I could walk five hundred miles (or drive it, I guess)

I put on a lot of miles today, working at Grand Portage. The round trip included ten hours of driving and six hours working at the location. I worked on scheduling and work-related email for another hour after I got home tonight. It is so odd to leave before the sun rises and not get home until long after darkness falls again, but what the heck… it pays the bills, I suppose. The one thing I really dislike about the long trips to the end of the gaming world in Minnesota is that I miss seeing the family at all that day. The two best things about the trip this time of year are that the autumn colors along the North Shore of Lake Superior are breathtaking right now, and that this involved five hundred miles of driving today. That makes this five hundred miles closer to getting new tires on the service truck. The reason I mention that is because on Tuesday, I was driving home from Fortune Bay and it was raining pretty hard. I kept the speed to fifty miles an hour, because the tires have little tread left, and even though the truck is one heavy beast, with that little bit of tread, the truck was still slipping around on the road, like butter in a hot frying pan. (You just pictured melting butter in a pan, didn't you?) Our maintenance company is ridiculously tight-fisted with OUR money, and won’t let me get new tires yet. I think that when I go in for an oil change again, I will be able to finally get new tires. In a way, I don't mind, because I will have brand new tread for the winter. Oh, and I plan to tell them I want A/T tires instead of the cheesy road-tripping crap that is currently on the truck. For the uninitiated (Heather and Mom, this means you), A/T means the tires are all-terrain and have meatier tread. That is useful for Grand Portage trips in the winter.

While I love the scenery along the North Shore, the winter weather can be nuts. I have been on drives to Portage and in the course of twenty miles, it changed from sunny skies and clear roads to white-out blizzard conditions and glare ice, and then back to sunny skies again. Superior is such a big lake; it literally induces its own weather. I personally think that getting two feet of lake-effect snow in one day would rock! Heather would agree with me. Since our lake country winters have yielded the most pathetic snow levels lately, the idea of all that snow sounds like a blast. Besides, Gabriel is getting old enough that he can really begin to appreciate the snow. I want a snowstorm that is hardcore, the kind of storm that keeps you snowed in for two or three days straight. Those were the days!!

Come on. Let it snow!

postpartum lecture

I went to my OB/GYN today for my postpartum check-up. The whole thing started out with Gabriel seeing his picture on the wall in the waiting area and saying, "He's funny!" He likes Dr. Leland's sense of humor. The man has as great of a bedside manner for women in labor as he does for children. He always gets a high-five from Gabriel and makes him laugh.

After befriending Gabriel for the millionth time, he proceeded to ask me if I am having the baby blues. I said that I was generally feeling fine. He asked me how long I planned on breastfeeding. I told him that I would probably do it for a year, like I did with Gabriel. He asked me if I was having unprotected sex. I told him that I don't care if I get pregnant again and wasn't really worried about getting pregnant since I was breastfeeding so often (the wonderful child likes to eat just about every hour and that is why he is such a pudgy thing) and I have yet to have a period. He looked at me and said, "Now...you realize that you can get pregnant without a period and while breastfeeding?" I acknowledged that breastfeeding is not foolproof birth control, and that it was my husband's fault that I have two boys. He just laughed and said that he guessed that I knew how it all worked and what made him feel better about the conversation was that I started it all out by saying that we didn't care how soon we had another one.

Help?

Does anyone but my mother read this? Any mothers out there. Here is the deal: Maybe the child is just a night-owl. Today is a prime example. Gabriel woke up at 8:30am, fell asleep for a one and a half hour nap at 1pm, and is still awake now at half past midnight. He only slept more than a hour for a nap, because it is impossible to wake him up. Factor into this that the child is currently sick. You would think he would need to sleep more. I've tried eliminating the nap. He isn't ready for that. That will just cause him to sleep at 5 or 6pm. He never lasts an entire day without sleep. So what do I do? Wake him up at 7am? I know that part of the problem is that I can't wind him down. But, if I can't manage to get him to sit quietly in front of the tv or with a book, then what can I possibly do to get him to slow down and get tired?