the unforgiving minute

nap
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

as the boy's daytime caregiver, i find those minutes after a) the diaper change that follows b) the nap, preceded by c) the first feeding of my shift to be ones of "well, what am i going to do for the next few hours?"

i mean, it feels like, here i am only in week two of the next few years of childcare and i've already run out of ideas.

i know already that there is nothing while he is awake that will hold his attention for more than maybe 10 minutes, tops.

the play mat, the baby swing, the bouncy seat -- i think i went through that progression in maybe 15 minutes on day one. i felt like i was really screwed.

today was a bit of a triumph as i got him to watch about six minutes of a baby einstein video on the youtube.

otherwise, it's like ... walk around to get him to burp his gas out, step outside and circle the yard, and, once the full-on crying commences, play the felix mix on itunes and rhythmically rock to get him to stop before hopefully he falls asleep.

(that was some real salvation when kris early on told me he shouldn't be awake for more than two hours at a stretch, lest he ruin his day's sleep pattern. so there's always the nice, time-killing nap to hope for.)

oddly enough, i'm probably grateful for the diaper changes in that they knock off a quick five minutes, and they're frequent and usually good at ending a crying jag.

so let's tally this:

feedings, 40 minutes x 2 = 80 min
burping/digesting, 30 minutes x 2 = 60 min
diaper changes, 5 minutes x 5 = 25 min
total: 165 min or 2 hr 45 min

which leaves about 2 and a half hours i need to fill each day before i have to head to work.

the wild card is naps (twice a shift).

a great nap is two hours; good is one; and mediocre is 30 minutes.

however, their combination -- especially the second one -- can be tricky and potentially wreak havoc with getting him and me dressed for leaving the house.

(especially bad since laying him down is a dicey deal that can nip a nap in the bud. makes things like eating and showering a crapshoot.)

if i look at it as "only" five hours between kris leaving and my going to work, there's really not that much time to have to fill.

i mean, getting ready for work and daycare is already about 40 minutes. maybe if i didn't wait until almost that last hour, i wouldn't be barely in time for the page 1 meeting.

while i don't feel the need to keep the boy entertained so much as not bawling, there's still a pressure to keep that waterworks from gushing -- which leads to some kind of stress, i suppose, where every minute awake and content feels like another bullet dodged.

kris and i have both reached the point of wondering what we did with ourselves before we became parents. did we sleep all day? surf the web? write poetry?

if nothing else, this child has made us much more efficient with our own time, since we're sharing it with him.

and, the good Lord willing, these minutes will only be drops in the bucket of years with him treasuring the moments when our boy was very small and had all the time in world just for us.

day care

day care
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

the day kris had been dreading arrived, when maternity leave ended and day care began this week.

amazingly, the lad seems to have adjusted ok, with a minimum of fuss and the occasional spit-up. no crying. yet.

given that i was taking over daytime responsibilities with mama at the office, i was glad to have survived the week, as well.

i'll call it beginners luck that i was able to get the boy to take at least one good nap on my watch each day, which made his sleep easier in the evening for kris.

but perhaps this coincides with the supposed 3-month turn, where all the troubles with eating and sleeping suddenly evaporate.

while i'd love this to be the case, i'm going to get the rest i can so i'll be ready for another week of semi-solo child care.

(still, gotta watch that prep time on the boy, though. that eats into my getting ready for work time to the point that i'm just barely getting to the newsroom in time for the page 1 meetings.)

change, again

friday morning
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

the window gets tighter all the time.

with the proximity to labor leading to doctor's orders to rest at home back in january, kris edited her final late-night story and ended our last work shift together.

now, with the end of her maternity leave, i lose mornings with my wife, too.

couples make do with much less togetherness than she and i on a weekly, let alone daily, basis.

i'll have to be grateful for the truncated day and three-quarters that we'll have together for our weekends -- and stop staying up so late that we're apart at night.

a new chapter begins.

lucky me

lucky me
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

as saturday evening rolled around, after a day of housekeeping and child-rearing, i sat on a couch and looked across the way at my lovely, exhausted wife, with our babe in her arms and asked, "remember when we used to plan for saturday nights?

"where we were going to meet our friends, what we were going to do, what we were going to drink, then snuggling?" (yeah, this is a pg-rated blog, pal.)

i pointed to the boy.

"there's our saturday nights."

i kissed my beautiful wife and our handsome boy, thanked her for waiting for me all those years, and for giving me a life.

whitesville

here's a shot my buddy tom took in whitesville, w.va., the day before the last four miners were found at the performance coal mine in montcoal, w.va.

including those known immediately to have died in the monday afternoon explosion, that brought the total dead to 29.

it was sobering, grim work reporting on the tragedy as it unfolded.

there was no divorcing ourselves from the event; we hoped that there would be a good ending after the first news of the blast.

obviously, heart-breakingly, there would be none.

need to sleep and care for the boy pretty much precluded any timely recounting of the day's events in the newsroom in this space.

for posterity's sake -- and, perhaps, some means of making peace with the consequences of disaster -- there was this.

By the time we went to press early Tuesday, we reported that the explosion at Performance Coal had claimed 25 lives and four miners remained unaccounted for.

By mid-morning, a friend sent a text that Rick, the husband of a high school classmate, Kim, was among the missing.

This was no longer a tragedy of faraway numbers; this was affecting someone I knew. From my home in Charleston, I was now part of a community in Whitesville.

i'm not even sure what it accomplishes, other than catharsis.

easter

the first son of the first son of the first son
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

this time last week, i was having work dreams -- of uploading wire stories and pictures of my west virginia mountaineers' final four loss to duke to the daily mail web site.

they were fairly matter-of-fact, workaday dreams -- just the process of collecting the material from the associated press, then editing the stories and captions, writing headlines and checking my work.

the "nightmare" was that our championship dream was over, and in the worst way: a blowout loss where our strength was overmatched and our weakness exposed.

duke had to play their best game to beat us; and, unfortunately, they did.

i awoke disappointed, but faced with the need to have our boy ready to attend easter mass and brunch afterward, my priorities quickly shifted.

regardless, i proudly donned my gold and blue tie and proceeded to have a wonderful day with my family.

oddly, the only feeling of dread i had would be from anticipating the sense of satisfaction i imagined my non-wvu co-workers would have from watching our bubble finally burst.

i suppose being overshadowed for the better part of a month in a glamor event would grate on one's nerves if one weren't the subject of attention.

but the derivation of joy from another's sorrow still strikes me as small and mean.

while i say i try to regard my school's competitors with respect and its in-state brethren with special kindness, i guess doing so with the expectation that it be reciprocated sort of makes them superficial acts of respect and kindness, doesn't it?

a day later, this trivial bit of hand-wringing would be put into tragic perspective.

mountaineer circus

so this is what it's like.

granted, it's not the runup to the bcs national title game, but the attention paid to my west virginia university mountaineers this week gave more than a little taste of what it feels like to have my team in the national spotlight.

columnists are analyzing, speculating and even pontificating.

polls are prognosticating.

and would-be entertainers are trombipulating. (not a word. borrowed from funk godfather george clinton.)

it's a circus.

and if i were a hard-charging, true blue believer, i'd be in nirvana, thinking we were finally getting our due.

but you know what? if we don't beat duke tonight, we're yesterday's news.

wvu juju

i think it's bad juju to think the thoughts i'm thinking about our coverage of this weekend's final four games.

these are the ones where i'm wishing i could design the page where west virginia university wins the national championship.

that's because we're not playing for the national championship.

it's saturday. our opponent in the ncaa tournament semifinal is duke university.

and if we defeat them, we have to beat either butler or michigan state university on monday.

i'm counting chickens before they're hatched.

it's bad enough our managing editor, bob, has wanted a big wvu presence on all our front pages this week to drive home the importance and excitement surrounding the game.

and, as a fan and journalist, i can get behind that.

but as a superstitious follower of the mountaineers, i can remember the last time we as a newspaper organization got all jacked up before a big game that would have led to the really big game, we tanked in a tremendous upset.

13-9, bob, 13-9.

i hate this feeling.

that said, i'd rather we won the national championship without having any say in its front page coverage than being assigned the design job for that day's paper and losing.

gold and blue newsroom apologist

from my vantage point in the newsroom, if i could liken the week leading to today's ncaa semifinal matchup between my west virginia university mountaineers and the duke blue devils, it would be akin to the embarrassment of a diner at an all-you-eat buffet walking past tables of folks agog at your fifth plate overflowing with food.

i like to think of myself as being objective and impartial and possessing of good news judgment.

so it's with not a little sheepishness that i found myself agreeing with my bosses that this was the story of the week -- state school among last four to play for college basketball national championship.

it's been the big news all week for news outlets that aren't in our state, let alone our town.

our team and our coach have been covered in stories published by news outlets from new york to los angeles.

it happens every year to the participants in the days leading up to every major sporting event -- saturation and overload to the point of puking for the non-interested observer.

well, this year, one of the participants just happens to be my school.

and our job is to play to the interested observer -- the ones who'll buy our newspaper and the ones who drive up our internet hit counts.

in an office populated with alumni of numerous institutions of higher learning, i can appreciate the fatigue of having to cover the same school on seemingly every page from every conceivable angle every day for a week -- especially when you couldn't give a rat's ass about the mere mention of said school in the first place.

a colleague said doing so ignores the minority of people who don't care, that we're leaving them with little else to read.

thinking about this later, i wondered if he would agree, then, that ours should be the publication to practice the newspaper equivalent of affirmative action, where we would pump up stories that would cater to the tastes of those whose sports teams are presently not as newsworthy.

(i considered this thought in political terms that might resonate with his center-right leanings. i'm not sure if he'd agree with my analogy.)

that said, as a person with a natural aversion to hype, i can absolutely appreciate his sentiments.

and, as a newsroom insider, i'll be the first to tell you that i know we're beating a dead horse.

but as an outsider, as a fan who's looking for information about his favorite team from as many sources as he can get, i can't stop coming back for more.

and these are the people we, as a news gathering business, are going after.

if we lose tonight, those few hundred extra copies sold or web hits recorded will be no more.

if we win, we have one more day to sell readers more news.

i call it making hay while the sun shines.

baby talk

an addendum to the sentimental text message deletion. these are all from kris, from various child-rearing moments last month.

yeah. odd baby. cute, but odd.
7:33:20pm
03/01/2010

he literally pummeled me with his tiny fists. just stopped screaming for first time. he is so close to getting laid down to cry it out. have held him all night and my arm can take no more.
7:01:48pm
03/10/2010

your cat is fucking dead
7:57:31pm
03/11/2010

guess who just fell asleep in his swing?
6:42:10pm
03/16/2010

labor and delivery

last installment of deleting sentimental text messages ... these were from friends and family when the baby was on his way into the world.

they start with inducement and end with ... well, you know ...

1/21/10
we're very excited
pamy, 1:14:33pm

yay! good luck! steady hand when you cut the cord. (just don't over think it:) ). we re praying for you guys.
pj, 1:17:29pm

keep us posted. tell kris hi! hope you both are able to get some rest tonight
kim, 9:38:09pm

that's gd. she needs her rest for the big day. ...last night as dinks :-))
pamy, 9:38:19pm

tell her to hang in. will see you tmrw. sleep well. get rest.
joy, 9:43:33pm

ok-praying for all of u and especially f :)
joe, 11:06:49pm

01/22/10
GOOD LUCK! o-don't know if anyone put it this way-but when its time to push, tell kris to bare down like she's trying to poop. those r the muscles to use-in case she can't locate her muscles b/c of epidural ;-) works like charm
pamy, 7:44:36am

see-thats gods way... ;-))
pamy, 7:54:02am

go f go!
brad, 9:29:20am

pulling for ya, girl.
nanya, 10:41:16am

i saw your jeep in the hospitay parking lot, is everything okay?
ashley, 1:21:48pm

may the schwartz be with yooooooouuuuuuuu!
pj, 2:38:53pm

just said a prayer... it'll be ok
lem, 4:56:57pm

oh, oh, oh, oh good luck!!!!!
heidi, 6:31:51pm

my pitocin took a long time too. hang in! love you guys!
carrie, 7:12:44pm

f = stubborn.
brad, 8:47:25pm

no problem. keep smiling, should be anytime...really
lem, 9:14:18pm

01/23/2010
baby yet?
pj, 8:01:26am

yea! bout time
lem, 8:14:21am

i'm glD she's doing better. hang in there. we love you!
heidi, 8:14:40am

outstanding.
nanya, 8:18:30am

great! it wont be long!
becky, 8:22:31am

i hope you're taking notes. this a big story.
nanya, 8:40:57am

how's it going?
joy, 1:06:57pm

give her a big kiss for me.
nanya, 1:16:03pm

:-x
pamy, 5:28:55pm

aaaaaaahhhhhh, congratulations!!!!!!!!!!
heidi, 6:54:11pm

yay! all is well?
pj, 6:54:22pm

yay! my heart is so happy! can't wait to see pictures. love you guys!
carrie, 6:55:52pm

congratulations! how's kris?
nanya, 6:55:59pm

YAY! congrats! sammy is gonna teach him to play basket ball. u should see him act it out. YAAAAYYY! xoxoxo. :-x
pamy, 6:56:25pm

bout time. omg. i hope he does keep that up. if he does, he gets that from u p. congratulations!
lem, 6:57:11pm

oh i am crying. kisses all around
monica, 6:57:35pm

congrats, guys!! how're mom & baby (and daddy)? will let you guys rest & soak it in. likely see you tmrw. love ya!
joy, 7:23:25pm

sooo cute! i think kris wins! 0:-)
pamy, 7:26:10pm

i love him already.
carrie, 7:35:58pm

awesome! kris doing ok? good job papa m.
jake, 7:37:16pm

when can they go home? cant wait to see u all.
jake, 7:40:57pm

yay! congrats! where does w come from?
reggie, 8:13:24pm

wow! congratulations kris and p! what a gorgeous baby boy and what a cute picture. you guys, all three of you, rock.
tony, 10:41:42pm

01/24/2010
congratulations!
auntie felipa, 6:42:46am

looking back over these, i recall my use of lists to contact whole groups at a time with one message. i kept shifting contacts from one list to another, then lost track of who was where and when things got sent. some folks never got word.

i remember once the inducement, then labor, started, i would send out regular reports every four or five hours or so, ending with an emphatic "over and out" to end communications.

this was supposed to keep my phone from beeping with responses that distracted me and bothered kris. i think it mostly worked ok.

stork en route

in the next installment of deleting sentimental text messages ... baby announcements ...

06/10/2009
pamy called it! yea! congrats!
lem, 11:16:48am

how far along?
lem, 11:18:25am

:-D :-)) :-) :-p :-> :-"> :-x
pamy, 11:32:01am

CONGRATULATIONS!!! so ... what does that mean for martini fridays? that's awesome!
joy, 11:32:59am

yahoo-congrat!!! i did!j
pamy, 11:33:48am

u know how i guessed? u avoided us @ church & u don't keep a new catholic fr church
pamy, 11:41:31am

8 wks?
pamy, 11:48:06am

does she barf?
pamy, 11:48:22am

but usually u give a quick hello
pamy, 11:49:10am

:-x u guys made my day :-D
pamy, 12:12:13pm

awesome man! congratulations!
tony, 2:18:07pm

08/24/2009
three legs!! awesome!! congratulations!!
joy, 11:47:22am

engagement

cleaning out the ancient cell phone of sentimental text messages. these followed us on the car trip home from myrtle beach from friends we'd contacted with the big news of our official engagement. (the one with the ring, of course.)

all misspellings and shorthand as sent. last names left out. i'm guessing the original message read "kris and i are engaged" or something like that.

you can see a lag between what must have been the original send and the network reception heading north.

08/10/2007
me 2. tell cris 2 call carmie. c u guys @ home.
lem, 6:20:12pm

congrats. heather and i celebrated our 10th yesterday.
chopper, 7:43:27pm

yay! congrats!
jessica k, 7:44:59pm

get some!!!! congratulations to you both!!!!
jacque, 7:45:45pm

holy cow! congratulations!!! that's awesome!
julie, 7:47:16pm

congratulations!!!
kevin o, 7:47:26pm

congratulations!
matt h, 7:48:30pm

CONGRATS! love u guys!
nicole, 7:52:23pm

congratulations! yay! i'm so happy.
tony, 7:55:59pm

p should change his name so he can be a wise guy
we are so happy for you
j. mo, 8:01:38pm

congrats p! u didn't tell me after church :). was it somethin in the water @myrtle? or did the hazzy hot humid air cuz a temporary meltdown;-) cu both intown
billy, 8:04:43pm

congrats!
pam e, 8:08:22pm

wow!!!! congrats!!! start planning the bachelor party!
j! steve, 8:09:37pm

congrats pee!
e j, 8:10:51pm

congratulations!! :)
tara, 8:11:44pm

lets go celebrate so i can say the west of my puns
dinner tomorrow
j. mo, 8:14:46pm

congrats! it's about time you made an honest woman out of her :-)
jessica r, 9:03:33pm

congrats, my friend! i'll call when i have better phone service.
danny, 9:17:57pm

08/11/2007
your kids will not haue to be baptized
they already will be kristened
j. mo, 11:55:26am

cool! what's the date? doesnt count if u dont set a date!
andy, 2:37:37pm

08/13/2007
did i hear some good news about you???
beverly, 7:56:19pm

that's awesome! congratulations! i'm so happy for you!
beverly, 8:48:07pm

ooh, ooh, i woulda! :-)
beverly, 8:50:02pm