Why, Blog, Why?

OK - So, I've been a stay at home dad now for over a half-year and I should have plenty of time to post, yar? Nar! Honestly, the only reason why I have any free time right now is because Mom has the kids for a few minutes so I can finally finish up this post that I've been working on for literally months. So what have I been up to?

1. Fatherhood
2. See #1

Honestly, that's about it. My plan to aggressively code for freelance projects in the off hours took a sever hit within the first few days of this role change circa January '08. Office work left me mentally drained. Full-time fatherhood leaves me physically drained.

So how has it been so far? No doubt it's been fun. As I tell anyone who will listen, whether you're a stay at home dad, a normal working-man, or even a divorcee with visitation writes, fatherhood is an excuse to act like the 13-y-o dork that still lives inside you. Cracking fart jokes, wrestling on the floor, wearing a clown wig - fatherhood, to me any ways, is about showing your kids the fun side of life and being a kid again, recapturing that sense of wonder from discovery and that lackadaisical, hakuna matata sense of time. Well, that and screaming your head off because the kids seem to have lost their ears/brains over breakfast. That is fatherhood.

I guess I can't say that's all that's been happening around here. Since the Summer months have come (at least according to the calendar if not the actual weather...) things have ramped up. People talk about having Seasonal Mood Disorder, but honestly I think it should be called "You Live In New England". Summer makes me want to stay here forever. The other 11 months remind me why I probably/hopefully won't...

Any ways, Summer has ramped up our social lives. We went to an awesome wedding at a summer camp (marshmallows and weird-smelling cabins included!), went to Maelin's first dance recital, celebrated our 6th anniversary, saved a bird from certain death-by-cat (not once but twice!), have been to the lake a few times, had the family over, etc., etc.

Freelance work has actually been pouring in as well despite my time for completing said work. That has resulted in all too many 20-hour coding binges during which I still managed to neglect some of my favorite clients (Sorry Steve!). My Mom's off for the summer though and taking the girls a few days a week for the next few months so hopefully I can catch up. Oh, and Firefox 3 launched last week but while I managed to get an updated Clean & Close patched to work with it, it's currently still waiting for someone from Mozilla to review it so it's not available for auto-update yet. (But you can download it directly here)

OK, I got code's to write. Until next year...

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.

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Sarah started having contractions at 2:30 am on Tuesday, and a little less than 11 hours later Raya Madeline Bloom came into the world.

Raya Madeline Bloom

Born: September 26, 2006 @ 1:03 pm
Weight: 7 pounds 15.8 ounces
Length: 20.5 inches

Both Mama and baby are great. Big Sister Maelin is loving her new role and loves to help out with the baby. We got home earlier this evening and are getting settled in. I’ll let Sarah blog about the details of the birth when she’s feeling up to it.

We’re having friends and family over as everyone’s health and mood permits. Hope to see you all soon!

Can’t sleep, so I’m up surfing. I thought I may as well post some updates.

First, if you left a comment recently (a legitimate one) and it isn’t showing up you have my apologies. I just nuked 85 comments that all appeared to be spam. If yours got lost in the shuffle I apologize.

If you hadn’t heard, Sarah is pregnant with our 2nd (or 4th if you’re counting, or maybe 3rd 2nd if you want to get technical) child. If you had heard that you might not have heard that there was some concern because of some blood pouches that formed in the uterus, and while they aren’t an absolute indicator that something would go wrong, it was just one more thing to worry about. And then, if you heard both of those news items maybe you didn’t here the latest complication - that the baby might have Trisomy 18 (a.k.a. Edward’s Syndrome), which as one nurse practitioner explained is “incompatible with life”. How quaint. This concern stemmed from a cyst (specifically a choroid plexus cyst) that was found in the baby’s brain during a recent ultrasound. Ironically it was the same ultrasound that confirmed that Sarah’s body had reabsorbed the blood pouches.

This month has seen some good news after all of that though - At a follow-up ultrasound a few days later they were able to rule out Trisomy 18 with a pretty high degree of certainty (1 in 99,000). That was a huge relief. We also found out the sex of the baby which I won’t reveal here in case any of you don’t want to know, but I’d be happy to blab about it if you drop me an email to ask.

I’ve been reading a lot and listening to some fabulous sci-fi stories in podcast form. In the past few months I’ve gone through The Lock, a really great fictional read about the theories behind the Loch Ness Monster. It goes down some Darwinian lines of thinking, and there are lots of quotes from real-life biologists and naturalists. If you are into evolution and naturalism and cryptozoology then I would recommend it.

A young Canadian named Cory Doctorow has quickly become my new favorite author. I knew of him originally as a contributor to Boing Boing, a geek-news site that I read daily. I found out he was an author through Escape Pod, one of the great sci-fi podcasts, when they read one of his stories. I then started to listen to some of Cory’s own podcasts which are a mix of readings of his own stories and recordings of speeches that he has given on Digital Rights Management software/policy/legislation. Then just last weekend I picked up a short-story collection of his called A Place So Foreign and 8 More. The stories are fan-friggen-tastic and I’m just all but finished reading it already. He has a really unique style of writing in that he a.) likes to dump his readers into the middle of these strange locals and then explain them from the inside out, and b.) he uses a lot of nerd slang, techno babble and geek-speak which is at first striking and then ends up supporting the stories and characters. The stories are fun and short and, well the guy deserves all of the awards he’s gotten for writing so far.

I’m also picking through Understanding Waldorf Education, a great introduction to the principles of Waldorf education. It’s the education model that we hope to educate Maelin with. The private Waldorf schools are pricey for sure, and there aren’t many in New England, but the system really echo’s Sarah’s and my own thoughts on life and learning. I’m not well versed enough on the topic to give a detailed explanation, but in short they focus on natural, spiritual, emotional and artistic talents and try to get students to focus on things that they aren’t already good at (i.e. get the athletes to paint and the painters to play). The schools are in beautiful locations to boot.

And then there’s the Bill Bryson book that I’m reading called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Unlike Stephen Hawkings’ Universe in a Nutshell books which I’ve read and listened to on CD numerous times to no avail, Bryson’s book goes from the creation of the universe to present time in words that mere mortals can understand (even if the actual ideas are still unimaginable).

When I’m not reading I’ve been playing Oblivion for XBox 360, an amazingly open-ended role-playing game that is great for people like me who just love to explore.

In other family news Maelin has been crying up a storm the last few days and we can’t tell if it’s new teeth coming in or the Terrible Two’s or something entirely different. It’s been real tough on all of us though with lots of stressful nights. But, it makes the times when she’s “normal” like pure heaven, and she couldn’t be any cuter either way. Today she stood at the window as I left for work and was yelling “I Love You” to me as I drove past - heart wrenching let me tell you, especially now that she’s started in on me every morning with “No work Papa. Stay Maelin’s home.” Yeah, like that doesn’t start the day off with a sob.

Work… is work. I do it for the paycheck. Nuff said.

44-minutes later and I suppose I should retire to bed, at least if only to do some more reading. All of this reading by the way has started to make me think about getting into writing again. I wrote a lot when I was younger, especially in high school. I’m sure there is a floppy disk laying around some where with some really bad beginnings of stories. The hard part is deciding what to write about. I feel like every idea I have has already been done in some way or another. One great thing about reading Cory Doctorow’s stuff is that he has a knack for taking an old story and spinning a new story off of its heels. As he quoted in a recent podcast, “Amateurs plagiarize. Experts steal.” :) I guess that’s my cue to just do something, anything to get the ball rolling. If I’m brave enough maybe I’ll post some of it here.

TTFN

Link of the moment - DIY brilliance

If you haven’t heard yet, I am an incredibly fertile man, and as a result Sarah and I are expecting another bebe. This one is due sometime in April. Sarah will be posting all of the details on her new blog at http://maelin.csb7.com/wordpress/ http://www.csb7.com/blogs/mama/.