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Our friends Scott and Anya – former New Yorkers who currently live in Hong Kong – swung through town this weekend and threw themselves a little party on Sunday evening in the back garden at Flatbush Farm, an excellent bar/restaurant just a couple blocks from our place (coincidentally, it’s also where Beatrice and I, with my parents, had dinner the night of our City Hall wedding a year ago July. So it’s a place with good vibes.). Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have read in an earlier post, brothers Dominic and Sean came to stay for a week. But they got to, or rather had to, spend a couple extra days in New York. They’d been scheduled to fly back to London on Saturday evening, but late Friday night we learned that, due to Hurricane Irene’s approach, the flight – indeed, pretty much all flights – had been canceled. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I wrote – but didn’t get around to editing and posting – the following:

When we first brought Nyan home from the hospital just four weeks ago, he was calm and content. We marveled at our good fortune , because he just didn’t cry much at all. When he was hungry or had a dirty diaper, sure. But that was about it. I remember remarking to Beatrice that this could change, based on what I had read. Of course I hoped I was wrong.

I wasn’t.

Call it colic, call it fussiness, or just call it what it is: crying. Maybe in those first few days, Nyan just hadn’t yet learned how to cry. Well, he’s a smart kid and a quick learner, ‘cause he’s a crying machine these days.

I guess it really started about a week ago, or maybe last Saturday: Beatrice was out running some errands and was gone for a couple of hours. And Nyan cried pretty much the entire time. On and off, but more on than off. And every day since then – usually during the afternoons and early evenings – it’s been the same thing. We run through the checklists – hungry? Cold? Hot? Dirty diaper? Gas? Does he just need to fart on daddy’s arm? – but more often than not, there’s no discernable reason. He’s just crying.

We try various techniques. We rock him. We hold him tightly as we walk in a figure-8 around the bedroom. Sing to him. Caress him. Talk to him. Put him on the bed. Put him in his little travel crib. Whatever we can think of. But more often than not, it seems, nothing works.

It went on from there – more venting than anything, I suppose, but also a bit of a plea for assistance or ideas.

But nevermind: things are much better the past few days. Not sure why; I’m chalking it up to what I expected all along, which is that, in these early days, as soon as we get used to some pattern of Nyan’s behavior, it changes.

He still fusses and cries, but not nearly as bad. Maybe we’ve just learned how to soothe him better. We’re also keeping to the routine better, which surely helps; a key bit of the routine is bathtime, every day around 5:30. He still gets a bit wide-eyed when we first put him in the tub, but he quickly mellows out and really seems to enjoy as we scrub him gently and pour warm water all over his body. When he comes out and we wrap him tightly in a towel, he looks extremely content, and then it’s right into his pajamas and down for some sleep. The past couple days, at least, he’s slept pretty solidly through the evening. And he’s always been a pretty solid sleeper at night, aside from waking up every two or three hours for some food. But once he’s got a full belly, it’s usually right back to sleep for everyone.

Yesterday evening, he went down for the count around 7pm and hardly stirred after that. I think he was just exhausted, as it was an usual day: I was off from work, and Beatrice had to go get a wisdom tooth taken out in the morning. So Nyan and I hung out all morning and into the afternoon, and then we all hung out for a bit in the mid-afternoon until Beatrice went down for a nap. Nyan, though, was fussing up a storm in the afternoon; I spent a good 90 minutes rocking him and trying to soothe him, finally getting him to take a couple of quick cat naps with me until bathtime. But besides that, he was awake pretty much the entire day, despite our best efforts to get him to nap earlier, so he slept all evening long. Works for us.

Beatrice and I are pretty logical, so when Nyan is fussing and crying for no reason, it vexes us. Mainly because we hate to see our baby in distress, but also because it’s a riddle that we just can’t solve. What we’ve pretty much settled on is that, when he’s crying for no apparent reason, he just wants to be close to us. So, usually – though not always – some hugs or cuddles will do the trick. It keeps us from taking care of many chores or whatnot, but so be it. (Once he gets just a touch bigger and can comfortably fit in the baby sling and/or the Baby Bjorn, perhaps it’ll be better: he can be close to us as we move about the house or the neighborhood, doing our thing. We’ll see about that.)

That’s our working theory for why poor Nyan was extra fussy this evening, as Hurricane Irene has been inching her way up the coast toward New York.

Although, it may have just been his normal late afternoon/evening fussiness, as it seems to have (finally) passed around 9pm when he (finally) fell asleep.

(It’s his first hurricane, of course. Or tropical storm, depending on its strength when it hits with full force around 8am tomorrow…)

The scene: the bedroom in the morning.

A new father, running late for work, nevertheless takes a few minutes to tenderly hold his four-week-old son. The boy is cradled in his father’s left arm, head against the bend of his elbow, bum on his forearm, pressing tight against his father’s body.

The father strokes his son’s hair, smiles at him as the boy gazes up with his big dark eyes. The father leans down and gives him a kiss on the forehead. Tells his son he loves him.

A slight smile crosses the son’s face. The boy, unable to speak as yet, surely feels the love and responds in the only way he can:

He lets rip a big juicy fart right on his father’s arm.

Precious.

We have more visitors this week: two of Nyan’s uncles –  Beatrice’s brothers Dominic and Sean –  arrived late Saturday night for a week’s stay. Dominic has two daughters, and Sean has done a lot of babysitting, so they know their way around a baby. They’re doing the tourist thing – the Brooklyn Bridge hike today, a Yankees game on Thursday, various other sightseeing and activities on the agenda as well – and also trying to teach Nyan’s hapless parents a thing or two.

And indeed, one thing we’ve learned is that, well, we’re a bit clueless so far. We’ll readily blame the lack of a solid night’s sleep, though that excuse will only take us so far. Not that we’ve made any major mistakes; if anything, we’re perhaps too doting. Dominic has pointed out that part of our problem is that, when we’re both home, we both tend to try to take care of Nyan at the same time. For instance, if he’s fussing or crying, one of us will head to the bedroom to soothe him, and the other will follow, even though it’s just a one person job. It comes from a good place – we want to help each other out, and we want to see our son, frankly. But having one person hovering while the other is soothing isn’t really accomplishing anything, and as Dominic pointed out, that’s a good way for both of us to get exhausted very quickly, if we’re not already there.

While Emerald was here, she and Beatrice worked up a daily schedule, a routine of sleeps and feeds and activity time for Nyan. I think the routine may be more for us than for him – it’s somewhat easier to deal with everything if we know what’s coming up, and when – but it’s surely somewhat good for Nyan as well. It worked well for a few days, although last week – with Emerald back in England and me off of work – that routine sort of went out the window, as we just sort of winged it. Things went well enough, but it was running us a bit ragged by the end of the week, and it may also have led to Nyan being extremely fussy and non-nappy for most of Saturday. So on Sunday, after we got a talking-to from Emerald over Skype, we renewed our commitment to the routine.

It worked pretty well on Sunday: Nyan had scheduled times for feeding, for a stroll around the neighborhood, for naptime (or at least laying in the dark bedroom time). He was still fussy on Sunday evening, but seemed less so. Same deal on Monday evening: a bit fussy, as usual for the evenings, but he calmed down and fell asleep quicker than he had been doing, it seemed. We’ll take what we can get at this point.

Speaking of Monday, I went back to work, and Beatrice kept pretty well to the routine. A cousin of Beatrice’s – not a blood cousin, just a close family friend – is a doctor doing her residency in New York, so she came over for lunch and to spend the afternoon. They took Nyan on a stroller ride mid-afternoon – the scheduled activity time – and also met up with the lads, who had gone to a nearby Irish pub to watch a football (soccer, for us Americans) match being broadcast live from England. It ended up being Nyan’s first visit to a pub. He didn’t seem to quite realize the significance of the moment.

We’ve got more family coming this week as well – my cousin Jeff is on a business trip in New Jersey and is coming over either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, or both. Living in New York is kind of like when I lived in St. Thomas: it’s pretty easy to convince friends and family to come visit. Hopefully they’d all feel the same if we lived in, say, Topkea, or Albany.

On Wednesday afternoon, while Beatrice stood sentry over our napping son, I ran a couple of errands in the neighborhood. We’re a few blocks from where they’re building a new arena for the NBA’s New Jersey (soon to be Brooklyn) Nets, and it’s been an ugly process – shady eminent domain and tax breaks handed to the developer, blocks of homes leveled to put up the arena, dirty clangy construction trucks that have started rattling down our street, and the design of the arena itself. It was originally to be designed by Frank Gehry, of whom I am not a fan, but at least you can say, I suppose, that his buildings are usually interesting. Ugly, but interesting. But due to cost overruns (or bait-and-switch, if you’re a cynic, which I am), as soon as the project got all of its permits, Gehry was dropped, his design replaced with a mundane arena with a weird curved design that many critics said make the whole thing look like a giant toilet seat. (Given how woeful the Nets have been in recent years, there’s an easy metaphor in there somewhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

Nyan got strapped in to his carseat/stroller combo yesterday afternoon so Mommy and Auntie Maria could take him down the road for some bubble tea. (Well, bubble tea for them. Nyan, as you can see, wasn’t too fussed. In fact he slept the entire time.)

Nyan got his first bath on Monday evening. Much needed.

We’d been cleaning him, of course, through sponge baths and the like. But on Monday evening, when I went in to the bedroom to wake him from his nap and give him his evening feed, his onesie was soaked in the back. I quickly realized that someone (ahem) had, uh, apparently screwed up the diaper and had left a little gap along the side of his hip. His jojo (as they call it in Burma) was placed just so, so that when he peed, rather than the diaper absorbing it, it somehow shot out the back of the diaper and up the back of his clothes. (No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it clearly took a lot of either skill or luck. But be that as it may, half his back was soaked in his own pee. Not good.) Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my company gives new fathers 10 days of paid leave. I took just four days right after Nyan was born, choosing a couple painful weeks of being away from him so that I could have time off after Beatrice’s sister left. That time is now, so for the next week, I’ll be blissfully house-bound with my wife and new son.

Day one was Saturday, and it was probably a good indication of what to expect: chaos, really. Not in a bad way, but just in an impossible-to-plan-things and impossible-to-get-much-done sort of way. We managed to do some laundry, clean the house a bit, and make a quick grocery run. But for the most part, we’re at the mercy of Nyan’s needs. He’s hungry? Drop what you’re doing. He needs a new diaper? Ditto. He’s having a gas attack and needs comforting? Go comfort him, now. Read the rest of this entry »