MichaelandChrissy.com

I love to watch anime while feeding Gavin at night.  It’s the perfect time for a guilty pleasure.  With an exhausted Chrissy asleep by 8 PM, it was usually just me and Gavin up at ten, midnight, and later for feedings.  He would need a bottle roughly every two or three hours.  What else can you do while feeding the baby but watch TV?  I had a lot of anime coming through my Netflix queue, and I would intermittently watch an hour or two a night while taking care of Gavin.

Netflix has a really good selection of anime.  I watched the entire multi-disc series of Black Lagoon (12 eps), RoD The TV (26 eps), Hellsing (13 eps), Haibane-Renmei (13 eps), and Noir (26 eps) during Gavin’s first few months.  I sometimes watched whole movies, including Vexille, Blue Gender, and MD Geist.  There’s also some good anime on cable nowadays.  I’ve been watching weekly episodes of Hellgirl, Gunslinger Girl and Gundam 00 on my DVR lately.  I really enjoy anime, but I don’t think I’ll get to watch as much anymore.

The problem is that Gavin is almost sleeping through the night.  Now that the night-time feedings are dwindling, I have a lot less time for anime.  Once I went back to work after paternal leave, Chrissy took over weekday nightly feedings.  That left me with nights between 8 PM and midnight, and weekends.  Viewings were further curtailed as Gavin has required fewer bottles (and slept longer) in the last few weeks, but it’ll be a lot harder to find downtime for cartoons soon.  I suppose that I could just wake up at 2 AM to watch anime (without the feeding part), but I really like sleep too…

Chrissy recently found some time to take some Halloween photos of Aiden and Gavin.  Yes, Halloween was two weeks ago, but it’s hard to find time for these things when you’ve got two kids!  She could have easily blown it off, but Halloween photos are an important family tradition in our house.  We’ve got fabric backdrops and props and everything!

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

An unintended part of this tradition has been the choice of clothing.  Gavin gets all of Aiden’s baby clothes, which have been in storage for two years, including the Halloween-themed clothes.  So what we end up with is a photo of Gavin in the same clothes and almost the same pose as the one that was taken of Aiden two Halloweens ago.

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

This brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast our two boys.  When they were only a few months old, they looked pretty much the same.  Gavin has more hair, and Aiden was almost a month younger at his first Halloween, but they still look remarkably alike.  Unfortunately, Gavin didn’t get as many outfits or backdrops as Aiden did, but remember, Chrissy has two kids to manage now!

Aiden (2006)

Aiden (2008)

But then there are also the differences between then and now!  Although Aiden still has the ceramic pumpkin that sports his name across the front, that is where the similarities end!  He’s gotten to be such a big boy over the last two years.  We’ll have to see what memories next Halloween brings us!

Last night, Chrissy decided that Gavin should try something a little more solid than formula.  So, she mixed up some baby cereal for him to try.  It wasn’t much more than a thin gruel.  He didn’t take to it very well, and pushed most of it out of his mouth with his tongue.  Maybe he’ll be more receptive next time?

I remember when Chrissy first gave Aiden solid food.  He didn’t seem to like it at all then, and he didn’t like it this time, either.  Chrissy gave him a bite of the baby cereal, since he was asking for some.  His expression was funny, at first, until he started dry heaving.  No wonder Gavin didn’t want any!

Gavin slept through the night for the first time last night.  It was a shock because Aiden began to sleep through the night at fifteen weeks old, so Chrissy and I were crossing our fingers that Gavin would do the same.  At fourteen weeks, Gavin was still waking up at 2 AM and 5 AM every night, so we weren’t holding out much hope for a big change in a single week.  But we got lucky!

Or so we thought…  When daylight savings time kicked in on Saturday night, all of our clocks automatically fell back one hour.  So Gavin woke up at four?  Well, no.  Our bedroom clock went completely wonky and reset itself four hours ahead.  Chrissy woke me up for work at 2 AM, thinking that it was in fact 6 AM.  We were so happy to see that both kids were still asleep!

Chrissy didn’t realize the error until we turned on the TV for the weather forecast, and it said that it was 3 AM!  I was just about to drive to work, assuming that it was still dark outside because of the time change, but instead went back to bed.  When we crawled out of bed for the real 6 AM, Gavin was just waking up (and hungry!).  We’ll have to see if this was just a fluke!

When Aiden was born, I always called him “the boy”.  It was “Where’s the boy?” or “I’ll change the boy.“  People would sometimes criticize me because I didn’t say “my son” or “our son”, but it just came out as “the boy” when I referred to him.  Think of it as a “stylized pronoun”, since it’s used to refer to him, not something that we call him directly. “Hey, boy!” sounds too much like Homer Simpson.

Enter Gavin.  It started early, with me calling Gavin “the boy” on day one (three weeks ago, for those keeping count).  I knew that this would get confusing very quickly, since we now had two boys.  One might say that I shouldn’t have started calling Aiden “the boy” to begin with, but Chrissy calls him that as well, so it’s not just me.  The obvious step would be to call Gavin some else, like “the baby”. And that sounded right.

So now I have two sons, one that we call “the boy” and one that we call “the baby”.  It’s strange that we never called Aiden that when he was an infant, but then we didn’t already have a boy that we needed to differentiate from.  I find myself slipping often, but I’m getting better about referring to Gavin as “the baby”. And Aiden knows Gavin as “the baby” as well.  If you ask him where the baby is, he’ll point him right out.

Our stylized pronouns should not be confused with nicknames.  Each of our sons has their own nickname, and it’s not “boy” or “baby”.  That would be lame.  I often call Aiden “Hot Shot” or “Shotimus Prime”, and that has stuck since he was tiny.  Lately, I’ve been calling Gavin “Tiberius” because his middle name is “James” (get it?).  We’ll see if that sticks like “Hot Shot” did for Aiden.

* There’s no such thing as a “stylized pronoun”. I made that up!

Gavin was born a little jaundiced, which means that his skin has a yellow color to it.  Gavin seems to be a bit on the orange side though, a good look for him, since his head is about the size of an orange.  You can see it clearly when compared to the pasty white of my arm in the photo below.  Jaundice is fairly common in new babies, and it’s supposed to go away on its own after a week or so.   

The nurse suggested that we put him in direct sunlight for an hour a day to help clear out the bilirubin in the skin that causes the color abnormality.  We’ve been putting him in a sunny spot by our kitchen window, being careful that he doesn’t get too warm.  The pediatrician said that the color will leave his eyes last, but to keep an eye on him as his kidneys filter out the excess bilirubin.

I really like to write for the family web site, but the last week has been a whirlwind of new-baby activity.  We’ve done this before, being second-time parents, but it’s still taking a bit of time for everyone to get acclimated to caring for a new life again (or for the first time, in Aiden’s case).  Maybe I’ve been too busy to compose anything or possibly too tired to think straight, but it’s been difficult to come up with an adequate description of how I feel right now. So, let’s get analytical.

Gavin James Wilson was born on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008.  He was six pounds and fifteen ounces, and twenty and one-quarter inches in length, just a tad smaller than Aiden was.  Chrissy and I went to Community Hospital in Munster to try out their new single-occupancy post partum rooms (they didn’t have these last time we were there).  We showed up at 5 AM, got into our room by 5:30AM, and then prepped for surgery at 7:30AM.  After a short wait, Gavin was born via c-section at 9:09AM.

I accompanied Gavin to the nursery to be weighed and warmed up while Chrissy rested up in the recovery room.  Chrissy’s mom was there waiting for us, and she got to watch through the window.  I’ve got some video of the nurse checking Gavin out, so I might be able to post that some time.  Chrissy spent the next few days in the hospital, and we were able to bring Gavin home for the first time on Friday, July 25th.  Which brings us to the present, home again with a new baby in tow.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us at the hospital!  We got visits from Chrissy’s parents, her three sisters, Aunt Linda and Uncle Marve, Aunt Paula and Grandpa, and Felice and her mom, Pam.  My Dad and Diane stopped by as well, which was a very pleasant surprise.  We appreciate being in your thoughts!  Keep watching this space, as we’ll be updating with new baby pictures as often as we can.

Chrissy and I ordered a bedroom set for Aiden a few months ago so that we could move him into the guest room. We decided that he should have a real bed to sleep in before the new baby comes along to swipe his crib.  The idea here is that, with any luck, he’ll be so used to living without bottles, binks and cribs by the time Gavin comes that he won’t feel the need to fuss about not having them.  We picked up the furniture from the DirectBuy warehouse on Saturday and spent the evening assembling the beds and moving Aiden’s clothes into their new spaces.

First of all, a reminder that oak is heavy.  That being said, Aiden’s new bedroom has a lot of oak furniture.  All of it needed to be carried in.  We started with the bunk beds, which came in several boxes, including one big one for the “Captain’s Storage Unit”.  The chest of drawers came next, followed by the massive dresser.  We attached a large square mirror to the dresser once it was in place.  The furniture looks really good, and these are quality pieces, nicer than I thought they would be. We put a set of plastic safety rails on the bed for him too (the ones that were made for the set don’t work with the under-bed storage cabinet).

We were assembling the bunk beds until ten o’clock on Saturday, so that would be Aiden’s last night in his Gavin’s crib.  For his after-lunch nap on Sunday, we put him down in his new bed for the first time.  He cried for a bit at first, but we’re not sure if he was crying because he didn’t like the bed or he just didn’t want to go to sleep.  We had a similar issue at bedtime that night, but he eventually went to sleep without any problems. Aiden’s toys are all in his new room now, and we’re almost done moving the pictures and other wall stuff, so we’ve closed up the nursery until we need it again.

Claims that our new baby will be named “James Tiberius Wilson” were completely false.  It was an April Fool’s Day joke.  I know that I’m a huge geek and everyone expected Baby 2.0 to be named after a Sci-Fi character of some sort, but come on. I mean, come on.  Besides, Chrissy would never allow it.  Instead, we are now leaning towards “Gavin James Wilson”. Let us know what you think.

Speaking of April Fool’s Day jokes, there were some good ones across the internet yesterday. The first one I saw was Thinkgeek’s Pii Pii game, which was a “urination simulator” for the Nintendo Wii. Thinkgeek has had some other good gag products, but this one was the most disturbing. Google has an April Fool’s Day post every year.  This year they introduced the Virgle plan, a hundred year outline for Mars colonization, but it wasn’t as funny as some of their previous hoaxes.

Blizzard released news of a new unit for Starcraft 2, the Tauren Marine. Taurens are shamanistic minotaurs from the Warcraft series, hence the irony. Cow jokes abound. As it turns out, a lot of people would like to see the Taurens in SC2. And lastly, I was “rickrolled” by YouTube at least once. That’s when you get a video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead of the content that you were expecting.

Chrissy and I tossed around baby names for a long time before finally making our decision today.  Our new baby boy will be named “James Tiberius Wilson”.  I plan on calling him “Kirk” for short.  Chrissy thinks that this is in homage to Kirk Cameron, of “Growing Pains” fame, so please do you best to make sure that this remains so.  Thanks to everyone who responded to our requests for name suggestions; we really appreciate all the help and support!