Why, Blog, Why?

So, I went into this thinking “We have one kid already, so a second one should be easy…” OK, the truth is that it’s not so easy, no sir. In fact I had completely forgotten (or blocked out) how difficult the first few months were with Maelin when she was born 2-1/2 years ago. The sleepless nights, diaper changes at 3:00 in the morning… Well, that’s it really, just those two things, but man-o-man do they wear on you after a week.

But that has nothing to do with the subject of this post, which is about me being a stay at home Dad now.

Follow up:

Sarah went back to school this past Tuesday (she’s in rotations now and can’t take any more time off from school), and since we felt awful over the thought of sending a 1-week old to day care, I am staying home with both kids. Lucky for me, I was able to work out a deal with my employer so that I could telecommute and work in the evenings.

The week took some getting used to. Trying to manage a 2-year-old’s daily routine with the unroutine of a newborn could have been messy. but I must have done something to please the God of Time and Synchronism because everything fell into place quite nicely. Naps and feedings ran together like well lubed cogs.

One thing that was a bit disappointing was some of Maelin’s behavior. She’s been hitting and not listening a lot in the past two weeks. You can really tell that she is testing her limits with us, like watching for our reactions while doing something we just told her not to do. Of course, her life has been thrown for a loop just as much if not more than our’s has by the arrival of baby Raya. But the whole “terrible twos” thing came out of nowhere. Or maybe we are just tired enough these days that we notice it more. Time-outs have zero effect on this kid, and she could care less about losing toys (we even went so far as to put every single one of her toys in the basement and she was like “meh…"), so we’ve been trying to counter this behavior by keeping her as active as possible. Still, she’s probably not getting near as much excercise and play-time as she used to at day care which is probably why she’s acting out. Fortunately we paid to hold her slot through at least January and we might start dropping her off a few days a week just so she can get the interaction with the other kids and she hopefully won’t feel as cooped up. I’m not sure how she’ll take to going back though, especially knowing that Raya and I will be home without her.

We stayed at home for the most part this week, but we did go to see the cows and get ice cream at the dairy farm on Thursday. We also got out nice and early on Friday and went to the local Barnes and Nobel book store, where we happened to show up right at the beginning of story time (and I was the only Dad in a room full of Moms).

All in all - I’m exhausted, but no worse than Sarah is after a full week of work and nursing through each night, and it was nice to spend so much time with my girls. Still working out some of the tricker parts of working from home, but I’m not going to knock it since it’s way better than having to take an unpaid leave of absense. To be honest, I think I get more done working from home at night then I did going into the office during the day. And let me just say that it feels really friggen sweet to be able to just go take a nap for a little bit if I’m feeling tired and then going right back to work. Way better than slamming coffee at the office and trying not to let my head hit the keyboard. And in case you’re wondering, I have yet to telecommute naked. Yet.

This turned out to be way off-topic for what I usually post to this blog, so I think I’ll post these updates to the kids’ blog from now on.