July 18th, 2006 by 
gowest
Logan has never been a good eater. In fact - he is an extremely difficult eater and it is very hard to predict if he will eat at all at a certain time or not. Simone took him to a feeding specialist / pediatrician / psychologist for evaluation. We do not have the final report yet, but it seems like he has a mild form of Hypotonia.
What is Hypotonia?
Hypotonia is a condition of abnormally low muscle tone (the amount of tension or resistance to movement in a muscle), often involving reduced muscle strength. A child is said to have low muscle tone — hypotonia — if his muscles are on the loose, floppy side. You may find it unusually easy to move your child’s arms and legs when they are relaxed, or that he seems to slip through your arms when you pick him up. Although hypotonia is not a well-understood phenomenon, children with low muscle tone often have delayed motor skills, muscle weakness, and / or coordination problems.
We looked at all the symptoms and some match what we see with Logan, while others are completely off. So, it is very hard to tell what the issue is. Does he have Hypotonia or is the pediatrician overly cautious? We do not know yet. Simone is very concerned and I think she is absolutely overreacting. She has a light tendency to read the worst case scenarios of something and to project them onto herself and her surroundings. It makes it often more difficult to deal just with the facts and to remove the assumptions from a situation.
Anyway - Logan will get some physical therapy to learn eating a little better. Hopefully this will work out well and makes life a little easier for us.
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July 17th, 2006 by gowest
Last Friday was one of the worst days with Logan so far. I got home from work and he was already fussy. We had a dinner reservation with friends and were hoping for the best as we did not find a babysitter in time. But of course Logan had to become a complete monster this night. He refused to eat and drank only a little bit before we left home for dinner. At the restaurant he started acting up and decided to completely freak out during the meal. We had him with us for dinner often in the past. I have never experienced something like this. Never ever. If I would have enough hair left, I would have ripped it out that night.
The last 15 minutes at the restaurant Logan was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide. He turned from Monster into the sweetest child. But the damage was already done. Simone and I were completely done. When we got home we gave him a bottle and put him to bed. He fell asleep almost instantly. It was 8.30 PM and I usually work for another hour or two, but my brain was fried. I went to bed and almost immediately fell asleep. I have not been mentally exhausted that much in a very long time. A screaming baby like I had to experience - that is the best form of protecting yourself against having a baby.
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July 16th, 2006 by gowest
It was time for round 4 or 5. I actually stopped counting how many overall layoffs there have been now. Fact is I am still employed and I am not sure if it would have been better to lay me off 2 months ago. The last time the severance packages carried a minimum of 60 days salary + Health Insurance. This time it seems like that the severance package was reduced to 30 days and Health Insurance will run out at the end of the month (roughly 2 weeks from now). This could mean that the going gets really tough now and that money is getting tight. Maybe the next time there is not enough money left to pay severance at all? Who knows? Overall - the fun is missing and we have not been busy lately at all. The people who were busy were actually doing the same things 2 or 3 times because it wasn’t done right the first time. That seems to be a common problem here. The slap a solution into production just to go back a couple of times and fix it because it was not done right and it was done with no planning at all.
Anyway - I think the taxman is still proud of me - I am still paying a shitload of taxes every month to keep the government going. 
By the way - if you know about a job opening for a Senior Windows Systems Engineer in the southern Denver Metro area (or via remote / work from home), let me know.
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July 14th, 2006 by gowest
Got up at 5.00 AM as every morning to go running as usual. “Oh, my gosh - I am turning blind.” was my first thought. Everything was so blurry. I even took my glasses that I never wear and things got even worse. I couldn’t see shit. No, the lights were turned on - that was not it. My blood pressure slowly came up to speed and oxygen was transported to my still sleeping brain. With every breath I was able to get a clearer thought of what was going on. “What did I do last night?” was flashing in front of my eyes like a movie. I saw me preparing everything for the night, but I did not see me doing a certain thing. No, I am not talking about sex. I am not very organized in many ways, but my morning and evening procedures are so standardized - it’s like a program.
Well, apparently the evening program must have crashed with a major Blue screen of death. There was a big piece missing from my memory. At work I would have talked about a memory leak. Here I found an easy term for it:
Lack of sleep
What had happened? Well, I wear contacts. To be more specific, I wear dailies - the contacts you just use one day and then trash ‘em. I had forgotten to take them out last night for whatever reason. My eyes were dry and things looked so blurry. I grabbed into my eyes and removed the contacts. Things still looked blurry, but when I went for my morning run things slowly improved. lol It’s not the first time I noticed that I do not function very well with a major lack of sleep. See, what a baby can do to you?!
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