Presenting Benedict Felix

So after 40 weeks and three days of waiting, Benedict Felix von Hoerl made his debut at 10:05 am, January 21, 2009. We had a c-section because when they did a biophysiological profile of him at 39 weeks, 5 days, the computer estimated that he was already 10 lbs, 1 oz! Maybe that was why the "little" guy was refusing to budge; he knew that the usual exit might not work for him.

All the hospital staff was great and Dr. M was a dream. Hearing her say, "That's a big head!" made the whole c-section thing seem like a pretty good idea. In the end he weighed in at a mere 9 lbs, 7 oz. Shervyn got to hold Ben while they counted surgical instruments to make sure there were none left inside and we brought our boy home 4 days later.

All in all, we're still amazed that two solid 7s managed to make a perfect 10.

Most Boring Post...EVER!

So as most of you know Amanda and I have been working on the boy's room in those moments between the holidays, trips to the lake house (or as I like to call it "OZ"), bank failures and the like. Well last week the last big ticket item arrived: the FLOR carpet system. Essentially they are a series of very durable, environmentally friendly and easy to install carpet tiles as you can see from this picture:



They are actually really, really easy to install. All you have to do two perpendicular strips and then build out from there. So using my trusty tape measure and even trustier T-square I used one wall of the room to lay out the first row:





As you can see pretty much 9.5 inches away from the wall. Then I started the perpendicular row. And it really was perpendicular:



However, what I had forgotten was that in a fifth floor apartment in a pre-war building there is no such thing as a perfect 90 degree angle, but even with all of this I still find it hard to believe that the wall could be this crooked:





But I suppressed the worst of my OCD tendencies and instead of pitching a fit, I actually finished laying down the carpet. And if I may say so it looks pretty darn good.