Category: family

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Pacifier is a great name for it.

If the pediatrician or lactation consultant we spoke to is reading this, I’m sorry, but we are already using a pacifier.  If said healthcare professionals have a problem with that, they get to come and bounce him to sleep.

The pacifier is seriously like a drug.  One or two hits on it, and his eyes start rolling back in his head, his whole body goes limp, and he is buzzing like a champ.  We discovered this after what we will affectionately call the “feeding marathon of 2008” a few nights ago.  Jacqueline fed him for basically 4 straight hours, from 3ish to around 7 AM.  For those of you keeping score at home, that’s generally a time that most humans are asleep.  I took over at 7, and since I am running woefully short on breastmilk these days, I reached for the pacifier, to give Jacqueline a much needed nap.

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Baby Sling. Not as Cool as a baby Slingbox. But Close.

So, I am hoping that my phone very soon becomes a baby slingbox (with Steve Jobs about the give a keynote speech at the WWDC hopefully talking more about iPhone apps, icluding my fantasy world where a slingbox could be added to it), but in the event that it doesn’t, I always have the baby sling to fall back on.

My wife Jacqueline (or Jacq for short—hence all the plays on the phrase ‘Jack in the Box’ found here and at our website) is amazing.  That is unrelated to the baby sling, but since she made the baby sling, I think it serves as evidence for the statement.

She made me a custom, UNC baby sling.  Now I can not only look like a hippie, (which is a secret desire of mine… refer to the hairstyles I have rocked over the past years…) but now I can pull off “appropriately wine-and-cheese-snobby” and hippie all at the same time.  Nothing says snob like a piece of UNC apparel.  We have a right to be snobs, we’re the best!

The baby sling takes some getting used to, and requires one hand over the baby’s head while moving.  I have yet to slap his head into anything of substance, but it has been a near-miss on several occasions.

Well, back to checking the macworld live feed of the WWDC keynote.  I’m such a dork.

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Discovering a whole new world.

It has been fascinating watching little Ben become more and more alert, as well as increasingly responsive to the world around him.  I’d love the ability to read his little mind as he goes about his days. Here’s how I imagine it going:

You would not believe the three weeks I’ve had.  These strange masked people grabbed me, promptly cut off my belly-button buffet,  and started prodding all over me.  Everything was so bright.  I could really have used a nap, but every time I got close to one some new-sounding and equally blurry person came and poked on me some more.

After the first few days, life isn’t so bad.  I get to eat all the time, and get this… instead of it going straight in my belly, it goes through my mouth.  I know, I didn’t see that coming either.  I have to say, it’s pretty sweet.  The only downside is that it doesn’t all stay in there.  It comes out the other end.  What a strange design.

I recognize two voices.  One is the person I was inside all the time, who now is the one who feeds me.  She’s really pretty, and is becoming less and less blurry.  The other is a deeper voice… the same one that used to only tell me in a really muffled way about “Tar Heel basketball” —whatever that is.  He is much scratchier when i lay on him to take a nap.

So I got hungry the other day, and tried to say “hey mom, can I eat now?” And you will not believe what came out of my mouth.  It sounded like a mix between a siren and a weedeater engine that is out of oil.  Needless to say, mom couldn’t figure out what I meant, so she took off my pants.  I tried again to let her know the problem, and this time when the siren went off, I peed on her.  I didn’t mean to, and I’m not proud of it, but it happened.

The last thing I want to mention is the strange mini-world they put me in from time to time.  The rest of the world is a sort of muted tones, Banana-Republic-meets-Goodwill sort of place.  Then they plop me down in this place that seriously is sensory overload.  Words can’t describe it, but I’ll give it a shot.  Take a rainbow, a giraffe, several mirrors, a parrot, something that looks like a stuffed chicken, a palm tree, and a half gallon of kelly green paint.  Mix them all together and stir vigorously.  You are getting close to the looks of my mini-world.  Most of the time I just close my eyes and pretend to sleep to avoid the headache.

So that’s a glimpse into my boy’s world.  I think.  I’m just impressed he can already tell we shop at Goodwill.

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Strollin through parenthood.

Little Ben and I just got back from a trip around the neighborhood.  He was in the stroller, I was walking behind the stroller wheezing as I pushed it up the hills.  He has been doing great, but both Jacqueline and I have realized that this parenting thing is certainly no “paint by numbers” game.

I guess coming into parenthood i had certain expectations.  But like any relationship, what I am finding is that those expectations are not going to be correct, because there are other people involved.  It’s not like a relationship with my computer.  I wake up each morning to the same computer.  It hasn’t grown, changed, had a bad night, or in any way pooped on itself.  I enter in certain data, and I can expect certain results.

Not so with parenthood.  Just because he slept 5-8 hours per night the first week we had him home from the hospital doesn’t mean he is going to do so the next week.  We found this out.  Does it mean that something is wrong?  No.  He’s not a computer that produces the same result every time you enter certain data.  He’s a person.  And he has good nights and bad nights.

It works the same way with Jesus (you knew some type of metaphor was coming… it was just a matter of time).  He is a person (albeit a much more perfect person than my son), and so anytime I try to just plug in a formula—read two chapters a day, journal at least a page, and don’t drink too much beer—it doesn’t work, because that’s not love.  Love is a relationship, and a choice.  I am spending time with a person, not a machine.

Thanks, Jesus, for a little boy not sleeping through the night teaching me some lessons.

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