Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Well happy gummy bears day to you all. Er, happy father's day. We celebrated Wayne's first official father's day with literally pounds of gummy bears. Seriously. We saw that Amazon sells 5 pound bags of gummy bears (Wayne's favorite brand, Haribo, even), and we couldn't resist.

In other news this week, we tried to keep the week low-key (my choice), since it was my last week of part-time work. My family leave is officially all used up, and it is time to return to work full-time. I tried proposing a few plans of modified schedules or part-time work so I don't have 5 days each week I have to pump. Paela is not eating in the middle of the night, and it is rough enough to try and keep up when there are only three days of full-time work to worry about. Even an electric pump just can't compete with Paela. So for the next several months I will work from home until Paela's first nap is over and then head into the office to finish the work day. This way there is one less bottle per day I have to try and produce. Fortunately, Wayne can be with her during the day -- the main trick will be figuring out a plan so that Wayne can still barrel through his thesis proposal on schedule this fall.

We went apartment hunting again this week. Wow, apartment prices just keep soaring here in the bay area. It's amazing. We learned that we qualify for subsidized rent, what they call "below market rate" (BMR) apartments. They have different levels of qualification, but I'm still amazed that on a software engineer's salary, not even accounting for tuition fees, we qualify for BMR. This is a San Jose thing, though I think some other cities in CA have BMR programs. This means that if we can find an apartment complex with a BMR unit open (complexes have specific units set aside for this purpose, and usually there is a waiting list), we can have about $200 per month less rent to pay. Wow. No one can convince me the bay area pay compensates for the housing prices, that's for sure. We put in an application at one of these apartment complexes, so hopefully we'll find out tomorrow if we've been accepted.

With the rest of our free time, we went swimming lots and lots. It was a warm week...not 100 degree warm, but in the low 90s, upper 80s. Swimming is nice.

And Paela got sick. Again. I think this makes for the 7th cold in Paela's eight months of life. Which makes us question: does she just naturally have a poor immune system? Or do babies really get colds this often? Will the challenges to her immune system at an early age mean it toughens her up for later, or will she always be so susceptible to viruses? At least this cold is lighter than previous ones.

But we were also looking for new toys for Paela and a wonderfully kind lady we met through craigslist gave Paela a huge stash of toys for free because she wanted them to go to a good family. Paela -- she made off like a bandit.