Category: …And Little E Makes 3

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology

Dad’s day off

Tuesdays are my wife’s day off, so about half the time they wind up being my day off from Evan. I feel like a bit of a heel for looking forward to Tuesdays. My wife has the baby most of any given Sunday, but that’s because I’m off at the farm working my butt off – not much of a day off for daddy. I love my kid, but it’s kinda nice having a day to myself once a week. His mom has hauled him into town for a pediatrician’s visit (normal) and his first round of shots (which I don’t think he’s gonna like). Then she’s got some other stops to make – and quite frankly, I think those have everything to do with showing the little guy off. 😆

In today’s “this day X years ago” posts, this topic cropped up, and I thought I’d go and take a look at what my music directory is like now, two years later. Survey says…about 120 gigabytes! Of nothing but music/audio! That’s almost exactly 1/3 of my main PC’s hard drive. Good Lord. This is part of why, the last time I was at Kent’s place and saw his Western Digital external drive, I’ll admit I popped a bit of a woody. That thing is nice, and it’s a RAID drive to boot (pitiful pun intended). Needless to say, that’s gone right onto the old wish list (right up there with the Wii I’m never gonna get at this rate :-P). Here’s hoping Santa think I’ve been a really good daddy this year. 😯

That’s all I’ve got in my brain right now. (Ain’t much, I know.)… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Fisher-Price presents: My First Shiner

You can tell Evan’s my kid by the way he fights sleep. That is to say, he isn’t merely resisting the notion of closing his eyes and surrendering consciousness – he’s actively trying to kick sleep’s ass so he can stay awake all hours like Daddy does. This is the cause of some almighty screaming crying fits at night, as well as lots of flailing about. He’s put an inexplicable scratch on the right side of his own nose that I don’t look forward to explaining at his next doctor’s visit. And now my son Sluggo has managed to punch himself just below the right eye and cause a bit of swelling. 😯 … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Television & Movies

How I fed your mother

Man, I’m getting domestic in my old age. Not only did I feed Evan and change him all day, and not sleep a lot, but I whipped up some dinner for Jan before she got home (a rather tasty white cheddar rotini with broccoli and chicken thingie that I kinda hammered together) and some dessert (extreme chocolate brownies for her, chocolate-peanut-butter brownies for me). For my dinner, I finished off a pasta salad concoction that I threw together around lunchtime. Nobody’s starving in this house on my watch.

In the past 24 hours, Jan’s only had to worry about one feeding and one diaper change while I napped at around 9:30 tonight. I got up at about half past midnight to find that Evan’s mom had snuck off to her bed with him, but when he woke up for a bottle, she was strangely happy to hand him back over to me. 😆 He’s back in his crib now, with an Obi cat keeping his feet warm. The roaring winds have cooled things off drastically, so I have the little guy under a couple of layers of blankets, which he kept kicking off until Obi helpfully laid a single arm across his feet. (I tried to get a picture of this with the night vision setting on my camera, but it just didn’t turn out.) News flash: Evan smiles for daddy, and smiles for mommy, and smiles really big for Obi. He wuvs his kitty. I’d bet a substantial amount of money that his first word will be “Obi”.

I’m not sure what to do about Xena’s adopted kitten. I didn’t see that coming at all. We’re expecting a hard freeze tomorrow night, so I’m not sure how this is going to work out…Xena may like the little white and grey kitty, but the supreme council of housecats hasn’t signed off on the interloper.

The talk shows have hushed up with the advent of the WGA strike; soaps’ll be next, and then weekly shows. For those wondering what the writers are really demanding, J. Michael Straczynski explains it all for you. Granted, he simplifies things a great deal, but it’s about eight cents, folks. Not eight cents on the dollar, but eight cents per unit, which is a much smaller figure in the end. His post doesn’t address the internet/new media end of things, but I’m hoping he’ll tackle that one soon.

Hopefully no one’s put off by this week’s truncated update to the site; we may have to figure out “something else” with the episode guides, which are normally weekly bread and butter, if I can’t do better than this. One thought that has occurred to me is to present episode guides like not-every-week features – present them only when the season is completed. I’m not too sure about that though. theLogBook isn’t grinding to a halt just because I’ve got a giggling bundle of joy, but obviously there’s going to be a little bit of rearrangement of priorities here and there, and him keeping me up with hours and hours of binky blasts – which, by the great big grin on his face I see when I go to fix it, I’m convinced are absolutely intentional – instead of sleeping sure doesn’t help. 😆 … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base

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

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...And Little E Makes 3

And that’s why we do all this stuff

Despite the fact that my wife and I are trying to get back to normal, sleep-at-night “regular people” schedules ahead of her return to work on Saturday, last night I was told at around 10 o’clock that I needed to somehow pull together a bunch of Halloween-themed songs for a function at my niece’s pre-school the next morning. I had already shorted myself considerably on the sleep front Tuesday with the idea in mind that I would, in fact, be going to sleep at a “decent” hour (i.e. not after 9 in the morning after an all-night shift with the little guy), and would wake up a couple of times to bottle-feed Evan. So needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled with this. It took me most of the night to try to track down a bunch of such tunes, which I don’t normally keep in stock in my collection, and I didn’t get around to actually beginning to assemble the aforementioned compilation until about 5:00 a.m.; Evan woke up at 5:30 and I went to feed him. I was dead to the world, basically feeding him on autopilot. It was almost 6 before he sucked down the last of the bottle (by the way, those little disposable-bottle baggie things are really cool), and he was sleepy, and I was too, only he’d actually get to lay his head down when we were done, rather than going and sorting through a bunch of “spooky” ’50s and ’60s novelty songs that I just barely peripherally remember from my oldies radio days.

I burped him to no avail, and then he held up right next to my ear and gave me a big ol’ baby BELLLLLCHH. Right in the old man’s ear.* I had to keep from laughing too loud at that and waking up the whole house, and as I was putting him down in his crib, he looked at me and laughed with a little baby smile that could’ve melted lead. He must’ve seen that it had some effect on me, because he kept doing it all day.

If there’s a better reason to become a dad than to soak up all those baby smiles and kiss away all the baby tears that I possibly can, it certainly hasn’t occurred to me yet.

* THAT’S MY BOY!

P.S. The real beauty of the Halloween music CD that I made? It then proceeded to not get used at all. For anything. Long story.… Read more