Homegrown Edward
Here’s Edward in his swing from the Undergraduate Library.
And here’s a nice set of three (all taken in a row!) of Edward being cute and awake in his hammock chair.
Archive for Blog
Edward Sleeping
Here’s a picture of Edward doing one of his favorite activities.
Yes, that is an iPood creeper he has on. This picture was actually uploaded in semi-real time. He is still asleep in that very spot and acting very cute.
Mars has water ice!
Either Mars has water ice or Doctor Manhattan is messing with our heads.
Maintaining Sanity
A steady stream of flashing lights and sound really helps with keeping awake and alert during late-night feeding and baby care. And when you’re only sleeping three to four hours at most, everything is late-night.
Sarah and I have come to really appreciate the following inputs:
Cable Television with DVR
From National Geographic to Food Network to HGTV to Discovery to SciFi to Comedy Central: there’s always something cool, fun, or interesting to watch on our DVR. While channel flipping would be ok, the DVR is really what makes cable worth it. Frequent interruptions for the baby mean that without the ability to pause and rewind our shows we’d essentially only watch about twenty five percent of the content IF we happened to catch something really cool during the weird hours we’re feeding the baby. Unless you’re into paid programming, there’s not a lot of tv on at 4:27am.
The News and Weather via the Wii
For quickly keeping up with the news and weather with one hand (the other holding the baby) nothing beats the Wii weather and news channels.
The Internet via the Wii
The Internet is, of course, just stuffed with fun content. The Wii’s internet channel allows truly one handed browsing of all of our favorite sites.
Hulu.com
We finally tried out Hulu after discovering to our chagrin that our DVR had dropped two of the last three Battlestar Galactica episodes. Awesome! It has a wide selection of TV Shows and even quite a few movies, all with very small commercial breaks. The commercial breaks are denoted on the video’s progress bar and have a timer countdown while they are running. I’ve always said that I’d be right onboard with official tv torrents that included commercials and, since there’s no download time, hulu.com is even better than that. Hulu even has full movies and a pretty decent selection of them at that.
While it isn’t supported by the Wii’s browser (Flash higher than version 7 required) it does, of course, work great with Opera 9.5 on the PowerMac connected to the tv. The full screen mode taxes our Internet connection a bit too much, but using the mac’s mouse scroll wheel zoom with cursorceror to hide the mouse cursor we get a nice full screen presentation without stuttering video. Since we have the PowerMac connected into our surround sound system as well, the sound is even (thanks to Dolby magic) pretty decent. In a stroke of genius they even mapped spacebar to pause, so after we get the zoom in situated we don’t need to move everything around to find a pause button.
Endless Ocean
Videogames and baby watching are a tricky combination. If he’s deep asleep I can get in some game time, but I can’t really focus on anything involved. Even Super Mario Galaxy requires a bit more concentration than I’d like. Endless Ocean, on the other hand, is a game that requires absolutely nothing from the player. You get to run around beautiful underwater environments and have absolutely nothing that requires focus. In fact, the entire game encourages relaxation over acoomplishment. You can even drive the boat to a scenic spot then just sit in a deck chair and watch the ocean. While diving you don’t need to worry about air, depth, or anything at all. Drop the controller and your character will just patiently wait while fish and creatures swim around to the soothing music. When you do have time to explore, the game is actually pretty interesting and rewarding. Seeing a whale glide in and swim alongside me was an awesome videogame moment.
BMW Gina
The BMW Gina concept car with a fabric, instead of metal, skin looks amazing.
More Cute Edward
I took this one immediately following his inspection and bath. One of the nurses was nice enough to hold him up for a really cute shot of his “things could be better” face.
These two, like the first picture I posted, are from the series of pictures I took during his first cuddles with mommy.
I haven’t really taken many pictures since, but I now that Sarah and I are both much more rested and relaxed that will surely change.
Happiest Parents on the Block
The only reason that I have the clarity and time to write this blog post is because of the Happiest Baby on the Block DVD. I’m totally serious. The marketing blurbs attached to this series are completely accurate in our case. After he got over his new baby jaundice he really got into the swing of crying. He would have crying spells for up to three hours, usually in the middle of the night. Even when he wasn’t seriously exercising his lungs little cries were never far off. Yesterday we finally (and I have no idea why it took us that long) opened up our Happiest Baby DVD and watched it with screaming infant in tow. We tried the techniques in turn as the video went through them and snap: happy, quiet baby!
Now we maintain the soothing techniques throughout the day and night and he is consistently relaxed. He does of course cry when he needs to be changed or is hungry, but no more inconsolable crying spells. We went from enduring those three hour crying spells to at most thirty second crying spells, and most of that time spent soothing down. It is absolutely astonishing and it is so so awesome.
Sarah and I were getting pretty tired and stressed because we each felt guilty leaving the other with a crying baby, so essentially we both didn’t get any real rest. At night we could barely sleep before our cute crying baby would need attention. Now we are both sitting on the couch puttering away and little Edward is sound asleep and relaxed in his baby rocker (sans distracting toy bar and locked in the non-rocking position). Ahh.