Sophie turns 10 months old today. In celebration of the event, here’s some video of Sophie walking. Enjoy!
(The video is encoded in Ogg Theora, so you’ll need at least Firefox 3.5 or Chromium 3 to see it.)
My two-year old is turning into quite the comedian. He’s currently specializing in knock-knock jokes. Here’s a couple of recent gems:
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Baby Jesus.
Baby Jesus who?
Baby Jesus had luck.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Truck.
Truck who?
Truck you haven’t seen about.
You might need to let those sink in a bit for the underlying humor to set in.
Has anyone else noticed that the standard ice cream container has recently shrunk from 1.75 quarts to 1.5 quarts? Same price, smaller container. I remember the last time they shrunk five or six years ago to 1.75 quarts from the then-standard half-gallon (2 quarts). It’s not just one ice cream vendor, either; they all seem to be on board with the transition. What’s going on? Would people balk at paying $6.50 for a half-gallon instead of $5 for 1.5 quarts? And how is the ice cream cartel so powerful so as to dictate that all manufacturers all switch together?
It’s been four weeks since Hong started going back to work at the office, so I wanted to write and say how it’s been going.
In short, it’s been rough. Sophie has had a hard time adjusting to drinking from a bottle instead of “straight from the source”, so to speak. She would essentially starve herself for eight hours until she couldn’t take it any longer, then she’d finally drink it all down. And of course, once she starts to get hungry, she’s quite fussy and needs a lot of holding and rocking. There were days where I’d literally be holding her for hours, pacing around the house and desperately trying to jam a bottle in her mouth, Sophie crying most of the while. And because I’d be warming up the milk over and over again, eventually some of it would go bad and I’d have to throw it away.
By Thursday of the first week, Sophie was getting dehydrated and had been crying most of the day, so I called Hong at work around 3:00, told her I couldn’t take it anymore and could she come home right now? She came home and fed Sophie.
You know, I’ve contemplated trying to come up with a Top Ten List of why stay-at-home dads are better than stay-at-home moms. Things like, “we can clean the house and fix things around the house too” and “we’ve got more strength to chase them around the house and get them good and tired for the night”. That’s usually about as far as I get, and a Top Two List isn’t very impressive. You could, however, probably come up with a Top Ten List of why stay-at-home moms are better than stay-at-home dads, and on that list you could say that “moms have breasts”. This whole bottle situation could be avoided if I just had a pair of boobs.
Each week since has been progressively better. Sophie would start drinking a little bit around noon or 1pm, and I’d be more calm in trying to feed her. As of yesterday, she was able to take her bottle twice without any fussiness or crying. I don’t want to claim victory yet, but it’s a relief to see that things are getting better.
As I predicted earlier, I haven’t been able to keep to my same standards of housekeeping. The house has frequently been very messy, which would sometimes add to my frustration, knowing that there are all of these chores to be done that I can’t get to because I’m currently rocking a fussy baby. It took me most of last weekend to get everything done and check most tasks off of my to-do list.
You’d think that dealing with three kids would be more difficult than one or two, but I’ve so far found the opposite to be true. Maggie and Oliver play together quite well, and seem to be understanding that I can’t always play with them because I’m dealing with Baby Sophie. The fact that I’ve been more willing to let them watch TV in the last four weeks helps. (I allocated my old laptop to serve as a media server, making it very easy to pull up an episode of Ni Hao Kai Lan or Word World for the kids.) And I think if I had to stay at home just to take care of the baby, I’d go crazy with boredom. For all their troubles, three kids are more fun than one or two.
Today was Hong’s first day back at work and, hence, my first day dealing with the kids by myself. As a result, I only have enough time to write this paragraph.
Today in Indiana we experienced the infrequent combination of 1) enough snow to have fun in, 2) temperatures that weren’t too cold to be outside for, and 3) neither Maggie, Oliver, or myself were sick. I took this as a sign that I should put off my chores for the moment and go out and play!
They enjoyed making snow castles with their shovel and pail. Meanwhile, I didn’t shirk all of my chores…I used some of my time to shovel some of the snow off the driveway.
After it was over, it was warm chocolate milk for everyone!
I remember with our first two children, I’d be reading a baby care book to come across the helpful fact that
Newborn babies typically get between 16-20 hours of sleep a day.
I’d scoff at this because my babies weren’t getting anywhere near that amount of sleep. My selective memory remembers they were only getting 12 hours of sleep a day. It was probably actually more than that, but I quite remember that it was less than what “the books” were telling me.
Naturally, I was fully prepared to accept the inevitable with Sophie. Given that, it’s perhaps amazing that she was brought into this world in the first place. What could we have been thinking? But apparently God has smiled upon us and granted us a child that knows how to sleep. She’s definitely closer to the 20-hour-a-day mark, and can sleep through anything, including two other kids who may be squealing or fighting nearby.
Sophie is already on a regular sleeping schedule at night, waking up once around 2am and again around 6am for feedings. She’s calm the whole time, and can be coaxed back to sleep with a little bit of rocking and cuddling. After dealing with colicky Oliver and his hour-long crying fits at night, Sophie has been simply amazing. She’s such an easy baby.
We used to justify our kids’ wakefulness as a testament to their alertness and intelligence. Depending on how smart Sophie turns out, we may have to change our reasoning to simply say our first two kids were just unusually difficult.
I became a father for the third time today when Sophie Ling Seifert was born at 8:48am. She looks a lot like her older siblings did when they were first born. We will be in the hospital for the next few days while Hong recovers from her C-section.
When I quit my software job about a year ago, I had calculated that I would be away from the job market for at least the next two years, at which point Oliver would be attending school at least part time. Now with baby number three on the way, my return date has essentially been pushed back by another three years.
To be honest, I’m a little dismayed at the prospects of not working for another three years. I really valued the time I worked as a software programmer, even when just doing it for my own projects. (You could probably say especially for my own projects.) Attempts to do work in spare moments haven’t worked out well so far, since trying to do development in half-hour chunks doesn’t do it.
Yet I am optimistic that it will all work out in the end. I’ve already snagged a domain name for my software business-to-be: rascalsoft.com. There’s no need to type that in your browser yet, because there’s nothing there. I’m not even sure what I’ll be doing, although I’m considering a business in custom Mac OS X development. I’m still a newbie at Objective-C programming, but I’ve got three years of half-hour development increments to get accustomed to it.
I could always just get a traditional job, but even once all three kids are at school full-time, I’ll continue to be the one to pick them up from school and take care of the remaining family obligations, so it would have to be a position that would be very flexible. In all likelihood. that kind of position doesn’t exist, so starting my own business is the way to go. Listening to the Stack Overflow podcast has gotten me even more interested in being my own boss. I may not make a lot of money from the venture, but at least I’ll be back in the computer development scene that I enjoy so much.
Today, I have been able to visit the doctor for a physical, write several e-mails, and make this update to my weblog, far more than I would normally be able to accomplish while watching the kids. It is all thanks to today being Hong’s first day of maternity leave.
To some of you, this is the first word you’ve heard that we were expecting our third child. We’ve kept it decidedly low key from the get go. Simply put, our newer larger house seemed like it needed another child, and I was looking for a bigger challenge in my job.
We don’t yet know the gender of the baby. We’ve already got both girls and boys clothes in the closet so we’re prepared either way. We haven’t begun picking out names either, although Hong has already shot down all of my suggestions.
The C-section is scheduled for December 21. Hong gets four weeks of paid maternity leave and had a week of vacation remaining for the year, which means we have five weeks before the big day. That gives me five weeks where my job function is reduced, since Hong is around to help out. Five weeks to to get things done that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.
I might put some extra love into this website, maybe putting up some new videos, something I’ve neglected to do for over two years now. I’ll also take some time to visit the car dealer to get a new minivan. I’ve tried to see if it was possible to squeeze three car seats in our existing station wagon and its a no-go. It’s time for me to complete the suburban housedad experience and become a minivan driver. The excitement is almost palpable.