5 posts tagged “dadstuff”

Playtime

And so the days are filled.  It's summer, despite recent hints of occasional autumn in the air (as happens nearly every January here I've learned), so it's too hot to walk around the neighbourhood with R in the stroller Lone Wolf and Cub style, and besides which the flies, these damned, damned flies are much too annoying until the cooler weather comes around in March.

So we're again settling into a rhythmn of sorts, with a bigger focus on actively playing with the boy every day.  Chasey seems to be a good one, with me stomping from one end of the house to the other, jumping out from behind doorframes to squeals of surprise.  Plus there's blocky-blocks, his first steps towards playing with my star wars lego when he's several years older.  And we usually have a crack on the piano as well, I've learned to cover up the LED lights for the different settings so he can hit the actual keys instead, insisting that his hands go where mine are as I trill various riffs and chords up and down the length of the instrument, encouraging him to sing along and just to whack whatever notes he wants and we'll call it "progressive jazz" or something.

K made a really telling comment recently where she found in her year off with him that she tended to put creative effort into cooking, and, being much less skilled than her in what could be loosely called the culinary arts in our household, I'm finding the same thing.  It seems to be the one thing that's grabbing my interest in any substantial way right now.

It feels... almost hollow at the moment, despite the daily enjoyment of getting this quality time with my son.  I'm sort of just pottering around the house most days, cleaning this, reading that, websurfing here, weeding parts of the garden there. 

So I've pulled out some uni stuff from last year with the thought of catching up on reading and note-taking I should have done in an attempt to get intellectually engaged until my next subject starts in April.  I've also got tentative ideas about drafting up a work-related paper and getting it published somewhere for the sake of the gap in the cv I'll have for this year.  And I'm holding off on any craft stuff I've got ideas about until a talented friend moves into the neighbourhood and she's around to show me the absolute basics and get me started.  But it all feels so intangible right now.  Part of me is inclined to work up a rough weekly timetable, knowing full well that something will probably change with R which will then render it nearly meaningless anyway.

So it strikes me that it's just a case of getting busy again, of forcing myself to not be lazy and just bloody well do it.  This seems to be a common theme for me, experienced a lot while I was working too.  Feeling as though I'm not achieving anything (though in reality I am), getting dissatisfied and grumpy with myself about it, and then launching into the next absorbing interest until I get bored and dissatisfied all over again.  K, in her wisdom, has observed this close hand, noting how I discover something (last year it seemed to be single malt whiskies from Islay, establishing a garden of sorts and poker with friends), throw myself into learning all about it down to finest details, and then moving onto the next thing.  I guess at the moment I'm once again in the transitional phase.  What'll it be next?   

It is said that children should be seen, not heard, but that expression is sometimes better applied to parents. Until recently the most egregious parental oversharing was usually your sister-in-law's Christmas letter or the guy with the endless stream of baby photos. But there's a new species of chatty dad and mom: the hipster parent-memoirist.

In cyberspace and on newsstands, writers are out to prove that parenting, or at least parents, can be cool. The online magazine Babble.com spun off from literary sex journal Nerve com publishes articles by and for parents who can't quite believe they ended up doing something as square as raising a kid. (In his Babble blog Baby Daddy, Steve Almond endearingly refers to his 3-month-old as "the little f___er.") In a typical hipster-parent offering, an edgy novelist, musician or feminist sex writer has a baby--Me! Who'd'a thunk it!--and wrestles to reconcile his or her sensibility with the numbing demands of the cradle. For blogger Rebecca Woolf, that moment came when her baby barfed on the Moby section at an indie record store. Mom's response: "I call that punk rock!"

More at a Time magazine article titled "Too cool for Preschool" here.  Not quite sure if posts of mine like the dadstuff one below put me into such a category, but it's probably fair to say I'm nearer the edges than I would have initially thought.     

home now

It's now been a little over a week since we brought R home, after three long weeks of his stay in the special care nursery of the hospital.  Just had to make sure he was feeding ok and everything before he came home, hence the delay.  

So since then it's all been about working out the rhythms, when he feeds, when he's awake, what's the best time for me to do a bottle feed so K can get some sleep, etc etc.  Happy to say that I'm dealing with poo much better than I anticipated, though there are other things I haven't been so great at.

I've taken this week off work and will be back into it come Monday, so I'm hoping we can arrange things such that I can do an early morning feed, get some exercise (would like to think I'd get back into my forms but we'll see), and then head into work all bright-eyed and bushy tailed.  (No, really.  See blog-title above.)

Truth be told, I'm kind of looking forward to launching myself into work again - it feels like I've been sort of "off my game" for nearly a year now.  After accepting an offer to do similar work in a different place back in May, I neglected to remember that it meant I'd have to prove myself all over again with a new group of colleagues - even if many of them were people I'd previously had good professional experiences and relationships with.    

So what with work, upcoming study (arranging it for the nth time again) and general dad-stuff happening, it'll be interesting to see what impact this has on my blogging.  I haven't had anything for a little while as I'm acutely conscious of only speaking when I feel I have something to say.  You'd be surprised at the amount of internal editing that occurs to me on a daily basis.  Expect a couple of things about books and games shortly though.   

Sheesh, this kid K and I will be having, seems a chance it could be bit, well, uh, loud, if gestational behaviour is any indicator.

When seeing family recently we were reminded about doing the whole "playing Mozart to the foetus thing", right?  So there we were, driving around doing whatever, and playing like Mozart, Bach etc etc, feeling a bit dumb, and Hubert* just isn't reacting at all. 

But switch the radio on to whatever guitar-bass-drums band du jour that happens to be stacking the airwaves and there's kicking and movement and K's getting sore ribs and a bruised bladder and everything. 

It was really brought home last night when we caught an old live performance of Henry Rollins on ABC2 and this pesky kid's just seemed to be completely rocking out again in K's womb.

So yeah.  Kinda cool.  Sorta brings out that shtoopid friendly-punch-to-the-kid's-shoulder yeah-I'd-like-to-think-you're-a-chip-off-the-old-block dad thing in me.  Also means that I have another reason for keeping that old Ibanez bass I've been lugging around for years, given that they might be needing lessons.  Interesting times ahead, no doubt.

[* "Hubert" is just the notional name used for the baby of indeterminate sex currently being brewed up.  Don't ask me how we came up with it, it's just one of those things.  Heck, we had friends with "Cletus the Foetus" who turned out to be a beautiful baby girl.  Names, like the football team, are still being debated.  Check again in around 10 weeks or so.]