Family Update 1/11/10

I am taking a small hiatus on my frothing about the economy to fill everybody in on the goings-on around the Hobbs’ household.

Julian: Julian started crawling in earnest this weekend past. Before he would pull-up to all fours and lunge. Now he does actual crawling. What’s more, he is pulling up to standing in his crib: not just staying there, but rather both briefly and repeatedly, as if it is calisthenics. Methinks he is doing so to strengthen his legs. He already remembers where he last saw things and figures out that if you put something over them, it is still there but hidden. He appears to be quite bright and ahead in his development. Over the past few months, he naturally developed a fear of large volumes of water, which makes sense; however, this weekend, after a brief adjustment period of about 15 minutes, he was splashing and carousing like an old pro.

Sophia: Sophia is improving by leaps and bounds. She has been much better about communicating, though she still has sleep problems. We see it as a vicious circle: she doesn’t tell us when she is sleepy, but when she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t communicate as well. She and Julian both had a cold this weekend but are now over it. So far, she isn’t missing Shamu. We’ll see if we can make it 3 months without it…for those not “in the know” SeaWorld San Antonio closed Jan 3 and doesn’t re-open until the beginning of March. Sophia is obsessed with going there. We still want to put her into ballet, but until she starts heeding instruction a little better it would be a waste of everyone’s time.

Antonella is doing well. We started at the gym (hence the pool) at the first of the year. We haven’t worked all of the bugs out of our schedule. She is still teaching at the Montessori school, though I know she is waiting anxiously for something else to come down the pike. She still isn’t getting a full night of uninterrupted sleep, but it is getting better and better little by little.

I am enjoying my respite from school, though it is quickly coming to a close. It would appear that I screwed up my degree plan of study, but I didn’t hear anything about it until a couple of days ago. This could be a problem, as I might not get my books shipped until after class starts. I still need to finish making up an incomplete in an elective that I took. It had never been offered, and it was intended to be offered in a break. Thing is, it was too much work even then, if I was lucky enough to have been offered it a year ago in the slot that it was intended to be undertaken. The class did not exist last year, though they withheld that information from me and made it seem like I just didn’t get signed up for it before the end of drop/add. It was basically learning half of a operations research book and half of an engineering/probability book (the statistics half) in six weeks. Even without the other class, the 200+ pages of reading/week with 8+ hours of lecture was too much. Doubly so with the other class I was taking. They saw that it wasn’t feasible, so they extended it out by two weeks, but then that overlapped with my MBA capstone class, which made it that much harder, since that class was extremely time-demanding and ever so crucial.

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s. Take care,
Bryan