A Day In The Life

This will probably be a short post, and perhaps not the most profound, but a post nonetheless.

I have pondered what to cover here and what would be so utterly mundane as to be annoying to read. After much more thinking than typing(holding a baby kind of enforces that) I have come to the realization that blogs are inherently filled with naval gazing, and the fact that my stated purpose for the blog is to have a record of life as it happens.

Our daughter is six weeks old. Our days all run something like this: up at six, but Heather has already been up once about 3am to feed Hannah, but now we are both up. I take Hannah and work on breakfast as best I can one handed (getting pretty good at it) while Heather showers and gets ready for the day. I go to work, Heather does whatever Hannah will let her get done.

At noon most days I am able to come home (something we are very grateful for) but it’s less of an extra dose of family time and more a chance to change a diaper and give “mom” a short break.

In the evening, I am primarily responsible for Hannah, with perhaps a small hand-off to run down to the gym. It turns out the 6 to 9 block of time is her most active, although not particular interactive yet, time of day. We play to the extent she can, and maybe read, all of that eventually leading up to bed time.

It has been my job to put her to bed, which consists of trying to convince a 6-week old that being wrapped up like a mummy and laid in a basket is not only ok, it’s the ideal time to sleep! Some nights this is easy, some nights it can take hours, but so far she has eventually conceded the point, if only from fatigue.

( actual swaddled baby not pictured)

Stay tuned for more posts detailing the exciting new changes Hannah has brought to our household! 🙂

-Jordan

 

 

Cloud Backup

After having brought Hannah home, and taking a few pictures to prove it, I started to worry, as I am sure many new parents have… “Are my backups good enough?” “Should I be doing offsite backups?” “How am I going to be able to accommodate the sheer volume of digital media being produced here?”

As luck would have it, I happened to be catching up on my Security Now podcasts, and a solution was mentioned that sounded ideal.

CloudBerry is a program that manages archives on a number of 3rd party storage solutions, and allows you to compress and encrypt data before shipping it off to be saved. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, except they have good support for Amazon Glacier.

Glacier is a very low-cost backup option, that was designed with backup in mind, meaning they don’t really expect you to need the data, and you agree that you could be waiting a few hours after your request before they give you access.

Being low-cost was key for our situation, as we have discovered that the appearance of a new baby in our lives sucks up *all* projecting time. That means the “delete extra photos so the backups aren’t huge” project will not be getting done any time soon.

I haven’t actually completed a backup yet… pushing 50+ gigs up to the cloud over our feeble internet connection takes some time, but I am very excited to have found something that appears to meet our needs and won’t cost a small fortune to accommodate the dismaying magnitude of disk space consumed by photos within our network.

-Jordan

Where The Plan Broke Down

Now that things have settled down to a somewhat predictable, if very different than before, life with a baby in the house, I thought I would take a minute to go over some parts of my “go to the hospital” plan that didn’t work so well, and maybe a few that did.

Before that I suppose I should give a quick rundown of events leading up to the birth of Hannah. Tuesday December 18th, Heather and I both went to work as normal. About 4:30 that afternoon, she called me to ask that I come straight to her office and take her to the hospital. This meant that we simply asked Heather’s mom, Pam, to pick up the bags we had packed for this very event. It also meant that the first of a few mistaken assumptions on my part were exposed.

Assumption one: I will be the one to pickup the bags. We had attached a list to the bags, detailing daily use items such as a toothbrush that would need to be added at the last minute. The list only contained items for Heather, because I only needed a couple extra things added. Namely, toothbrush, deodorant, kindle, nexus tablet, charger for all three devices.

Assumption two: Because I would be picking up the bags, I could pull on the sweatshirt that wouldn’t fit in the backpack. Warm clothing for me has the unfortunate habit of taking up an enormous amount of space in a bag, so I decided to just wear the clothing at least until we got to our room.

Packed items that I overdid:

Granola bars: A few of these were nice, given that Pam and I were acting as backup nurses basically all night, and couldn’t really leave the room. What we didn’t need were two entire boxes of bars.

Distraction items for Heather: We had movies, music, massage lotion, books… you name it, we had it. None of it got used during labor. Heather did watch a movie or two in the postpartum room.

Distraction items for Jordan: I had made a point of loading up my kindle with a bunch of books, and had queued up a nice backlog of interesting articles on my RSS feed. The reality was that pre Hannah I needed to be attentive to Heather (even when she didn’t need anything per say, she just wanted to feel like she wasn’t going through things alone). Post Hannah I was too tired to think about pleasure reading.

Vending machine money: This seemed like a great idea, but I already had granola bars, and if I had time to go down the hall to a vending area I had time to hit up the cafeteria and get real food.

Unexpected wins:

My tablet. I purchased A Nexus 7, expecting to read and maybe play a few games on it while at the hospital. What I ended up using it for was for communication. E-mail, Facebook and Skype all worked surprising well, and were a much greater priority than I expected them to be.

A blanket. Yes, the nurses brought plenty of blankets into our room… or they probably would have been plenty if the “cot for dad” built into the wall wasn’t built into “floor to ceiling windows on 3 sides” alcove, and Hannah didn’t come right before a blizzard. The blanket was theoretically for Heather I think… I can’t actually remember what I packed it for. Given that I didn’t have a sweatshirt, a nice soft fleece style blanket was a lifesaver.

I think that covers the majority of the adjustments / reflections I had regarding the items we packed for the hospital.

-Jordan