baby care

Schuyler shows off her tender and gentle handling of infants...

and her generous blanket usage on her own child.

hi ho, hi ho...

...it's off to work we go. in round 2, there's a lot of deja vu. all the little things you have to do to keep these kids alive come back to you - everything's the same but a little bit different. breast feeding is working this time around which is lovely and i think both parties enjoy the experience more than at least one of them thought. papa feels a little less necessary than he did when he was The Milk Man but now that mama is back to work, we both have returned to the duties that come with expressing. the little sacks of dated milk popsicles have returned to our freezer, slowing taking over the space from less life-sustaining items like Haagen Dazs and frozen yoghurt bars. watching all that liz does to make this kid stay alive and happy, makes me pretty glad my mammory glands have been switched off. she's a trooper. when the kids are teenagers and pulling their melodramatic nonsense, i'm going to be the cliched father reminding them of all this work that went into making them. i'm sure they will weigh this knowledge and reason through it and accept that perhaps they were hasty in their behaviour and apologise.

on another note, i missed being home with Charlie the way i was home with Schuyler. this new job has many advantages (like being home in the evenings with the kids and being able to attend all doc appointments but i don't get the summers off to be with my kids either - cry me a river, eh?). i feel like i haven't been enough of his dad yet. i'm working on making this up to him over his lifetime. i may even learn a sport or something.

our little people

Schuyler takes a break from the stresses of Toddlerdom in the morning.

Our happy but Casper-like son trains in his Neglectomatic.

bye bye pink beach

Pink Beach was our second home here. When Kim and Wardy Baby were upside down in Australia we could always come over to Pink Beach and hang out and it was kind of like we were hanging out with them for a bit. Now, it is been rented out for two years, it will be sad not to have that part of them here. Fortunately, Kim and Wardy Baby themselves will be back soon in enough in April so life is good.

anywhere & everywhere

In her continual effort to take parenting to the next level, Schuyler invents the bookshelf bed.

And she has also learned to use tools effectively... Namely to reach forbidden items.

bermy bouncers

Although the parental humiliation level is extremely high in the above clip, it did result in Charlie's first laugh being captured in one's and zero's forever.

Our more alert readers may recall the original:

waking up is hard to do

that's my boy

So tonight we decided to break Charlie. He'd been mainly sleeping on the couch with me for the first sleep of the night and then in the bed with us and feeding through the rest of the night. We were just trying to get by so we let sleeping babies lie. Tonight was the night we would change all that. We read up on all the sleep methods (meaning I listened to Liz summarise the volumes she had read on the subject) and then put him to sleep in his room at the same time as Schuyler went down. And he screamed. I mean really screamed in a way that makes you feel like (a) the worst parent that has ever, ever lived ever and (b) that information could be extracted from terrorists in a matter of seconds if subjected to this sound. Every 3 mins or so i'd go in and remind him that he wasn't completely abandoned in what appeared to be a nicely painted jail cell and that we loved him still (although the screaming doesn't help your case there, buddy). After a half hour, liz fed him and we put him down again. And he screamed. And then cried. And then sobbed. And then... mysteriously and magically, he went to sleep. And liz and i spent our first evening alone together in months both recovering from the emotional erosion and feeling oversized pride in our little boy. And he slept a good 6 hours before his next feed. Got up a couple of more times but after a feed went right back to sleep. That's m'boy!

driving my baby

2011