Archive for July, 2008
Randomness
by aaron on July 31st, 2008
• Got to play Guitar Hero tonight with Mark. I haven’t played a video game since before baby.
• I have so much freelance work, I’m afraid my brain will start oozing out my ears. Too much work is a good thing in this economy, right?
• I still think the following words/phrases should give it up already:
— whilst
— heart of hearts
— outside the box
• Next Wednesday and the following Saturday I am going to be getting paid to do somethings that scare me because I feel highly under-qualified to be getting paid to do them. These things involve a camera, strangers, L.P. Field, and a scissor lift.
• I had really wanted to make some art for the Tomato Festival again this year, but I just don’t see how it’s going to happen.
• All babies seem to be bi-polar. Sebo can illustrate this perfectly.
• Red Bull, Beef Jerky, A Cliff Bar and a Frappucino can wake you up when you need it to. And yes, I mean at the same time.
• In 12 days, Michelle and I will have been married for 7 years. That’s just freaking amazing.
7 weeks
by aaron on July 29th, 2008
Today Sebastian is 7 weeks old. I can’t believe it’s been so long. Up above is a cameraphone pic I took on Friday night before taking him in to Limelight in East Nashville to experience his very first art show. He’s been really fussy today. Didn’t get much sleep last night. He is beginning to respond a little to us … we’ll make a sound and he’ll make a sound. Sometimes. I’ve noticed him looking around a lot more, today he was looking at some of my paintings on the wall, which was cool. He’s such a handsome little man, but with a heck of a temper. Hopefully the temper won’t stay around!
Anyway, this isn’t much of a post, just wanted an excuse to say he’d been to an art show, one of many more. I realize I’ve not posted much recently. Seriously, this whole being a parent thing is so much bigger and more exhausting than I ever imagined. I’m lucky if I can carve out ten minutes a week to write anything. And when I do, like right now, my mind is pretty much just mush.
Gotta run. Have fun.
When I grow up
by aaron on July 23rd, 2008
The other night Michelle and I watched a movie that I’d never had any interest in seeing but actually it turned out to be pretty good. It was The Kid. It’s a movie about a man who runs into himself as a child and he’s able to see how stuffy and heartless he’s become, and we learn things about his childhood that led him to give up on his hopes and dreams.
This movie really got me thinking about my own life, and in turn, Sebastian’s. He’s going to have hopes and dreams about what kind of person he wants to be, and what he wants to do when he grows up. I was talking to Michelle the next day about wondering, as a parent, which dreams we need to cultivate and encourage, and which ones will just be fleeting. Like do I buy him a guitar the first time he expresses interests (and he will express interest) or do I wait until the tantrums last for 30 minutes or longer?
But this got me remembering some of the things I wanted to be when I grew up.
And in no particular order:
• Astronomer and/or astronaut (probably the longest-running dream of mine)
• Scientist of some sort
• Artist
• Novelist
• Rescuer (a guy who goes around rescuing people, preferably with a rope so I could swing from things)
• MacGyver
• Special Effects Makeup Guy (this dream lasted about 30 minutes)
• Left-fielder for the Red Sox
• Video game designer
• Comic book illustrator
• Single panel comic strip artist (like The Far Side)
• Miniature golf course designer (I’m still holding out hope for this one)
Birth story
by aaron on July 23rd, 2008
Nicole did an amazing job writing up our birth story and she posted it on her blog.
You can read it here.
Sleepless
by aaron on July 18th, 2008
This afternoon at work I was literally falling asleep at my desk. After probably 45 minutes of this (not to mention the fact that it’s about 112° in my office because they’re trying to save electricity money) I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to come home and take a nap. So I did and I slept for 3 hours straight. Ever since Sebo’s little growth spurt kicked in a couple weeks ago, this is by far the longest I’ve slept in that time. So I slept from about 5:30 until 8:30. And about 10:00 Michelle and the kid went to bed and I came into the home office and got to work. This may actually become something we do more often in the future, at least when I have a lot of freelance like I do now. Michelle suggested maybe I sleep from 5-10pm and then get up and go to work. That way at least I could get an amazing 5 hours of sleep in a row. She might be on to something. We were talking the other day and we realized that neither of us have slept for more than a few hours at a time since June 8th, the night before the night we went into labor. I would have thought that after 5 weeks, we would have gotten used to something like this, like maybe we would have trained our bodies to thrive on only a little sleep.
No deal. It’s just as difficult now as ever. Maybe even harder. I have a hard time concentrating at work. I fidget. I look like hell. Sometimes I fix my hair and sometimes I just don’t care. We’re big fans of LOST and you know when Desmond was in the hatch, before the survivors got there, and every 108 minutes for several years, he had to enter the code or the world would end? That meant that he could NEVER sleep for more than about an hour and a half at a time. I feel kind of like that.
So it’s 1:22 now and I’m working on the magazine, stuff for Nashville Shores, the Titans program book, and some sample interior pages for a book publishing account I’m hoping to land at my meeting with them tomorrow. Wish me luck. And hopefully I will stay awake during the meeting and that I’ll remember to wear pants. Sleepy people do crazy things.
One month
by aaron on July 10th, 2008
So today is Sebastian’s one-month birthday. I can’t believe it’s been that long, it’s gone by in a blur. Although there are some very early mornings when sunset and sunrise seem to run together and it feels like it’s been quite a long time. But here he is, a month old … he’s still little, probably just over 7 pounds now. He’s on the verge of being too big for his preemie diapers, I think.
Observations and things I’ve learned in the past month (in no particular order):
• I’ve been impressively attentive in some areas and embarrassingly negligent in others.
• I now wear between 3 and 5 different shirts per day, everyday.
• Watching him be born is something I’ll never forget.
• Michelle can make him smile by tickling his cheek with her hair. It’s pure bliss.
• Our moms seem to have magic dust in their fingers the way they can get him to fall asleep.
• I have become horrible at calling/emailing people back. Sorry about that.
• When he figures out he’s hungry or has a dirty diaper at 2am, he patiently waits for us to wake from our sleep, wipe the cobwebs away, and calmly tend to his needs while he quietly entertains himself with cute little coos and ahhs. OR he goes from zero to 95 in a heartbeat while we fall out of bed and stumble for the lights with our hearts racing, and he doesn’t stop until he gets whatever he wants. Believe whichever story makes you happier.
• Breast feeding has been so much more difficult than we’ve ever imagined, thanks to a horribly painful thrush infection. Yeast be damned.
• Diapers and formula are REALLY expensive. Once he’s bigger, we’re going to switch, at least in part, to cloth and/or “G” diapers, which will require more work, but should save money and the planet earth.
• I’m pretty sure he enjoys peeing on me.
• Health insurance companies have no heart whatsoever.
• Hospitals are great. Nurses and doctors are wonderful. But despite what they say, our best interests are not at the top of their list. They have their protocol and there’s no amount of reasoning or pleading I could have done that would have convinced them NOT to keep our son from us for the first ten hours of his life, all because his breathing was 2-3 breaths too many per minute for them to allow him be with his mommy. Sure, they admitted that this fast breathing was absolutely no danger to him and that the magic number was 70 and they couldn’t let him leave the nursery if it was even one breath above that. Sure, they could have EASILY monitored him in our room so that Michelle could breast feed him early in his life to create that bond in the crucial first 8 hours that you can’t get back. They could have let that happen instead of starving him and causing him to get jaundiced because they wouldn’t let him eat for the first 10 hours until he was so weak he couldn’t latch on, forcing us to supplement him with formula. The nurse told me flat out to my face that she did not care whether he breastfed or not, she wasn’t letting him leave because she wasn’t allowed to let him leave until that digital readout said it was below 70. And he had to read below 70 two consecutive times … and they only checked him every 30 minutes, which again could have EASILY been done in our room. Would it make sense that being taken out of your mother after nine months and taken across the hospital to a strange white room and placed by yourself naked in a pan and left there alone for hours instead of being cuddled by your mom and dad might make your breathing elevate a point or two? No sir, rules is rules.
• Nicole, our doula, was indispensable. I have no doubt that God specifically led us to her after other doula(s) didn’t work out. I can’t imagine doing this again without her.
• Navigating the families and trying to make everyone happy has been a stress we didn’t anticipate.
• He looks so much like Michelle when she was a baby, it’s ridunkulous. Awesome.
• We have terrific friends and wonderful parents.
• We’ve tried to somewhat limit his exposure to people and places thus far … after about another two weeks or so, he’ll have the doc’s go-ahead and then we can feel more comfortable taking him around crowds. At the pediatrician’s recommendation, we go to restaurants with him sometimes now when there’s no one else there. Did you know that if a baby gets a fever before a certain age that it’s VERY bad and they have to spend a few days in the hospital and, among other things, get a spinal tap? How come? Not really sure, but we’ve had several doctors tell us that.
• Going back to work when you’d rather be at home with your wife and brand new baby just plain sucks.
• Yes, photos are coming very, very soon.
• The past month has been more difficult than I could have ever imagined. But at the same time I can’t believe we’re really parents, and that just makes me happy. Since he’s been born I’ve pretty much been floating between feeling completely desperate like I don’t know how in the world I can be strong enough to pull this off, and feeling so happy and blissful that I could just explode in a field of butterflies and daisies. Or unicorns and glitter. Either way, I’ve cried a lot.
• I could list lots more. But I need to wrap this up, I have work to do and a baby to get home to see.
I can’t believe it’s been a month since the 40 hours of labor came to an end. Insane. And I know time will only speed up as he gets older. I love him. I love Michelle. I know I’m supposed to be her rock, but she’s totally been mine. I hope i can pull myself together and be the dad I want him to have.
Where the hell is Matt?
by aaron on July 10th, 2008
One of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in a long time.
………………………………
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
I Met the Walrus
by aaron on July 10th, 2008
Love this:
“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.”
Jesus the Boogeyman?
by aaron on July 8th, 2008
The other morning I was at Publix paying way too much for some Enfamil and I noticed that on a rotating book rack there was a book, aimed at children, titled “Jesus Wants All of You.” I couldn’t help but think that if a kid saw that and didn’t understand the context, that sounds like a pretty scary concept.