What’s Chris Doing?

Amara is proving to be a demanding child and with no other support people to help Kate I have decided to go on parental leave. My last work day before that happens is May 11.

I had a raid failure on Monday which prompted me to take the site down for a couple of days and subsequently move it to a hosting company. I don’t think there is any loss of data, but it will probably be a few days until I get all of the pictures back up.

There are new pictures here. We are also moving the videos to YouTube to let them provide the bandwidth. Here is a new video for your enjoyment:

We got home from the hospital around noon yesterday. This is the first moment I have had to be able to collect my thoughts enough to post. I added two more pictures to the photo gallery and posted 2 new videos here and here.

Time to go try and get a little sleep, or maybe eat something.

Update 2007-02-23: Videos moved to YouTube to save me the cost of bandwidth and make downloads faster for you.

For those of you looking for blow by blows about how mom, dad and baby are doing, everyone is great. Baby is feeding, pooping, sleeping and generally being to cute for words, without any problem (the nurses all can’t get enough of her). Amara was delivered by C-section, so, as you can imagine, this physically very hard on Kate. She has already been up a couple of times though walking is very painful. Kate is hanlding Amara like a pro. She still needs lots of help from me since she is not very mobile, but I think we might be taking to this parenting thing – just call me diaper and swaddle man :).

For the moment we are working hard to sleep as much as possible, while keeping Amara fed, changed and happy. We are all really looking forward to coming home from the hospital where it will be much quieter and easier to handle the sleeping thing.

I have to get back to my ladies. Some time today I will hopefully get to take more pictures, which I will post as soon as I can.

Our expected arrival came today at 12:22pm. She is 8lb 12oz, 22 inches long and both mother and baby are doing well. Click on the picture at the right for more pictures. Videos here and here.

Updated 2007-02-19 6:50am: Lack of sleep and daddy being a dork means that I spelled her middle name wrong. It’s Rhiannon, not Rheanon. Getting the spelling right means you can find out about Rhiannon from Welsh mythology.

We decided that a two door car was not going to be practical so we ordered a Pontiac Vibe. We got it yesterday.

We traded in our 2001 Pontiac Sunfire. The new car is great but I am sure that I will miss the old one, it has a lot of memories associated with it.

Probably the aspect of being a father I am most looking forward to is the endless supply of photographic subjects. I am not just talking about the child herself, but also her toys. We already bought a bunch of toys, in part to entertain Xavier when he was here, and in part because they were cool and on major sale. Last weekend I got Kate to set something up to shoot and she decided to play with stacking the Peek-A-Blocks. Our child won’t get much out of the Peek-A-Blocks for a while, since they are for 6months+, but at least someone is having fun with them :)

This holiday season marks the latest iteration in the Game Console wars. Microsoft has already released the second generation of their game system, the Xbox 360 and Sony is going to release the Play Station 3 in North America tomorrow. The grand daddy of the gaming system world is Nintendo and they are also set to release their latest console the Wii on Sunday.

The interesting thing about all of this is that the Wii is the least powered, least featured of the three, but is likely to be a big winner anyways. This is in part because it is the cheapest, but probably more importantly, they are trying to have the best game play rather than the best graphics.

Nintendo has long been known for having fun games and have had some of the most successful game franchises of all time including Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda. One of the interesting features of the Wii is that they are going make classic Nintendo games from the original Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Nintendo 64 at $5, $8, and $10 respectively.

If you are under 35, you probably already know most of this, my older audience probably doesn’t. What everyone doesn’t know is why Kate and I won’t get one even though we and the baby want one.

Basically Kate won’t let me get it. She says something about needing money for a baby and mixing Wiis with young children might aggravate sleep deprivation and child neglect. When I asked the (as yet unborn) baby to kick if she wanted a Wii, she obliged.

I guess the child and I will have to work on wearing Kate down :)

We got a visit from Sarah and Will and Xavier this weekend. That means I got an opportunity to practice taking baby pictures before my own little one arrives. The ones here were taken at Major’s Hill Park.