October 2011
17 posts
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Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying... →
Baby Grace goes to urgent care in my latest Good Men Project column. Here’s an excerpt:
Babies train you. For nine months, you are subject to your baby’s cravings. You learn to respect the belly. You make room for the belly in your lives, see how life revolves around it, allow strangers to approach it as if it somehow belongs to everyone. The belly dictates, leaves marks and itches and...
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It's Not About Me
Really. I could say something funny about my son grabbing a fistful of my lentil dinner tonight, but instead, things should really be about the face-slapping awesomeness of Matt’s book, The Last Repatriate (Nouvella 2011) being released this week. So, really, it should be all about him:
buy
buy
buy
Ma tt’s
b k
oo
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Buy a share of Matt
When I’m not being a father/husband, this is what I’m doing. My novella, The Last Repatriate, has just gone to launch and is available for one week, ending Nov 1. James Franco says of it: “Salesses’ examination of the troubled mind of a Korean War POW returning home is pensive and brooding. A subtly painful psychological journey.” Get it, pretty please? I wrote about the real soldier...
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No Time To Sweep
me: oh no! what's this blood-blister on alfie's foot?!
wife: what?!
me: (mentally already at the ER)
wife: um. that's just popcorn skin.
-bp
Fatherhood: The secret to a longer life? →
drego:
“A new study suggests that dads are less likely to die from heart-related diseases than their childless counterparts.” Read more…
(source: Stanford Medicine, via The Week)
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Golden times
I talk a lot about how hard it is to take care of her, but now that baby Grace is almost four months and sleeping through the night, she’s pretty fun. Everything is new to her, so she’s always looking around, learning, playing. As she discovers things, it’s like we’re discovering them, too. She’s old enough to be aware of the world but still with that cute baby face...
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“She seems a lot less like an alien now.”
– ms
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The Silent Grind
As Matt pointed out, the term “sleeping like a baby” is one of the most horrendous misnomers of all time. “Let sleeping babies lie” is, however, pretty dang accurate. Or is it “let sleeping dogs lie”? Well, it should be babies, believe me.
One of the ongoing surprises about parenting is that I had no idea I led such a noisy life....
This is one of the most beautiful essays that I... →
mammalingo:
From the New York Times: “How do you parent without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by bit?” It is written by the mother of a terminally-ill child. “The only task here,” she says, “is to love.”
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Great Stress →
My latest column in the Good Men Project is about my wife’s postpartum pain (arthritis?!), 100 days, zombies (kind of), and baby Grace’s gift to us: sleep.
When the in-laws leave, they leave us with both more and less time. We play host only to baby Grace, which means also that we have no one to take over when we screw up. We tell ourselves that couples raise babies on their own all...
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How many ounces should a baby eat in one day (at...
We’re worried she hasn’t been eating enough the past couple of days. Maybe 23 ounces in a 24-hour period. Formula. My wife says she should be eating more like 33 ounces, according to the internet. Of course, I come to the internet for a second opinion.
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How much sleep is good sleep?
Baby Grace has been sleeping a lot again lately (and eating less), like she’s gone back in time a month or so. She’s 3 months old now. She has a cycle of about 4 hours: play, sleep, eat. She eats 4-5 oz at a time. The sleep part of that cycle has been a little long lately—I just woke up from a nap with her :)—and the play is more perceptive. We think the extra sleep means...
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The Sleep War: bryan, pt. 2
confession: sometimes we let Alfie fall asleep while we're sitting on the couch so that we have time to watch an episode of Louie. This might have something to do with the whole he-sleeps-like-a-tiger-with-dysentery problem.
question: How do so many parents stay sane long enough to keep a "night routine"? Music, nightly baths (we're lucky if we hit biweekly), singing (my voice wouldn't soothe a narcoleptic sloth), etc. I clearly still need to work on my parental staying power.
-bp
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The Sleep War: bryan, pt.1
Before Alfie was born, I had some sleep issues. They were minor, but they were enough to inspire the major thread of my book-in-progress, Wake, Sleeper. Natalie was always out with the lights, and I stayed there trying to keep my eyes closed and not remembering when/how they opened again.
These roles reversed when Alfie came along, and now I can barely stay awake when I crawl in. But, even if...
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100 days! Baek-il chukha!
Baby Grace turns 100 days today. In Korea, the 100-day mark is a big celebration, so we had a party on Sunday with family and copious amounts of food. Grace wasn’t the happiest girl, though, with so many strange faces. She’s in this staring phase where she will look you in the eyes for hours, literally. But she did mark the milestone in her own way—she slept through the night...
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The End of Gender: What Can We Do As New Parents? →
My latest “Love, Recorded” column in The Good Men Project is more an essay on gender and babies. If I say there are cute baby pics of my daughter looking like a boy versus a girl, can I get you to read it? I’m also publicly admitting my fear of dolls.
Now that the nephews are 3, they insist themselves on wearing blue or, if pressed, green, on playing exclusively with dinosaurs and cars and...
