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Baby: Raise one for the daddies
Thu, 06 Dec 2007

The time to say this has passed now, by a week, but I did write some of this during The Bleak Days so I thought I'd pollish it a bit and let it out, Chris Tolkien-like.

Now, before I get started, let me just get this out of the way -- we all know women are the heroes of the day - the very stones upon which society is built. Any woman, sick as a dog and with one arm can still get a family ready for school and work and out the door while doing laundry and preparing a dinner for later while paying bills. The man will prick his thumb will be out of commision for a week. Furthermore, my child is also the most beautiful and crafty little baby in the world, bar none. With that, I may continue.

As I mentioned once before, men don't really get recognized over-much for what they're up to in this whole Papa thing. And thats fine, since we're usually the kind of lugs who don't care to be recognized since all we're doing is nothing special.. it is expected, it is the norm, it is merely what we do. Life and all that. Still, I I thought I would spill a little image of life out here, for fun.

The baby was sick for awhile, and teething at the same time. Which is to say she couldn't stay asleep because her nose wus plugged and so couldn't breath unless being held upright (or sitting in a bouncy chair but thats hard to set up and a trifle risky). The poor girl was moaning or crying a lot due to the pain, and it upset her eating and sleep habits terribly. Thats fine for awhile, but this dragged on for weeks, which was something. Sometimes these teeth just give us all a wallop.

So for a few weeks, my day went something like this ... get up (usually a little late I might add), head to work. Work my tail off (near year end it is always like this) and rush home soon as could be to relieve the wife.. a day with a moaning unhappy squirmy baby is a challenge to be sure. Get home, take care of sed child intently (you just have to play with this little bundle, she loves it so much!) until she gets extra cranky and head up to get her to sleep. With luck maybe a cold dinner, but that was merely optional. During this period of time the poor little girl was in such discomfort that it literally took anywhere from two to four hours to get her to sleep.. oh, for sure she might fall asleep for a few minutes, but she'd be back awake, so I'm counting when she'd actually sleep for any length of time. Also for sure is my wife helped out a bit .. it takes more than 2 hands to get sprays into a squirming baby's nose, or to get cough medicine into her mouth and so forth. But all told it was a good through-to-midnight or more to get her to sleep, and almost certainly she'd be up a half dozen times at night. Not too bad all told since we did manage to catch a few hours of sleep (interupted, but still) each night. But the thing that really got to me was the days whizzing by with not an instant to myself. Babies train you to lose the 'selfishness', thats for sure.

Due to a loooong history of being a night person who awakes and sleeps instantly, I'm night warden by choice. Love it :) Still, it was a trying couple of weeks when I'd stumble off to bed at midnight or one, and be up for work at 8am after helping the baby back to sleep two-four times in the night, or having to hold her for another hour or two during the night.

Wow! Now, many nights weren't that bad during this period, but many were.

You might recall my intense dislike of ebooks, mostly for reasons of DRM and interface. Still, if you can get a good book an rtf, txt, html or other actually open format, the DRM argument can be dropped. It is a rare book that you can obtain in sed formats of course, but there are tools for converting forcibly between some formats... so I made the plunge and fired up a very fine book reader on my PDA. (PDA because it is backlit, so I can read at night time or in the dark.) I've always ignored ebooks (I think I blogged about them in the past but if not, I can rant easily enough), but for this purpose they work well -- a baby on your shoulder half asleep or sleeping and you can still read.

I mention this only because, sick as it might be, I've been reading two books a week for awhile, almost entirely at night time. Not short books, either. (OKay, they're not Cryptonomicon either.) The days literally breezed by.. no TV, no chilling time for anything .. just work and sitting in the dark. Crazy times.

At least I've been catching up on some reading .. its been too long. About 9 months :)

Fortunately (for all of us), the baby is only a little sick now and seems to be finishing the current bout of teething -- good for her the little trooper, she doesn't deserve that punishment any more. So the last couple nights we've actually gotten a touch of rest.

Anyway, so there you go, thats the life of a daddy. Women do the hard tasks.. teaching the baby in her early months and all that, not to mention the entire birthing process. But lets not understate what daddies go through, too :) One thing I suppose worth mentioning is now that the baby is better and I have gotten a bit of time to myself, I have forgotten what it is I used to spend my time doing. I mean really..

.. isn't it all about the family now?

Funny how life teaches you the real shit.

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