The Waiting Game

The time is approaching…we will soon have a new baby daughter!  We finished our baby CPR class and now are waiting for our sweet baby daughter to arrive.   We can hardly wait to meet her!

We already have picked out a name but are not letting anyone know what it is until she is born.  Currently my family is calling her Susie.  This is due to my maternal grandfather being sure that I was going to be a girl and writing on my piggy bank that he kept for me the name Susie.  I was going to be his Susie.  As is obvious, that whole plan did not work out so well.  I only got to know my grandfather for about a year before he died of brain cancer.  So, in his honor, as soon as my family found out that we were having a girl and that we were not going to let anyone know the name until she was born they started to call her Susie.

Last weekend was Claudia’s second baby shower at my parents house in El Rio.  That morning, I attended CORBA’s Fat Tire Festival at Malibu Creek State Park in the morning and joined Claudia and the rest of my family at my parent’s house in the afternoon.

We are getting excited and cannot wait for the big day!

Baby Care Class + More Riding + More Dissertation

As you can probably gather from my blog posts, I use mountain biking for fitness and to work out the tension of a long week of work, family and dissertation. There is something liberating about heading up into the hills for a few hours to escape. I am hoping that we can start doing this as a family once Claudia gives birth and the baby has gotten old enough and strong enough to go for bicycle rides in the child’s seat. I am really looking forward to that!

September 16, 2006

On September 16th, I was able to make it 5 miles up the range and down to the other side in time to meet the North Ranch Mountain Bikers at the intersection of the Caballero Canyon trail and dirt Mulholland for their planned ride that day of Sullivan Canyon. If you look closely, you can see me in these three different photos. I unfortunately took 4 very slow spills (more like topple-overs) during two short sections of single-track during that day. I was fine but skinned up my knees a little bit. The North Ranch Mountains Bikers were a nice group of folks that were alot of fun to ride with. I added about 14 miles to the route that the club took that day. Needless to say, I was dead tired after that ride.

Baby Care Class

On Saturday, September 30, we had our first baby care class. We have so far taken Lamaze, Breastfeeding and Baby Care classes through The Birth Place at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center. We have only Baby CPR left to do this coming week.

Thanks to my wonderful mother, we were able to finish preparing the Oma’s/Baby’s room. A couple weeks ago, we painted the bedroom yellow with white trim and the upstairs bathroom white. We also replaced all the towel racks and the toilet paper holder in that bathroom. That same day, we painted the downstair’s bathroom as well. Two weeks later on her birthday, my mother once again came down and helped me finish painting the downstairs bathroom, put up the new lighting fixture and paint the upstairs hallway. We could not have done any of it without her and are very grateful for her help! I’ll try to post some nice photos of the wall color in a later blog entry.

We are getting about as ready as we ever will be for our new arrival. I have been told that you can never be truly ready for the arrival of any child, but I think at this point that we are probably as ready as we could make ourselves. We are really looking forward to meeting our new little girl!

October 1, 2006

Two weeks later, I decided to combine some work with my normal fitness mountain bike trip into the Santa Monica Mountains. Claudia had asked me to help her with some computer work at her place of employment. So I decided to ride from Brentwood to Pacific Palisades via the Santa Monica Mountains. The ride was actually closer to 18 miles since I didn’t start recording the ride until about 1/2 mile into the ride. But I got to see alot more of the E. Topanga Fireroad than I had seen up until this point. I even saw a large male deer with a full set of antlers with two does reclining in a meadow near Trippet Ranch. It was raining lightly when I started and soon stopped only to start again a few hours later as I was nearing Pacific Palisades. All in all, a great day!