An old friend from university sent ‘You Won’t Remember This Either’ which has a great quote in it:

What continues to amaze me about parenting is how it simultaneously expands and condenses time. The days can seem long, but the months fly by.

That really captures it for me. I feel like a goldfish sometimes. So I take video and photos in the hope that they will keep triggering the memories for me one day.

I went to the first video he did, ‘You Won’t Remember This’ and my wife spelled it out for me – that phase of our life is over.

There is something about the omnivorous now in parenting, and the constantly shifting challenges and demands of the moment, that creates a kind of rolling amnesia for everything yesterday.

I sure hope I got enough video of it cause I’m not much of an animator.

When my first child was born, the nurses said, “Boy, he’s a loud one.” I realized later that if the nurses were saying that, he really had lungs on him. Just about every night we’d go through “happy hour” which usually involved us cradling and jiggling our little guy around while he eventually went to sleep. I had a healthy supply of ear plugs.

So, was this normal? Was he colicy? Were we doomed to the horror stories I’d seen on Nanny 911?

We very quickly accumulated a stack of books about 3 feet high on helping babies sleep. They spanned a spectrum from letting them cry it out to never letting a tear touch their cheek. As this was our first and we hadn’t been around babies very much we tried just about everything to “help” our child get to sleep and this went on for a number of months. Eventually we got onto “Healthy sleep habits, happy child” by Marc Weissbluth (disclaimer, I setup an amazon affiliate account and I may get a few pennies if you buy it). It helped us to understand what was “normal” at the various stages of our childrens lives and for my next children they had it much easier. They got more sleep, we got more sleep (more, that doesn’t mean enough…). Everyone was happier.

So, I sometimes come across first-time mothers and the inevitable question comes up, “does it ever end?” followed by, “how?”. I’m going to send them here because a) I can never remember his name and b) maybe it will help.

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrr! My children are well versed at running around yelling, “Arrrrr!” but soon they will be blessed with our ongoing evolution of piratedom. Names.

I’m partial to this one: Rancid Billy Dread

Get your own using this easy generator or do a more involved quiz at PirateQuiz.

Arrrr!

Today my oldest boy asked me, “Daddy, how did you build the internet?”

Now admittedly I didn’t build it. But I realized in that moment, in my son’s eyes, I could have.

I’m a geek, and a dad, and I’m proud.

Round 2 – it doesn’t look like you can sync events created on the phone to the gcal caldav calendar.

As soon as this came out I jumped into using (and we’re switching my company to it…today!). One problem I’ve run into is that my exported calendar is 2.4 MB. Google isn’t able to import that so I’m going to have to migrate over slowly.