Ayla has this strange way of letting us know that she is hitting one of her milestones in development. When she started mimicking sounds, I used simple words like “hi”, “hello”, and “Ayla” that could be made without forcing her into complicated mouth positions (reminder, she is only 3 months old). When Joy was dropping her off at daycare one morning, Ayla looked up and clearly said “Ayla”, which shocked Joy and the daycare worker. The shocking part was that this was the first time she had clearly made an ‘L’ sound, and she hadn’t been prompted to say it either. Ayla has since incorporated her name into her normal vocabulary, and it can often be heard in the middle of cries or general babbling.

The most recent milestone she revealed to us was rolling over. She’s been able to turn herself over with some effort since 3 weeks, but it always seemed like a coincidence.. although a highly repeatable one. On Friday, she decided to show us that she can roll over on purpose. Starting from her back, she tucks her arm against her side, then uses her foot to push herself over onto her stomache. After doing this quickly a few times to make sure we got the point, she then pushed with her arm and continued in the same direction onto her back again.

I figure that since she is trying to do so well, I would try teaching her how to play the drums. Do you think that 3 months is too early?

It looks like we have neglected to post anything on this site for a while, which means we missed talking about a few very important happenings in our lives. The first one being the birth of our beautiful baby daughter on August 4th, and my new job working over at ASU. We will try to post articles about both of these events in the near future.

Yesterday was hard. We had to say goodbye to Anteros, one of our beloved cats.. one of our family. Last weekend he got sick, but seemed to be getting better, then started showing signs that something was wrong. We finally took him to the vet on Friday, and the blood tests showed that there were problems with his kidneys.. really bad problems. Besides the hard choice that we made yesterday, the other option would be to spend a lot of money to put him on IV fluid for a couple days and then retest him to see if he might respond to treatment. That treatment would have been a special diet and giving him fluids 2 to 3 times a week for the rest of his life. Basically having him on the cat version of kidney dialysis. As the morning went on, we could tell he wasn’t doing well, and any treatment would have just prolonged his suffering, so we said goodbye. We will miss him.

Last week our blower stopped blowing. There was a distinct hot electrical smell coming from the air intake, so it was a fairly safe bet that the motor was finally dying. It had issues last year, but we managed to get it started back up and left the blower running all the time. I climbed into the attic, opened up the cover to the blower, and pulled the unit out to see if I could clean it, and possibly get it going again for a little bit longer. It just wasn’t going to go. I vacuumed a lot of dust off the motor and fan blades, but it still wasn’t going to start back up. Even giving it a helpful push wouldn’t get it spinning again.

We made a few calls, and quickly confirmed that local suppliers only dealt with licensed contractors, and HVAC professionals would charge us at least $60 just to come out and tell us the motor would need to be relaced. After some online research, we decided to purchase a new motor and capacitor from Daves Parts Online. The entire order came up to just under $170! I’m fairly confident that the service charges alone from a licensed contractor could have easily outdone that price.

The new motor and capacitor arrived yesterday. I immediately changed into my work clothes and headed back into the attic to pull the blower. Removing the blower was the easy part, the hard part turned out to be removing the fan blades from the old motor shaft. It seems that 10 years of fine dust can really make parts stick together. After a full afternoon of carefully applying various implements of destruction, I managed to extract all the parts and give the fan blades a good cleaning to get rid of the dust buildup. I was just finishing the final assembly of the blower unit when Joy arrived home from work. At this point we decided that taking a break for dinner would be a good choice to give my back a break, and stop our stomaches from grumbling.

With a full tummy, and a rested back, I hauled the newly reassembled blower back into the attic. The old motor was lead-less (it had a plug on the side rather than loose wires), and the new motor had leads, so now I had the fun task of removing the old wiring harness from the control board and running the leads from the new motor and attaching them top the proper locations. I performed a quick test before closing everything, and was happy to see the motor start spinning right away! I re-attached the front, plugged it back in, and headed back down to finally relax!

It’s so nice to have air blowing out of the vents again, but it’s even nicer to know that there is one more thing around the house that I can do myself without paying someone else.