Happy Halloween

Briefly, I'll acknowledge how sporadic my blogging has been over the past few months. I have an infant at home now. What do you want?
If you follow this blog with enough regularity that you feel personally affronted by my inconsistency, (a) I'm flattered, and (b) you need a hobby.

Fall is a fantastic time of year. I think you really have to be an adult to fully appreciate it. As a kid, fall just means school started back really recently, and you are as far away from summer vacation as it is possible to be. As an adult, you get the schadenfreude of watching kids go off to school, while enjoying (mercifully) cooler weather, college football, pumpkin flavored everything, and the approaching food and booze filled holiday season.

This Halloween is our first as a family of three. We are spending it quietly sitting at home, watching reruns of Warehouse 13 on Netflix, while our daughter compliantly snoozes in a pack-n-play and the lights on the front porch remain definitively off - the universal bah-humbug to trick-or-treaters everywhere. See above about the snoozing baby if you are wondering why we are so decidedly unwelcoming. We did not even do a jack-o-lantern. We carved out a pumpkin with visiting family a few weeks ago, and even baked the pumpkin seeds and made a pumpkin pie with the innards. But we found out the hard way that if you carve out a pumpkin, but don't carve a face into it to let the inside dry out a bit, it tends to do something I can only describe as "putrifying" within a relatively short time.

Personally, I've always been of the mind that holidays are a state of mind and should be dragged out and enjoyed as long as possible. I'm kind of halloweened out at this point. I realize Olivia won't remember any of this October, but we took full advantage of her first Halloween to do every kitschy family oriented outing we could think of. We attended Boo at the Zoo, where hundreds of barely controlled post-toddlers rage around animal exhibits in pursuit of sugar while displaying their parents' taste in costuming (or lack thereof). We saw a lot of fellow geeks in the crowd, mostly in Star Wars paraphernalia. We went with a group of friends to a corn maze, where the corn barely came to our shoulder and the group was lead unwaveringly through the maze by someone who practically had the layout memorized. It required no active thought on my part, but we still had fun, despite not getting lost for countless hours with a two month old. We went to a friend's Halloween themed birthday party where Olivia survived her first zombie attack. And, in a sign of the holiday creep infecting even my cynical self, the weekend of Halloween saw us hosting a few friends for a pre-Thanksgiving feast. Yes, that's right. Thanksgiving in October. We had to try out some tweaked recipes thanks to Olivia's dietary restrictions, and I daresay our friends made willing guinea pigs.

I look forward to taking my daughter trick-or-treating and all that Halloween necessarily means to a walking, talking kid, but I enjoyed this October just the way it was. Hope you did as well.

Now I'm going to return to shunning Trick-or-Treaters. Happy Halloween.

Adventures in Baby Feeding

Remember back before Olivia was born, when I had time to blog occasionally, and complained on my wife's behalf about all the things she had to leave out of her diet? We looked forward to the days of having an outside baby so she could go back to eating whatever she wanted.

Not so much.

Some babies don't deal well with certain foods, even when those foods are getting processed through mom and delivered as breast milk. Dairy is a big offender, but occasionally babies can't tolerate soy, wheat, eggs, and so forth, which means you have the potential as a mom who is attempting to breastfeed to have a MORE restrictive diet with an outside baby than you did when you were pregnant. This is not exactly the same as having an allergy to the offending food product. As I understand it, babies' digestive systems just can't always process proteins associated with those foods, and ideally they will begin processing them correctly as their systems' mature.

Ideally. In the meantime, the inability to process these proteins can cause inflammation in babies' intestines, which manifests as stomach pain and incredible fussiness. Personally, I think there's a good chance that a lot of you whose parents described you as "colic babies" probably had issues with something you were eating. But what do I know? I'm a lawyer, not a nutritionist.

Olivia has an intolerance for dairy protein. So we went from no soft cheese in pregnancy to no cheese, yogurt, milk, ice cream, cream based soups, most sauces at Olive Garden, and a surprising number of bread products. But dairy hasn't been the end of the story. We are currently experimenting with eliminating soy from Wife's diet, and that appears to have taken care of most of the rest of Olivia's digestive issues. Do you have any idea how many things have soy in them? Between the two intolerances we are seriously considering the cro-magnon diet where you eat nothing but unprocessed meat and produce.

The only other realistic option is going formula. There's nothing wrong with formula in my opinion except for the ludicrous expense. Especially if you have to find a formula that is neither dairy nor soy based. So, ladies, if you are expecting and looking forward to eating everything you've missed out on for the last few months.... go have some ice cream. It might be the last you have for a long time.

What I did over Fall Break

I remember back in high school and college when I was too spoiled to truly appreciate all the free time I had. In my naive, spoiled point of view, Christmas break went by far too quickly, spring break wasn't long enough by a long shot, and fall break, that glorified long weekend that usually coincided with Columbus Day (a holiday for one of the most celebrated screw-ups in history) was a damn tease.

Oh, for the days when responsibility was nil, and days off were plentiful.

In adulthood, a long weekend is a precious commodity. The only way you can really replicate the type of responsibility-free time off you have as a kid is to retire. Barring that, take time off between ending one job and starting another.

And that's what I did last week.

Some of my Constant Readers already know that I have left state employment for private practice, but for those of you not in the know...I ...left state employment for private practice. That's pretty much all I have to say about that since I don't blog about work as a general rule. Mostly out of courtesy for you all - law practice isn't really that exciting.

But last week the Wife and I took Olivia on her first beach trip with some of my family. You might be questioning our sanity, taking a seven week old on an attempted vacation. You'd be right. By and large, she was great, but take a new baby out of their element and surround her with lots of new stimuli, as well as grandparents, aunts, and uncles all itching to hold her constantly, and you've got a recipe for an overstimulated baby and a destroyed schedule. As if a seven week old has an established schedule.

Nonetheless, we all enjoyed ourselves. Olivia got to visit the aquarium (which I'm sure amounted to a lot of soft colored lights to her), and put her feet in the sand and water on the beach. The latter was a bit cold, and elicited a scream or two. Olivia didn't like it either. It was a good trip and a much needed break.