Revelations and Tampons

First, a Kaia update, and apologies to my wife if this embarrasses her in anyway.

Kaia's decided that the most fun thing to play with ever is a box of tampons. She'll go into the bathroom, find the box, bring it out, then start flinging tampons everywhere. Sometimes, she'll put them back in the box, other times, she'll take handfuls of them and go on walkabout.

As such, I'm finding tampons all over the house. One in the living room, a couple on the guest bed, some in Kaia's bedroom. I crawled into bed last night and one of them poked me in the back.

So there's that.

Also, her vocabulary is increasing, though some of them are one-offs. I've heard her say: dog, duck, bike, banana, cow, hi, bye, mommie, daddy, more, happy and a couple others I'm not remembering. Mostly, she's just started repeating random words, and not really associating them with anything. Those she has down are dog, mommy, daddy, duck, hi and byebye, the latter two she's even got down in a situational context. she knows to say hi when someone shows up, and byebye when they're leaving (with the accompanying wave).

Oh! And ball. She says ball all the time. We were in Walmart over the weekend and walked by one of those large displays of big plastic balls and she started pointing and saying, "ball," over and over again. So Steph bought her this little ball, about the size of a grapefruit, not realizing it was a ball of the superbouncy variety. We're doing our best to keep it away from Fletcher, and Kaia loves chasing it around the living room.

So there's that. Still not eating worth a damn. We've started giving her a bottle of Pediasure before she goes to bed. We'll get some weight on her somehow.

That's the update.

The Revelations Part
Yesterday I had to drive Steph to the airport before going to work. Her flight to LA left at 11:35, so we had to have her at the aeropuerto by 10:30 or so. All parties took it pretty well considering Mom was going to be gone for five days. Kaia watched mommy go through security, waving and saying "byebye" over and over again. No one cried.

I still get sad when Steph's going to be gone for any length of time. We're not really apart that much, so it feels like something's missing. Last night, and it was no fault whatsoever of Kaia's, I slept for shit, and I guarantee it's because Steph wasn't there.

Anyway, by the time Kaia and I got back in the car it's almost 11. We headed out into OKC traffic and I started thinking about how nice the weather was and how awesome it was to be in a city and not at work.

Got me thinking about working and what a crock it all is. That line in Office Space, something like, "Dammit, Michael, we're not meant to live this way."

Life is just flittering away from me and I'm sitting behind a computer writing/editing/chatting all day. One day is just like the next. That's how it's supposed to be? That's not experiencing anything, that's just ticking by the minutes until retirement and death.

It's frustrating to me. The boredom and the ultimate pointlessness of what I do. These days, when I think about a career change, it isn't to engineering or law, it's to forrestry or construction management. Something to get me out from behind my desk and out there.

When Steph had her meltdown on our anniversary, she talked about how she always expected to be more, to do more. How she was so bored and demoralized. I told her that's how I feel every day, but the other thing I told her is that maybe we need to rethink how we've been going about this life and our way of living, gave her that definition of insanity bs. You know, doing something the same way every time and expecting a different outcome is ... well, it's dumb.

Hasn't there got to be a better way to do this? To put food on the table and a roof over our heads? Something a little more inspiring?

I get a little caught up in rat race on account of money. I've always been, not poor really, but paycheck-to-paycheck. That's the thing I've always wanted to escape. To have enough money to take a vacation now and then, to have some in savings if something comes up. That's all I've ever really wanted. I've never really wanted more "stuff." I don't need an awesomer car or a bigger tv or ... whatever. See, I can't even think of what'd I'd buy if I had money. I'd just do things.

So why not just do them anyway?

But in the meantime, gotta figure out this career thing. Now is the time to change, because time is running out.