Eating

At seven and a half months old, we totally have a baby Joey Chestnut on our hands. So far, there’s pretty much nothing he won’t eat, though he doesn’t love some foods (spinach, papaya, sockeye salmon, poi). But whatever it is, he certainly packs away. An older friend took a look at him and said, 7 months? Well, he hasn’t missed a meal. This morning, he ate a 4.5 ounce packet of roasted pears and apricots, and a banana. He will eat solids at least twice a day, in addition to his regular nursing schedule. He’s a frickin’ 19-pound 7-month-old.

Obviously, this is just another indicator that we are awesome parents. Baby mama and I are just high-fiving ourselves all over the place. Natch.

We return to NYC in a couple days, and I’m ready to restart blogging the hell out of it once we do.

Baby-less

For my (belated) birthday, my wife got me a night away, with her and without the baby. So I write this from the top floor of the Moana Surfrider hotel, in Waikiki.

Baby is with my mother-in-law, who generously agreed to do a 24-hour stint with our 7-month-old while we get drunk and watch the sunset – and for the first time since being un Hawaii, not the sunrise.

Incidentally, no one told me how hard it would be to leave our baby, even knowing it is with his grandmother. We put together detailed instructions for grandma, and still I feel totally anxious and can’t even really relax, despite the drinks. I really just live and miss our baby.

Nah, I’m fucking with you. We did leave a list of pro-tips, or at least baby mama did. But after a couple of drinks at our favorite local beach bar/restaurant (Duke’s), and a dip in the ocean, I feel so relaxed I may slip into a coma and STILL show up for mire drinks down under the banyan tree.

Love and love and more love to my wife and MinL for making it happen.

birthday

So, today is my 40th birthday, and I am now officially older than dirt. I thought I would have a bit more angst about turning 40 than I actually do, but something about having a 6 month old baby makes it harder to introspectively focus on (and complain about) what’s happening to you.

But 40 is 40, and I can be a little thoughtful about what’s going on in my life at middle age.

On the negative side, my career is about to undergo a pretty major transition, and we are anything but settled in where we are living and spending our time. I’m somewhat unsatisfied with how both of these things are going. I know, most of our friends are going through some version of this ennui, on the job front at least, but somehow I thought I would find something that I would be passionate about waking up to do every day. And I have decidedly not given up on having a job that fills me with warm and fuzzy satisfaction.

On the positive side, partner and baby. I was skeptical for years that having a baby and being married would make me happy. And I do think that I perhaps would be happy if I didn’t do either of those things. But I am deliriously happy with both partner and baby. So far we have avoided being crazy with each other and with parenting. I’m not saying it’s been easy, or that we’ll keep our shit together going forwards. I am saying that there is much less challenge on these two fronts than I had imagined as a 20-something kid.

So I’ll take this birthday in stride. We’re not doing much of anything for it, and I’m not really a birthday party kind of person anyhow. Some time when we get back from our summer vacation, maybe we’ll throw some sort of party. Until then, things are…wonderful. All my problems are 1st world problems, and the wonder and joy that are my baby mama and my baby make up for all of them.