Monday, September 01, 2008

Our little girl...

Well, I'm sure you've been waiting with baited breath for my first true post about fatherhood. So here goes. Let me say that it's a whole lot of work. But honestly, it hasn't been too bad. We stayed at the hospital until last Tuesday, so tomorrow will mark the first full week at home with Erica. The first night was rough, but since then after we put her down and she finally calms down she sleeps for up to four hours. I can't complain about that too much now can I?

It does feel good when people talk about how pretty she is. I mean, heck, after they say that they end up saying things like she looks like me. So either people are flattering us or I look pretty good!

I gotta say that Erica has quite a pair of lungs on her. When she gets upset she can really let people know about it. One funny thing is when she gets the hiccups. It's even funnier when she's crying and has the hiccups at the same time. I can't help but laugh as she's crying loudly and hiccuping.

This is not an authorization for a nickname by any means, but she is our little frog. First of all, her legs kick out alot like frog legs. But also, I don't know how many times we started to change her diaper and she starts to pee all over herself, the new diaper, the changing pad, and everything else.. She's like those toads and frogs we used to catch around our house growing up. We used to catch them all the time and if you held them too long, a stream of pee would come down you arm. That's all kinds of gross. I don't know what happened to all those toads. Maybe we hunted them to extinction around our house, or maybe I quit looking for them like I used to.

The cool thing about having a kid is seeing Jeanette in action. She is so gentle and kind with our daughter. She is really in her element. I've always known that Jeanette would be an excellent mother.

Sometimes I can't believe I'm actually a dad. Right now, it's around midnight and I waiting for Erica to wake up so I can take her to Jeanette who is sleeping and feed her. As I'm sitting here with the monitor on, I heard the sound of music from her room. Somehow she has hit the music player that's attached to her crib. I have to go and change her diaper and take her into Jeanette. Hopefully, she'll go to sleep after this. We'll see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a beautiful girl!

Don't worry so much, Rus. I saw your post on the unhappiness blog. I've got you beat...;-) or is that supposed to be ;-(?
Anyway, I've been through the kid thing, including a car accident where two of my kids had broken legs (talk about worry whenever I couldn't hear the boy breathing...!)
Nature has been doing the baby thing for millions of years and she knows what she is doing. All you got to worry about is to not screw up. Buy good food, cook, keep the TV off or get rid of it altogether, and she will be fine if there's a planet left for her to fix. Children meet the challenges of their own generation. They WILL grow up, no matter how dumb we are, and all the extra stuff that schools and psychologists and peer parents try to foist on us is just crap. Don't buy it. Everyone tries to get you to do something because "the childrennnnn are our fyyoooooocherr", but they aren't. Kids are THEIR future, not ours. We screwed ours up when we left home without improving our parents' land.(maybe you didn't, going by the outhouse picture..)
Congratulations and good living.
Oh, and one more thing: the most dangerous place in a kid's world is the automobile and the highway. Keep her home or in a park or in the woods, or even on a train, but stay off and away from the roads. Basic statistics.

Anonymous said...

Oh, one more thing:
Patience comes from an infinite well inside us. It makes us stronger to just wait and give a child a chance to redeem themselves before we punish them. It always pays to wait.