Daddy musings

What a near-month. As Holly mentioned in the last post, this has been a whirlwind three-week period and I'm standing here (I am actually typing while standing) looking at the calendar, dreading my return to work next Tuesday. It seems that all the unexpected Max care combined with me being laid up with back problems for a few days has really impacted the amount of things we wanted to get done during our time at home together. I suppose it's a good reminder that life can't be planned etc. etc. Despite all this, it has still been wonderful to be able to spend this time together, ushering our little Leo into the world and I feel really fortunate that our work situations allowed us this opportunity. Also, don't let the above paragraph leave the impression that we haven't enjoyed all of the extra time with Max. He's at a really fun age these days, full of energy, new words (you should hear him say SHOES and BOY) and love for his little brother. Yesterday, Max held Leo for the first time and you should have seen the look on his face. I don't have the pictures on the computer at the moment, but when I do, I'll put them up.

Over the past few weeks, I've been blown away with how different this experience has been on us the second time around, particularly mentally. I keep thinking back to Max's first few weeks, trying to remember if he behaved the same way Leo does and how we dealt with it. No matter how I slice it, I feel like everything related to Leo's care has been much more laid back than it was with Max. Likely 90+ percent of this can be attributed to the fact that we at least have some experience this time around (although everyone warned us that it doesn't count for a lot if the kids are really different). I still think back to that first moment, getting home with Max (OK, not the one where I almost dumped him onto our driveway from the car seat...a few moments later), where we put him on the bed and just kind of sat there, staring at him and thinking "Now what?". With Leo, we already knew about diaper changing, holding babies, the wear and tear of an altered sleep "schedule".

I've had a horrible past of putting some things into writing and then effectively jinxing life, so I get that saying the following comes with a bit of risk, but here goes anyway: I feel like we've been exceptionally lucky with Leo so far. Obviously, his first two weeks of ex utero gestation weren't very taxing, but now that he's started to be awake and aware a bit more throughout the days (and nights), he's still relatively soothable (like his older bro was) and he seems to spend a lot more eyes-open time just lying there and scoping stuff out soundlessly than Max ever did (although that may be revisionist history). We are lucky that Leo is in good health and a capable breastfeeder, which should allow Holly to more or less follow the same feeding timeline she did with Max.

Speaking of timelines, I was curious about what we'd written about our first few days with Max. On day 9, it seems that we first moved him into a bassinet beside our bed. Well, we're at day 24 with Leo now, and we tend to prefer sleeping with him in bed, albeit in two different rooms to reduce the chance of waking Max up (thank goodness Max, when healthy, has maintained his awesome sleeping ability!!). It seems like I wasn't so keen on co-sleeping the last time around, but it feels pretty natural to me now. This will probably change in the coming months as we get Leo used to sleeping on his own and as we transition Max to a full-size bed, which will probably end up with him crashing our bedroom a few times. It was also interesting to see that we waited almost two weeks to take Max outside for any amount of time. The first evidence on our calendar of getting out and about with Leo is a trip out for sushi on day 7, but I'm pretty sure that we took family walks even before then. Socializing Max early and often seemed to work pretty well, so we're hoping to do more of the same with Leo.

The last post in September of 07 hints at Max's first big growth spurt, when the feeding kind of got out of control (I bet this is when the 3-hours-at-a-time-in-the-bassinet action stopped dead cold). It makes sense, coming at about the 3-week mark. We think that Leo's been up to the same shenanigans over the past 4 days or so, but (again) mentally, I feel like we had such a better outlook on the whole process that it made things feel better even if, in reality, they weren't. I remember last time, really not knowing when any difficult period would end and really getting wrapped up in the badness of the moment. Now that we have a good sense of how long blips take to run their course (again, under the assumption that Max and Leo are the same sort of typical - Leo clearly has a lot of time left to ruin this), we can plan accordingly and not expend too much energy dwelling on "When will this end????" In fact, last night Leo may have come out the back end of his spurt, sleeping 3 hours with me, 4 hours with me and then another 3 with Holly through the night. Now I've surely done it - tonight is going to be 1 hour, 1, 2, 30 minutes, another hour and then straight on 'til sun-up :(

Anyway, the bottom line of all this is that, despite some minor obstacles over the past month, we are all really happy and healthy these days. Despite having to transition to single-parent (and hopefully single-child) daytimes in the coming week, we're feeling confident about being parents of a newborn again and are looking forward to getting the kids involved in more activities in the fall (gymnastics and swimming for Max, singing and mommy-dancing classes for Holly and Leo). We're really grateful for all of the support we've received from our family and friends, particularly help getting our house in order and facilitating the shuttling of Stardoms around Ottawa. All-in-all, Max and Leo are in good hands and I can't wait until they can look back and appreciate this fact.