I was just looking through some family photos for a picture of myself for an avatar (hello, string of prepositional phrases!), and I am realizing that I am only rarely in a photo by myself. I suppose it’s because I’m the one with the camera. But I did run across this rather amusing picture, taken when C was about 75 days old. I guess the camera caught me by surprise?

I don’t know where it came from, but last night  C called me “Daddy Bird.” She’s been in a really cuddly, cute, wonderful phase lately, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is. So she was giving me a big hug right before I put her to bed, and she said “I love you, Daddy Bird.”

This morning, I was goofing off with C and wearing her Nemo hat, and it wasn’t so out-of-the-blue for her to call me “Daddy Nemo,” but it was fun.

The so-called terrible twos are marked by fit pitching and screaming stubbornness. Just a minute ago, C flopped on the floor beside me, crying fake tears because I couldn’t make Wonder Pets magically arrive on the television on her demand. But now – 60 seconds later – she is standing in the middle of the room, singing some unknown song at the top of her lungs.

And it’s best for her to learn now that she won’t always get what she wants, believe me. She will get much less sympathy later in life.

There are some unpleasantries to the terrible twos, but most of it is wonderful, and that’s the way I’ll always remember it. You can keep your terrible twos; I’ll stick to the too cute twos, thankyouverymuch.

If you regularly read my blog, you probably realize that I take a lot of photos. Because of the advent of the digital camera, I went from an extremely occasional photographer to being somewhat obsessed with capturing everything. Hell, it’s not uncommon for me to take more than a hundred photos before lunch. What can I say? C is a cutie pie. And I like being the one to memorialize anything, as long as I care about the people. And as long as everyone realizes that just because I like taking pictures doesn’t mean I’m good at it. I guess I should take a class.

Anyway, the problem is that I have nearly twenty gigabytes of photographs on this computer, and this computer only has a 110 gig hard drive. I do send all of my photos to smugmug, but I’ve never been comfortable with deleting them after I upload them, even though I know they’d send them back to me on dvd if I wanted it (and gave them $). Plus, smugmug stores their files on Amazon’s servers, so it’s not like they’re not with a trustworthy name. Still, I just can’t bring myself to do what I need to do.

And I don’t want to buy an external harddrive, because I don’t want to lay down $100 on something that could easily fail or be stolen. Or be dropped. It seems like a safer bet to spend money on “the cloud” taking care of your storage for you.

So that’s why I signed up for a Jungle Disk account a few weeks ago. They’ve got a nifty feature where you can use their service as a network drive. As long as you’re online, your data stored on the network drive will feel like it’s on your computer. Abracadabra, presto chango, no need to keep storing stuff forever on your harddrive. Instead, my photos are stored twice on the cloud, once by Amazon and once by Rackspace.

The funny thing is it’s still hard to ditch the hard drive, and I’ve yet to do it. I think it’s because I feel better knowing I can see the drive my stuff is on, even though it might not be the best place for it.

I just need to make that leap, right?

Yesterday was no fun for all of us at our office. C was sick, but I still had her here because neither Katie nor myself could take the day off, and my mother had to be at the office, too, to help with C’s four year old cousin. But luckily, we had a bunny outfit. You can tell from the last two photos that she was running a fever. Although she was feeling a bit better by the time I snapped the pictures, her hair was in super curly mode from sweating out the bad stuff. Poor baby.

Over the last few weeks, C has become increasingly “daddified.” If I’m around, no one else will do for anything. Yesterday, when she awoke from her nap, she got up on her own and came into my office to tell me about her nap and her trip to the grocery store with her Mimi. After she finished she gave me a high five and then asked for a boppy. I got up and started walking towards the fridge, at which point my mom showed up and offered to lie back down with C. My poor daughter was horrified.

It took a good twenty minutes to calm her down.

I’d by lying if I said that I wasn’t a little flattered. Having a small person totally love you, trust you, and depend on you is a wonderful feeling. ‘Nuff said. But it has its drawbacks. I love having C at the office, for example, but it’s difficult to do that on rainy days if C sees me and just wants me to hold her or read to her. A month ago, I’d read her a story and then say “now it’s Mimi’s turn to read to you,” and she’d happily trot off. Now she wants nothing to do with anyone else and cries at the suggestion of leaving me.

Obviously, teething is also playing a role here.

A few months ago, when C was mamified, I tried to convince Katie that it was really hard for me not just because she didn’t want that much to do with me but also because it’s a rotten feeling to be the one always taking the child away from what makes her happy. “You might not like being the only one who can take care of her,” I’d say, “but imagine how it feels to be the one always making her cry!” Now I know the other side of the coin.

And she does cry when I leave her. C comes to work with me three days a week, and my mother usually beats us here in the morning, although she also tends to leave an hour before quitting time. But on the other two days, I take C to my mom’s house. And that has not been going well lately. For a few of those days, I finally had to have my mom peel C off of me while I ran out the door, having already spent thirty minutes or more (translation = making myself incredibly late to work) trying to get a daddified girl off my lap. On Monday of this week, my mom put on an Elmo video for long enough for me to sneak out of the room. Today, C was sitting by the front door, and the second she turned her back I made a run for the back door and escaped through the garage. I always wonder if C gets confused when she turns back around and I’m suddenly not there. And I feel absolutely terrible about it.

I wonder how long this will last. It’d sure be nice to have a middle ground.

I just finished some work for a client, and I went downstairs to turn it in. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I stepped over the baby gate and set my work on the newel post in time for a big hug from C, who was shouting “daddy!” at the top of her lungs.

After the hug, I put my work in the boss’s office and then chased after C, yelling “I’m going to get you” while she shrieked with glee. I lifted upside down in the air above me while tickling her. When she got down, she begged for more, so I swooped her up and plopped on the visitor’s couch by the front door, where she laughed and laughed and begged for more tickles.

A few minutes later, I helped my mom take her out the door. Today is grocery day, and C gets to drive the “car” at the grocery store while my mom does her weekly shopping. As she was going out the door, she looked up at me and said “daddy go with us?” I said I wish I could, but I have to work. She blew me a kiss as my mom walked out of sight.

I have it pretty good.

I feel like I’m incredibly behind at work; I have stacks and stack of work on my desk, and I am evaluating new professional software and feeling guilty for not studying for the CPA exam.

And on top of that, I was off work all day yesterday because I was at the doctor’s office. I love working here in smalltownville (Sevierville), but I hate having to take a full day off of work because of one doctor’s appointment. On the upside, I’ve had stomach problems for years, and it looks like the doctor might have found a reason. I’m trying not to get too excited yet.

I love what Katie posted today. And she’s had a way busier week than I’ve had.

This weekend, I’m going to get back to drywalling. I’ve got at least four big holes to drywall. Two are ready for their last sanding and paint. One is squared off but barely begun. The last I haven’t yet looked at. I’ve never done drywall until this week, and I’m actually pretty excited about it. Every time I can fix something at the house, I don’t have to get someone else to fix it. I also intend to get some painting done this weekend.

And I get to watch some football.

It’s a pretty good life.

This morning, C was not a happy camper. I don’t know if she got poor sleep (I did, although I’m not sure why), if she wasn’t feeling well, or if she just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. All I know is that nothing made her happy (especially when the cable went out in the middle of Tigger and Pooh), and she let us know all about it. I’ve never had such trouble just getting her in her carseat.

And then we got to her Mimi’s house, where she hangs out on Mondays. She was fine being there as long as I was there, but I couldn’t stay there forever. I ended up being a full thirty minutes late for work today, because C did not want me to leave.

I finally left her collapsed on the sidewalk and crying her eyes out. I nearly had to pull over and do likewise, it was so painful, but my mother (C’s Mimi) called me five minutes later and said that C cried for a minute and then looked up and said “boppy?”

I don’t know what we will do when it’s time – and it’s probably past time now – to get rid of the boppy. I dread that day.

Ever since I signed up with SmugMug (highly recommended!), I’ve been working to reorganize my/Katie’s photos. I’ve gone through about five thousand photos in two months, going backwards from this year, and it’s been wonderful not only to feel better organized but also to remember good times.

Like the time I shaved off my beard (briefly) so Katie could see my face before we got married.

Beardless Jon in 2006

beardful Jon in 2008

And yes, I did have long sideburns. The only thing I miss about not having a beard was having fun sideburns. They were bold, but they were me.