Tag: Atlanta

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of no sleep…

Money Sucking Heater

Thirty minutes. It’s not a big number really, but thirty minutes here…thirty minutes there…it all adds up.

Thirty minutes–that’s how much of my life I’ve gained back from the valley of “The Sleep” thanks to having another baby. And mind you now, this thirty minutes is only on the backend of the night—the time when I have to get up in the morning to get myself ready for work and help get the kids and dogs all squared away. This time doesn’t include whatever lost (er…gained) time I garner in the middle of the night thanks to bottle feedings and coddling.

I know about this thirty minute number thanks to my thermostat. When we moved into this house, one of the first things I did was rip out the 70s style-dial-A-temp thermostats and install handy programmable ones with the really cool green backlighting for easy nighttime adjustment. With these, you can tell your a/c and heater when to turn on and off, which is a heckuva lot better than just setting it one temp and then constantly running back and forth adjusting it, or leaving for work in the morning and thinking, “Crap! I forgot to turn the thermostat up (or down).” So, all in all, a handy little doo-dad.

With gas prices what they are, I’ve been putting off turning on the heat, but with temps dipping into the low 40s for consecutive days, the house finally cooled down enough to warrant the heater. I mean, there’s only so many layers of socks one can expect a toddler to put up with for any length of time. Last night just before bed, I turned on the upstairs heater and adjusted it down a bit since we were all going straight to bed.

This morning when the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., I noticed it was still cold in our room, but figuring the heat would kick on any moment, I just forgot about it and went about my usual routine. It wasn’t until 5:45 that the heater came on, which means that last year, when the baby was still a tiny baby, versus a cranky grab-tastic thing that never sleeps, I was getting up at 6 a.m. and setting the heater to kick on 15 minute before we got up so the house would be all toasty and warm for our emergence.

So long story short, that’s how I know that I’m losing (dangit! GAINING!) at least thirty minutes of sleep each night. With my oldest son getting up as soon as he hears me pour my first cup of coffee, I suppose I’ll be adjusting the heat back to 5:15 a.m.

Hello $400 heating bills–goodbye pocket money! And for this, we’re worried about some caribou in a land where few people live and even fewer ever visit. Nice.

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

I’m handy…I swear!

Thanks to my own father making me sit and watch (and in a few rare occasions pitch in and help) him do things around the house when I was growing up, there are very few things I won’t tackle around my house. I can refinish furniture, build simple bookcases, perform general remodeling, install appliances, etc. In fact, I do so many things around here on my own because I’m too cheap to pay someone else to do it, that my in-laws are rarely surprised when I said I did such an such project and are in fact more surprised when I tell them I had to pay someone to do something (such as walk around on my roof blowing out the gutters!).

However, this weekend, I found something that I can’t do…carve pumpkins! I absolutely stink at carving pumpkins. Once would think that with the thousands of dollars in tools that I have in my arsenal, that I’d have the two or three things necessary to successfully carve out some eyes and teeth without breaking the darn pumpkin nearly in half, but I don’t.  We got two pumpkins the other day at the Dairy-cum-punkin-patch and my oldest son wanted to carve a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine in it. So, I downloaded the template. I also thought I’d just carve the boys’ names in the other pumpkin, so I picked out a nice creepy font and typed their name in MSWord in a size that would fit on a pumpkin and I was ready to go.

At first, everything went great. I got out my jigsaw and cut the tops off the pumpkins…perfection! This was going to be so easy…and cool! However, when I started trying to cut the design that I had traced out on the pumpkin, I quickly realized that the brute-force power-tool approach was not going to work. Unfortunately, that was AFTER I’d botched the first two letters in my son’s name. Leaving that one in disgust, I turned to the Thomas template and while it did turn out much better, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It looks OK at night with a candle in it, but I’m afraid that for the other pumpkin, I’m just going to print up the boys’ names on paper, let them color it and stick-pin it to the pumpkin and call it a day.

My Punkins

Hey, I’m no artist. I’ve always known this, and why I thought my handy-ness would translate into a useful artistic endeavor such as pumpkin carving is beyond me. But one thing about botching something is that it teaches you a valuable lesson. With luck, this year’s punkin debacle will fade from both boys’ memories as quickly as it takes my youngest to go through a box of diapers and by the time they are both old enough to appreciate punkin carving, and aren’t icked out by scooping out the punkin guts (my oldest wouldn’t touch them), I’ll hopefully have found a nice set of carving tools and perfected my craft.

Maybe next year I’ll get a third punkin and practice on it before operating on the real ones. All’s I can say though, is thank the good Lord that I didn’t become a veterinarian.

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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States Society

There’s a fine line between obsession and crazy…

WeightliftingAt 34 years of age, I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination; however, I’m no spring chicken either. After nearly 15 years of fairly heavy weight training, my joints and skeletal system (especially my back) are probably more in line with a 44 year old. A study back in ’01 revealed that despite any bone density gains weight lifters earn from throwing around heavy weights, once they stop, those gains rapidly diminish. Add to that all of the joint and spinal damage nearly all weight lifters garner, and you gotta wonder why a person does it.

As I was working out this weekend, I noticed a young guy who is frequently there at the gym when I am. He’s probably in his mid-to-late 20s and it’s always been obvious that he has a great body, mostly because when he’s doing legs, he rolls his pants up so everyone can see his quads, etc.  And despite being obviously muscled, I never realized how much until I saw him in one of those tight Under-Armour® shirts (white) this weekend, where you could see every muscle, including one of the best sets of abs I’ve ever seen. Now, despite being 100% heterosexual, I can tell you that, from one weight-lifter to another, the dude looked incredible!

I can also tell you however, that he didn’t get that way naturally. I’m not saying he’s using steroids (I’m not “not” saying this either), but naturally, muscles simply don’t get and stay that full (read: pumped) without some help. It just doesn’t happen.

Of course, I started reflecting back to the time when I was “that” committed to my body. I was never in my wildest dreams as chiseled as this guy, but I was worlds better than I am now and it occurred to me what a young-man’s game this exercise thing really is. Some people might say I’m just being petty and jealous, but the truth is that it takes a phenomenal narcissist to create and maintain that kind of physique.

When I was 25, I once had a date critically tell me, “No woman wants a man who has a better body than she has.”

Truer words were never spoken. The kind of commitment it takes to maintain the thin-skinned six-pack look that models make look so easy requires an approach to eating that is fanatically limiting. It requires that every waking moment that isn’t taken up with work or other essential activity, be spent either at the gym, or hitting the pavement burning off the calories you just ate that your body didn’t automatically siphon off to feed your muscles. It takes the ability to turn the guilt you feel over eating a slice of pizza, into something positive like a few extra reps on the bench press. Basically, it requires sacrificing nearly every facet of your life that doesn’t revolve around your body, and that, my friends, is why you see so few married couples with children who are in such great shape.

Sometimes it takes this kind of mental meandering to convince yourself that you don’t suck. I’ve been really down on myself about my weight gain lately, and although it’s nothing major, it’s a stark departure from my 20s. Plus there’s that whole drive to look good for your mate. I suppose in the end, all you can do is your best and hope that it’s enough.

I mean, with two kids, who has time to be a narcissist?

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

My Super Powers Only Work When Warming Up Baby Bottles

Baby Feeding Trophy There should be a trophy award for parents who are able to get up in the middle of the night and calm a crying baby without waking up the entire house, or even the entire neighborhood for that matter. And parents who pull this off in an apartment complex should get a cash reward on top of their trophy (“Do you need cash NOW?” I hate those commercials!).

Overall, I’d give myself fair marks for being able to pull this off. I’m probably about 80% effective when it comes to being able to put the baby back down, but last night, I deserve an Emmy nomination for my performance…

Our youngest woke up around 12:40 a.m. I heard him before he really got wound up, so I headed downstairs for the obligatory bottle. We normally leave a small fluorescent light on under one of the cabinets to light our way, but I suppose after two children, it has burned out and I’ve been too lazy to replace the bulb. I’m a man, so naturally I can find the refrigerator in the dark if need-be, so I opened it and grabbed a bottle, then turned to the right, walked one-point-five steps to where my memory says is where my microwave resides, opened it and stuck the bottle in.

For you mothers gasping in horror at the thought that in my sleepy state I’ll over-warm the bottle and end up scalding my child’s mouth, not to fear; I’ve done this hundreds of times, and not burned a single child yet.

Now, our house is about 19 years old, 20 really if you count when they actually started building it. And while this isn’t old for a house, it’s old for the appliances, which are original. In appliance-years, 20 years is really like 40—not so much because they don’t work as well, but mostly because after 20 years, whatever fashion style your appliances matched 20 years ago has long since disappeared from the showrooms of today’s appliance vendors.

For whatever reason, my mind was sure that, despite any light whatsoever, I’d be able to instinctively hit “3, 0, Start” on the microwave keyboard, but I didn’t. In fact, I’m not sure what I hit, but whatever it was, it started the microwave counting down like some sort of radiation time-bomb. I kept waiting for it to say something like, “Just what do you think you are doing Chris?” (“A Space Odyssey” reference for those of you playing along at home).

After pressing a few keys trying to kill it, which only really served to enrage it further, garnering a cacophony of “beeps,” I ran over to the light switch and turned it on so I could see what the heck I was doing.

Subsequent attempts at stopping the countdown were useless and by this time I could hear the baby ramping up for a mega-scream, so I quickly keyed in the correct “3, 0, Start” sequence and LO! It worked.

Bottle warmed, I ran upstairs, grabbed the baby out of his crib and before he could wake up the whole house, I stuck a bottle in his mouth and started changing his diaper. All is well with my soul…

But then…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…

…it wasn’t stopping! The microwave had apparently finished its countdown and was not going to be happy until I acknowledged it.

I quickly buttoned up the baby (whoever thought 15 buttons on a onesy was a good idea should be shot!) and ran downstairs to shut the microwave off, only to find that none of my attempts at cancellation worked.

“Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…”Beep”…

Knowing I had only moments before the baby dropped his bottle and started wailing for assistance, I dashed out into the garage and flagrantly started flipping circuit breakers in an attempt at shutting off all power to the microwave and thankfully, I hit it on the third try.

I then ran as fast and as quietly as humanly possible back upstairs just as the baby was finishing up most of his bottle. I picked him up, burped him, put him back down and let him finish his bottle and quietly go back to sleep.

Whew! Crisis averted.

Nightly duty done, now the only thing left to do is calm down enough to go back to sleep before the alarm goes off. Maybe if I had a nice, trophy to snuggle up to…