The Micro Observer: Christmas Break

Christmas break has come and gone. Hannah's first Christmas went well. She got the hang of opening presents during round three of gift giving. Round one - Christmas Eve pajamas; round two - Christmas morning at our house; round three - Christmas at my parents'. We thought she would go a little more crazy with the ripping-stuff-open part. It was really more us ripping the paper a little, getting her to hold on, and pulling the present away from her so she ripped some paper off. Seeing as how she had the most gifts (a lot of it was stuff we would have bought anyway that just got wrapped up), it took a while.

Speaking of Christmas gifts, Heidi got me a whole bunch of loose leaf tea for Christmas, which reminds me that I never chronicled kicking the coffee habit. A couple months ago (October?) I decided (with Heidi's, um, help?) that I should quit drinking coffee. It wasn't so much a problem with coffee altogether, but 10 cups (5 mugs) of coffee a day was a little much. Especially with a blood pressure of 140/80. My original plan was to just cut back, until Peter (a post-doc in our lab) said "There's no such thing as quitting not cold-turkey". Or in other words, if you try to quit by cutting back gradually, then you won't succeed. Apparently he volunteered at an addiction center for a while in college. His advice matched with my experience; I had cut back before, but I always ended up drinking way more coffee than I should. Since that's a good hallmark of addiction, quitting coffee seemed like the best choice. So, a week or two of bad headaches later, I was coffee free and feeling decent. Much better, in fact. And my blood pressure dropped to 120/68. Excellent! Last weekend I had a medium latte while Heidi, Hannah and I were at the mall. Holy crap! I felt like somebody was squeezing off the blood supply to my eyes (makes sense, since caffeine is a vasoconstrictor). And that was one fifth of what I used to have every day!

The rest of Christmas break will be remembered as the week of shoveling. The redemptive part of snow is that it allows me to go cross-country skiing. Except that when we came home from my parents' last Sunday I sprained my ankle coming down our steps (that last one is real tricky). So no skiing. Just wrapping up my ankle to go and shovel our ridiculous driveway. I should get a picture. It really is ridiculous. And then yesterday, for the first time, I came down the driveway too fast (not by choice) and slid across and off the road, barely missing a big tree (the brush helped stop us). Heidi was in the back with Hannah. She told me that Hannah just sat there and looked around a bit with a "hmm, this is different" sort of look. Thankfully everyone was safe, and the only mark on the car was a little bit of tree on a door handle. Phew!

Another look that Hannah has been making recently is a "what's that all about" kind of look. A look of discernment, perhaps? She furrows her brow and looks a little quizzical. No pictures of that yet. I will, however, leave you with a couple of Christmas pictures.