iohelix

it’s my shift tonight, as it was last night, and I have to confess that I checked on my little one.

I can pretty much guarantee that anybody who is a parent has checked on their baby once or twice for no other reason than to still their own thoughts.  being a parent, I fall into that category.  it’s not everyday, and certainly not every hour, but at least once a week I check on her.

I walked into the room, leaned close, and as I did, she made the softest little moan of content you could ever imagine.  it was the reason I walked in there, and having my needs met, I gently touched my head to hers and walked out.

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My boss, Michal, has given us the opportunity to move to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, for work.  He has opened up an EGI office, Energy & Geoscience Laboratory (yellow push-pin in center) there, which is where he is from.

When he first proposed this to me a few years ago, we were pretty apprehensive.  Along with my mom’s poor health, Benjam’s work and trying to conceive, it didn’t seem like a good idea.  Now, I’m kinda really excited for the adventure and culture shock!

Sometimes I think we are most wise when we are babies.  All babies want is to be loved, to be touched with affection and gentle sincerity.  Every day is a new opportunity to discover something new and with new challenges to step up to and overcome.  Socioeconomics is not yet a part of their vocabulary, neither are the pressures of society, nor of ourselves.  Human interaction in it’s simplest, most genuine form is all that is necessary for communication and there are no hidden agendas or reading between the lines in conversations.  It is so easy to love babies because there are no expectations, just pure, unconditional love in the highest sense.

I love my baby girl. so. much.

Skye is so strong all of a sudden.  It seems like within a few days she can now hold her head up completely (which is a huge feat since her noggin is huge), lift herself off a flat surface with her chest and arms and she’s rolled over a few times too.  She’s even initiating holding her bottle on her own, too.  She’s come so far from being a wobbly bobble-head!

Ugh.

In order to elicit an interest in our Black Sea project, my boss wants me to present our work progress at our annual CA (Corporate Associates) meeting in September. We’re not talking the measly 3-5 people at our usual end of project meetings. We’re talking 30-50 head honchos of the world’s biggest oil companies. Not to mention EGI’s director looming in the back with an eager look on his face that I perform well. This isn’t just an GIS presentation either, this is a technical performance on the tectonics and structural history of the region, in addition to our database. Little ‘ol me, playing with the big boys with their big toys.

To say I’m nervous is a slight understatment. Hence my inability to fall asleep.

not really sure what i want to say with this entry. i saw the weblog on alli’s site.

www.babymckallister.blogspot.com

i knew i didn’t want to look, but of course, i did. thanks, alli! now i am just filled with a ton of emotion and yet, speechless and don’t really know what i want to say.  today was kind of a testing day with skye.  she couldn’t be comforted or entertained and i lacked the patience to keep up with her.  why.  why, after all that i’ve been through can i not just love her with infinite patience? why can i not fulfill her needs on demand and comfort her in the moment she needs it most? her cries can be so, so sad. a cry of deep melancholy.  i wish i could just reach deep in her spirit and just know what she needs and deliver it on a silver platter.  why is she so sad sometimes? i know babies cry. i know this. but still. why.  and why does it affect me so profoundly.  the video of the hinkley’s stillborn was unquestionably moving. how grateful am i to hear my daughter’s moody cries, and to be able to even try and comfort her, and receive her comfort in return. a life without skye is one i never want to imagine or live through.  but i would, even it if only meant i would have the last 4 months and nothing more. the last short, four months of her life have been undoubtedly, the best of mine. benjam and skye are the most meaningful people this life has given me.  (and our families).  my job, my house, none of it compares to what our little family has together.

our horrific 2 year quiet struggle with infertility, the enduring 2 months of in vitro fertilization procedures, the painfully long 2 weeks waiting for the pregnancy test, the 9 months of pregnancy stress and the last anxious 10 minutes before her birth…every single second was worth just 1 minute of her warm, softness next to mine.

Since my wife and I started using a blog again, I was thinking it would be cool to go back in my archives and grab the old posts I had on here years ago, and try to find a way to import them back into the blog.

So I started looking in my backups folder for a database dump that would have the blog posts in it, and I searched and searched, but could not find the most recent version of it.  I have a coupe older ones, and some really old ones, but not any that were from right before I deleted the blogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a backup of them, or if I did, I don’t know why I didn’t keep it in a safe place, but I didn’t.

So I jumped on the wayback machine, and found one more post that I didn’t have in my backup.  I imported the backup into my database at home, installed the version of WordPress I had when the posts were made (also via the wayback machine), and posted that last one that was missing.  Then I installed the latest version of WordPress, made an export file, and imported them into this incarnation.

So now I have posts that go back about 5 years (albeit very sporadically), with the possibility of a few missing that are probably gone for good, unless I happen to find an old dump somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I doubt it…   oh well.

I’m off to make a backup of my site right now, and I’ll label it ‘Keep’, because obviously, the method I have now doesn’t work.

Maybe I should start putting my site backups in Subversion…

Anywho… enjoy the old posts.