The Littlest Callenberg

At 5:31am on Sunday, April 15, Michael Augustine was born.

Today he is eight days old. Already he is getting bigger: his cheeks are chubbier, his arms are starting to fill out. Sometimes I still look at him and wonder how on earth this little person was inside of me. (And how on earth I managed to push him out.) 

We are settling into our new life here, taking it slowly and quietly, and sleeping when our beautiful boy lets us. 

Last Week at Pitt

I kept wanting to title this post something about going out with a bang, but it would sound like a really bad, really tasteless joke.

My school is having some problems with bomb threats. As in 40 in the past three weeks. At first it was mostly the building where I teach and one of the other main class buildings--handwritten notes left in bathrooms. Some classes had to be canceled, and once I had to teach outside. But it has since spread to many other buildings (including dorms) and now it's always a batch of them, as in three or four buildings at a time. It's very frustrating.

I am only teaching for one more week, and I'm really hoping that the alarms don't go off and force me to climb down 23 flights of stairs less than a week before my due date.

In the meantime, several of my students have notified me they won't be around campus for the rest of the semester because they don't feel safe. I don't blame them (although I really don't think a bomb will go off), and I expect several more will leave campus before the week is up. I will accommodate them the best I can, but it makes things rather a pain in the rear.

We'll see how things go!

PS--Sorry about the weird font changes lately! I'm not sure what's up with that.

Getting There

Keith and I attended our last prenatal class at the hospital last week. The topic was how to care for a newborn, which included things like swaddling, changing diapers, and bathing. Everyone was supposed to bring their own "baby" to practice on--a doll or a teddy bear.

Well, neither of us had a doll or teddy bear (well, I have a teddy bear, but she doesn't really have legs). So we brought the only thing we did have, which was a stuffed elephant I'd been knitting for Baby C.

I knit like mad the night before to make sure our elephant had all four limbs. But he had neither ears nor eyes, which makes him look like some sort of muppet or other unidentifiable creature. (Keith didn't want to carry him in the hospital.)

The pattern is Elijah by Ysolda Teague. It's fun to knit and absolutely adorable, although I think that I need to knit any future stuffed animals from some sort of wool rather than cotton, as bits of the stuffing are showing through at my increases.

Maybe he'll get his ears before Easter.

Other projects I hope to finish this week: my manuscript (by tomorrow or Good Friday, hopefully, so that it can be printed and bound on Easter Monday or Tuesday), my grading, and some cleaning. And then baby can come as soon as ever he pleases.

This is how I'm spending my Holy Week ... say a prayer for me!

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.