Welcome to the world Mr. Fawcett

Upon announcing to my wife that our friends and fellow bloggers Allen & Elaine had their baby, both she and Kaden cheered. I can't honestly expect Kaden to have understood, but at this point he is understanding so much that I half expect him to guess the name.

Today at 2:30p 2:50pm, Owen Grady Fawcett, was born.



Congrats to the parents, and to a very lucky kid. We hope to see Owen very soon, and I'm sure Kaden looks forward to playing big brother and showing him the ways of the 1.5 years older world.

This birth puts the Fawcett's clearly in the breeders category, and we are happy to have them with us. Welcome to the rollercoaster of incredible highs and sleep-deprived lows that is kid-rearing.

It is times like these that remind me of the feeling I had just after we had our kid. First, it was that unbelievably overwhelming emotion of being forever linked to this new being. Then, soon after, it is something like - "we've been tricked! the breeders made it sound all nice a cuddly, and all this thing does is crap."

I jumped any parent I could, demanding to know how they conspired to withhold information from pre-breeders about the difficulty of infants. These interchanges would always end with them saying something like "it will pass soon" and me angrily grumbling something about "the party line" and swearing never to obfuscate the horrors and joys of being a parent.

Well, I can safely say that starting this blog pretty much solved solved my non-disclosure worry, so let me also add to the happy new parents that this whole kid thing is totally rockin. We scampered around the Children's Museum today and he was a barrel of fun. My favorite moment was when, after about five minutes of working diligently, he successfully diverted the water fountain toy to spurt water all over himself, all the nearby children, the floor, and some unsuspecting parents.

But the Fawcetts are a bit of a ways from that, so in the meantime Megan and I racked our brain for the things that we found we could not do without and sent them a little care package:

- Swaddling blankets: of all the early voodoo advice we got about babies (eg do fat babies sleep better?), this one I totally bought into and have first hand knowledge of working

- Stack Up Cups (The First Years): from just watching it at an early age, to counting as he stacks them now, endless fun with tower building and destroying

- Take and Toss Learner Cups (The First Years): Kaden pretty much rejected bottles, so we started sippy cups very early and this was by far his favorite of the many many many we tried.

- Giraffe Blankie (funbath), this makes him feel less attached to us, right?

- Flipper Gripper Baby (Sassy), we ended up with a lot of Sassy products, but this one easily has the most hours on it. There were days on end where this little spinning rattle was the only thing stopping Kaden from completely losing it in his car seat.

One additional thing worth mentioning here that we left off the list but continue to use like crazy.. a humidifier. Not for it's intended use, mind you. It's not like Kaden is in danger of petrigying himself from lack of milk intake, he's thankfully gotten over that.

No, it's that a good *cheap* humidifier makes a lot of noise that provides a great cover for the fact that we do, in fact, stay up later than our kid and are not allowed to put him in a sound proofed outhouse. Huge loud fan = cavorting parents not worried about an errant laugh leading to twenty minutes of rocking a four month old back to sleep.

PS - since I know how music-focused the Fawcett's are, it is serendipitous that I just read yesterday via BoingBoing about the lullaby cover songs of such alt.rock standards as Radiohead and Nirvana.

PPS - Allen's firsthand account is now online here

It takes a...

There's a perfectly good reason I haven't blogged in a little bit.. everything has been going so well! Its been generally so positive, and I know that the surest way to bore people to death is it to regale the world with tales of how the times are all so wonderful and pleasant and la la la.

The other shoe will drop soon, but for right now it's so damn good that when it's close to his bed time and we say, "ready to go to sleep" he actually nods his head, says "yeah." Then goes over to the crib ready to hop right in a snuggle off to bed. I can see my father shaking his head and mumbling under his breath, "I battled through being a journalist in Far-East Asia and this is the boring stuff my son can produce. Where's that drama!" as he unsubscribes from the now entirely mundane tales of his grandson.

Yep, life with Kaden has certainly stabilized a lot from the early months of uncontrollable crying and projectile poop. We are in that wonderful blissful period where he sleeps well, plays like a mad hatter, and talks up a storm (although mostly in a language we don't understand). And we are enjoying it as much as possible because if there's one immutable lesson about this child-rearing experience it is that just as soon as you adjust to something, it changes.

Anyway, I can't help but notice that the infamous "terrible twos" are right around the corner. So I'm sure there will be much to post about soon, and in the meantime I'm keeping the photos flowing every week.

Besides, just because he's been generally a fun (if exhausting) little guy to be around, doesn't mean that the rest of the world has been behaving. There was the recent incident in a Starbucks where Kaden was walking around with a plastic bag in his hand and the woman took the bag FROM HIS HAND and then scolded me saying, "he shouldn't have plastic, it could choke him."

I was about to reason with her that I was standing right next to him, so that was doubtful. But then I realized she is the type of person who lives her life in fear and is far from my help. She has commanded her relatives to give only wooden toys, and cowers in fear if she is forced into using a microwave-save plastic bowl in the microwave (if she owns one). Meanwhile her kid is full of splinters and bruises from swinging his heavy mallet-like wooden toys at both his own head and his parents.

I like wooden toys as much as the next person, and I certainly rant about the horrors of cheap, loud, plastic toys as much as the next guy. But do it because you like it, not because you are afraid of something. And please, I understand it takes a village and all, but scolding another adult for something innocuous like a plastic bag of crackers? More like, "it takes a village idiot."