[sad face]

some of my virtual friends are going through a trial separation in their marriage and it bums me out.

Also, I know I'm past-due on posts related to my 1 year old (and counting!) and some other topics, but my capacity for writing has diminished in recent weeks.  Sorry!

month 12 - Happy Birthday!

today was great, my favorite little man!

I will definitely write more soon about this first year, but I wanted to say today that I love you and you're number 1!

11 months

Happy yo 11!

Wait...that's from craps...

Seriously, Happy 11 months, little buddy.

I like to think this crying jag took place after you read the month 10 post and felt really bad about how you never sleep and your mother and I are at wit's end...but really, you were just having a grumpy moment and I was feeling picture happy.

The sleep really has gotten better in the last few weeks, although there are plenty of nights that you get your mom out of bed 3 - 5 times.  Those nights do not make for pleasant mornings.

In other news, you had your first Thanksgiving out of the womb and it went pretty well.  Now that you are officially the youngest member of both sides of the family tree, you get plenty of attention.  Your birthday the day after Christmas is sure to be a test of that theory, as most everyone is going to be partied and holidayed out, but for Turkey day you were a big hit.

This month has been a big one for your relationship with your big brother Frodo, in some complicated ways.  As shown here, you two like to hang out and have similar interests.  Frodo has also warmed up to you as a partner for play - he brings you his toys and gets you to chase him around the house.  But we also had a scary moment yesterday...you poked or pulled on the Grumpy Old Dog side of Frodo and apparently hurt him enough that he snapped out at you and we got this...

This was your first real injury and your mom and I were beside ourselves for most of the day, and still when we talk about it we both get a little weepy.  You are fine, and within minutes of the "incident" you were laughing and ready to play, and you and the dog have been trying to get close for some cuddling since, but Mom and I are going to take it slow with the reintroductions.  To be fair, my big sister split my lip a few times and my big cousin dumped me out of the back of a wagon for a broken collar bone, but the site of seeing you bleeding and those moments of frantic worry about how bad it might be and how bad it might have been came as a pretty big shock for tus padres.

So back to the happy stuff - you have become much more mobile in the last few weeks and you have learned to wave - it is still adorable, every single time it happens, when you see me walk into the room and you sit up and wave at me.  I can't even imagine what it will be like when you can talk (at least for that short window that you can talk but haven't yet learned to be ironic or sarcastic....)

We need to shoot more film, but this moment catches a lot of what was special about this month:



I love you so much, little Man.  One year is coming up so fast, and you and I need to come up with a plan for how to deal with your mom realizing her little baby boy is growing up!

Month 10 UPDATE

Maybe it was Jessica's threat of Ferbering, maybe it was the public shame the prior blog post, maybe it was the universe recognizing that the Time Had Come...but our little man has strung together a mostly consecutive series of nights sleeping 5+ hours at a time!

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.

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.

Oh hi!

I didn't see you there!