Zach Dotsey

Amanda and I started out the day at church and helping out with Grow Zone.  Amanda helps check kids in and I help take care of three year olds.  I read the story to them today, and one of them, a regular in that room, told me I did a good job.  Most of the time was taken up with trips to the potty, though.  I don’t know what the deal was, but it seemed like just about every kid had to go to the bathroom today.  And it wasn’t just the ones in my room, but the ones in the room on the other side of the adjoining bathroom as well.

Karen and Phil Mercer arrived at our house not too long after we got finished with Grow Zone.  They were in town because today is Michael Mercer’s 26th birthday.  He showed up shortly after they did and we all packed up and went to Atlanta Bread for lunch.  Anna, Barry and Hannah Frazelle were all there too, along with Hannah’s boyfriend, Christian Black.  Kirsten was on a ski trip.

We all ate, talked, that sort of thing.  I gave Barry a copy for Fleet Foxes to check out.  Even though we tend to like a lot of the same music, Barry and Anna tend not to really dig stuff I give them to check out for some reason, so there’s no telling if he’ll like it or not.

Back at the house Amanda made a birthday cake for Michael- chocolate cake with chocolate icing.  It sort of fell apart when Amanda layered it, but it tasted good, so that’s all that mattered.  The Mercer clan ate, hung out for a bit as Amanda and Karen looked at pictures of Dr. Seuss murals online for nursery ideas, then everyone took off.

Amanda and I headed over to Nick and Amy Warkentien’s for a breakfast dinner.  They made some pancakes, the second batch of which produced the absolute thickest pancakes I’ve ever eaten.  Like the ugly cake though, they tasted good still, and that’s all that mattered, even if they did look sort of like berets.

After eating Amanda and Amy talked pregnancy stuff while Nick showed me a DVD of MuteMath in concert.  They’re pretty entertaining live, it would seem.

I got a call from my brother, Adam Dotsey.  I won’t really go into it, as it’s not my place to do so, but I wanted to mention it because it’s sort of an important thing.  He had a bit of a problem, the details of which I don’t know.  Nothing legal or life-threatening, but certainly a pretty big deal.

Zach Dotsey

Milly’s got a lot going on this week.  She should be about seven inches long and about eleven ounces.  She’s swallowing amniotic fluid, which does several things for her.  Not only does it hydrate and nourish her, but it helps her practice swallowing and digestion.  She can also get a taste for whatever Amanda’s eating now, so I need to remind Amanda to eat more variety.

Milly’s arms and legs are in the proper proporations now and bone is developing from cartilage which, along with the formation of neurons between the brain and the muscles, gives her more coordinated movement, as opposed to jerky movements she had before.

I’ve had a lot of vivid dreams lately but I don’t usually remember them for very long.  I had two that I can recall pretty well last night.

In the first one, I was friends with Tina Fey.  She came over to my place, which was similar to an apartment I’ve seen somewhere, but I can’t quite place it.  She was sitting curled up in a papasan and I was sitting on a couch and we were talking about what movie to watch.  I wanted to watch The Hulk but she wanted to watch something else.  We were also being a bit flirty.

I then have some vague knowledge of Amanda having found out that I was flirting with Tina Fey and she kicked me out of the house.  Someone in Greensboro was friends with a college kid who was looking for a roommate so I moved into his apartment.  He and his friends were all Carolina fans and had Tar Heel posters up all over the place.  On top of that it was noisy and a little junked up, and I didn’t feel like I fit in at all.  I could look out my window at night and see people outside, walking around, being drunk and noisy at pretty much any hour, and all the time I thought about how Amanda was off getting ready to have our baby.

Why, Tina, why?

In my second, completely separate dream, Milly had just been born.  We were on the way home in one of the old vans my parents owned when I was younger and Amanda was nowhere to be found.  My youngest sister, Andra, said something about Amanda having disappearing after saying she needed to pee.  Anyway, Milly was hungry so we stopped somewhere to try to find some milk.  (I know, babies don’t drink regular milk.)  There was a Subway in the shopping center where we stopped, but they wanted $70 for two packs of milk in plastic bags.

Erin, my other sister, was with me, and as we were walking out of the Subway we found that Milly could not only walk a little, but she could talk as well.  Not full sentences or anything, but more like when a kid is first starting to make real words.  As we were walking back to the van we put the baby on a Power Wheels thing and she rode it down a hill.

She was a very pretty little baby, of course, with dark curls on her head.

Zach Dotsey