No good news as far as Henry's sleeping habits, but he sure is cute! When he is awake (23.5 hours a day), he is generally a happy baby. He motors around and gets into trouble. This begins a tough age in my opinion. 9-15 months are pretty labor-intensive times. A lot of following the baby around and telling them "no," removing them from dangerous situations, saving their lives, the usual fare. He is starting to use "mama" and "dada" meaningfully, like when he wakes up at night. If he's not hungry, he says "dada," but if he's hungry, he says "mama."

It seems like Stephen's tantrum stage was short-lived and is over for the most part. I can't overstate how good and easy Stephen is. He is good-natured and does whatever you ask of him. He eats well. He sleeps well. It's pretty much always been that way. We went out to eat with some friends on Saturday, and Stephen sat in a regular chair (no booster seat) the whole time and didn't act up once. He even tried to order his own dinner. "Me. Cheese." Then we went over to M&E's apartment and the boys tag teamed a Pac-Man game for a little bit. It was entertaining for about three minutes.

Here is a video of Stephen when he was fairly close to Henry's current age. It's incredible to me how similar they look and act.

We got some bids on getting a fence. I was pleasantly surprised by one of the prices, so we should have a large fenced-in area in our back yard in a few weeks. We also have blinds and/or curtains on most of the windows now. It was very strange having absolutely nothing on the windows; we felt so exposed. Jaime was getting dressed inside the closet. We bought a desk, hutch, and file cabinet for the front room of the house, and the desk had a piece missing. I called the number on the box and they said it was on backorder and it would take six weeks to ship us a new part. So now I have a half-assembled desk in my living room for six weeks. Fun stuff.

This house was a flip (for the definition of a "flip," consult every show on TLC), and consequently a lot of things were not done correctly. It's just a facade. They painted the floor of the garage with regular old indoor wall paint, so it's already peeling up all over the place. Some of the doors don't latch properly without having to use excessive force. The overflow drain was not installed properly on one of the bathtubs. I added some hot water to the boys' bath and water drained into our kitchen. Sigh. My first attempt to fix that was unsuccessful.

We still have a few loads of stuff to bring from the old house. Steve is coming over tonight to help me take apart the elliptical trainer and move it. That's a big task that's been looming ever since the day we moved.

Henry finally got a tooth--actually three of them. He now eats two tubs of baby food and about 6 Mum Mum crackers a day. So, now that his teeth came busting through, he's eating more, and he's nine months old (tomorrow), wouldn't you think he might be sleeping better? No. But that's okay, he's generally pretty happy these days. We'll take what we can get. He's just about eliminated "spitting up" from his repertoire, which is very nice for the laundry situation.

Stephen's development seems to take one step forward and two steps back. His verbalization of letters and words is worse than it was a month ago for sure. Somewhere along the line, every letter became pronounced like the letter T and the word "me" is now pronounced "be." We call Stephen the fun police nowadays, because he follows Henry around and takes away all of his toys, pulls him away from his activity table, or says "no" (which sounds like doh or dow) to everything he tries to do. It's fairly annoying, but it's not mean-spirited or anything and we should be thankful Stephen is such a good and loving big brother.

We packed up the dogs and a lot of stuff and spent two nights at the Youngs' for Thanksgiving. The first night, both boys slept 11 consecutive hours without making a peep. The next night, Henry was up for maybe 5 or 7 hours when he should have been sleeping. Fortunately he did that on a Thursday night of a four-day weekend, so Jaime had days to recover from that nightmare before returning to to work. Things went very well besides that, though. Good food. Stephen helped make ice cream. I have a couple pictures from Thanksgiving that I need to post, but with packing and doing Christmas stuff and making my annual calendar, I'm a bit behind.

Wow so, apparently if I want something in my life to get better, I just have to write a long, whining entry on this very blog. One week ago today, I laid out the reasons that it has been pretty tough to be in this house, and within a few days, things seem to have made a drastic change.

Here it is, only November 8th, and I swear Henry looks so much thinner than he did in his Halloween pictures. Suddenly he's a very tall, skinny boy. He loves to grab on to the couch and pull himself upright. He's starting to try to climb the stairs. He's undergone an incredible amount of development in a short period of time. And most importantly, he doesn't shriek a constant, mind-bending falsetto squeal these days.

Also, in between then and now, our offer on the home was accepted, and the place "passed" the home inspection. I know it's not a pass/fail inspection, but the house is in pretty good shape and the current owners agreed to fix everything that we listed. There are also some noteworthy things I learned about the house. It uses a well for water; it's an enclosed steel well about 100ft deep in the front yard. This means we can't flush the toilets when the power goes out, because we are not attached to a water supply that has constant pressure. The roof was put on in 1999 or 2000 and they wrapped all the wood trim in aluminum, so there's no exterior painting to do.

Every once in a while, I can't help but feel like we made a huge mistake. I'm sure everything's fine, but it all happened so fast. First it was "Yeah, we may look at houses." Then it was "We're looking at a few homes this weekend and next." Then it was "Okay, we bought a house." I haven't even walked to the back of the back yard yet, and the house is (probably) ours already. There could be an alligator swamp back there!

Halloween was a smash hit in this house. Two Saturdays ago, Jaime and I looked at five houses with our realtor while S&S babysat the boys. We stopped at Cafe Rio for lunch on our way back (ehhh, it wasn't that good) and then hopped over to one of those temporary Halloween costume stores that sprout up everywhere in October. Not surprisingly, the place was pretty ghetto. They had cash registers from 1985 haphazardly thrown on a plywood checkout counter. You could tell all the dudes working there hated their lives. Anyhow, we took the easy way out and spent $55 on two prefab costumes. Elmo for Stephen and a dinosaur for Henry. Stephen immediately fell in love with his Elmo costume and kept wanting to wear it every day for a week.

Last Saturday we looked at five more homes in a different county. This second foray was actually our initial primary location--way out in the country. The first house we went to was only a 35-minute commute from Jaime's work (we drove past her office and timed it). When we left our house, it was cold and rainy, but as we drove there, it turned to sleet, and then snow. By the time we got to the first house, it was obvious that it had been snowing for quite a bit. The plows were out in full force. We looked at what amounted to a bunch of old houses. Some of them were ugly, some were too old, and some were too far out. The second trip was a bust-o. We had only looked at ten houses, but we (mostly Jaime) had already looked at about 200 online and eliminated most of them. So, of the ten houses we had seen, one really stood out. We decided to make an offer on it. The market is really in our favor right now (seller usually pays all of the closing costs these days, and many of the contract/disclosure laws change next year), so we decided to go for it. We were to meet with the realtor on Sunday evening and hash out the details of our offer.

Sunday morning I had a photography job; that went pretty well. As soon as I got home, my throat hurt. I thought maybe it was autumn allergies since the photo shoot was mostly candid shots as the family walked down a wooded path. I started to go downhill fast. Next thing I knew, it felt like the onset of a flu: muscle and joint soreness, stomach ache, fever, sore throat, chills. We met the realtor at S&S's house so they could watch the boys while we worked out our offer. By then I felt like death. I envisioned myself in bed for the next four days; this was not going to be good. I slept horribly that night, but on Monday (Halloween) morning I felt much better. Wshew! No flu.

So, I've finally worked my way back to Halloween. Jaime got off work early and we headed to the mall with our boys in costume. From 5-7pm, the stores at the mall give out candy, so the place is filled with children in costumes, going from store to store. We had a good run and got out of there at 6:05. We rushed home so we could give our candy away to the neighborhood kids. I wanted to be out of candy by 8pm so the boys could go to bed in peace. Every kid who came to our door got three candy bars. I was a candy-gifting machine! It worked out pretty well, too. By 8, foot traffic slowed way down, and we were out of candy.

By Yesterday afternoon, we had settled on the terms of our offer . We got the house! At least, it appears that way. Closing date is December 13.

Despite all of this good news, the past few weeks have been really rough. We have been making excuses for Henry for months now. "He's sick" or "he's teething" or "he's constipated," but no, Henry just hates his life. For a while he was doing this constant, loud grunting sound which was driving me crazy. Now he has progressed into the shriek. Lots of parents warn you about the high-pitched squeal, but Stephen never did that. Right now, Henry does it constantly, and it rattles me to the core. It hurts somewhere between my ears that I can't define or explain. He does it when he's happy. He does it when he's angry. He does it when he's hungry. He does it when he's trying to get the cat's attention. He does it every second of every day. It's hideous. I always thought parents were stupid to "warn" me about a child developing some sort of squeal, but now I get it. I understand. Comprendo. No mas. It's not just that, though; it's a whole host of things. For instance, Henry woke up at least five times last night, and then he got up at 5:10am ready to go. I'm no longer making excuses for him. He's just a butt.

It's not just Henry; it's Stephen too. At two and a half years old, the unending tantrums have finally kicked in. I know it sounds stupid to say this, but the kid has no sense! He just goes nuts! He's also eliminating the nap from his repertoire. That wouldn't be so bad if he was the only kid, because a nap is kind of restrictive and keeps you in the house. I'd rather him keep napping if Henry's going to nap, though. Okay, well I've passed the 900-word mark for this entry. That's far too much yapping, don't you think?

Checking back through this blog's archives, I see that Stephen slept through the night from the age of 3 or 4 months, with very few exceptions. Henry is now seven and a half months old, and he never sleeps through the night, with very few exceptions. He completely sucks at sleeping and napping. It's terrible. We sort of knew how spoiled we were with Stephen, but we couldn't really comprehend it because we had never experienced the other side of it for ourselves. Well, now we know what it's like to be the parent of a mortal, less-than-angelic child in regards to sleep. It's terrible. Who wants to wake up every single night for the better part of a year? What's the point of that? When does it stop?

In addition to that, Henry is generally terrible at napping. At Henry's current age, Stephen was sleeping ten hours a night and taking two naps a day totaling 3-5 hours. Henry maybe takes 2 hours of naps in a day. One positive is that I can synchronize Henry with Stephen's once-a-day nap schedule and get some time to myself in the middle of the day (12-2pm maybe). Recently I use this time to make an attempt at napping myself, which is completely wasteful and stupid of me.

Well, football is back, which means I have self-imposed sleep deprivation a couple nights a week. It also means I drink a lot more beer, like a good American. Stupid. I was doing so well, too.

I think I'm going to attempt to not drink any soda--diet or otherwise--for the entirety of 2012. Soda is about as useless as the NFL, so I don't know why this should be hard. I've done well with my 2011 goal, which was to not use any tobacco product of any kind. This included bumming single cigarettes off people or using Steve's snus. I've stuck to it 100%, so it will most likely become permanent. I remember my parents having a conversation with each other when I was younger that New Years resolutions are pointless because one can make positive changes to their lives any day of the year. I have often repeated this cynical notion for most of my life, but I eventually realized that it doesn't really make sense. You can buy your wife a dozen roses any day of the year too, but you do it on Valentine's Day because it is the day that you show your love for someone. There are certain days to do certain things; we can't all do everything on every day. Anything that prompts you to do something beneficial for yourself is, well, a good thing, obviously. I had a couple other ideas of things to do for 2012 but none come to mind at the moment. How about not impregnating my wife? We'll save that for 2013, hopefully. That's a good goal.

Recently I've come to see the importance of abstaining from things. I don't think we should have everything that we want simply because we can. It's important to have rules to live by--things to make us stop and think about the things that we are doing. I made a conscious effort to take six months off from making music in order to get my motivation back. I still have over two months left on that, and I've done somewhat well. I haven't opened Buzz (software) in any of this time. I've done some other things to ensure that I don't get completely out of practice. I used some stretching software to slow some earsauce songs down by a factor of 5-10 times. I took my favorites from that project and am putting together a sort of "aside" album of free music. I should be done with that this weekend.

Anyway, that's enough stream-of-conscious rambling for now. I just figured I needed some text on here to break up the constant barrage of pictures and videos.

I try not to live my life in fear. Different people would have you be afraid of different things. Nancy Grace wants you to be afraid of anyone who may ever come in contact with your children in any way. Dr. Oz wants you to be afraid of apple juice and energy drinks. Hank Williams Jr. wants you to be afraid of our democratically-elected president. Jenny McCarthy wants you to be afraid of vaccinations. Alex Jones wants you to be afraid of.... well, everything. That list could go on and on, as you well know. Some people literally think that everyone is trying to hack their Wi-Fi network, kidnap their children, and riddle any car with bullets as soon as someone shows disapproval of their driving. That's fine (I suppose), but it's also fine if I choose to ignore those people and live my life.

The problem is that this thinking affects me even if I choose not to buy into it. Being a thirty-something-white-male puts me in the category of "strangers that people avoid." For instance, I can't offer to help a middle school kid carry something heavy into their house. I can't offer to give a couple of women a jump if their car won't start unless there are 30 witnesses present. Women love to say that chivalry is dead, but what has really happened is that any man who offers to help a woman is "creepy" and any man who even speaks to a child he doesn't know is a "pervert." The result is that my only option is to sit by and let people suffer unless the person in need is a man similar to me in both age and stature.

But it's different when dealing with your children. Now I have to try to strike a balance between choosing not to live in fear and being a "bad parent." [If you ever wonder what it takes to be a bad parent, just think of all the things that made someone a good parent 30 years ago.] Even 15-20 years ago, most parents did not know where their kids were for a few hours a day. In the summer, I would get on my bike and I'd be gone. No cell phones. No GPS. No chip implanted in my skull. You can't do that anymore. There is a very specific chain of custody with your children that is arranged with cell phones, background checks, and bodyguards.

Clearly I jest... but to what extent? Bill Burr jokes that "anything they're doing to your dog now, they're going to be doing to you in ten years." This is a reference to the tracking microchip implanted in most dogs. Is too much safety really a bad thing? Is there such a thing as too much safety?

[Without getting too much into politics,] I for one would rather err on the side of freedom than on the side of safety. I don't fear terrorists as much as I fear having my phone tapped by my own government. I value the freedom I had as a child. I could venture deep into the woods across the street from my parents' house, far from the eyes of any authority. And what did I do with this freedom? I caught crayfish in the stream. I cleared out bike trails with a baseball bat and a rake. I climbed up the bank of the river, grabbing on to exposed roots, pretending it was a massive cliff.

This is why I'm looking for a house with a significant amount of land. I want my children to experience some of that freedom that is oh-so-hard to come by these days. I want to be able to send my kids outside to play without it being a death sentence of boredom and drudgery in a fenced-in area the size of a tennis court. Due to a nearly-collapsed housing market, it appears that my wife and I can afford our dream home at the age of thirty. For this we are grateful.

Maybe I'm projecting my desires onto my children. They will probably care little about how I grew up, just as when I was young I cared little about how my parents grew up. But it's worth a shot, and it's hard to have a love of the outdoors when you hardly have any room to breathe.

Life is good, and I have nothing but thanks for this opportunity. [I am, on the other hand, already upset by the rapid-fire emails from the realtor and my wife reading the stats out loud all night of every house within 100 miles.]

Henry went to his six month wellness exam today. He is now off the charts in height and at the 95th percentile for weight. He is catching up to his brother in height and weight (and his brother is 22 months older than him). After we finish this case of diapers, we are just going to move him up to the size of diapers Stephen is wearing. So we'll have a 7 month old and a 30 month old wearing the same size of diapers.

Age: 6 months, 2 weeks
Length: 29 inches
Weight: 20lbs, 13oz
Head Circum: 17 inches

Related charts, graphs, etc.

Stephen's six-month checkup stats.

You just have to love a six-month-old. Henry is a real champ. We never need his car seat anymore (except in the car, of course). We can plop him right in the stroller and he loves it. He looks around until he inevitably falls asleep, at which point we recline the stroller. That massive double stroller is very nicely designed, and it doesn't weigh so much without the car seat in it.

We went to Sweetwater on Sunday night with Jaime's parents, and Stephen literally ate until he puked.... at the table. He had a good amount of lobster bisque, a lot of spinach & artichoke dip, and of course, more french fries than he could handle. The puking at the table thing was pretty unfortunate, but my wife's fast action stopped it from being a complete disaster. He was embarrassed and afraid that it would happen again, but everything ended up being fine.

Yesterday I took both of the boys and both of the dogs on a regular-length walk (30mins) by myself at 5pm. Stephen walked for the last half by himself. I've taken everyone for plenty of walks by myself, and Stephen has walked the last half by himself plenty of times, but we've never combined the two. I was a bit nervous to let him free without Jaime around, but of course he was just fine. He runs ahead a little and waits to cross the street. He started sniffing the grass a lot yesterday and saying "dog." He thinks he's pretty funny.

Stephen has his letters down pat. He definitely knows them all, though he can't say a handful of them (anything with the 'ck' sound is out, as are H, C, W, and S). Everywhere we go, he reads the letters off of street signs, menus, pretty much anything that has letters.

Bill Cosby used to start one of his [many] famous parenting bits with this request: Will all the people in the audience who only have one child please raise their hands? At that point, a certain percentage of the audience raises their hand. He then says You are not parents. You are not a parent until you've had your second child.

Now I'm starting to understand what he means, and my children are not even old enough to do the things he was talking about in that routine. For me, having one kid was like having a mischievous little friend. Once the child reached six months old, my routine went back to something that more closely resembled my pre-kids life. Having two kids, however, is like becoming a ringmaster. And just think, my boys aren't even old enough to bicker yet! Thus begins a long stretch of breaking up fights and trying to figure out who made what mess. Even earlier today, for instance, Stephen was being very good and wanting to read books with me, but Henry had a hurting stomach and screamed bloody murder for about half an hour. As a parent, I am dragged into whoever's situation is worse at any given time.

It also seems like we are more than twice as busy as before.. like it's more than double the work even though it's double the kids. I'm not sure how that is possible, but it seems to be true. And my parents had three kids! My aunt/uncle had five kids! Having kids certainly gives you more respect for your own parents. When my cousin visited for a few days in June, he started off the week saying "You got a pretty good gig, watching the kids." Then by the end of the week he was saying "HOW COULD YOU HAVE FIVE KIDS AT ONCE?" (like his parents did).

It's nice to watch my boys becoming friends already. They are so close in age that it's something different than I had with my brothers. Stephen was trying to teach Henry some letters out of his book yesterday. Not surprisingly, Henry was not very attentive or interested. It's great to know that Stephen is already a pro at sharing.

With the exception of a few daily tantrums, the "terrible twos" are not terrible at all. At least now Stephen knows how to be good. He is more helpful every day; he can put all the clean silverware in the dishwasher away by himself. He can go into the basement and get me more blankets for Henry. He uses the laptops in a nice way (for the most part). He can watch whatever YouTube videos he wants. He can make a video full screen, pause it, and do all of that stuff. On Jaime's laptop, he nicely types gibberish into her sticky notes program. He loves to hold down letters while he says what letter it is. EEEEEEEEEEEEE.

When you're having a child, everyone loves to warn you about all the perils. The same thing happens when you're having your second child. Horror stories about someone's child hating their new baby sibling are everywhere, and you suddenly find yourself unable to escape them. I will say that Stephen has been nothing but nice to Henry. He likes to sit with him and watch TV and wipe his drool with a blanket. He makes noises and faces at the baby to make him smile. He lays on the floor next to him and pushes me away if I try to join in.

Henry obviously needs a lot of attention, and most of the time I'm the only one around. Stephen has taken to going upstairs and playing/reading in his room by himself for about an hour every day. He "reads" his books one by one, page by page, and puts them in a neat stack on the floor. Then he puts all of the books back on the shelf. Sometimes I go up to check on him and ask if he wants me to read him any books. "No," he replies. On one hand I feel bad that he's not getting as much attention as he used to, but on the other hand, he is learning at a young age that the world does not in fact revolve around him. And he is dealing quite well with it.

This multiple children thing is going to be a lot more fun for everyone, I think. Stephen already has a new friend and I have someone else to entertain the baby. People that don't have children are worried that having a baby will ruin their lives. To that I say, yes, your old life goes bye-bye when you have a kid (and even more so when you have more than one kid), but it gets replaced by a new life that is much better. What was so great about my old life, anyway? I could go to bars and pretend I was still 22? I could waste endless amounts of time on the computer? When people talk about "how hard it is" to have kids, I think they are really talking about how hard it is for them to let go of their pre-baby life.