Important Life Lessons



I have been thinking about collecting a list of important life lessons to pass on to my girls. If anybody has any they would like to add, please feel free to add it in the comments.

Lesson #1:
The close door button on the elevator doesn't really do anything except maybe.. MAYBE cancel a recent open door button push. It is basically a giant placebo, made to give anxious elevator travelers something to do if they can't wait the 3 seconds for the doors to close on their own. I have run tests, so I know this to be true. Any feeling you have to the contrary is just an effect of the intermittent reinforcement caused by occasionally hitting the button at the same time as the door was going to close anyway. Bottom line: The close door button is for suckers.

Been a little over a week since I last posted. This is mostly because I have not been up to anything really different. Feel free to re-read the Shut-In entry to see how most of my days are going.

We are ramping up for me to go back to work. This should be some fun. On the plus side we are going to try a Night Nurse/Doula to see how that affects our sanity. The negative is that they are not cheap, so even in the best case scenario I doubt we will use one more than a couple of times a week. We are also scheduling sitters/help to come and get Candy through the next 3 weeks. So far we got two days a week covered. We will need more. I think I am coming to terms with the idea of spending a fair amount of change on Baby Care assistance.

Turns out babies cruelly go through cycles of growth spurts and behavior change. It usually takes at least a week to develop a good routine where you feel comfortable feeding and getting the baby to sleep. Unfortunately something like every 2 weeks the baby's needs/patterns/general fussiness changes and you are back to square 1. Well, maybe square 1.5. It is my understanding that this cycle slows (i.e. a change every 1 week stretches to 2 weeks to 4 weeks to 3 months, etc). Good Lord I hope so.



They grow real fast. Kayla just measured in at 7.5 pounds, 2 punds more than when she was born. For those of you keeping score that is a 40% jump in body mass in a single month. While it may sometime seem like I can gain weight that fast, I really can't. It would be like gaining 80 pounds in a month. Of course, if I ate my full every 3 hours it would help. Rylie is also gaining quickly, although we do not have an official rate (because of Kayla's stay in the NICU and Rylie's tiny birth weight they got on different doctor visit schedules), but I can tell you it is much harder telling them apart with a single glance. Rylie has a smaller mouth and a rounder head, but at an angle with their mouth covered... definitely getting tricky.

Our longest trip was an ill-advised foray down to the ocean. Basically we were having a really bad day, with not much sleep and the girls acting real fussy. I was depressed even before we talked to our architects, who delayed our house renovations AT LEAST another month and half. Apparently this is because, and I shit you not, the structural engineer has run off to be with his wife in Budapest. Yeah, that's in Hungary. We felt powerless and very unhappy. But we were bound and determined to do this beach trip because we had been putting it off and were feeling shut-in and wanted to at least accomplish this one damn thing.

Yeah, maybe not the best attitude for starting a mini-road trip. Another reason this was dumb is that it took us so long to get going that we didn't leave the house until 2pm on a Friday. If you are familiar with LA traffic you may be thinking to yourself, hmm, I bet the drive back might be unpleasant. More on that in a sec.




We ended up taking Topanga Canyon down to Malibu and stopping for food and view at Gladstone's. When we arrived at the restaurant we were surly, grumpy folks (at least I was) but an hour of sun and surf with coconut shrimp and a beer and I felt relaxed and human again. I was starting to think this trip was a good idea... and then we tried to get home at 4:30 on a Friday. There is really no way to avoid significant traffic and we didn't. And we also discovered, while road noise and motion sooth the babies, being stuck in traffic does not. It kind of is like Speed, keep the car above 55 mph or the babies explode. When your baby cries for an hour 3 feet from your head... you will develop a headache.

Fortunately, most days and most outings are not like that. Like take this trip to see Gramps (my father). That was much more pleasant.