Long Time Coming

It has been a long time since I have done one of these…like, six months.

A lot has happened since then. Mostly the birth of my son, Asher.

I am now a father of two and a member of a family of four. This change could not have been more wonderful, more frightening, more exhausting, or more exciting.

When I walk in my daughter’s room in the morning, she almost immediately says “What Asher doing?” When we bring him down the stairs after a nap she stops whatever she is doing and squeals “I want to see him!” She wants to know when he is sleeping, and when he is awake. She wants to know what he is doing at all times, why he is smiling, if his hands will always be small, if he wants his binky, and when he is eating. She is either a caring, doting big sister, or is training to be a stalker.

It is a toss-up at this point.

Yes, two is a lot harder than one. Yes, it is more than twice as hard. But it isn’t because of the newborn – all he does is eat sleep and poop. We actually wondered more than once why we thought having one of these things was ever hard. A day spent with a one-month-old is a day spent flipping back and forth between MSNBC and FOXNews to see if you can make yourself black out. With the occasional bottle and dirty diaper thrown in.What makes it so hard is trying to deal with a two-year-old with one hand tied behind your back. you still need to read books and play tag and negotiate potty-training, all while carrying around a floppy ten pound mini human being.

Also, any downtime you had is now gone. When Olive was born, I felt jealous at my wife’s ability to soothe our daughter by feeding him – something me and my poor excuse for man-boobs could never do. But I didn’t envy the hours each day she spent nursing while I slept, watched TV, wrote in my blog, or did any manner of other required or leisure activities.

Now, the tables have been turned.

For the first two months of Asher’s life it seemed that he only wanted to eat when Olive needed to be changed, bathed, fed, taken to the playground, put to sleep, taken out of her crib, put in time-out, or needed help building a fort, playing with play-dough, playing hide-and-seek, or running from her imaginary friends. I would spend my day doing these things while my wife would nurse and watch two back-to-back episodes of Teen Mom 2.

But we are falling in to our new routine and we really don’t remember what the old routine was anymore – we are having so much fun now that we don’t want to.

Writing in the blog has been tough, finding time between baths and diaper changes and play and sleep and work has been more difficult than I expected. Also, I have to change the mast-head and that is just a pain in the ass. But just like how I have gotten used to my new routine as a parent, I hope to get used to a new routine as a writer.