Category: Family

I have an unfortunately superpower of waking up early, sometimes not even when I want to.  So I was about to start typing up on this here blog but my boy decided to wake up as well.

I just spent the last forty minutes trying everything to get him back to sleep.  Ultimately all I could do is wait him out in the dark and think all sorts of eloquent thoughts that are no longer available to me now that I’m back at the keyboard.

As soon as you start to think you have a handle on things, babies have a way of reminding you that their vote counts.

A couple years ago, I started messing with the banjo again after I stumbled across a clawhammer instructional book at the library.

Two christmases ago, I got good enough to play a couple songs at speed during our short lived stint in the never ending remodel house.

Our girl is a dancer, and given just about any source of music, she’ll dance like noone is watching. Another christmas passes by and now I’ve got a boy, and he smiles whenever I break out the banjo.

I wonder when this window will close. When she’s too old to dance for papa, and when he gets tired of the same few licks the old man has figured out to clumsily bang out.

Or maybe I’ll be able to get them to join along. Asian parents always foist music on their children, why not bluegrass instead of classical?

It was a little chilly when the lunar eclipse happened, so I set an alarm every ten minutes so we could go out watch the moon slowly disappear.

At 8:35 when the moon was about to be fully eclipsed, we bundled up and went outside to watch the last glimpse of the moon turn be transformed into the dark blood orange ball in the sky.

Our girl asked the eternal question echoed throughout the millennia, is the moon gone forever?

Fortunately with the foreknowledge of science I could confidently assure her this was just a temporary thing, but indeed it was an odd feeling to watch the moon be slowly swallowed up.

An hour later, I took her out one last time to show a sliver of the moon slowly emerging behind the eclipse as we went off to bed.

He’s had “ma” down for quite a while warming the heart of my wife, but little guy is now adding new noises to his babbling.

He plays around with them throughout the day, but last night he really practiced all his new sounds as I tried to walk him to sleep. After, all he was trapped in my arms with the lights off and not else much to do.

Selfishly, I’m waiting for “pa” or “ba”, but I’ll take this for now.

Our boy is much better at sleeping than his older sister. Which is really nice.

What’s not so nice is that he wakes up silently and starts moving around the room.

When she was a baby, the girl would always wake up crying, a reliable alert while we were doing stuff around the house.

So now we gotta pay attention. The little ones can get themselves in trouble in a hurry!

I nuzzled the little guy as he was sleeping last night.

His sister was such a light sleeper as a baby, that I never dared indulge in such activity with her.

But he just snorted, shifted around, and fell back asleep.

Sometimes it takes the quiet of the night to remind you of the privilege of having children in your life.

When a sibling arrives, it a reminder of the truism that your parents will always think of you as a baby.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of growing up, and let these images simmer in the back of your head unacknowledged.

But confronted with a real baby, you’re is reminded when bigger one did x, y, or zed.

Letting them grow up is gonna be a lot harder than I thought.

When there’s a baby and a young child in the house, change happens so quickly it becomes normal.

It’s not that you get used to change, but that it just is the frame of reference. You forget yesterday because every yesterday is different.

One day he’s crawling. Next he’s sitting, and then propping himself up unsteadily, and then…. Meanwhile our girl is going through her less dramatic but equally drastic changes as she races towards her fifth birthday.

When every day is a new normal, does the word have any meaning?

I’ve been pondering the head to body ratio ever since I heard about the heroic ratio.

Our boy, an infant, is about 1 to 4

Our girl is about 1 to 5

We adults are about 1 to 7.5

The classical statues are about 1 to 8.5. Just a little larger, a little less childish. A little more heroic.

Similarly a lot of cartoon babies, are drawn at the extreme of 1 to 2. I’m certain that is how we will continue to see our babies, even when they be growed up adults.

I keep writing about walking the boy to sleep in part because it is the one time I am forced to sit in the dark and let my mind wander.

But it’s also because it is almost a little game. Walking a crying baby to sleep is a dance, testing various well practiced feints and moves, repeating those that work (until they don’t), and eventually (hopefully) he will settle down and fall asleep.

It’s still a chore and not what you’d call fun. But if he does fall asleep, there is a nice sense of satisfaction as I sit there in the dark rocking in the dark with his little head on my shoulder, his body rising and falling to my breath.

In those moments, I’m reminded about those days long ago when my daughter would need to be walked to sleep. While I’m not exactly nostalgic about those times, I’m certainly a bit wistful.