = '',-- this is the schema for table to look at
	@TableName nvarchar(255) = '',	-- this is the table to look at
	@FieldName nvarchar(255) = '',	-- this is the field that will be scanned
	@RTrim bit = 1,					-- should the field be right trimmed before finding the character set ... mostly for char field types
	@LowCharRange int = 0,			-- character scan start point
	@HighCharRange int = 255		-- character scan end point
as
begin
	-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
	-- interfering with SELECT statements.
	set nocount on;

	declare
		@count bigint = 0,
		@sql nvarchar(max) = '',
		@selects nvarchar(max) = '',
		@error varchar(200) = '',
		@field nvarchar(264) = '',
		@sqlbuild nvarchar(max) = ''
	declare @chars table(
		[character] nchar(1)
	)
	declare @statements table(
		[sql] varchar(max)
	)

	if @TableName = ''
	begin
		set @error = 'You must supply a table name.'
		raiserror (@error, 15, 1)
	end

	if @FieldName = ''
	begin
		set @error = 'You must supply a field name.'
		raiserror (@error, 15, 1)
	end
	
	if @error = ''
	begin
		-- Bracket the table name to avoid naming issues
		if left(@TableName, 1) <> '[' and right(@TableName, 1) <> ']'
		begin
			set @TableName = '[' + @TableName + ']'
		end
		
		-- Bracket the field name to avoid naming issues
		if left(@FieldName, 1) <> '[' and right(@FieldName, 1) <> ']'
		begin
			set @FieldName = '[' + @FieldName + ']'
		end
		
		-- Should we rtrim the field to deal with trailing spaces ... mostly for char fields
		if @RTrim = 1
		begin
			set @field = 'rtrim(' + @FieldName + ')'
		end
		
		-- Create a temp table to hold our examples of each character matched
		if object_id('tempdb..##fieldCharacterSetTemp') is not null
		begin
			drop table ##fieldCharacterSetTemp
		end
		set @sql = 'select * into ##fieldCharacterSetTemp from (select t1.* from ' + @TableSchema + '.' + @TableName + ' t1 inner join ' + @TableSchema + '.' + @TableName + ' t2 on 1 = 1 where 1 = 0) X'
		exec(@sql)

		--Loop through the ascii characters low to high
		while @LowCharRange <= @HighCharRange
		begin
			--Build the from and where clauses
			set @sqlbuild = ''
			set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + 'from '
			if @TableSchema <> ''
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + @TableSchema + '.'
			end
			set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + @TableName + nchar(13)
			set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + 'where ' + @field
			-- If the character is A-Z or a-z then case sensitive compare
			if (@LowCharRange between 65 and 90) or (@LowCharRange between 97 and 122)
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + ' COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS'
			end
			set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + ' like '
			-- Deal with a few special SQL characters
			if @LowCharRange = 37 -- % character
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + '''%\%%'' escape ''\''' + nchar(13)
			end
			else if @LowCharRange = 39 -- ' character
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + '''%''''%''' + nchar(13)
			end
			else if @LowCharRange = 95 -- _ character
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + '''%\_%'' escape ''\''' + nchar(13)
			end
			else
			begin
				set @sqlbuild = @sqlbuild + '''%' + nchar(@LowCharRange) + '%''' + nchar(13)
			end

			-- Buld main counting sql
			set @sql = ''
			set @sql = @sql + 'select @countOut = count(*)' + nchar(13)
			set @sql = @sql + @sqlbuild

			--Get count of rows that have the character
			execute sp_executesql @sql,N'@countOut bigint = 0 output',@countOut=@count output

			--If any rows have this character add it to the result set
			if @count > 0
			begin
				insert into @chars values (nchar(@LowCharRange))

				-- Build the select sql to look at example lines that have this character
				set @selects = ''
				set @selects = @selects + 'select top 1 *' + nchar(13)
				set @selects = @selects + @sqlbuild
				
				insert into @statements values (rtrim(replace(@selects, nchar(13), ' ')))

				set @sql = ''
				set @sql = @sql + 'insert into ##fieldCharacterSetTemp' +nchar(13)
				set @sql = @sql + @selects
				
				exec(@sql)
			end
			
			-- Next character
			set @LowCharRange = @LowCharRange + 1
		end

		select * from @chars
		select * from @statements
		if object_id('tempdb..##fieldCharacterSetTemp') is not null
		begin
			select * from ##fieldCharacterSetTemp
			drop table ##fieldCharacterSetTemp
		end
	end
end

Weary Mommy

Some days I feel I am losing the battle.  The kids are so demanding and there is little gratitude at this stage.  I just got both kids in bed.  I did Desmond’s routine first, but then he literally screamed and wailed for me while I tried getting Kaylynn down.  I find myself squeezing my eyes shut and taking a deep breath so I don’t flip out.  I don’t always succeed.  I got Kaylynn down, found the missing lambie responsible for the incessant screaming, and tried explaining to Desmond why I can’t always drop everything and run to him when he calls me.  I tried reassuring him that I hear him and always want to get him what he needs but sometimes he’ll have to wait a little bit.  (I’m sure he gets it now.)  Then Kaylynn was crying again so I fed her some more and got her down again.  I think her teeth are bothering her.  Anyway, it’s silent now and I think I should probably go to bed.

I’m feeling drained: physically and emotionally.  When I’m not dealing with kids I’m trying to do a load of laundry or dishes.  I feel I’m just here to clean up messes and take care of everyone else.  Many days I don’t even take enough time for myself to get out of my pajamas which sounds nice to stay in your pjs all day, right?  But then I feel so blah and gross.  It doesn’t help. 

I’m also tired of being overweight.  I need to find the time to get myself back in shape!  I think I’ll join a gym down the road and go at 5:30 in the morning before Davin needs to go to work so I can do it ALL BY MYSELF without any distractions from the kids or the endless housework.  The problem is I’ll have to go to bed around 9 so I can wake up at that hour.  (Yeah, right.)  Still I need to change something.  I hate starting every day with a sigh and a groan.  I know exercise will help me have more energy and feel better about myself.  This way I’ll have time to refocus, talk to God in the quiet of the morning, and get the day started off right.  I need to begin my day on a positive note before someone’s crying for me. I’ll have to sacrifice sleep to get “me” time, but when I start falling apart everyone suffers so I’ve got to do it.  God, please give me an extra measure of grace!

September Birthdays at Oaks Park

Saturday was spent at Oaks Amusement Park with my family celebrating Mom and Nathan’s birthdays.  They wanted to do something different this year so this was it.  We all had fun going on thrill rides and most of my pictures ended up being of the go carts.  Kaylynn slept about half the time, and Desmond went on lots of kiddie rides but some were too scary.  The big slide was too fast, but the Ferris wheel was slow and offered a fun view of the “race cars” down below.  A fun time was had by all, and we ended the very hot day with a delicious ice cream cone.

Growing, Playing, and Shopping

It’s hard to believe Kaylynn is four months old today!  Gotta get a cute picture of her. 

The other day Desmond enjoyed pulling Kaylynn around in his little wagon. It’s fun to see them playing together!  He is very careful with her and likes bringing her toys to play with.  Kaylynn likes to watch him and gives him lots of smiles.  Sometimes Desmond can even get her to laugh when I can’t.

Yesterday I checked Desmond into Playland at Fred Meyer and got so much shopping done while Kaylynn slept in the Ergo. Amazing! Why haven’t I used this free service before? Desmond had a great time playing with toys – which is what he begs me to do whenever we go shopping anyway. I’ll definitely be doing more shopping here. What a great feeling to be able to get everything on my list and not have to chop it down to the bare essentials so we can get out of the store without a meltdown.

I’m gearing up for the JBF kids consignment sale next week.  I’m tagging a few things to sell, and I’ll also be volunteering for one shift.  Hopefully I can make a bit of money to cover some of what I need to buy.  Kaylynn needs a few warm clothes for winter in a couple different sizes and Desmond needs pretty much everything.  I love shopping this sale for good deals; it feels like a treasure hunt.  It’s a bit time consuming though with three different trips for drop off, volunteering, and pick up, not to mention the hours needed to shop!