Wednesday, October 26, 2011

month 10

New for this month: less treacly sentimentality and more grumpy Dad.

Don't get me wrong, son - I still love you, maybe even more than last month, but month 10 marks the point that I am

OFFICIALLY OVER THIS "NOT SLEEPING" CRAP.


Seriously, those 2 weeks when you mostly slept through the night are a distant, months ago memory at this point.  Nine nights out of ten, now, you tend to sleep for an hour or maybe two, and then you scream until your mom comes to cuddle and nurse you.  Nothing else works.  NOTHING.

I mean, if I come and get you out of the crib, you scream at me like a Ring Wraith.  If I play with you for an hour, turn on the TV, threaten and cajole you, I can sometimes get you calmed down and back to sleep AFTER 2 HOURS.  Your mom is better than I am, in several ways, and my patience with 3 AM histrionics and hysterics is extremely limited.

The aggregate loss of rest has affected every corner of my life, from diet and exercise to creative output and my relationships with others, and especially my relationship with yo mamma.  See, what happens is that when you go all Munch on us 3 - 4 times a night, the net effect is to have two adults barely functioning on diminished rest and who have both expended the whole of their respective patience reservoirs on your bullshit...

[For the sake of the occasional reader of this blog - I (and the wife)
desperately love my son, but I do not always love the things he does.]

This month was not a total mess: you got pretty proficient at crawling, you can pull your self up on anything that will hold still for a second, you have mastered the consumption of a staggering variety of fruits and veggies...although the first 2/3 of that list is terrifying in some respects, and the last 1/3 has represented a significant jump in our weekly food bills.

Another significant development is that we are beginning to begin thinking about starting the process to detach you from your mom's boob..."weaning" sounds weird, so we'll call it GOB (going off-boob).  Our general GOB plan has been to stage down to a final disconnect on your birthday.  The last pediatrician's visit through a wooden clog into the works...he suggested that you couldn't take straight cow's milk (a component crucial to our GOB strategy) until AFTER your birthday...  But still, the revolution is coming, and while it may not be televised, it will likely be photo-documented.

Speaking of, and to go out this month on an up note, the requisite pics of you being adorable:





Love you, son.  I promise Thanksgiving won't take your 11 month thunder, but XMas might be too big for the both of us.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

rolling bands of experience

So this idea has been tumbling around in my head for a few weeks, popping up in enough various contexts to warrant a blog post trying to flesh it out.

The basic idea is that for a given phase of life, there are basic set of skills that make the experience more something (productive, fun, safe, effective, etc).  What I'm thinking is that a person may accumulate that skill set for a given "band of experience", but that band eventually passes and it is then time to prep/learn how to manage the next band.


Monday, October 24, 2011