Pico DiPaolo

Another year is rolling around tomorrow. Like last year, I’m not very optimistic about my little one eating a black eyed pea. So…. I have to resort to deceitful tactics to ensure good luck for little Joelle.

I think I got the idea from my mom stuffing my dog’s heart worm medicine into a hotdog because he wouldn’t eat them. Regardless of where my plan originated, I mushed up one single pea and stuffed it into the bread I baked to go with the peas last year and plan to do the same this year.

I don’t think of myself as an overly superstitious person, but this is one family tradition I won’t let slide.

Joelle has figured out that we don’t care for loud noise.  It’s funny to me that it only just recently occured to her because she hates the garage door opening, toilets flushing and the vacuum cleaner.  She has these new toys from her happy meals that play this obnoxious, repetitive song.  One night at dinner, she pressed it so many times – Chris finally grabbed it and said, “enough.”  That moment was a pivotal one for her, she recognized that she had irritated us and had asserted a bit of power over us.  She has now taken a strong liking to all toys and items that make noise.  She’s looking to push that button again.

We aren’t playing along.  We’re both ignoring it with every ounce of our will power.  I was on the phone with Nana tonight and suddenly she found her very loud, seldom played with popper toy.  She just walked the living – dining – kitchen circuit watching me to see if she was getting to me.  This morning, she yelled into the empty wrapping paper tube recognizing that it amplified her voice.  She got a new book that says, “I love Christmas cookies,” when you press a button.  She pressed it and looked at daddy with a smirk on her face. 

We’ll see who budges first…

Ok, this is really odd.  After finishing up that story about how I said, “I never regretted getting something done early,” the doorbell rang.  I could tell there were a lot of folks outside, so I opened it – I recognized immediately they were Christmas caroling.  I said, “oh, my daughter is sleeping,” but the singing had commenced and drowned me out.  Joelle had just asked us last night about Christmas caroling.  Literally, last night.  We explained to her what it was and then said we didn’t know why so many books still mention it because it was sort of an antiquated custom.  Is the universe mocking me? 

It was very nice – Feliz Navidad and We Want to Wish you a Merry Christmas.  We do live in a pretty cool neighborhood.  I’m mean really, who else has had Christmas caroling?  Too bad Joelle was asleep, she would have loved it!  Chris left me alone to listen – he sheepishly looked around the corner but wouldn’t come stand by me. 

Chris likes to make fun of me for being, well, the opposite of a procrastinator. Is there a word for that? Let me know if there is, because that’s me. Last night, I was filling all the egg cartons for Joelle’s cookie decorating party on Tuesday (yes, two days prior to the party). I have half dozen egg cartons and I filled each egg cup with a different type of cookie decorating accessory. I also decorated each tub of frosting with ribbons and their names. (I got the girls each their own tub, not anticipating that they would need a whole tub, but because I wanted to avoid germ contamination. Who can avoid licking the knife with scrumptious icing?) Chris chuckled and said, “Isn’t it a little soon to be getting ready?” I responded, “I have never regretted getting ready too soon.”

Those words are coming back to haunt me today. I still maintain that it is definitely worth the obvious obstacles that could arise to go ahead and get ready early, but I can also see where you might regret it. For example, we both worked very diligently at getting the yard raked yesterday (9 BIG bags of leaves – Petie: 1.5 hours, Chris: 4 hours. Before you judge my 1.5 hours against Chris’s 4 hours, please remember my handicap!) I anticipated that we would be able to go outside for the party. WRONG. It rained all day and is likely to rain tomorrow. I already put sprinkles in the egg cartons instead of a larger, easier to clean up, decoration – also anticipating that we’d be outside. Furthermore, the electric company sent over people to cut down the limbs of our trees hanging over the power line today. What are the odds? I stood there watching and envisioned a thick layer of leaves from all the ruckus in the trees. As it turned out, they did quite a nice job of tidying up after themselves, but it could’ve been ugly.

Finally, I wrapped what I thought was the remainder of my Christmas gifts yesterday afternoon. Although I didn’t vocalize my satisfaction when I was done, I had a mental image of me wiping my hands together as if to show I was done with that task. On his way back in town from Wimberley, my Dad brought over a gift for me to wrap for Mom today. (No, I’m not mad, daddy, I think it’s actually pretty hilarious.) I wonder what else I can jinx by getting started early….

Joelle has an advent calendar this year for Christmas.  We had one last year, but this is the first time she’s really appreciated it for what it is:  a countdown to Christmas.  She understands why she can only open one box each day and hasn’t tried to mess with that.  I’m sure she’s dying to just open them all up, but somehow this little 4 year old restrains herself to one a day. 

I thought the advent calendar would make Christmas come slower, but it has actually seemed to speed it up for me.  We opened box “14″ today, that’s crazy close to Christmas!  I think there should be a countdown calendar for your baby’s delivery date.  Every day you get to open a box with a giftie inside!  Bottles, binky, washclothes, lotion, etc.  Nothing fancy, just helps lead to the excitement.  Unfortunately, it would only work for scheduled c-sections, but it seems those are pretty abundant these days.  (Although more common on the 2nd baby when you need less stuff.) 

I’m not to counting down days yet….  6 weeks on Monday.   

I have a tentative date scheduled for my c-section – January 29th. Mark your calendars! It feels strange to know my baby’s birthday before she gets here.

Joelle met Dr. Levin today (“Auntie Sherri”). Dr. Levin is so very sweet with kids. She swooped Joelle up and gave her big hugs and her full attention. Joelle loved it at first, and then something in her clicked, “I don’t know this woman.” She gave Nana and I the pouty face. It was very cute and I’m glad I brought Nana and Joelle along to meet my doctor today. It felt weird that they hadn’t met someone who has become a central figure in my life. (Yes, Chris has met her.) Plus, Nana went with me to almost every single doctor’s appointment that Chris didn’t go to when Joelle was in my tummy. I’ve missed her this go round.

A friend of mine called the other night and at the end of our conversation, she said, “oh, by the way, I didn’t know you guys were ‘Hollywood Stars’.”  I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about.  By my silence, she realized I didn’t have a clue as to what she meant.  She said, “Your pictures are in a great big collage in the Picture People store.”  “Big display of your family with Joelle and her pig tails.” 

My first response was shock and a little anger.  My friend was also very surprised I didn’t know.  Don’t they have to tell you?  We looked on the internet to see if they had the right to use our pictures without our permission and asked around.  Joey introduced us to the concepts of innocent infringement and willful refusal.  Chris asked his friend at work about it because his wife is a professional photographer.  His friend felt relatively sure that we had indeed signed something without realizing it and Chris suddenly did remember filling out paperwork with lots of small print while I put up Joelle’s adorable pig tails. 

Still, we were ticked and on a mission tonight to confront them and ask them to take our beloved family off display.  Well… that is until we got there.  It wasn’t hard to spot – centered and in a large framed collage is our family at the Picture People in Memorial City Mall.  We sheepishly smiled at each other and said, “we are a cute family.”  Chris laughed and said to Joelle and I, “autographs, anyone interested in autographs!?”  So we left without saying anything at all to the busy workers.  

For those of you who didn’t know (odds are slim for our limited audience), I sat for the CFA Level 1 Exam this past Saturday. For some reason the CFA Institute calls it “writing” the exam. Every time I see that I think I have mistakenly stumbled upon some instruction manual for coming up with exam questions. The CFA stands for Chartered Financial Analyst and there are three tests covering Finance, Economics, Statistics, etc. and a number of years of work experience required to become a “CFA charterholder”. The three tests are Level I, Level II and Level III (so…logical…and note that if it is in roman numerals it is automatically harder to pass).

Why the CFA? Since I have a background in Finance and don’t have a job where I USE Finance all the time I seem to like to go back and study it (see MBA 2001-2003). I really do enjoy the subject material, it’s a resume builder, it’s relevant to some of my job reponsibilties and, well, my company will pay for it. I had always wanted to do the CFA or CFP program, but didn’t have the impetus to do so until this year. Omar, another analyst at my company mentioned that he was taking the December test and I figured that now was as good of a time as any since I could knock out Level I before the new baby is to come.

The deadline was September 15th to sign up and I only had a few days to decide. Sure you’re supposed to take 6 months to study for it, but I have an MBA in Finance and a degree in Economics so how hard can it be? (Very hard) And Omar hadn’t started studying, so surely I must have plenty of time? (Wrong) And I could disregard the passing rate of 35-40% because that probably factors in all the people who sign up and end up not taking it? (Wrong it only counts people who show up and take the test).

So after studying for three months just about non-stop I took it this last Saturday. It was difficult (as were all the practice tests, so I wasn’t surprised). Hard to say if I passed – I’ll find out in mid-January. Some thoughts from taking the test.

• –The security was pretty impressive. I had to show my ticket and ID once to get into the building, once to get into the hallway, and once to be assigned a seat in the testing room.
• –Everyone gets the same test and it starts with 18 ethics questions, then 12 quant questions, etc. It was funny to me to start the test and hear the pecking of calculators – I guess some people wanted to skip the ethics questions? Or were they already calculating how many more they could miss after missing some ethics questions?
• –One girl brought in a batch of 10 pencils in a rubber band. If you can break the lead of more than a couple of pencils while filling in 240 ovals you’ve got bigger problems.
• –They tell you to get there an hour in advance as they will close the doors at that time. I guess “that time” means 10 minutes until the test starts because most of us were sitting there for 45 minutes – you could tell that the people who failed it in June and were taking it again knew better and showed up later.
• –The test is 6 hours total – 9-12 and 2-5. It would have been funny to watch as an outsider. At noon people converged on the snack bar to wolf down a sandwich, commiserate about some of the difficult questions and retreat to their cars to go get some more cramming in. “Halftime”, I called it

Goldie officially didn’t make it through the night last night. Despite Noonie’s prediction on the 8/28 post that Betas were practically indestructible, “… My dad had a beta that lived for three years, no matter how rarely we changed his water or even fed him. I hope you guys love your guy, because he’s there for the long haul!”, we have managed to send Goldie on to greener pastures.

So, should we go through a little ceremony for him? Man, we are just not pet people.

Chris’s musings on what the heck happened:

chris_dipaolo: wonder if he just froze to death?

chris_dipaolo: does say it should be between 65 and 75

chris_dipaolo: Feed your Siamese fighting fish two or three times a day, only what he will eat in a few minutes. Overfeeding will make the water cloud faster, and your betta will be more likely to get ill.

On Halloween, there was a little girl trick or treating. Then she went back home. Then she did some artwork. Then she went to bed with her pjs on. In the morning, she read books, she played dress up. Then she went to school with her backpack.

Then the little girl had a thanksgiving feast. She ate turkey and scarecrow. She played dress up, then she went to bed and put her pjs on. When she woke up she got some money and went to the candy store.