We had a busy day today. We went to the county clerk's office to pick up Zachary's birth certificate, hit up the Carter's outlet in Carlsbad, took Zach to the pumpkin patch in Valley Center to pick out a couple of pumpkins and then drove through our neighborhood being looky-lous and taking some photos of the fire damage that can be viewed on our Flickr site. For the record, we didn't take more than one photo of any of the houses, and we only went down a couple of streets. These were less than a mile from our house. For the most part, the houses that were damaged are completely gone. We only saw a couple that had only partial damage.

Anyway, it's fussy time, so we need to go distract the baby. Fussy time usually starts sometime between 7 and 9pm and goes for a couple of hours. The best distraction we've found so far is a bath, but he doesn't really need a bath every night. We'll see what we come up with for tonight! (I'm gathering bath toys as we speak...)

The air quality was a little better today, so Bryan spent a little more time out in the yard, checking things out. He discovered that the tree between our yard and our neighbors' had several charred spots, which means that there was fire closer than we thought. We feel even luckier now, knowing that embers or debris could have easily set the tree on fire, and it would have just been a hop, skip and a jump from the tree to the house. If firefighters came into our yard to put it out, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Bryan posted a few photos from the fire on Flickr. We're going to go out through the area in a day or two and take some more photos of houses near us - it seemed like it would be incredibly insensitive to play looky-lou and film or take still photos during the first couple of days. It's just amazing to see how many areas around here had small fires, and to see the areas that are completely devastated.

One nice thing we've seen is a tremendous number of signs around the area - paper on garage doors, bedsheets on fences that say things like "Thank you firefighters and SDPD." I know it's their job, but they really did a tremendous job saving the homes that could be saved, and dealing with stressed out residents trying to get back into their homes before the evacuation order was lifted.

FYI, since the national news has been maybe a little less correct with pronunciation, here's a quick primer: Poway - POW-way (as in ka-pow!), Escondido - Ess-cun-DEE-doe. Rancho Bernardo is pronounced the way it looks.

Here's a map of the areas that burned. Click on "92127" to view our area. You'll see a big cluster of red houses, drag them to the center of your screen and use the tool on the left of the screen to zoom in - zoom in about two clicks to see the individual street names. We're slightly southwest of the big cluster, slightly northwest of the camera icon, on Florindo. There's one house on the road behind us, Capilla, that sustained damage, but this is a very good way to see just how close the fires came to our house.

We still have a house.

We still have stuff.

We will be able to live in our house once the air quality gets a little better.

We headed up to Rancho Bernardo this morning when Nancy's cleaning lady came, figuring she really didn't need to have us, Zach and Bailey underfoot. Our neighborhood hadn't been opened yet, but we wanted to see how the area looked. We could get close to our neighborhood, so we decided to go grab some lunch and feed the baby, and then we heard on the radio that our area had been reopened, so we headed over to the house.

We've got a lot of crap in the yard - the high winds resulted in the trees dropping a lot of junk. The windowsills and areas around the doors are gross and ashy, but they'll clean up. The house smells a little smoky, but certainly better than what I was expecting. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of junk (ash and particulates) in the air. Also unfortunately, the landlord never fixed the a/c, so while other folks with central air can use that to help filter their air, we can't, and so we decided to head back to Nancy's house in La Mesa for at least tonight. We don't want Zach or Bailey to get lung rot because we were too eager to get back home.

We're going to try to get back into the house to stay tomorrow, although we may need to crash at Jasmine's if the air isn't better. Once we get back in, we'll have some cleaning to do, but it'll get done. Things are kind of higgledy-piggledy from us packing and leaving the house quickly (i.e., the things that normally live on top of the dog crate just got tossed into a corner of the kitchen, stuff got pulled out of the closets and thrown on the ground as we were grabbing stuff), but that'll get cleaned up eventually, too.

All in all, we're very, very lucky. We took the long way out of the neighborhood and saw many homes about a mile away that had burned completely. When you see those on the news, or are watching from another state, it's sort of mildly sad, but I started to cry when we went past today, seeing people in their burnt remains of a house, sifting through to see if there was anything they could salvage. It was horrible. Some stretches were fine, then a house or two that was gone. Or vice versa.

Thank you to everyone who's been thinking about us and praying for us. We're okay, we should be back in the house within a day or a few, and our neighbors also escaped major damage.

Whew.

They're allowing residents back into Northeastern Rancho Bernardo, but we live in the Northwestern section, and they have not reopened our area yet. It sounds like with the winds shifting, there's still a possibility that certain areas up there could flare up again. They're considering reopening other areas later in the day, maybe ours will be one of them.

In the meantime, I can post to the blog, but any email I try to send is being held up - it may be an issue with Michael and Nancy's wireless network, since I can't figure out any other reason why I'd be getting the error message that I keep getting. So if you've written or called me, I'm not ignoring you, I just can't get individual emails out and I'm trying to not use the cell if I can help it because fire officials are still asking that folks avoid cell use in order to give rescuers the access they need to communicate with each other.

Just a note to anyone evacuating at any point - there are always things you wish you'd brought. Hindsight is 20/20, and when you have 15-20 minutes to pack, you have to make some quick decisions. However, I find it remarkable that I grabbed three days' worth of clothes for Bryan and I (and more than that for Zach, since he has a tendency to go through multiple outfits in a day), but virtually none of the clothes match. We look a little funny in our poorly chosen clothes. I tease Bryan about how he needs Grranimals to match his clothes - it looks like he's the one who packed! (I'll be in trouble once he reads this, of course) I don't want to go buy extra clothes if we'll be able to go home in a day or two and take stock of our possessions, but it may be time to think about doing some laundry. Hey, the unmatching clothes are clean and the only ones we have at this point, so how bad can it be? We're much luckier than some folks who had 5 minutes or less to evacuate and had to leave with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

Also, a shout out to the firefighters. There aren't words to describe how grateful we are for all the fire crews fighting our fires. They're hardly getting any sleep, they're doing incredibly difficult, dangerous work, and many of the local firefighters have families that were evacuated themselves, and none of the firefighterrs are being allowed to go home to their families - they're keeping them at various centers, feeding them, letting them get a little rest and then sending them back out to the front lines. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your service, and a big thank you to your families who are having to make do without you at this difficult time. Also, thank you to the firefighters who've come down from Reno, northern California and other areas. We appreciate everything you're doing.

City Councilman Brian Maienschein, who is the rep for Rancho Bernardo, had his staffers go through RB and complied a list of homes that were destroyed. Thankfully, none of the houses on our street were on the list. Now, we're not in the clear yet, because they weren't ruling out major damage from smoke or water, but at least it sounds like our house is still standing.

A big thank you to those of you who've had us in your thoughts and/or prayers - I'm going to impose on you to keep us there a little longer, and hope that perhaps we managed to escape with only minimal damage. We won't be able to get back into the neighborhood until tomorrow at the absolute earliest, and it may be longer than that before we know the status of things for sure. Stay tuned for updates.

There are now over 500,000 (half a million) households evacuated in San Diego.

It will be at least another day before people are allowed back into Rancho Bernardo. Around 2 this afternoon, one of the city councilmen is supposed to post a list of homes that were destroyed in RB. We'll see if we get good news or bad news.

Right now, the hardest part is just not knowing. Once we know some things, we'll be able to formulate some kind of plan, whether it's short term (find a hotel that'll take dogs, somewhere south of San Francisco) or long term (Bryan becomes a geo bachelor for a bit and Zach, Bailey and I head for my parents' house in Seattle for a few weeks). Mostly I'm worried about intruding on Nancy and Michael for more than a few days. They've been wonderful, reassuring us that we don't need to be in a hurry to find Plan B, but I still worry about our presence being a pain in the butt.

We've been evacuated.

We left yesterday (Monday) morning, around 6 as soon as the evacuations were announced, about an hour and a half before the reverse 911 call came (as of 8 last night, our answering machine at the house still worked). There have been a lot of houses destroyed in Rancho Bernardo, but so far our house hasn't been one of the ones listed.

We packed what we could in about 20 minutes, loaded Bryan's truck and my car and headed out. It took us about two hours to go ten miles. We went to the base where Bryan's boat and office are, to come up with a plan. As we were headed out, my boss Nancy called and offered her spare room up to Bryan, Zach, Bailey and I. Luckily she and her husband have dogs, so Bailey has had company.

Last night was a little scary, as Mt. San Miguel (or something like that) was burning, and you could clearly see the fire lines from Nancy's back yard. We repacked the few things we'd sort of unpacked, just in case we needed to evacuate again. It looks a little better right now this morning, and Nancy and Michael are both headed into work. We're staying put to keep an eye on things.

I'm hoping the fact that we still had a working answering machine last night is a good sign. Bryan saw a press conference with the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, that was being held at a fire crew staging point about a mile from our house, so hopefully that's a good sign, too. Maybe (maybe?) the worst is over for our neighborhood. I'm not sure when we'll be able to get back there to survey the damage - I know they won't let anyone back in the area until it's safe and the fires are completely out, and who knows when that will be?

The numbers are staggering - something like 300,000 people have been evacuated. Every hotel room in the county is booked. They have evacuees at a number of high schools, at the local fairgrounds and at Qualcomm Stadium.

We're not sure of our longish term plan. If we leave, we'll need to head out of the county to get a hotel, and we don't know if the Coast Guard will let Bryan leave. We'll stay with Michael and Nancy for a couple of days, but then we'll need to see where things are and make some decisions. Until then, all of our possessions fit in our car, but Bryan, Bailey, Zachary and I are all safe. We appreciate everyone thinking of us, but please don't call our cell phones - at this point, that's the only way a lot of the rescuers can talk to each other and the officials are asking that folks avoid cell phone use as much as possible in order to allow the rescue workers access to the cell networks.

The Santa Anas are blowing again, and there are huge wild fires to the east of us. It reminds me of four years ago, when the Cedar Fire and the Paradise Fire were burning near us. We could stand out in our street at night and see the flames on the hills to the east. We knew there was trouble today when the air turned smoky around noon. Now, not only do we have smoke and poor visibility, there's ash in the air.

I don't like the Santa Anas, even when there's not a fire associated with them. They creep me out. On the surface, yeah, it's a dry, warm wind, but there's something else, a feeling in the air that comes with them. Bryan just told me they're predicting that the winds will get stronger tonight. As of right now, 10,000 people have been evacuated from several communities near the mountains. I, of course, am mentally preparing an evacuation list just in case. The firefighters can't do too much until the winds die down, and we've had so little rain for the past couple of years, everything's dry as tinder.

I really hate this - the smell of smoke had me spooked earlier, and I don't know if it's because I'm a mom now or what, but I'm crazy protective right now. We went out to run errands earlier, and I insisted we take Bailey with us, just in case our neighborhood was evacuated by some freak circumstance and we couldn't get back in to get her. She'll go to daycare tomorrow, but I'm glad she'll have people with her (and it's probably a lot less smoky downtown at daycare) and I'll be at home in case Zach and I need to leave or Bailey needs to be picked up pronto. The other thing that has me worried are the two huge palm trees at the end of the drive. They probably should have been taken down years ago, but our landlords aren't too hot on even having the basic maintenance done on them, let alone the probably astronomical cost of having them cut down. (Side note: Tomorrow's high is supposed to be nearly 100, and the landlord still hasn't gotten our a/c fixed. Awesome.) Anyway, those things sway frighteningly in a typical breeze, let alone the gusts we've been getting. I'm praying that they'll hold up, and that if, god forbid, they don't, that they fall toward the street, not the house. Yet another reason to have a mental packing list for evacuation.

Gah! Okay, I'm really freaking myself out now. The Wild won their game against the Avs tonight, so two more points for them. Wahoo!

We gave Zachary his first tub bath last night. When we first put him in, we had a few minutes where it looked like things could go either way, but as it turned out, he seemed to like the water, and didn't fuss at all! We took video (thanks Dad!), but I didn't get any still photos, so we'll have to see if we can extract some from the video. We're still refining our bathing technique, but we'll get there.

Bryan's back at work today, and underway most of the week. Zach and I took Bailey to daycare this morning. She really needs to go now that there's a baby in the house that's taking up a lot more of our time and attention, and I feel better that at least one day a week, she has people and doggies to play with and focus on her all day long. We do the best we can when Zachary's sleeping, but she's been such a good and patient dog that at least she can get rewarded with some regular exercise.

We bought a harness for her that hooks up with the seat belt and keeps her confined to one seat in the car, which means that she can ride in the back with Zachary and be held in place securely, so she can't reach him. She's probably safer that way, too, since it's like having a doggie seat belt on her. The ride this morning went smoothly (Zach's a good sleeper in the car), and the dog daycare folks oohhed and ahhhed over Zach when I brought Bailey in. Hopefully Bryan will be able to pick her up on his way home from work, and at least this way we can make sure she still gets her dog daycare days in even if Bryan's underway or at work.

Zach is napping at the moment, so I'm going to take advantage of this brief opportunity to shower and eat something. He's been doing a decent mid-morning nap lately, and hopefully that'll continue, since it's my one fairly reliable chance to get a few things done around the house!

Last night was the much-awaited first game of the season between the Wild and the Ducks. Of course, thanks to the morons at Center Ice, the game was blacked out here. Apparently they still haven't figured out that San Diego does not get the local Anaheim Fox Sports Channel, so even though we can watch the local feed of Kings games, we have absolutely no access to Ducks games, and blacking out the Center Ice feed ensures that we're stuck and frustrated. I had a baby less than three weeks ago, it's not exactly like it would have been practical to try to go to the game in person (although trust me, the thought did cross my mind....).

Anyway, as you might imagine, there were several scrums, including Boogaard vs. Parros and Boogaard vs. May. It looks to me like May is getting in over his head when the officials break things up, and Parros only got a slim advantage because Boogaard lost his balance partway through the fight. (Thanks to Ryan for posting highlights on You Tube, since that's the only way some of us can see what happened {bitter at Center Ice!})

It was a physical night, with Nick Schultz getting into a fight with Ryan Getzlaf that was pretty raucous, and unusual in that Schultz isn't really a fighter. Getzlaf got lucky at the end there.

Tuesday against the Kings should be a little milder. Hopefully when the Wild swing out here again in December we'll be able to take Zach to his first Wild game...or maybe the idiots at Center Ice will have gotten a clue by then - ha, right!

Dodged a pee diaper by blogging when it happened. So Bryan was stuck with it. Thank you, Internet!

I. Am. So. Tired.

The little man needs to eat about every two and a half to three hours right now. He is a leisurely chower, falling asleep halfway through, requiring that we play "wake the baby" to finish feeding him. So basically, it takes about 30 to 40 minutes to feed him, and then figure another 20 or so for burping, diapering, settling, etc. He has good awake periods during the day, sometimes for a couple of hours, but the gist of all of this is that right now I'm getting an hour and a half to two hours of sleep at a stretch, then I'm up for an hour or more. Bryan's a big help, handling diaper changes and that kind of stuff, but the cumulative effect of sleep deprivation has me feeling (and acting) like my brain is wrapped in a big fuzzy sweater. Don't ask me complex, multi-part questions because I just can't handle it. I go into a room to do something and promptly forget what I was going to do. I know we need something from the store, but darned if I can remember what it is. The nights go better if I can grab an afternoon nap, but about 50 percent of the time, that just doesn't work out.

Today we had a visit from an RN with the New Parent program, which is a California program funded by the tobacco tax. She came out and checked the baby, checked me and gave us a bunch of resources and info about free classes and support groups. Zach went to the doctor last friday for his circumcision (traumatic! Probably more so for me than him!) and he weighed in at 7 lbs 14 oz, a gain over his previous doctor's visit the week before (7 lbs 4 oz) and his birth weight. Today he weighed 8 lbs 6 oz. At this rate we'll have a giant baby before Christmas! The nurse went to give me some info about how to tell if your baby is getting enough milk. I told her I didn't really think that was an issue, given his weight gains!

So hockey season has finally started, and the Wild is 3 and 0, just the way we like it. Boogaard is already playing better than last season, and I'm hoping this'll be a good year for him and the team. I don't think we're going to make it up to LA this weekend for the games while they're in town, which is too bad because it's the mother-son road trip for the Wild, and I figure since I managed to get my picture taken with his dad last year, it would have been cool to track down his mom this year. But I think Bryan and I are going to be too busy being a dad and a mom to Zach at the moment, and I don't really want to take the baby to Anaheim, since the Ducks fans are a-holes, and Staples Center is not in the best neighborhood. Maybe when the Wild come back in December we'll be able to get tickets and be a little better prepared to take the little man to his first hockey game. In the meantime, he watches games at home with us from our laps and his bouncy seat.

Okay, I think I'm up for baby duty so Bryan can go blog or update the Flickr page. Next Wild game is Saturday, in Phoenix. Kinda weird not to be headed out to Phoenix for the game - we've had a good time taking Bailey on a road trip to see the Wild, and we finally figured out which hotel they stay at when they're there!

Zachary turned one week old yesterday, and I'm still marveling at the fact that a) he's ours, b) he's here and c) that we've managed to keep a tiny human alive for an entire week. I don't know where the day goes. It seems like we wake up, start the day and then suddenly it's evening and we haven't done much beyond feeding, diapering and if I'm lucky, a load of laundry and a shower. Bryan has been a model Daddy, jumping in to change diapers without being asked, keeping me fed and hydrated and being a never ending source of support. He's been staying up on the late shift with Zach (who loves sleeping on Dad's chest) so I can get to sleep around 10 and catch some zzzz's before the night feeding starts. He's been absolutely wonderful, even when I've been tired and hormonal and gone Chernobyl (read: total meltdown).

Breastfeeding is definitely a learned art, and Zach and I are still learning. We're doing better than we were the first few days, but occasionally we have a feeding where both of us end up frustrated and cranky. I expect there will be fewer and fewer of those as we go, and I know he's getting the benefits of nursing, so that keeps us going.

My mom headed back to Seattle yesterday, and she was a huge help while she was here, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry so we could focus on transitioning to being a family. My dad was in town on business, so he and Mom got to spend some time with Zachary, and with us, which was great.

The Wild start their season on Thursday, and we're ready! We've ordered our Center Ice, my sister in law Crystal sent a really cute Wild t-shirt for my birthday and I've been following the training camp and preseason news on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's site. Bring on the hockey! Hopefully this'll be a great season for Derek Boogaard and the rest of the Wild.

But for now, I think I need a nap.