Insanity is harsh, but when I sit down at the computer at 11:45 totally frazzled from 90 minutes of screaming, my creative juices are slow to work their magic. M. was in all kinds of weird moods today. She had a pretty good night of sleep, even spending the time from 6:00 to 8:30 AM in her crib. She woke around 10:30 or so for a feed, and really never got back to a deep sleep until 5:00.
If you’ve never had a child, you probably don’t know that when you’re staying in the hospital, they give you a chart to track your child’s feeding schedule and diaper changes. It’s all so they can be sure the kid is getting food and processing it. Being the anal geeks we are, S. and I have continued to faithfully update the spreadsheet we built to track this information. I’ve got a nice little Excel sheet that lists date, time, a large field to either put amount of time feeding or amount of bottle consumed, which “side” we start on if S.
It was a dynamic morning here at the palatial, imitation estate of DDB. I had two very interesting phone calls. The second, which we’ll discuss first, came from the Apple Store here in Carmel. “The 20 GB iPod you requested arrived this morning. You can pick it up anytime today. Thank you for spending more money on Apple products.” My shiny, sexy, little beast of a music player is sucking up music from my hard drive as I type.
Before M. was born, I assumed my paternity leave would consist of lots of time on the computer, reading 3-4 books a week, and otherwise relaxing in the ways I was used to. To-date, I’ve read zero books (although I’ve read lots of chapters of several parenting and computer books) and have obviously posted less than what I was doing in the past. So let’s catch up on a few things.
Funny thing about being a parent: despite knowing it’s going to be a huge challenge, before your child is born you spend lots of time agreeing with your spouse on what rules you’ll be parenting under. It all seems so logical and orderly when you’ve still got a fetus instead of a child. We agreed that we’ll share discipline roles, our daughter won’t have earrings until she can take care of them herself, and so on.
Lots of stuff that’s just dandy today. First, my daughter dropped her first load of spit-up on me about an hour ago. It was the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen. We’ve been feeding her more and more often, and she seems to have calmed down a little bit. Tricky stuff, this parenting racket. Big props to the state of Missouri for passing the gay marriage ban! Now neither my native state of Kansas nor my current home state of Indiana has to take the credit for being first!
Evil Gail may want to skip right past this post. The Era of Good Feelings came to a screeching halt just after midnight Monday morning. That’s when our laid back, well-behaved, bundle of joy decided to become a fussy little screamer. And when I say a fussy little screamer, I mean the fussiest of little screamers. We’re hoping her appetite has just accelerated beyond the feeding schedule we had her on and we’re just too stupid to figure it out without screaming and yelling.
Note: This was all written before we had our first difficult night last night. I went to bed at 2:30, S. was up another hour or so until M. calmed down and passed out. So, minimal editing in the interest of getting something online. Seven days as a father. Pretty crazy to consider that, and to see how much my life has changed in such a short time. I’ve been trying to think of unique ways to describe what it’s like to be a father, but all the standard clichés seem to work best: it’s an unreal, humbling experience; I’m in complete awe of my wife not only for the physical, emotional, and mental burden of being a mother, but also for being a pediatrician; it’s the most amazing experience of my life; I already see different things being important to me than what was important last Saturday; for every element of uncertainty and fear, there’s an equal element of excitement, happiness, and hope for the future.
No one actually said that, but I thought the hostess at the Cheesecake Factory said that as we approached her desk last night. Fortunately, S. didn’t hear her at all and asked her to repeat herself. “That’s the cutest stomach I’ve ever seen, you should be pregnant all the time. I’ve had four and I never looked that good. This must be your first?” Thus began another unsolicited conversation between a random woman and my wife.
I missed Lance Armstrong’s destruction of the Tour de France field today while I was at the dentist getting a filling. There’s not much cooler than catching a world-class racer who had a two-minute head start then beating him handily. The Legend of Lance grows. While letting the Novocain take effect, though, I did see something very odd on the TV at the dentist’s office. I was staring at the ceiling during a commercial break and heard the most excellent “That Great Love Sound” by the most excellent Raveonettes.
Insomnia struck me again Monday night. We went to bed around 11:20, which when you factor in that I had been awake since 7:00 AM and had gone for a three mile run in the afternoon, should have been late enough for me to lay down and be comfortably asleep within 10-15 minutes. Not that night, though. Thoughts bounced through my mind, my mental stereo changed songs every few seconds, and I lacked the ability to relax (I generally know I won’t be sleeping anytime soon if my mind jumps among thoughts and background music like a caffeine fiend flipping a remote).
Happy Monday to you all. Another week, another seven days closer to being a father. I had really reached the point where I was greatly excited about the whole thing and the elements of fear were disappearing. Then we had to invite a coworker of S. over for dinner last night. Jennifer and Jason are proud parents of a three-month-old boy. He’s a total cutie and was well behaved throughout the night.
A fine start to Friday with Martha Stewart getting prison time and Lance Armstrong making a big statement in the mountains of France. I don’t really care much either way about Martha, but I’d much rather hear her give a defiant speech against an adverse ruling than hear her gloat if she had got her way. Meanwhile, Lance gained back nearly half of the time he trailed the overall leader of the Tour de France by, jumping to second place overall, and left several of his prime rivals well behind him in another classic Armstrong climb.
A quick confession. Despite moving to the Mac, I’m still using Microsoft Word to type up my posts. Apple Works just isn’t fun to use, plus this way I can shoot files back and forth between my laptop and the eMac. Just so you know. I feel better now. I watched very little of the All-Star game last night. By the time we got home from our belated anniversary dinner, it was already 3-0 AL and we were focused on getting our infant car seat bases installed in both of our vehicles.
“You’re a what?” you probably ask. I’m a Switcher, which is what Apple calls people that shun the Windows world for a Macintosh. Our beautiful little eMac arrived yesterday morning. The computer Gods must have been watching, because the Dell laptop that I use for work promptly got ravaged by a virus/spyware that no one could figure out how to fix. I spent literally all day yesterday, and most of this morning, on the phone with our tech support people, or sitting watching my screen as someone in K.
Hey, a rare Sunday post! Partially out of anticipation of a rather busy Monday ahead of me, and also to mirror the major papers of the world that have arts related features in their Sunday editions. In this post, a quick review of Anchorman as well as some thoughts prompted by my latest Zen entry. Friday night, we braved the opening night crowds to catch Anchorman. We bought our tickets 90 minutes early and after fine Mexican cuisine at Qdoba, claimed seats a full 20 minutes before start time, just beating the rush.
Slow day, so I’m sitting here listening to the audio feed of OLN’s Tour de France coverage. Not all that dynamic. “The wind is really playing havoc with the race right now.” That doesn’t paint much of a picture for me. Much like my attempts to listen to the BBC’s Euro ‘04 coverage a couple weeks back, anytime there’s real action, the feed breaks and goes into Buffering mode. Delicious. We stopped into Babies R Us briefly last night, and it’s the first time I’ve been there and not heard a Kenny Loggins song.
Thanks to some Blogger downtime on Tuesday, an extra day off for the blog. It was an exciting holiday weekend in the Blog household, though. As mentioned Friday, the Johnson County Belfords paid us a visit. I’m afraid our fast paced lifestyle wore them down quickly, but they were troopers to stick to our rigorous schedule. Friday evening, we took them to the wife’s favorite pizza place, Bazbeaux’s in Broad Ripple.
Not much going on today. We have visitors coming in this afternoon (The Belfords, of the Johnson County Belfords) so I’ve got some cleaning to do. The lawn needs to be mowed before the obligatory holiday rain hits. I’m really hoping nothing work related comes up today. It’s nice to turn three day weekends into four day weekends. Big new baby shout outs to the B’s, who welcomed little Sam into the world yesterday.
What have I done the last three nights? Put baby stuff together. Swings, strollers, high chairs, and other assorted knickknacks. There’s nothing like that little fear in the back of your mind that you’ve put the wrong screw in the wrong arm support and 18 months from now it will fail, causing your child to not only fall, but probably pull a bowl of scalding hot oatmeal onto her body, eliciting extreme pain and much shrieking, followed shortly thereafter by a visit from the Division of Family Services.