THE BOY
Samuel is doing magnificently, and has really been a wonderful little boy. He spends his days in a mixture of eating, playing on his play mat, and sleeping. Where eating is concerned, Sam is consuming mostly bottle-fed breast milk, although in the early morning and in the evening, he will nurse. Mom is able to keep up with the boy, but he has a pretty huge appetite and eats between 25 and 30 ounces a day from bottles, plus whatever he gets from mom. Sleep has been more and more predictable for Sam, and he has been making some major strides in this area. Generally, he will sleep for 8 hours at night, and usually from 9 pm until 5 am. His naps are fairly regular, about every two hours, and we are still swaddling him for most of his naps and evening sleeps. However, just in the last couple of days, he has been taking a midday nap while lying on his play mat. For these he is not swaddled, and no rocking is required. When he gets fussy, I just give him his binky, and he relaxes and then conks out. He still is occasionally thrown off for a bad day due to his intestinal happenings, but his signs are more clear, and that helps us know how to proceed. While playing, he has begun exhibiting new behaviors, which are exciting and fun to watch. He can roll from his stomach to his back (sometimes), and also burps himself when placed on his stomach. he tracks things well with his eyes now, and is gaining good voluntary hand control, grabbing onto hanging toys and steering them toward his ever-gaping maw. He is also giggling and smiling a lot, especially when I pretend to eat his belly and say "nomnomnomnom" in a funny voice. He also loves getting changed, and has been enjoying his baths now too. He is a very social baby, and behaves his best around new strange faces. He has had a myriad of visitors over the last month, and all have commented on how cute and well-behaved he is.
THE MOM
Liz is back to work in her second week. Her boss encouraged he to ease back in, so she has been working some partial and some full days, and will begin all full days next week. Sam is always happy to see mom when she gets home, and mom misses him while at work, but both seem to be managing well, and tears have been kept to a minimum. The hardest transition was that of going to almost all bottle feedings and pumpings rather than mostly BFing, but both mom and baby are adjusting well.
THE DAD
Life has been busy, busy, busy. The Boston Choral Ensemble had a concert weekend that I helped with ushering for, as well as doing a bunch of marketing for. After that, there was still marketing to be done for the upcoming BCE planetarium concerts, the Walk for Music and the Commission Competition winner. This has taken up a good deal of my free time, and it is amazing how quickly an hour here and an hour there can just disappear. I also attended the memorial service for my grandfather in Ocala, Florida. That was my first and only time so far away from Liz and Sam since the birth, and it was weird being away. We were going to try to take a family road trip down and back, but the timing just didn't work out, and that is probably for the better. I ended up having anxiety nightmares while in the hotel, where I would wake up and be searching under my bed and around the room for the boy only to realize that I was the only one in the room. On the way home, I tripped over somebody's luggage in the Orlando airport, and really hurt my left knee, which has made traversing our stairs and rocking the boy exceedingly difficult for the past 3 weeks. I have healed to the point where is is only a mild nuisance knee now, but I still have to be careful when carrying Sam. When I got home, I had picked up a little cold, and then as the cold was leaving, I stupidly gave myself food poisoning due to sheer laziness and a dirty utensil. That was a difficult time, and I lost about 8 pounds. As I recovered from that, I prepared for a series of 4 singing gigs at the Catholic Diocese for Holy week. They paid pretty well and went pretty well, but kept me busy, and were nationally aired on Catholic TV. The face of American Catholicism I am not, but I think my solos went off fine. Once I realized that the would was going to see me, I decided enough was enough and shaved off the beard and mustache, and so am clean shaven once again. Now that all the craziness of the last month is over, I am working on settling in to my job as a stay-at-home dad. It is a bit of a tough adjustment, but I would say that the toughest parts are the lack of social interaction with similar-aged peers, and also calming both Sam and Claire (the girl who I watch twice a week) when they are both upset at the same time.
Those are pretty much the updates for now. I hope to write more frequently as I figure out what my day-to-day schedule will look like. By then I should really be deep into the journey that is my fatherly duty of stay-at-home fathering.
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