Family
Heartfelt updates about family milestones and everyday moments. From taking Mazie to college and annual visits to the Renaissance Festival to Swedish‑pancake breakfasts and VR outings with the kids, this category celebrates togetherness.
- Help
- Up
- Down
- Please
- Keys
- Credit Card
- Water
- Ball
- Hi
- Bye
- Mom
- Dad
- Shoe
- Sock
- Book
- Lion
- Kitty
- Dog
- Duck
- “All Done”
- Okay
- “Oh Jhez”
- “I know”
- No
- Bra
- Nose
- Mouth
- Eyes
- Meow
- Roof
- Keys
- Towel
- Blanket
- Fish
- Bee
- One of the memory sticks in my MacBook seems to have died. I isolated the bad DIMM and I’m back up and running on the single good DIMM. I had to head to Radio Shack for a very tiny screwdriver. I’ve already files for an RMA. Luckily I have multiple laptops along so it was all fine.
- Mazie has learned lots of new words. She’s learned “please” although it sounds like “plea” and she now appends it to everything she says – which is very cute.
- This tiny 2-bedroom apartment is actually starting to feel like where we live. Scary.. I miss our house.
Mazie Conquers Stairs
Lately most of the news on the Mazie front has been about new words. Lot’s of new words. She can usually get her point across now, at least to Mom and Dad, and she’s picking up new words faster and faster.
However, a couple of days ago she made it down both flights of stairs in our house without any help. Obviously Mom and Dad are surrounding her with hands ready to grab her if she falls. She’s really careful, and braces herself to the wall but makes it pretty solidly down each stair – one step at a time.
She’s a long ways from navigating steps without help, but she sure does have fun walking down them. She gives a triumphant giggle when she finishes all the steps.
How Many of Me?
This site showed up in one of my RSS feeds recently, How Many of Me? It is a fun little site that takes census data to do rankings of people with the same name. For example, did you realize there are 49,535 people with the name John Smith. That is bigger than my home town. You could fill a medium sized city with John Smiths.
According to the census data, there are no people in the US with the last name Thingelstad. There are however 328,466 people with the first name Jamie. Of those people, 69.86% of them are female. This is something that Tammy loves to tease me about all the time, even before she had the hard data to back it up. This usually presents itself as me paying at a restaurant and the waiter not knowing who to give the card back to.
My name is the 182nd most popular first name. While Tammy’s name is compltely unambiguous – 100% of Tammy’s are women – her name is 144th most popular so not quite as creative. Of course her actual name, Tamara, is much less popular ranking 421st. However, we know from Name Voyager that neither Jamie or Tamara (Tammy) were creative for their time since they peaked in popularity when we were born.
Mazie enjoys a very rare name. There are only 4,500 Mazie’s in the US (100% are female) and it’s the 2,762nd most popular name.
Isn’t the Internet so much fun? 🙂
Thank You for the Sleep
I wrote earlier that Mazie was having a horrible time getting her sleep. Asheville was the breaking point for Tammy and I. We were like zombies, Mazie was miserable and incredibly unhappy. We finally went to a different hotel the last night and Mazie was able to sleep. The good news is that she slept great at Ed & Nancy’s, and she’s been doing great here in Charleston.
She’s slept through the night and went to bed well for the last 5 days and is doing great. It’s amazing how big of a help that is to all of us. Yeah!
Mazie's Words
Over the last couple of months Mazie has really started to develop a lot more language skills. It’s so fun to watch her pickup new words. Tammy and I were curious how many words she knew. Not just words she would mimick, but words that she actually uses on her own. Here they are in no particular order.
The list gets longer everyday, so this will be instantly out-of-date.
Fender Bender
Here’s a big bummer.
Last night while driving back to the hotel getting ready to put Mazie down a car was trying to run the light as it turned red. The other car was turning left onto my street, I was going straight. I honked and the other driver slowed, but did not come to a complete stop. Luckily the other driver slowed to probably less than 5 mph. Very unluckily, the other driver was uninsured and I’m probably going to get stuck with the repair costs or face my insurance going up since I actually used it. [Insert rant here about the scam that the insurance industry is.]
The damage is to the rear lower panel on the passenger side. It’s totally drivable, thankfully. The other car hit the wheel and then scraped the crap out of the panel.
The even bigger bummer is that the panel that got dinged up is the entire rear bumper. I imagine they are going to have to replace the whole thing which will add up quickly.
East Coast Adventure '06 - Day 27 - AT
Today we left Asheville and headed into the mountains. We drove about 30 miles northwest of Asheville to Hot Springs, NC. Hot Springs is one of the cities that the Appalachian Trail goes right through the middle of. The sidewalk that is on the main street of Hot Springs has “AT” trail blazes embedded right into the cement. Our visit was more to the AT than to Hot Springs, so Mazie loaded up into the kid carrier and we headed out for the trail.
I knew we weren’t going to get much of a hike in. I figured Mazie would make it an hour in the carrier and she did just about that. She did a great job walking by herself on the flats. She navigated the roots like a star and looked smashing in her bright green fury jacket.
It was fun to be on the AT and hiking with the white “blazes” of the AT in sight. Honestly the trail was no different than any other hiking trail we could have been on. However, this one could take you all the way to Maine if you just kept on walking. How cool is that?
Go to day: 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 or East Coast Adventure collection.
Traveling With a One Year Old
It’s now the 25th day that we’ve been “on the road”. For me, this now marks the longest I’ve ever been away from home. While it’s not a huge deal, I do miss the creature comforts and the simple familiarity of your own domicile. Traveling is always a bit stressful. Yes it is fun and all, but I find that I never really relax. Even now, sitting in the hotel unwinding and tapping on this laptop it’s not like if I were at home doing the same thing.
However hard the travel may be for me though, it’s peanuts to what it’s like for Mazie. We are still just getting going on the vacation part of our trip but Mazie is taking a while to get used to it. The biggest problem by far is sleep. She just isn’t getting enough of it. And as anyone with kids knows, a lack of sleep results in a very unhappy baby, and equally unhappy Mom’s and Dad’s.
At home Mazie is a great sleeper. You put her in her crib at bedtime and she just goes to sleep. On the road, she screams. And screams. And screams. Getting her to sleep is an accomplishment of it’s own. Tonight we let her cry for 10 minutes (blood curdling, shaking the other hotel rooms kind of crying) and after that I went in and held her in the bed while she fell asleep and then moved her to her crib. Last night she woke up at 2:00am, ready to go. Wide awake. Oh, and screaming. I brought her to bed and she finally went back to sleep in our bed, but it was a long night for everyone.
She has refused to take a nap anywhere other than her car seat since we left Minnesota. This issue highlights one of my pet peeves on toll roads. While driving on the toll roads Mazie would be sleeping away, ever so happy, then we’d have to stop for a toll. As soon as the van came to a complete stop she’d wake up and it took some extra special quiet to get her to go to sleep again. Usually she was then up and ready to complain about the car seat. Toll roads and sleeping babies do not mix!
The hotel we are staying in has three rooms, but unfortunately the only door is to the bedroom. Tonight we put her in our bedroom to see if that works better. I sure hope it does, the meltdown that took place at 3:00pm today doesn’t need to be repeated. This afternoon’s meltdown included a full on screaming festival followed by rubbing food into her hair. Tammy’s looking at other hotel options now, just in case.
First Two Weeks
I just put up a bunch of pictures from the first two weeks of the Great Adventure. These were edited down by Tammy, which is far superior to me and means you actually get pictures of people instead of just things.
Other updates from the first two weeks:
Also, happy to say that I’ve been sticking to my weight loss program with good diligence and I’ve lost 5 pounds in the last two weeks. Yeah!
Day 17 of the Great Adventure is starting with Grandma Kaye and Aunt Angie visiting. We are heading to the Bronx Zoo this morning!
East Coast Adventure '06 - Day 3
On Friday we embarked on the Thingelstad Family Great East Coast Adventure 2006! What is this amazing event you ask? We are going to be away from home for 5 weeks. The first three will be in New Jersey while I work out of our office here, taking advantage of being in the same office as so many others. The last two weeks will be on vacation in North Carolina. Yeah!
Days 1 and 2 of the adventure were travel days. We left Minneapolis on Friday morning around 9:30a and drove, and drove, and drove. We took breaks for Mazie to get out and run around. We camped in a Starbucks in Rockford, Illinois waiting for a monsoon like rain to pass and providing an opportunity for Mazie to let out some energy, and me to get some back (triple espresso!!!). We also had a great Japanese dinner in Rockford. However, we didn’t take into account that as soon as Mazie saw the food on the grill getting cooked that she would want to eat. Squaking was moderately high. We spent the night just outside of Toledo, OH in a splendid Holiday Inn Express.
We arrived to our great little apartment here in Lawrenceville, NJ last night after another long day of driving through Ohio and Pennsylvania. At one point while driving through Ohio in the morning Tammy looked over at me and said the best line of the whole drive
I’m going to sleep. Try not to do anything stupid.
I appreciated her vote of confidence and continued to motor along while her and Mazie got some rest.
We spent Sunday here in NJ getting the apartment setup and preparing for the week. Stay tuned for more updates from the Great Adventure.
Go to day: 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 or East Coast Adventure collection.
Best Kiss Ever
Mazie is growing up so fast. She’s such an amazing kid. For the last couple of months if I asked she would come over and give me a kiss on the cheek. Well this weekend she decided all on her own she was going to give her dad a kiss! Man was that awesome. I was holding her and she comes around and gives me a smack on the cheek. I’m still beaming!
She’s doing really great. I can tell that she’s trying to learn how to deal with stairs which has her, at times, over-protective dad freaking out. I’m constantly lurching to grab her as she approaches anything resembling a stair. She’s doing a lot better walking along with me – she stays with me well for as long as a block only wandering off a little bit.
She is also starting to talk more and more. She’s figured out “help”. If she gets into a tough spot walking around, or wants something off of a counter, she will ask mom or I for “help”. She’s got “dog” or “cat” down well, including a very convincing “meow”.
She just gets better and better, and being Mazie’s dad is the best job I have. 🙂