Full Night's Sleep

I think last night was the first full night's sleep. We've had stretches from midnight to 5 or 5:30, but this was a full 11 to 6. Rose also now grabs both legs with her hands.


The itzbeen is a wonderful tool. The glowing orange buttons have symbols for diaper change, feeding, sleep, and anything you want. The oval button above the readout turns on a flashlight. There is a right/left slider for keeping track of which side a child was nursed. As you can see, Rose went 9 hours between feedings and 8.5 between diaper changes. This is about how long she slept.

The Band and The Baby

So it seems that the baby is a great fan of The Band. I put on Kingdom Come (a live album) and she just went to town in her little floor exercise setup kicking and swinging arms to the music. Who knew that a Bostonian by birth would love Southern Rock from such an early age?

On Time and Sleep and other fancy things

With the new baby in house for over a month, I am learning the new perspective on time and sleep that each new parent learns. The many warnings of, "Say goodbye to sleep" and "Go see lots of movies now" are warnings communicated in simple terms.

Granted, Reena and I are both home full time, and that is a huge precondition to my new perspective. A full-time parent, whether single or unsupported, has a Herculean task. However, I have found that my sleep hours have decreased a bit, but the most interesting thing is my notion of time and sleep have radically changed. They are no longer tied to the rising and setting of the sun, but now they revolve around the sleep cycle of the baby. Reena and I trade off the night with one of us staying up until 3:30 or so and the other waking with the dawn chorus. Rose is beginning to catch 3 to 4 hours of sleep at a time, so this doesn't necessarily mean that the responsible party has to be up during that whole time--it just means it fairly often.

Thus, I am getting about 5 hours of sleep each night--an amount that would not work for teaching full time but is seeming to suffice for parenting an infant. Yes, this parenting gig is much less work than teaching full time, so far. This will get even more doable now that the New York trip is over (I took my class to New York for three days and two nights last week), the yearbook is done (I can't even describe the frustration that inDesign has been giving me), final reports are written, and the year-end DVD is authored and produced. Then it will just be my normal projects patiently waiting their turn to be done. Baby has certainly ratcheted the pace of getting projects back a further notch.

Next up during or after all of this is new material on the freedmanriles website with Rose. I have the structure down. Now I just have to build it.

Mountains to Move

As I get closer to the day the baby is born, it feels like there are mountains to move. Some, I am sure, are not needed, yet I construct them and am forced to move them. They, along with the important things, will be left behind when my priorities and time are reapportioned. I would love to see now from the future to know which mountains to move. Instead, I just shove ineffectually at all of them simultaneously. There are so many mountains to move.

A photo from the family vacation in Cornwall when I was in 6th grade. The scan is more grainy than the photo, but I still love this shot.

Bees are lazy cads today!

Usually I get a few things done each day and am happy, but today I am outpacing the bees. I have oiled hinges, replaced light diffusers, put down non-slip material under bath mats, run around town shopping for things to do chores with, got new parking tags for both my car and Reena's as well as putting them in, changed my voter registration address, and the list goes on. Buzz Buzz.

Recently I posted much stuff on Craig's list. Reena and I had culled this stuff from the rest for getting rid of before the move, but it came with us and sat in a room. More than half of it has already been picked up. I am ready to give anyone who shows as much of it as they want to carry off. Yay Craig's List.

The last push to organize the basement storage/work room and get stuff down there from the dining room where it has been hulking in the shadows will happen in the next few days. I will also be writing student recommendations for next schools, doing curriculum, and some of my own art. Plenty of feet up and watching movies, too.

So here I am, a year older, perhaps wiser, perhaps more foolish, and looking at fatherhood.

Oh, I posted house pictures on the other website. Very messy, but I hadn't gotten around to it, so there they are.