Back to work.

After 17 days off I’m officially back to work. I think that this is the most time off that I’ve taken at one time in my entire working life and it really sucks to go back but oh well, it had to be done. Gotta make the doughnuts right? The good news though is that I now have a son to show for it! We were going to go in and induce on the evening of Sunday the 4th but he decided to knock the bottom out at 3:30am on Saturday morning and then hang out for 44 hours instead. I meant to post something sooner than now but he’s quite the handful and time really flies and any free time was better used for sleeping or any other life activities that don’t involve getting pooped and peed on. Jessica’s last post pretty much gave the rundown of the whole process so I won’t really rehash it. All I can say is that it was one of the best moments of my life when I stood up and looked over the curtain and watched them pull out Alexander out of Jessica’s gut like he was an alien popping out in a movie. I thought I might get sick seeing it if I tried to look but it didn’t bother me at all. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was… something. I couldn’t even speak because I was so overcome with emotion. Anyway, after spending 4 days in the hospital we finally got to take him home which was a real relief. I don’t think I could have spent another second there.

The first couple days at home were brutal, Alexander was very fussy and cried constantly, there was nothing that I could do to get him calmed down and I got a little frustrated. Not “shake the baby” frustrated mind you, just frustrated that there didn’t seem to be anything that I could do except give him to mom who would put him on the boob. Even that didn’t help all that much because her milk was coming in very slowly and he wasn’t getting enough to eat without supplementing him. I was thinking “Oh man… is this how it is the whole time? What happened to the content baby that we had in the hospital?” A couple days in though the little plastic ring that they had on his circumcision fell off on it’s own like it is supposed to and then Alexander was back to normal. I guess I would be pretty bitchy too if my dick was hurting and I couldn’t let anyone know or do anything about it. After that it is pretty much how I expected it to be. He eats, he sleeps, he poops. He goes through diapers like crazy, sometimes dirtying his diaper again before we get his clothes back on from the last diaper change. He broke us in on the first day by peeing on the cat and having a pooptastraphe and squirming his way into covering almost his entire body with dookie despite my best efforts to stop him from doing so. “OHHHHH NOOOOOOOO! THERE’S POOP EVERYWHERRRRREEEEEE! JESSICA GET THE BABY TUB READY TO GIVE HIM A BATH, THERE’S NO WAY THAT I CAN GET THIS CLEAN WITH THE WIPES!” Hell of a way for a first bath huh? I thought it would be more of a calm kodak moment instead of the emergency situation it turned out to be. Jessica is doing a great job and is a great mom. She constantly is making me feel guilty by letting me get a full night of sleep in while she gets an hour or 2 at a time. I do my best to give her breaks and let her get some sleep but it is difficult when she is breast feeding and the baby wants to eat constantly and won’t accept any substitutes. Things are definitely getting better though and we are getting into a routine. Alexander usually has a good stretch about once a day when he sleeps like a stone for a good chunk of time which is nice. We are trying to move that stretch into the nighttime so Jessica doesn’t have to be up all night with him while I am at work, just part of the night. Here’s some pictures from the hospital and some more after we got him home.

I’m halfway through my newest class, it’s been difficult to get the work done because of the baby but I still barely have an A. For a senior level business class it isn’t that bad. The professor makes the material and work interesting but I still haven’t quite cracked what she wants to get really good grades. I always seem to miss something that she was looking for. I need to get A’s in my final 5 classes in order to finish with a 3.9 GPA and graduate with highest honors in May. Hopefully it will still happen but honestly if it doesn’t I won’t be all that broken up over it. I’ll still finish with honors of some kind no matter what.

In less than a week I have to run the Omaha Half Marathon. I was supposed to go run 10 miles last night but I only made it about 6 and a half before I petered out and felt completely miserable in the process. I tried to run that one straight through and it didn’t work out that well because my training has been sporadic at best lately. I’ve been doing a run/walk thing where I listen to a track that alternates every 30 seconds between a beat of 120bpm which is a fast walk and 180bpm which is optimal running pace and it works really well. I go faster overall than when I try my normal shuffle run and I feel a lot better afterward. I think I’m going to try that method in the half and I think I will have good results with it. If I can stay consistent with my pace I might come close to my half marathon personal best even with my poor training regimen. We’ll see I guess.