Solo flight
Today my wife went back to work, and I stayed home with the little guy. It seemed to go well on all fronts, though there were one point during the day where he was crying his little head off because, for the first time, his mom left him home with me for a significent length of time. (I’m pretty confident that was the cause – I changed him, bathed him, fed him, tried to play with him and get him to calm down, gave him some tummy time, sang to him*, played him some new music, sat him in his bouncy chair, laid him in his crib and every bed in the house, you name it. Inconsolable.) I felt like I’d struck out on my first daddy day because I pretty much had to let him cry that one out. On those occasions, a couple of times a week, where he gets like that – usually at bed time – I wind up ushering any and all cats out of his room like Geordi La Forge evacuating a bunch of non-speaking-but-clearly-panicked extras away from a warp drive that’s about to explode on Star Trek, and closing the door as the last one out. Then I go and turn on the baby monitor and listen to him cry anyway. But today, since he’d resisted any attempts to sleep all day long, I set my alarm to get me up in an hour and then went to take a nap in the next room. There was nothing I could do for him, and I was exhausted.
Of course, his mom came home and he was a perfectly behaved little angel. 😛 (He had actually calmed down before then.)
But overall, it was a good day. I’ve got to do some serious work on his sleeping patterns, but I thought that today was a good start. The only time I got frazzled was with the crying fit, but that was more a case of being worried about him than being upset or exasperated with him. Even when he was waking me up every 20 minutes or so, I’d go and look at him and he’d flash me that little smile (which he has clearly learned to use to his best advantage) as if to say “Yeah, dad, I gotcha. I just blasted my binky and made you come and give it back to me. Ain’t I just a stinker?”
I’m disappointed that I’ve had no bites in the O2 community on helping me with the Binky Blast! game, by the way. I know that, in execution, it looks like an average O2 game, not a trendsetting, flashy G7400+ game that pushes the bounds of what the system can do, so I suppose it’s failed to capture the imagination. Maybe someday I can figure out how to program it myself.
Anyway, back on track: infinite respect to the stay-at-home moms and dads out there. Today was my trial by fire, and I know there’ll be days both better and worse than this ahead. But one look at that little face is more than enough to know it’s worth it. And my reward for today? Evan’s mom came home and cuddled him all night and then went off to snooze with the little guy.
I guess she missed him too.… Read more
