Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Debi came down with an ear infection last week.  Toren likely came down with it at the same time, but it took us a bit longer to recognize his symptoms.  Debi took him into the doctor and the doctor prescribed a strong antibiotic.  Given how he was feeling, we decided not to send him to daycare but instead to keep him home.  That, of course, would mean we wouldn’t get much work done, but hopefully it would help him get better quicker.

I was watching him in the early afternoon as Debi had a class.  I fed him lunch, then gave him some Motrin to help with the pain and his fever.  After lunch I was letting him play in our front room.  He can now pull himself up to a standing position on his toy box, and since he loves to stand and walk, that’s what he was doing.  He was enjoying himself playing with his toys when I noticed a little tupperware of goldfish.  Not thinking anything of it, I opened the tupperware and handed one to Toren.  He took it, popped into his mouth, then continued to play.  He’d done the same thing dozens of times before, so I thought nothing of it…

Until he started gagging.  He occasionally chokes a little on food, coughs, then clears the food.  But he wasn’t clearing the goldfish.  Maybe I’m alone on this, but this scenario is basically my worst nightmare – I’m watching Toren alone, some freak accident happens, and… Yeah, so I picked him up, flipped him over so his stomach and chest were on my knee, and started thumping his back, hoping to clear the goldfish.  All the while, Toren his gagging, wheezing, and crying (which, in retrospect, meant he was getting some air, but I was still freaking out, and I never freaking out).  I had to pound on his back for a good 20 to 30 seconds before it popped out.  Toren was freaking out.  I was freaked out.  And then – the vomit came!

The antibiotic he is on is tough on his stomach as it is.  But having just eaten not twenty or thirty minutes before, he still had food in his stomach.  So, in the process of clearing his airway, I managed to upset his poor stomach and out came all of his food.  The vomit got all over both of us, and he sure seemed pathetic as he was vomiting, but I was just glad he was breathing.  Once the vomiting stopped and I had comforted him, he was ready to go back to playing.  Of course, I had to strip the two of us, throw our clothes in the washing machine, and mop everything up first, but 20 minutes after it started, you never would have guessed that I’d nearly lost my son.  He was right back where he left off, playing by his toy box.

Phew!

Who could stand to lose a kid this cute? Here he is waking up a few days ago.

Toren has recently learned how to sit up.  It seems like he should have known how to do that quite a while ago, but for seem reason he had a hard time learning how to do that.  Anyway, he can do it now, which means we don’t have to sit him up anymore.  That basically means he can transition from any position to any other – from stomach to sitting to standing and back again.  Hooray!

Another recent change – he has a second tooth that is just breaking through, but this one is on the top – top left tooth.

Overall, he’s getting more mobile.  He’s awfully close to walking on his own, but still insists on holding a finger (just one hand now).  He loves walking and that’s about all he wants to do.  That’s it for now.

Thanks to a little surplus grant money, I was able to purchase a nice, large, external monitor for my office.  With my docking station, that meant I could use two monitors simultaneously – my laptop monitor and my external monitor.  I had been doing this previously, but the external monitor I had before was about the same size as my laptop monitor (15″), so setting it up using dual monitors in Ubuntu was relatively easy.  But the new monitor is, well, huge (28″) and has a much higher native resolution – 1920×1200 vs. 1024×768.  I had two problems when initially trying to set up my new dual monitor system.  First, X11 wasn’t correctly detecting the possible resolutions for the monitor – it only allowed resolutions up to 1024×768.  Second, X11, when I first set up the dual monitor system, created a default virtual monitor that was 2048×768, which basically meant that I couldn’t go any larger than that.  As it turns out, solving the second problem solved the first problem for me.  Keep in mind that I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop because of some other X11 problems that 9.10 had when I first tried it out.

Here’s how I solved this.  In a terminal, I input the command to modify the X11 configuration file:

$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Technically you should always back this up before you mess with it, but I didn’t this time around as I knew I was just going to change one thing and figured I could always change it back if there was a problem.

In the “screen” section of the xorg.conf file, it said:

Section “Screen”
Identifier    ”Default Screen”
Monitor        ”Configured Monitor”
Device        ”Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual    2048 768
EndSubSection
EndSection

I changed the settings for “virtual” to: 2944 1200, which is the maximum width and height of my new monitor combined with my laptop monitor (width – 1920+1024=2944; height – 1200 encompasses 768, so I went with 1200).  So my new xorg.conf file looked like this:

Section “Screen”
Identifier    ”Default Screen”
Monitor        ”Configured Monitor”
Device        ”Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual    2944 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection

Once I changed this, I logged out, then logged back in.  Then using the “Display” tool (System->Preferences->Display), I selected my 28″ monitor and found that the maximum resolutions were now available.  I chose the correct one – 1920×1200, and hit apply.  Et voila, my dual monitors are now using their maximum resolution.  I think the video card in my laptop is freaking out trying to handle this resolution, but it works!

While Debi’s parents were here we took some photos.  Here are some of the better ones:

Toren with Granmary and Grangary

Debi and Toren

our little family

In preparation for a trip this summer, we picked up a baby backpack.  I spent quite a while looking at packs online and eventually went with the Deuter Kid Comfort III.

Deuter Kid Comfort III (even comes with a little bear)

It’s expensive, but thanks to one of our credit cards we get REI credit, so we didn’t pay very much for it.  And, well, I’m glad we got it.  It’s super comfortable and basically makes carrying Toren very easy as all the weight is on the hips, not the shoulders.

I put it on a few times to test it out, but decided it needed a real test.  So I looked up a local hike and took Toren out last weekend.  We went to Hillsborough River State Park (unfortunately it’s about a 30 minute drive to get there).  Here’s a map of the park with our hiking route in red:

Not sure how far we hiked, but we were out hiking for about 2 1/2 hours.

And here are a few pictures:

Toren in the carrier, ready to hike

hiking a trail with Toren

On the way back to the car, Toren fell asleep. He’s still a little small for the carrier, so he can’t use the chin rest to sleep. He made do:

Toren catching some zzz's on the way back to the car

this is his favorite sleeping position - with his head hanging out the side