Category: Fatherhood
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Today is the one-year anniversary of London’s big move from the NICU to her new home. Reflecting on that day a year later, I think I made the right choice by not overthinking what a big change it was going to be for London and for us. I knew it would be an exhausting transition, but…
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When London will not eat one thing I give her, Cheerios save us. They are like little life preservers floating about on the table top, saving her because they give her sustenance, saving me because she is actually eating something. I’ll hand London some Cheerios wherever we are. She drops half of them on a…
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For my fourth act, I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. When you study literature Rushdie’s works come up a lot in discussion. And yet, I made it through an English undergraduate program without ever being assigned one novel or short story by Salman Rushdie. In my graduate studies in International Relations, his name came up…
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A couple of months ago Kate secretly arranged for me to have a vacation. I am actually going to travel out of the state. On. A. Plane. I am heading to DC on Thursday for a four-night stay. My mom is helping out a ton by driving from New Mexico (again) to hang out with…
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I do not like the thought of going through a day without coffee. I love drinking it, but I have also become infatuated with making it. Weighing out the coffee beans, grinding them, weighing out the water, and slowly pouring water in a circular motion from the inside out have all made for a ritual I…
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A few months ago I wrote a post linking back to the story of London’s birth, the first posts on this blog. It had been a while since I had mentioned them and wanted to make sure people were aware of them, especially since they were now buried in the archives. I have finally done…
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May 4th. May the Fourth Be With You. It’s Star Wars day. And it’s also one year from London’s due date. It’s her one-year birthday (developmentally). It is a significant milestone, but I think May 19th will be more of a celebratory day because that will be the one-year anniversary of London’s homecoming. This time…
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London was on a ventilator for the first three weeks of her life. This meant that we didn’t hear a peep from her all that time. We could see from time to time that she was crying, but there was no noise to accompany the cry. It looked so odd, different than any other baby…
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The Apple Watch is not for me. I know, I know, a lot of people said the same thing about the iPad. Who needs one of those? But the two are not the same. When I want some actual peace and quiet, I enjoy storing my computer away, setting aside the iPad, and taking my…
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She sneezed into her hand five minutes after it happened. I shook my head in disgust and in further disappointment in myself for not stopping her five minutes earlier. We were all out at one of my favorite restaurants, the Bull and Bush, having an excellent weekend dinner. London was in a high chair eating…
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Hello everyone. Just a quick word here about the blog. If you’re on Facebook, give us a follow at this link. You’ll get all of the updates in your news feed, but you’ll still have to click over to the blog to read the whole post. And, if you feel so inclined, share the page…
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This last weekend we walked with London in our family’s first March of Dimes event. Last year we were still in the NICU when it took place and prior to that, I had no clue what March of Dimes supports. The organization exists to help moms have a full-term pregnancy. And if that doesn’t happen, then…
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I never expected to receive a stroller as a surprise birthday gift. Nor did I expect to be happy when receiving a stroller as a surprise birthday gift. When both of those things happened, I knew I had fully arrived as a SAHD. The picture here is just moments after I came in the door…
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It was one of those freak, 65-degree days in January and I had ventured downtown with London. We were at REI and I had just sat down at a patio table at the Starbucks there, overlooking Confluence Park and the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. Our table was in the sun and London stayed…
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London’s early smiles were one of the first signs of how happy a baby she would become. At first I thought the flashes of a smile I saw were just the typical baby imitating the adult’s facial expressions, but by the time this video was taken on her two-month birthday I had changed my mind. You…
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I would think twice about giving new parents a journal. Chances are, they already have three…at minimum. They don’t need but one place to write their thoughts down about the expecting, the arrival, and the aftermath of their first child. We were lucky and probably only got about five journals, enough to record every minute…
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A long way from a full feeding, but a good start. There were about two months of training from the day (February 27, 2014) I took this video of London until she could take a crack at an actual bottle. What an amazing step for her this was. A 1 ml syringe holds quite a…
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“How old is she?” The simplest of questions for parents of full-term babies to answer, but not so for parents of preemies because there are two answers for this one question. At some point, a baby arrives so early that their actual age is going to be different from their developmental age. For example, my…
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Every year someone at the Oscars uses their acceptance speech as an opportunity to get up on their soapbox. And every year people in the media, politicians, and sometimes people in your own living room get slightly irritated to irate about these moments when someone “supposedly” strays off topic, like the actor should not have…
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Inspired by the recent movie, The Theory of Everything, I picked up a nonfiction classic I had never read, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I have had this book around the house for five years and I had never cracked it open and, before doing so, I reminded myself that I may understand…