Evan Valentine, Stay-at-Home Dad

Jaime had a good idea to just let the video camera run while she fed Stephen the other night, and I could just edit it down. I took it from seven minutes in length to just under three minutes in length. It's still a bit too long. Stephen is attempting to feed himself pureed carrots with a spoon. If you get tired of watching it, skip to 2:35 when jaime grabs the camera again.

I couldn't be more satisfied right now. We're just preparing to be snowed in, eating frozen "California Pizza Kitchen," and catching up on recorded shows. I walked the dogs already, and we're waiting for the heavy snow to kick in.

Jaime stopped at Burger King and the gas station on the way home. She arrived bearing Whoppers, french fries, beer, and cheerios. Stephen just ate his first Cheerios a few hours ago, and he took it like a champ. He had quite a good time, and seems to be mastering the pincer grasp.

The local news makes it seem like there is a madness all around, but I saw other people walking their dogs, nice and calm, enjoying the weather. The grocery store was calm and empty this morning. All is well.

There have supposedly been nearly 600 traffic accidents already today in this area.

We're going to bathe Stephen and enjoy our night. Cheers.

We got a package of "leftover" gifts that my parents forgot to bring with them when they visited at Christmas. Stephen has improved at opening presents in the past month. He was having quite the good time with the wrapping paper by the time my wife turned on the camcorder. There is also a compilation of videos from Christmas day that I just uploaded, which I'm sure is terribly boring to people outside of my family.

I have not posted any of Stephen's milestones because everything is happening so fast. Even since my parents left, he has learned to hold his own bottle (feed himself) which is really nice. He is converting into a little destruction machine that only likes to break things or put them into his mouth. He can crawl up to the couch and use it to stand himself up in a matter of seconds. Then he just pulls all blankets, sweaters, remote controls, and laptops onto the floor. When he has nothing else to destroy, he can turn around and anchor himself to the coffee table, where he proceeds to throw everything within arm's length onto the floor. He can even, with great effort, get himself into a standing position in his playpen, where the divider is almost as tall as him. At that point, he struggles on his tippy toes to get his eyes above the bar so he can look at you. This all takes a great deal of effort and he is very proud of himself by the end of it.

Stephen has moved into the falling down stage of his life. He just falls down all day. In a more general sense, he fails at nearly everything he tries to do, which causes him to whine or to cry for ten seconds at a time. It seems like this is going to last a good long while. Learning to walk involves a lot of falling.

He is eating a lot of solid food and Baby Mum Mum Crackers. The high chair is getting a lot of use. It seems he is drinking a little less milk all the time, though it is hard to tell. Sometimes I feel like I am forcing the solid food on him, but he is not really gaining weight, so I must be okay.

He slept through the night nearly every day for months, but now you just never know what he is going to do. He woke up three times last night, but just needed a pacifier in order to calm him down so he could go to sleep.

We gave Stephen some pureed carrots last night in his high chair. Having a high chair makes it official--we have too much stuff for the baby. Now we need him to get a little bigger so we can retire his larger stroller. This is the start of a very messy boy. Soiled both a bib and a blanket in no time. He seemed to take to it eventually. Not sure if he liked the taste, but he liked the challenge of eating. We started by giving him such tiny amounts which would end up all over his chin. Then he would start opening his mouth for the spoon. I guess we're supposed to start doing this every night. Maybe it will be part of the routine; Jaime can feed him while I walk the dogs.

Looking through my .mp3s when Scott was here, I rediscovered some of my old favorites like Joseph Spence (1|2) and Tim Easton (1) and Townes Van Zandt (1|2)

We had such a good visit with my family this weekend; it seemed longer than 28 hours. It's rare that we get all five of us at the same place. I feel bad for Robert, he had all kinds of flights and riding in the car to deal with. Fly to my parents' and ride to and from my aunt/uncle's.

We got something in the mail that said Sirius/XM was going to reinstate our service for two weeks in an effort to bring us back. We were excited about it because it was going to be during the time of our big drive down to NC. Well, it turns out they gave us Sirius Lite (my name, not theirs) which has a limited number of channels. And it has NOTHING that we listened to. No 40's, 90's, Bluegrass, or Folk.. and it only had one of the 4 Comedy stations. You really need all four comedy stations if you plan to find anything remotely funny at any given time. Good job, Sirius/XM. Way to not win us back. We clearly didn't like it that much to begin with... they have gone as low as $4/month with a few offers ($24 for six months) and we still haven't signed back up. I know I am not an everyman in this regard, but I found that it didn't have much that I liked, even when we had all the stations. The "electronic music" stations in particular are dreadful.

I'm sad that this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is over. It was promoted as the series finale, but we'll see about that. Larry David quits after every season, but ideas start trickling in and he makes another season 2 or 3 years later.

Okay, I'll stop rambling now. Lord, I was born a Ramblin' Man.

What a weekend..

THURSDAY: Slept until 7:20, left for S&S' house by 9:00. We purposely did not feed the dogs in the morning, because Davis gets motion sickness in the car. Even still, he puked up a bunch of liquid, and my camera bag fell over right in the puddle. After we arrived and fed the dogs, I went to Giant to pick up some potatoes to make mashed potatoes. I also got some Stage 1 baby food (Carrots, Turkey, and Sweet Peas). We still have not given him any of the food. We watched the Lions get crushed by the Packers and made ice cream. This year was peanut butter chocolate ice cream. I typically do not like the ice cream that we make over there, but this was good. It was like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Everyone agreed that it was a bit strong, but I really liked it (and I usually don't like chocolate ice cream, either). The Klauses ran late due to airport woes, so we didn't eat until about 2:45. I made way too many mashed potatoes because I was worried we would run out and not have enough leftovers for the Mulligans, who were not able to make it on Thanksgiving day. I ended up making two gigantic bowls and dirtying every large dish in the house. Food was good. Ate too much, yada yada. Stephen was up for an hour and forty minutes during the night, which is uncharacteristic. We DO NOT miss that part of having a baby. He was happy as could be, and was starting to win us over with his cuteness--crawling around in bed and making cute faces and sounds. After about an hour and twenty minutes, though, his charms ran out on us.

FRIDAY: After eating turkey sandwiches for breakfast, we left for Chapel Hill at 9:03am. First long trip with the baby. After a couple hours, we stopped to get gas and try to feed Stephen. We wasted a lot of time trying to feed him and give him attention that he didn't want or need. We got back on the road, and he got fussy after a few hours. We got off at another exit and Jaime tried to feed him again. More wasted time, as he did not appear to want any food. The trip took us four and a half hours even with all the wasted time. We maybe could have made it in four hours (I always forget how long it takes us, so this is good to actually put it down somewhere). Overall, Stephen was good on the trip and we were worried over nothing. My parents arrived about 30 minutes after us and I went to the grocery with Robert and got some potatoes and other small items they needed to make dinner. My mom mixed up some thick cereal for the Stephen and tried to spoon feed him. She mixed up too much, and I don't think she expected such a strong reaction. She is used to taking care of Cierra, so she was giving him huge spoonfuls and he was choking on it. Stephen just threw a fit about the cereal. First he made some faces like "this is weird" and was quite confused, but after a few more spoonfuls he just started crying so loud. We had a second Thanksgiving around 5:45 that evening, and it was very nice. There were 11 of us plus Stephen, who slept in the other room for most of the meal. People played games throughout the evening and passed Stephen around. Stephen's uncle Robert gave him a lot of "piano lessons," and Stephen actually responded! He was punching the keys on his own just to hear the sound. It was pretty cool. We slept all right on the air mattress, even though the baby woke up about ten times. Each time just required a pacifier in order for him to go back to sleep. It was better than the 100 minutes the previous night.

SATURDAY: Jaime and I woke up and played with Stephen in our bed for close to an hour in between Jaime feeding him. He crawled around on the air mattress with us and played under the blanket. Once I heard people getting up and stirring outside our room, I got up to try to help make breakfast. After surveying what was there, my uncle decided that we needed to go get some eggs. We jokingly said we were going to make green eggs and ham with the leftover Thanksgiving ham. He took me to the store in their Prius, which was my first time in a Prius. Was pretty cool to ride in. Of course, by the time both of us idiots came back, we had 18 eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns. My uncle and I made a lot of breakfast for everyone, and we made green eggs even though we didn't get out the ham. Everyone kept asking "why did you make green eggs?" and my uncle would say "because it was me and Evan, that's why! That's what happens when you put us in charge." After that we took lots of pictures. We took a few posed pictures of Jaime and Stephen, and then changed clothes for the Valentine Christmas card photo. My uncle took those with my camera, and then we got out leftovers for lunch. After a little adventure with finding the Blu-Ray remote, my uncle put in Up. It wasn't as good as other Disney/Pixar animated movies. It was mostly sad. By the end of that, Stephen was being a pain. He had too much stimulation, what with all the pictures and new people and changing clothes multiple times in a day. We packed up everything in record time (seems like the only thing we forgot was the baby rice cereal flakes), took a big group shot with all twelve of us, and hit the road at 4:50pm. Stephen was excellent for this trip. Due to traffic, it took four hours and fifty minutes. Around Fredericksburg, traffic was pretty bad for seemingly no reason. We made no additional stops for Stephen, though. He was perfect. Since he was worn out from being passed around for two days, he slept most of the trip home. He only had three ounces of milk during the whole five-hour span. We got to S&S' house at 9:40pm, watched the end of The Incredibles on NBC, and watched the end of the Georgia/Georgia Tech game. Stephen was quite active and stayed up until 11:30 because of all the sleep he had gotten. Staying up until 11:30 is not my idea of fun after driving five hours and not getting a very good rest the previous two nights. But, he went down quietly and slept until 7am, so at least we got some sleeping done.

Today I am just trying to get caught up on laundry, scrounge around for food, and get some pictures edited for my family. Scott's visit and our trip to NC have put me well behind. We still have no kitchen faucet (and have gotten along surprisingly well without it, actually) and no food. Jaime's parents gave us some ingredients for cheese dip, so at least we can continue that tradition while football is on. My computer was frozen when I got back, which sends me into a tail spin every time... sigh.