SAHD-dom, the Second Week

Well, week-two of being the SAHD begins. It's been interesting -- after a fairly uneventful second half of the week, the weekend brought a brand-new baby: up all night, and feeding all the time. I thought it might be stress from the bottle/breast switchback, but that might be my stress more than hers.

I also thought the feeding all the time had something to do with the bottle being easier to drink from (requires less work to get a similar amount, etc) than the breast. But it may actually be a growth spurt: she just went through her entire day's bottle ration, and we still have one more feeding before mom gets back. Yikes. Also she hasn't really napped today. Which sucks. Because it means taht this blog won't be spell-checked, and most of my other work for the day won't get done.

This is like the moment on the SAHD roller coaster where we crest that first big hill: it's been calm for a little while, and suddenly, I don't think it's going to be calm for a long, long time. I'll let you know later this week how that turns out.

Holy Snow Day

Day three of being a Stay-At-Home-Dad (SAHD) has turned into a snow day. This means that I'm putting off plans for the mile-long walk up to the main-branch public library, and the slightly shorter walk to haul laundry to the laundromat. I was all excited to see if I could get these things done, by my lonesome, with the baby strapped to me, but adding in the trudge through snow (slippery snow!) and I'm going to call that too much for the first week of SAHD-dom. Call me a wuss, if you like.

So, day one was pretty much nonstop crying and sleeping, as we adjusted to the non-presence of mom for the bulk of daylight hours. Baby Aki held up as best as a three-month-old can, trying to smile, but then bursting into tears because she was hungry and didn't like the bottle. But she drank. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks as she did it, but she drank. Then she slept, mostly just exhausted from the crying.

Day two, we were visited by Friend, Neighbor, and Professional Baby Whisperer Georgia, who taught me the magic of warming the milk by running it under water (since la leche league said to never warm the bottle on the stove, and since all my info on baby-rearing comes from these movies I was just using milk from the fridge*) and behold! There was no crying! So the day went very smoothly, except for the fact that now that she was enjoying the milk, she was drinking a lot of it. We went through twice as much, which is to say, twice as much as K is pumping. Oops!

Soon, though. Soon, this will all be working smoothly. She'll have all the milk she needs, she'll eat it regularly, I'll have figured out how to carry both her and the laundry (or the groceries) through the mean-streets of Park Slope without running into rival mommy-gang territory, and all will be well.

Then she'll learn to crawl.

*that is to say, mother's milk. Not, like, whole milk.

Judd Apatow is Caden Cotard

So I just finally watched Funny People last night, and it struck me that Judd Apatow's movie is much more Meta than Charlie Kaufman has ever managed to achieve. I realize that I'm not necessarily saying anything new: a lot was made out of the fact that he got aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian Adam Sandler to play aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian George Simmons. But beyond that, with few exeptions, almost every character in the movie plays some version of themselves.

Actually, given that Jason Schwartzman's big breakout in Rushmore happened all the way back in 1998, it would have been slightly more appropriate for him to play a former child actor who made the rare transition into an adult career, but with that exception, you have characters/actors like Leo/Jonah Hill -- a talented scene-stealer looking for a big break played by a talented scene-stealer who got his break from the director who is currently directing the movie that he's in. In fact, most of the movie involves people playing either themselves or versions of their public personas to the degree that once you try sussing it all out you're liable to wonder if RZA may have actually worked at a deli. It's goofy.

Then you get to the casting of someone like Eric Bana as the handsome foil / Australian husband, which is even more meta if you've watched enough Apatow movies to remember the conversation that Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill had in Apatow's last film about the awesomeness of the movie Munich. How much did that conversation influence the casting? It makes my head hurt.

Embabied

So I'm knee-deep in a whole set of New Year's resolutions which sort of snuck up on me. I haven't really done the NYRes thing for a while, and when I did do it, it was always half-hearted at best. The reason being that I figure 1) I'm pretty happy with my life, and 2) when I'm not, it's not worth waiting until the calendar changes to switch things up.

What happened is this: in October of this past year, my wife and I became embabied. She's gorgeous and we do all the typical parent things, i.e. get excited when she opens her eyes, get excited when her poop changes color, then put her down for a bit and hope she sleeps while we frantically try to clean/cook/launder/pee/pay bills/work/read all in the five spare minutes we weren't cooing over our mini-us.

It didn't take long (okay it took a while) to figure out that my general unorganized-ness just wasn't going to work for this experience. Nor was my general lack of physical well-being. Nor was my habit of having a drink to help me relax every night. All these realizations hit somewhere in December, when New Life responsibilities and Old Life habits collided into each other and fell down, dropping everything they were carrying.

So I'm in the midst of a giant life-organizing overhaul with a little help. One of the things I'd like to do is start typing here (by here I mean the website, not the facebooks, where the website auto-posts) more often. So I'm gonna. Whee! Tell your friends.

now here's a pic of the newest addition: