I'm Alright

Our little guy was very brave through his first round of immunizations. He recovered quickly and is back to his smiley self. When we were at the pediatrician's office, he suggested that Colin may be a candidate for Greco Roman wrestling. If anything, I think he'll be a swimmer. He LOVES his baths- he gets this huge smile on his face and splashes his arms. I was trying to get him to do a mini back float (with us supporting him of course), but he doesn't hold himself with enough tension to pull it off yet. He doesn't even mind when the water runs over his face. I hope this is something that he can keep throughout his childhood and beyond- I love the pool and swimming, so I hope somehow that got passed or will get passed along.

Nobody likes needles

Today was the big two month checkup and immunization day. Our little man weighs in at 14lbs. 8.5oz. 24 inches long. He is apparently in the 90th percentile in both weight and length. It doesn't appear that there are any problems with him being that big, but the doctor did comment on it a couple of times. We heard the loudest scream, and saw the deepest shade of red he has ever turned. He shrieked and had this horrible look of confusion on his face when the first needle went in, and just when he thought everything was going to be okay -- he got poked again for a total of three times. He screamed for a little while longer and then just looked sad and hurt. They told us we could expect him to be tired and cranky. He slept for a while after the trauma is doing better than we were expecting. He is sleeping for the most part, but when he wakes up he screams like crazy. We gave his some baby tylonol, an he kept screaming until he tasted the grapey goodness on his tongue, I think it helped a little bit, and hopefully he will be able to make it through the night without too much trouble.

Movies!
There are now two little movies of our little man up in the gallery

Sears Portrait Lameos

We get a lot of coupons in the mail now for baby related stuff since we subscribe to one of those parenting magazines, and we both signed up for a bunch of free offers on the web. We got a pretty good coupon for pictures at Sears- the kind that are more or less required if you are born in this country. Overall it was a fairly frustrating experience that I would be very unhappy with if I was paying anything close to full price. We showed up on time for our appointment, but they were running late with another customer. From where we were sitting all of the proofs the woman was trying to choose from looked exactly the same so she should have just picked one. The whole time we were waiting Colin was smiling and laughing, he was looking around and totally ready to get in front of the camera. By the time we got into the photo room he was getting tired, and there was a big fan in the room since the lights get so warm and he didn't like the breeze. Still he was pretty smiley for the first couple minutes, but the woman didn't take any pictures of him... she stood there squeezing and shaking a rubber ducky in front of him. I was watching the screen she was using as a guide for the shots, and there were easily 5 good opportunities she missed. I think she thought he was older than he is, so she was expecting more responsivness and cooperation out of him. She eventually fired of a couple of shots, and we are getting some prints of the above pose . The other lame thing is that it takes two weeks to get your pictures. The one cool thing is that they have a web address you can look at your proofs at and order more prints from. That is where this pic came from. They have lager versions of the pic too, so we are going to copy it to a cd and take it to Costco and get some wallet size prints done (the pics are fairly low resolution so wallets are the only size worth getting).


BTW: Gallery 5 is up now...

Parenthood
I think it is time for me to really start posting more here, and making my posts more substantive. We have been parents now for a little over two months. Honestly it hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting. You hear such horror stories about the sleep deprivation, the mental stupor, and the laundry. The laundry is as bad as they say, but I think that we are doing pretty well with the sleep and stupor because we were mentally well prepared for it, we have a strong open relationship, and we have a really good baby. The last few days he has been kind of fussy, and his eating pattern has been a little off, but I still think we have it a lot better than a lot of people. For instance—he has been really fussy this evening, and he eat will eat for a little bit and then get fussy, an then cry because he us still hungry… but we just kept taking turns holding and comforting him until we got him to pass out in his swing. Some people spend every night fighting with a baby they can’t console – so I try not to complain about things too much. There are days when we are really tired from his keeping us up, and I’ll get comments at work about how tired I look, but most people think it is somehow cute or funny so I just laugh it off with them, and use it as a reason to go home early when I need a nap.

It is hard to put the feeling of parenthood into words for me, so I will think about it a bit more and see if I can come up with some more coherent thoughts. So far I think things are going well, and like I said, I think we are handling things pretty well. We have a clean, well dressed, well fed baby, we remember to cook for ourselves most meals, and I usually remember to change my shirt before going back to work so I don’t look like a bird crapped on me. Eventually we will work out a good, steady routine -- and be able to keep up on all the less important things (like blogging, and keeping the living room clean) but for now those thing aren’t as important as sitting and playing with Colin trying to get him to give us a nice big smile

More pics coming soon
I plan on getting up gallery five this weekend. It is interesting to look at all the pics. You can really see how he is getting bigger, and how he is changing. People are starting to say that he looks more like Christine now. The shape of his face seems to be changing too. At any rate, I just wanted to do a quick update, and let you know that you will be able to see for your self shortly.

Updates
So I keep meaning to update more, but I never quite seem to get around to it. Things have been going pretty well. We have a pretty good routine going when he decides to cooperate. Christine does most (almost all) of the getting up at night still, and we usually keep him in the bed with us so when he wakes up hungry she can feed him before he starts freaking out too much. When he is in his crib in the other room we can hear a lot of noise on the monitor becasue he wakes up serveral times through out the night, but he usually falls right back to sleep-- so there is no need to get up everytime we hear something. When he is hungry though... it is kind of like he has a fuse and if you don't assure him that food is on its way in a timely manner, he kind of explodes.

As always I will try to start writing more, but in the mean time there are more pictures up... Gallery 4