WHAT YOU TALKIN' 'BOUT, WILLIS?

The best things about being a parent..

I think the best thing about being a parent is being amazed at your own capacity for love. I had been worried about how I would be, how I would react to this new person. I heard people say, You'll never know how amazing it is til you have one of your own. I believed them, I knew they were right, I didn't know how much I would love this boy. I love Jackson so much, way more than my dog, whom I love immensely. I think it has to do with knowing that he will some day look something like me, he will run up and grab my neck hugging me, he will eventually think I'm a dork and be embarrassed of me, then hopefully after High School he'll come back around and we'll have an incredible relationship where we talk about great things and share whatever he wants to share of his life.

I also have to mention how incredibly in love with my wife I am now. I never stopped loving her, but seeing her with this kid has rekindled my affection for her in a way that I never suspected. She is incredible with him, she has taken on the challenge of Mommying so well, and I'm so incredibly proud of her and in love with her right now.

Finally, I am pleased with how close I have felt to God since Jackson has arrived. I don't ever want to forget in all the business of that morning, when we didn't know if she was in labor or not, grabbing everything we needed to go to the hospital, and stopping to pray before we left. Then that night as the three of us laid there on the hospital bed, praying together for the first time. It's a perfect time to rekindle our prayer life, and I certainly want to follow my parents example with raising me with nightly prayers and bible reading. It's so easy to take all this for granted, to say how lucky we are that delivery was relatively easy and our boy is healthy, but I give all praise, honor, and glory to God, and I hope we will all grow closer to Him as a family.

Life is over..

I've been thinking about life's accomplishments, how you graduate High Schoole, go to/graduate from college, get married, then have possibly have kids. Not everyone enjoys all these, but they are the average American things to do. Then for us parents, life is pretty much over, at least in terms of our accomplishing anything. We now just get to enjoy and live vicariously through our children's accomplishments, overemphasizing what they have done--turned over, said Dada, or taken first steps. It's all about them at this point, anything else you go on to do as a person, get a Ph. D. or write a novel, is just gravy but certainly not necessary.

I find it all very relaxing. No more pressure. Just keep the kid in school and off drugs and in about 30 years he should be coming to the same realization that I am that life's major accomplishments are over, at least in the personal success sense.

I feel bad about that last post.

Proverbs 12:15 - "The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice. "

Typical Reactions..

Here are some typical reactions to just about anything positive we say to people about our baby. For instance, we say, He sleeps most of the time, he's been great about that so far. They say, Oh, just wait 'til (teething, potty training, teenage years), he'll do (some horrible thing). If we say something negative about the kid, like, He kept us up all night last night, they say, Oh just wait, my kid projectile pooped, vomited, and passed gas, his head spun around and spit pea soup, or he ran away became a carney.

Why the one-upmanship about how terrible your kids is? I'm thinking, exactly, why my kid is better than yours. I mean, no offense, but you just said what stupid or annoying thing yours did. Why argue?

That's a pretty annoying thing that I hope to avoid in the coming years--the urge to share my wealth of knowledge. No offense to anyone whose given us advice, but when it comes down to it, we'll wreck this kid's life our own way.

Baby Inventions

Wouldn't baby monitors be more effective if they provided two-way communication? So I could be sleeping, working, or just being in another room and hear the baby crying, cut in and say, Hey boy, cut that out. Why should I get up and go in there?

J/k. I do believe in getting a lot of face-time with the baby. However, there are a few inventions I'd like to see to make life easier. The first would be a automatic diaper-changing machine. If Eli Whitney could invent a cotton gin in 1792, I'm pretty sure 211 years later we should be able to do something here. Also, how bout a baby washer styled after those nifty golf ball washers. Swish, swish, swish, and he's fresh as a daisy.

Any suggestions for useful baby inventions? I say useful, because here's a list of useless ones available at Target or Walmart:
Wipe warmers - takes all the fun out of slapping a cold wet rag on his butt
Electric or Microwave bottle sterilizers - guess what, you can do the same thing with a cooking pot
Boppy - some people love em, Kerry just sits on it
One-way baby monitors

Here are some products that I really like:
Diaper Champ - keeps poopy smell isolated and uses kitchen-sized garbage bags. I just want to see an X-Large version for families with octuplets.
Snugli - the only way a father can lay around and do whatever he wants while claiming to be watching the baby

Oh yeah, I want to invent Mom a way to drink while nursing without dribbling all over. I guess she could just use a beer hat or a Platypus backpack.

CSS in Mozilla..?

Anybody know why my site now looks OK in Explorer (except to those who don't like photo backgrounds and therefore hate my baby, j/K) but terrible in Mozilla? Is Moveable Type MS-friendly? It would seem that all the tags would transfer more easily into Mozilla than IE, and not the other way around.

Screaming baby..?

OK, so, last night it started. Wouldn't go to sleep, woke up after 30 minutes screaming, then screamed for 3 hours. Dan Lyons was right, my lungs ARE tired. J/K, the baby was screaming. Was fed, changed, burped, but just kept on.
Any advice?

Star Wars Kid

This is pretty funny.

More info at www.jedimaster.net.

Sleepy Baby

Our baby is the sleepiest baby in the world! Hopefully he's not sick or anything, which the doctor should have told us, but he is great. Right now hes sleeping on my chest in his Snugli. If our digital camera were here I'd post that, but its off to Toshiba for replacement. I'll just post this videoclip instead.

You'll need Window Media Player.

Jaundice goes Bye, Bye. Light therapy successful!

Bilirubin level dropped from 16 to 12 since yesterday, so no more therapy or trips to the hospital for Jackson. Big relief, but I'm gonna miss that space-pod aura around the bassinet at night.

Globaby!

So we're having some drama now. Today we went to the Children's Hospital to check Jackson's Biliruben(?) level, to see if he has jaundice. Turns out he does the minimum level that requires treatment. Its apparently pretty common, with lots of babies having it recently.

Anyway, when I got home from work I found my boy hooked up to a pretty cool fiber optic machine called the Wallaby. It emits a cool blue light into a blanket that treats the condition. I was all excited but it has Kerry pretty freaked out. I call it his space suit.

So, now we go everyday to the hospital to get his levels checked and he wears the space suit until it goes down. I keep praying thanks for all this incredible technology.

Sleep?

So, I actually should be dead-tired right now, which I am, but asleep. I've had no caffeine in days and only slept in 2 hour intervals between feedings and diapers and I still can't sleep right now. I probably could have dropped off but Jack had some hiccups from space (like ALF).

Threw his feet up on the background image of this page and tried to manipulate Josiah's css a little bit. I really hate CSS.. Should take a class on it.

Will post some more pics soon.

This is easy!

Well, I had no idea, but this is pretty easy! Eat, poop, change, sleep. Mostly sleep though. What a great baby. I know I've always said babies are basically all the same, smelly and ugly, but I honestly have to say, ours is different. He's awesome. So far there's no unnecessary crying, he sleeps a ton, his poop doesn't stink, and he's so adorable. And on top of that, I feel completely confident as a parent. Where is all of this coming from? God-given paternal instinct? Well, Grandma's a big help too.

Pics

Here are some images:

Too tired to blog any more..

3... It's the magic number

Well, so much for September! Here's what's happened..

8-14-03

So it's 6:00am and Kerry woke me up saying "something" was happening. Apparently her water broke. I wanted to post to my blog before we left but its down, so I'll paste this later. Need to grab stuff and go to the hospital soon. Keep stopping to pray every couple minutes, like vain repetition will help. Helps me anyway.

8-15-03

Long night. Here's a rundown of basically what happened:
5:30 - Water broke. Just a trickle. Kerry was uncertain about labor.
9:30 - Arrival at Women's East. Minor contractions on way to hospital. Nurse checked fluid and confirmed baby. 2.5cm dilated.
1:30 - Contractions much stronger. Still stuck in exam room.
3:30 - Finally get into nice room. Last contractions before epidural were "rough."
3:45 - Epidural. 6cm.
3:46 - Relief.
4:00 - Dr. Brody arrived. 9cm. Almost time to push.
5:00 - Setup room. Start pushing.
6:00 - Jackson is crooked, needs to line up correctly, head is stuck above the pubic bone.
7:00 - Head is crowning, he's close!
7:15 - A few big pushes and Jackson Christopher comes bursting forth! Daddy cuts the cord, Moms gets a couple stitches (he had a big head) and the boy weighs in at 8lbs 1oz, measures 20in. long.
7:25 - Grandparents rush in, lots of pictures.

Lots of stuff we could include but that will do for now. Here's a few of the funnier details.

After pushing with the nurse and doc in the room, when it was delivery time about 5 more nurses caming tumbling in like clowns from a tiny car. Who were all these people?

Kerry can be quoted as saying, "He needs to come out!" "Get him out of me!" and "Oooh, Ooooh!"

Our main nurse for the day had to have been this lady from Strangers with Candy and somehow I think our doctor turned into Dr. Zoidberg.

After nursing him they wisked him away to the nursery and we could a few minutes sleep, then a couple hours in between feedings.

Pretty tired this morning but awake now.

Wish the hospital had Wi-Fi, or at least a network jack, but only dialup is available.

Oh yeah, out of three digital cameras, 1 malfunctioned, 1 batt died, and the other was a lifesaver. Now neither of the working models want to connect to my laptop.

So, you heard it here first. Tons pf pics (served off my UTC account) coming soon!

Good Discussion

Hopefully this will link to some good discussion about God's view of people as groups or individuals, and is He happy with religious division today..

Let them eat my ridiculous new movie!

So Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign seems to be based on the idea that since he's rich, he doesn't need to take money from special interest groups, thus he's the best man for the job. I think thats a fabulous idea. Because really, who is going to be more for the people than the rich? Particulary an Austrian-born Hollywood actor. Of course there have been bad examples, like Marie Antoinette--also Austrian, but hey, you really think you want some poor guy off the street in office?

I thought of this first in the last mayoral election in Chattanooga, where there were about 10 crazy, underprivileged, lower-income candidates, running against Corker, an extremely wealthy businessman and land developer. As I much as I dislike excessive welth and the trapping thereof, I then decided that it is better for the rich to be in politics than poor. Of course honesty is the key, but who isn't going to take an opportunity to better himself, with all the construction projects that need to be doled out.

Of course now my theory has been debunked, by the likes of Martha Stewart and Mayor Corker, and having to drive to Douglas Street to get to work, or do a Dukes of Hazard, Yee-Haw when jumping the hill now constructed on Georgia Ave. near Vets bridge.

Oh yeah, I hated everything but the last 8 minutes of T3.

Vacation Last Year

So here's a picture from our vacation last year around Labor Day. I shot the print with my new digital camera, which apparently is nowhere near as good as scanning. Also, I unfortunately had B&W; film in the camera that night, so I added the blue back in with Photoshop.

Whenever you have a chance, I highly recommend seeing BMG.

Amazing Race

Kerry and I love CBS's The Amazing Race. I have been accused of planning our vacations as though we were competing on this show. I figure, why hang around one place for our limited two weeks of vacation when there's is a whole world I need to see before I die.

We have been fortunate enough to have been to many of the places they go on this show. In cleaning out the baby room I had to go through all our old pictures, so I plan on posting those as soon as I have time..

Chuck and Millie were our favorites in the season, but unfortunately they are already out of the game. I know Chuck from years ago and met him again in college and he is one of the most upstanding fellows I know. I hope the consolation prizes were good and that he and Millie end up together.

The show also upholds my theory that if you say anything in English with the appropriate foreign accent the locals will understand you.

Chatt State Commercials

Of all the great Chatt State commercials I've seen, I think my favorite is for the exciting career of courtroom stenography. At least it doesn't have this ugly mug in it:

Freakin' Out

So I'm starting to freak out about the baby. I've got so much work to do at work before he comes, plus stuff at home. When I get stressed I kind of shut down and can't get anything accomplished, start paying attention to the least priority stuff, etc. Like this weblog.

Also, since our friend Lindsey's water broke Sunday at her own baby shower at church, a week or so early, I'm now very aware that this could happen anytime. In a way that would be a relief. Just stop everything else and only worry about the one big thing.

Kerry is doing great, probably the best she's been the whole pregnancy. Except for trouble sleeping and enormously swollen feet and the end of every day, she seems really good.

So, I just need to go in an hour earlier and stay an hour later to catch up. Once I've completed editing these two big projects I'll feel much better. I heard someone on TV recently say, "I realized that I was either going to get up and hour earlier everyday and work out, or be fat the rest of my life." So now I've got that hanging over me too.

We're having a "?"

So my best friend's wife is pregnant, and HE doesn't want to know what sex it is. HE doesn't. I can somewhat understand when women have certain conventions about having kids, but c'mon Jeff, get with the program.

Well, good luck with all the yellow clothes, androgynous paraphernalia, and names like Pat, Aaron, or Chris.

Should be working now

Meg's movie should be working now.

Here's more to wet your apetite.

My Dog

I know this may sound really wrong, but will I love the boy as much as I do the dog? I mean, come on, look at her.

He'll have to be really sweet.

Infectious

Click here to watch the debut of Meghraj Hazare & SBP Productions' Infectious.