As mentioned in my previous post, I’m generally loving life. I really like my classes, my work, and my wife and my baby. But I could easily paint a little too rosy a picture. While Wake Forest, North Carolina beats Norman, Oklahoma for scenery 7 out of 7 days in a week, and while I’m incredibly glad to be here, life is still life.

One of the things I’ve been learning recently is that, while I love Ellie, I don’t particularly love taking care of babies. Jaimie does. She spent 8 months or so working as a nanny just because she enjoys working with babies. (There are plenty of other things she’s qualified to do; she wanted to do that.) And at the end of a long day, when Ellie loses it being incredibly fussy—as she has done repeatedly the last few days—even Jaimie doesn’t love taking care of her anymore. Unsurprisingly, neither do I.

This is not, to be very clear, a complaint. Rather, it’s an observation on my own sinfulness. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Last night we had over our dear friends Cody and Laura Piersall to watch The Avengers. Of course, Elayne’s bedtime came somewhere in the middle, so Jaimie and I traded off trying to put her down.

It was an interesting task, to say the very least. She was clearly not interested in going to sleep – too many interesting noises, not to mention those other people out there in the living room! – and she also decided to be doubly difficult in her approach to eating.

Read on, intrepid explorer →

Elayne is 14 weeks old today; she was 3 months old last Monday.

How time flies! Run through this much time 71 more times, and she’ll be 18: a strange thought, to be sure. Yes, that’s a lot of repetitions, but if they all go this quickly… well, it’s obvious that it won’t necessarily seem that long. I begin to understand my parents’ comments about how quickly we all grew up.

Begin, I say, because of course Ellie is only 3 months old. She’s cooing and laughing and starting to put things in her mouth and trying to roll. She gets happy when Mommy or Daddy enter the room, or come back after hours away at work, or put her where she can watch us while we’re cooking, or talk to her, or really do just about anything with her. Read on, intrepid explorer →