Daddy Reflections at 100 days

Owen is more than 100 days old! It is my turn to reflect on what things have been like for me as a dad. Here we go...


What I have learned about Owen:

He is super cute! He has lots of faces -- smily, confused, forlorn, furrowed brow, half smily and, of course, the blank stare. He has one new face where he bites things that I call "Tiger Milk", and more new faces popping up all the time. Here are some of those faces from back when he was only 99 days old:



In fact, Owen is so cute that the women at day care fight over who gets to hold and feed him! This is not a bad thing for us who worry about him getting enough attention.

More about Owen coming soon in another post about his likes and dislikes.


What I have learned about myself:

1. It turns out that I love babies (or, at least, I love my baby)! They are much more interesting than I had imagined. Owen is always changing, and his personality is growing all the time, especially when he grabs my chest hair I suppose. It's so cool that he is doing everything for the first time -- the world must look so huge and weird to him! It's fun to try to imagine how things are for him.

And when he smiles at me it is the best feeling in the world. I guess without those heart-melting smiles, cave-men and women might not have felt compelled to continue taking care of their kids after many nights with little sleep.

2. As expected, I get dumber when I don't sleep enough. This has become painfully obvious this year. I don't really want to give any specific examples... We are struggling with getting Owen on a better sleep schedule, especially at night. The last three nights he has woken up on average every hour or so, which is devastating to any attempt at longish sleep. Usually he wakes up sometime like 3 times per night and has something like a 4 hour sleep interval at some point. But he has had a cold the last several days (his very first cold, of course) and he keeps waking himself up because his nose is congested and he can't breathe properly. Poor little guy! And, after a few nights, poor us who are basically zombies.

3. It is kind of fun to use things in new baby-ish ways...


4. It's hard not having as much free time as I used to. I used to often take a few hours here or there to go on a little hike or something like that. Now, I have to squeeze things into smaller amounts of time, or make them baby-friendly activities. Not an easy task. I did do the Imperial Challenge up in Breck last weekend -- Marisa and Owen were there to meet me at the finish line which was really nice. Here we are right after the finish... (Note: my dad won his age group in the race!)


5. The worst feeling in the world is when something is wrong with your baby. We have gotten so worried in the past 3 months about lots of stuff -- a bonk on the head, jaundice, a clogged tear duct, two fevers, a cold, and other stuff I am not remembering right now. The worst thing for me was the bonk on the head, which happened when Owen slipped off my chest and out of the bed at the hospital. The docs came to check him out and he was very quickly given a clean bill of health, although the bump on his head didn't show up for a few days and lasted for about a month. Even though he was fine, I was haunted for days (and still am, from time to time) by the idea that I hurt my own kid. I talked with my dad and he reminded me of the time, when I was 13, that I broke my leg skiing. That wipeout was caused in part by my bindings that my dad had set. He told me that he felt horrendously terrible about that for a long time. I guess I know how he felt now...

6. Owen is not very big, but he really dominates our lives. We are always thinking or talking about what he's doing, how he's doing, how much he is sleeping, etc. Sometimes I miss the times when we were free to do almost anything. Not that we necessarily did that much, but we were really free to do nothing at all if we felt like it.

7. Cleaning up poop and spit-up and all that goop isn't nearly as bad as I expected. I had built it up in my mind as this terribly scary thing but it's not a big deal, really. Of course, I haven't been directly pooped on (yet?).

8. Skype is awesome! I was away at a conference in California for 3 days last week. But, every morning I video-skyped with Marisa and Owen and it really made it much easier to be away. No more distant conferences in the works for this year, so I'll be sticking around...


What I have learned about Marisa:

1. She is incredibly sweet with Owen. She sometimes uses up all her energy on the baby and has none left for anything else. It's tough for me to see that because I always tell her to take care of herself (and I do my best to take care of her) but she is so focused on the baby that she doesn't as much as she could.

2. She gets really spooked when Owen poops in the bath. This happened the other day and she was very startled! I was also startled but a lot quieter about it.

3. If left to her own devices, Marisa can end up worrying nonstop like crazy. I do my best to reassure her. Sometimes I am successful and sometimes not -- I wish I could keep her calm but some combination of my dumbness and her stubbornness makes that difficult.

4. Marisa is a master at getting Owen to fall asleep. She doesn't shush him or even use a pacifier, just her crazy mommy-jedi mind tricks.