Week in My Life – Day 3: Wednesday

This Week in My Life with Adventuroo is rolling right along, so let’s see how Wednesday played out, shall we? In case you need a recap, you can check out Monday and Tuesday here and here.

Just as a reminder, I’m focusing on documenting the “after work” hours of my days here, since those are what’s most important to me. However, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek as to what my desk looks like during all those hours I’m hiding from you, so I compiled this little gem today. I sit in front of 4 monitors all day, so I tried to capture that. This pic doesn’t really do my setup justice, but here is what each of my monitors looks like, in their real-life order from left to right.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

As we creep closer and closer to the end of our prolonged nice weather here, we decided to take advantage today and go out into the woods on the Ice Age Trail after work. Each year we like to hike up to a big lookout tower near Sheboygan called Parnell Tower, which is roughly an hour from our house. So I left work earlier than usual today to go pick up D and head north before the rush hour traffic ensued.

We left home just before 4:30 and started our hour-long hike just before 5:30. I carried D in the backpack carrier on the way up, R carried her on the way down, and she squealed with delight as she touched many trees along the way. There was even a puppy at the tower with his owners when we got up there. She was thrilled!

You’ll have to forgive the blurriness of the actions shots, because they’re, well, action shots. And taken on a phone camera. Ahem.

By the time we got back to the car, dark was settling in and we were starving, so we decided to hit up KFC on the way home. I can’t remember the last time I ate this since I’m not really a fan of fried chicken, but R got it in his head on the way there and I was so hungry I would’ve agreed to eat just about anything by then. I gave D her dish of Cheerios and a bottle of milk when we got in the car, and she was lulled to sleep by the highway rhythm within half an hour. We tuned into the start of the Brewers game, and what a dismal one it was, with Gallardo giving up 4 runs in the first inning. Eesh. Too bad it never got much better for the Crew tonight.

This next picture is beyond terrible, as it was taken on my iPhone like all the others and zoomed in as far as possible to aim at something in our orbit, but I couldn’t not take a shot of the amazingly gorgeous harvest moon we saw on the drive home. It was huge, orange, and simply beautiful, shining brightly down on the hills and fields of the countryside. It was very Halloween-y as it peered out between leafless tree branches, and it was even surrounded by a light haze of clouds. I half expected to see the silhouette of a witch on her broomstick flying past it.

The coolest part of all, though, was the shooting star I saw on the way home. I couldn’t believe it! I haven’t seen one in ages, and it wasn’t even totally dark outside. In fact, no other stars were out yet, but this was definitely a shooting one. So I made a wish, wished again on the first real star I saw in the night sky, and hoped they both come true.

We pulled into the driveway at 7:40, and I was hoping I could just get D inside, changed, and quickly back to sleep with the aid of another bottle of milk. I was planning on giving her some green beans and mashed potatoes from KFC, but she’d been asleep so long at that point and it was past her bedtime anyway, I just preferred she go to bed as quickly as possible. Too bad my nice smooth bedtime transition didn’t turn out to be so nice and smooth. D became inconsolable as I was changing her and only took a few drinks of her bottle. She screamed harder when I tried to put her down, so I just cradled her in my arms in the glider next to her crib and patted her back while rocking. This seemed to work, and she snuggled in so hard while slowly calming down. After a few minutes she clamored up onto my shoulder in a big bear hug and fell asleep. Poor little girl. I was afraid she’d wake up at some point in the night since she had so little to eat for dinner, and I was right. Not 5 minutes after I left her room she awoke crying. R went in there and got her back to sleep with some more rocking and a little bit of milk, and fortunately we didn’t hear a squeak after that.

Now here it is, 9:20, and I need to get in the shower before uploading all the photos for this post. I’m a total greaseball after getting all sweaty carrying my 25 lb. baby rucksack on the first half of our hike. These Week in My Life posts are keeping me up past my bedtime, but I think it will certainly be worth it in the end. Stay tuned for Thursday’s antics. You know the best part about Thursday, don’t you? It’s 1 day closer to Friday, wahoo!