Miscellaneous Update

Nehemiah is in a very good mood at the moment. He never seems to tire of his toys, even though he doesn’t have many of them at the moment. Sitting and staring at Mr. Frog and Miss Ducky is just a blast for him. He’s cooing and batting at them, occasionally taking a break to try and suck on his thumb.

This week he finally discovered his hands. He’ll grab and things intentionally now, and he spends inordinate amounts of time trying to stick his hands into his mouth. I can’t imagine they taste very good, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. His thumb is often the object of these exercises, but he doesn’t have the control to hold in his mouth long enough to actively suck. He’ll get the hand of it eventually, I imagine.

Today he has a doctors appointment, his 2-month checkup. I’m curious to find out how big he is, because he sure seems to be growing rapidly. Unfortunately he’ll also have to get a vaccination shot (don’t ask me which one, I don’t know) and I’m not looking forward to that. I imagine he’ll scream and thrash and cry and be mildly upset the rest of the day. My lovely wife is taking the last half of her afternoon off of work so that she can come with me. Thanks, Jennifer!

In other news, our heater went out again Sunday night. It’s been going out every week or so since we moved in, and the landlord is finally replacing it – supposedly. It was supposed to be installed Monday, so I stayed home waiting for it. Then it was moved to Tuesday. On Wednesday they apparently took it to the landlords house in Fort Collins. Rumor has it that it will arrive here today, but I’m not exactly expecting it to. What does it take to get some service in this town?

Check out “A Day With Nehemiah – Part I” over on DiaperTech.

Nehemiah and his Turtles

Nehemiah’s turtle mobile is one of his favorite things. He wakes up in the middle of the night and stares at it. He lays in bed in the morning and fusses until we wind it up to make it move. Yet I think he likes his mirror turtle even more. It can hang conveniently on the side of a pack-and-play or on the arm of his car seat. As I write he is staring up at it, sticking his tongue out and cooing persistently, trying to talk to the happy turtle with the mirror in its belly. Or perhaps Nehemiah’s trying to talk to the baby in that mirror. I’m not sure.

For those who have been asking for pictures of the house, I’ll get around to it eventually. We’ve still been pretty busy trying to unpack and get homework and things like that done. On top of caring for the baby.

In other news I just put up a post over on DiaperTech. Check it out.

2 Months old

Yesterday, Nehemiah turned 2 months old. 2 months. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like he’s been around that long, but then I realize how tired I’m getting. I don’t know how people can take care of more than one of these little critters at a time. I’m not sure how long I’ll last taking care of just one of them!

Nehemiah is smiling a lot more now, since he’s quite a happy boy. He smiles at people, he smiles at his turtle mobile, he smiles at ceiling fans, he smiles at colorful books, he smiles at his toys. A few days ago he even chuckled at Jennifer, which is a first. In short, he’s becoming quite a character, and it’ll be interesting to see how he’s developed in another months time!

Today is Jennifer’s first day of school, though she’s had to work for over a week now. Hopefully everything goes well for her, since first days are always exhausting. I think I’ll make her something nice for dinner.

Nehemiah’s favorite book

I’ve been reading to Nehemiah pretty regularly, though most of the time I’ve just read and re-read the instant classic “Duck, a first animal book” . It has quickly become his favorite. In the tradition of the best baby books, it is relatively simplistic, consisting of 9 illustrations (one per page) of animals, and the text consists of one adjective, the name of the animaland the noise that animal makes. For example, the first page says, “wool lamb” and underneath the lamb, “baa!” All told there are about 30 words in the entire book.

Nehemiah loves it.

He stares avidly at each colorful animal while the name and sound are read. He then smiles happily at the animal and occasionally coos. The happy smiling picture that you can see in today’s “A Nehi A Day” was taken while I read Duck: A first animal book to him.

I think we’ve got a book lover in the making.

Status Update

Nehemiah now weighs 11 pounds, 13 ounces. Last week he was measured at 23 1/2 inches long. He’s a big boy, now in 3-6 month clothing since he’s just too long for his 0-3 month duds. Sure, he’s not as big as some babies, but he’s definitely growing, and he’s definitely tall.

He’s been smiling a lot baby, more evidence if we needed it that he’s a good natured little guy. He’s been practicing a lot lately at sticking his tongue out. I work at it with him several times a day. Occasionally he gets it well, sticking his tongue out of a huge open mouthed smile. More often than that he tries to stick his tongue out and doesn’t even get it past his lips. Still, it’s quite cute to watch and I have no doubt that he’ll master control of his tongue in due course.

Nehemiah also likes mirrors. I took him to the doctors office for a checkup today and he was mesmerized by himself in the big wall mirror. He wasn’t a very happy camper when he wasn’t allowed to look in it. He also has a turtle toy with a baby-safe mirror on it’s belly that he is intensely fond of. He talks to it.

At the moment he’s laying quite content in the pack ‘n play staring at his turtles and the mesh walls that surround him. He doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings about his incarceration, though I have no doubt he’ll start fussing for his mid-afternoon meal any time now. I’m convinced that with a bigger belly and hair on his feet he could pass as a hobbit, since he certainly eats often enough to be one!

Tragedy

As you ought to know by now, Jennifer and I just moved out of out apartment and into a house. Since we were moving as quickly and simply as possible, most of our clothes were moved after being unceremoniously stuffed into garbage bags. On the whole it worked very well, as it made them very easy to move, but after we moved and most of out clothes were unpacked, tragedy struck. One particular bag, containing nearly all of Nehemiah’s hat collection,as well as his bibs, pants and extra sheets for his crib was not unpacked right away. A couple of days ago I was in the process of throwing out the garbage and general debris of our move, and I foolishly tossed out this bag along with the bag of used diapers that sat next to it. I didn’t even look to make sure it was garbage and had no idea what it contained. It’s gone. Nehemiah now has only three hats out of over twenty.

It’s a sad day, though he doesn’t realize it.

New Blog

Well, today was what I’m considering the first day of my new job as a stay-at-home dad. I was in charge a couple of days last week, but from here on out I’m the Parent in Charge. So I’ve started a second blog to chronicle my life and thoughts as a stay-at-home dad, while this blog will continue to be about our family. You can access my new blog by clicking on the link “Diaper Tech” over to the right. There’s not much on there at the moment, but there will be. There will be.

A Long, Long Week.

On Monday Jennifer left to go to one of the classes that she was supposed to take before school starts. I took care of Nehemiah all day, and thankfully the first day wasn’t too bad. He did vomit some in the morning but seemed okay for the rest of the day so I didn’t dwell on it. That night he began vomiting again, very forcefully. It wasn’t pleasant. This went on for quite a while and eventually we called the advice nurse who advised us to take him to the emergency room. That is precisely what we wanted to hear of course. There’s nothing I love more than a good long relaxing visit to the emergency room. Unless it’s a nice long stay in the hospital itself, which is of course even better.

Well, I was rewarded for our diligence and Nehemiah was indeed admitted to the hospital so that they could run a bunch of tests and make sure there was nothing wrong with his digestive tract. They didn’t find anything but he obviously wasn’t feeling well since he didn’t want to eat and sleep excessively. So we stayed in the hospital with him that night and all day Tuesday and Tuesday night and all Wednesday morning, finally leaving at about 2pm. After all the tests they ran nothing seious seemed to be wrong and the doctor concluded that it was just a stomach bug or virus of some sort. Nehemiah seems to be back to his normal chipper self, which is quite nice.

While all of this was going one I was also trying intermittently to get our Internet service so that I could do my homework this week. Qwest was supposed to have transferred our service on Monday by 5pm, but naturally it wasn’t working. I called the tech support and they claimed it was rescheduled to the next day, without informing me of course. Wonderful. The next day it still didn’t work. Nor did it work on Wednesday when I spent 2 fruitless hours with a clueless tech support guy who claimed my service was activated but seemed incapable of sending a technician to my house to sort it out. Later that day I talked to a person who told me it had been rescheduled. Suffice it to say that after an entire work week and 5 or 6 annoying hours on the phone (much of it on hold listening to advertisements about how great Qwest’s customer service is) a tech support guy was finally sent to our house today and it took him less than half an hour to get things working.

Besides Nehemiah going to the hospital and the Internet service crippling my ability to do homework, our hot water heater went out Sunday night and I had to get in touch with our landlord to have it fixed. Thankfully he did so promptly, and now we have plentiful multipurpose hot water on tap. I didn’t realize how nice it was until I took a cold shower. I don’t like cold showers.

It’s Saturday now, and my homework still isn’t done. Nehemiah is asleep and by the sound of things Jennifer is in the kitchen. It’s been a long day trying to get some things unpacked and set up and attempting to do my homework. After everything that’s happened this week and last week and the week before that I can only hope that tomorrow will start a really wonderful, relaxing, quiet week during which nothing unsettling or unexpected happens and our lives run smoother than clockwork. It’s a nice dream, isn’t it?

Internet access! At last!

We moved last weekend, and it unaccountably took until today to get our internet and phone working, though they were scheduled to be activated on Monday. Anyway, I’ll be able to post on here again, which is nice. Look for a summary of our awful week (I hate hospitals) and some “A Nehi A Day” pictures later this evening.

Six Weeks Old and Moving

It’s not much fun to move at the best of times. It’s even harder with a 6-week old baby, when no packing has been done in advance. Yet that’s our situation. All week we’ve been packing boxes and I’ve been hauling them over to the house and laboriously unloading them. Thankfully my knees have been holding up well, and only hurt bad yesterday, prompting me to take a break for a few hours. Tomorrow people from church will be helping us move our furniture, then on Sunday my brother-in-law and dad will bring up a washer and dryer for us and help me move the big, gigantic, massive turtle aquarium. Should be fun. Then on Monday Jennifer has to go back to work. School doesn’t start yet, but she has to take some classes before it does, hence the ridiculously early start date. All this means that on Monday, after an extremely exhausting week of moving preceded by an extremely exhausting week when Jennifer was sick, I’ll be on my own taking care of our son while attempting to get all of my school work done as well. Wish me luck, I’m gonna need it.