Monkey House

So, I’ve needed an excuse to just ramble a bit here. And my excuse will be a journal of my short (2-month) paternity leave. Oh sure, there’s tonnes of other stuff in the backlog (baby’s first Christmas!) but those things require video and/or photo editing, and my puter is running on 1GB of 333Mhz RAM for about a week… not in the mood to do anything too intensive with the machine until it’s up to speed. Instead, I will jump right into posting about my parental leave… no pics necessary, though I’m sure there will be some of those as well…

So, Day One is coming up. The plan? Don’t really have one yet. I think it will be:

1. wake up as Mama goes off to her first day back at the lab
2. Go through some of his usual diversions depending on what he’s in the mood for:
   1. practice sitting/crawling
   2. read book(s)
   3. jolly jumper
   4. mat time
3. Try to get him down for a nap. As far as I know, he usually has boobies which lead into naps. I do not have boobies. Bottle and reclining MIGHT do it, but it might now. This might be a tough stretch of walking around the main floor with a carrier
4. Fire up some laundry (or, nap with little guy if I’m bazaughsted)
5. Meet mommy for lunch
6. Go to the dog park
7. Swing past Future Shop
8. Nap #2, which may involve more playing by ear, figuring out how to get him to go down for some sleep
9. Exersaucer, laundry, pray mommy comes home soon
10. Start supper?

I’m under no illusion… my stay-at-home period will likely be easier than Alie’s was. The hard part will be establishing new routines, figuring out how to get him to nap, and generally rolling with the inevitable moments when I can’t figure out how to keep him happy.

But I’m looking forward to it nonetheless. Many dads I know are from the generation before me, or couldn’t take the time off work. 9 time out of 10 they say they wish they had taken more than a few days off. I may not be taking 35 weeks, but a solid 8 weeks is going to be unforgettable one way or another.

First off,

Since I came so dangerously close to missing saying “Happy Birthday” to my mom (I actually DID miss it by 5 minutes; called and woke her up at about 12:05am, which was a dubious choice (she may have valued her sleep more than a call from me!)) I figured I’d take a minute to do that here. So, Happy Birthday Mom!

My mom is pretty much the greatest mom anyone ever had. I would back that up with Scientific research, but anyone who meets her would realize there’s no real need. And as awesome a mom as she is, she’s an even awesomer grandmother (sorry, “grammy”). Which creates this feedback loop in which her awesomeness as a grammy reinforces her awesomeness to me as a mom, which reinforces her awesomeness as a grammy, which reinforces…

So thanks mom, we love you!

The Tree

There is a Christmas tree unfurling in our living room right now (no, not a sad one like the picture to the left; a real 6.5-foot bushy tree… more about the sad tree in just a moment). It will get decorated tomorrow. This might be a bit close to Christmas for some people, but for me Read the rest of this entry »

Rogers Cable can suck my <expletive>.

We get (got?) all our home connectivity services through Rogers. This means 2 cell phones, 1 Digital Cable, 1 “Express” Cable Internet (10Mbps), and 1 home phone. We are trying to ditch Rogers because what they’re actually sucking is our money. Out of us. Or our bank accounts. Which REALLY sucks.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the most recent letter we got from them. “Most Recent” because it is the second such letter. The first one came a year ago, saying (paraphrased), “If you would like to continue to receive your Better Choice Bundle discount, you need to commit to 2 years.” (I remember them saying 3, but Rogers insists it has always been only 2, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). On the phone and through no fewer than 3 conversations, I essentially told them, “Piss off. No, sir, I will brook this a moment longer, sir.” Which was a lie, because they held onto me for another year when someone stepped up and said, “We’ll grandfather your existing arrangement for another year.”

But this year, as they hinted, we got another letter saying the same thing. “If we do not receive a commitment by October XX, you will no longer receive your discount.”

What.

The.

F***.
Read the rest of this entry »

So,

Hard to get in time for updates lately! Holiday season? Maybe in part… Cole’s new sleeping habits… yup, to a degree! But it’s actually mainly a technical issue:

Whenever I do feel like just sort of rambling, I remember that posts won’t make it to the front page (“featured”) unless I put an image with them. I couldn’t be arsed to find or create a new image every time I come up with an idea. Solution? For the time being, I have reverted back to a “blog” style.

Frankly, it makes more sense anyhow. The slider is a cute gimmick once or twice, but then readers (ie. my friends and family) just want a quicker and easier way of seeing “what’s new, if anything?”

I plan to revise the blog style at some point, but time hardly permits. We’ll get there.

Most of you probably want to know what’s up with the little guy. The truth is, not a whole lot! In terms of mobility, he’s still mainly rolling around. He can do a double-roll whenever he feels like it, but usually runs out of runway to do a third. Not crawling just yet… although when he’s on his tummy, he seems to think that extending his arms and legs a la Superman will get him mobile. And then he gets frustrated when it doesn’t. It’s pretty cute.

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Tonight was a good sleep night, which is why I have a moment to write a blog post. But the past couple nights have been slightly less than ideal.

There’s not a parent alive who doesn’t ask new parents, “How is your sleep?” or “How is your child sleeping?” and there’s a reason for this. Sleep is a roller-coaster. You think you have an angel when it comes to nighttime routines and one day he proves you wrong. Then he does it for a few nights in a row and you think you’re going to go slightly loopy from exhaustion…and he gives you a good night to reset you.

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that he didn’t follow established routines. We’ve been fairly successful with our new routine in which he gets lots of independent sleep time starting at 6:30. But new routines take a while to stick, babies are constantly changing (teething time is setting in or has set in!), and apparently at this age it’s not uncommon for him to have out-of-whackness in his sleep schedule. Well that’s Cole in a nutshell… we took a video of his overtired goofiness, which I’ll try to post here in an update.

The rest of this is more about me.
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