Milestones and Meanderings

Today Baby Kate left the safe confines of the hospital maternity ward and ventured out into the big wide world. It was a day of firsts: first car ride, first time outdoors, first time wearing overpriced baby clothes, first time at a real live drag race (just kidding). Of course, given her lack of experience, most things she does are firsts. About the only things of which she can say "been there, done that" are drooling and making impressive amounts of poop.

But leaving the hospital, where skilled doctors and nurses are at your beck and call and are constantly monitoring her health and happiness is a major milestone. More specifically, its a major milestone for Rookie Dad and Devoted Wife, who now have to continue on maintaining this new little device without an owners' manual. As for Kate, it seems she wasn't really aware that anything had changed. Her attitude to the whole thing is apparent in the pic above.

The day got started a bit slowly when I was late to the hospital to pick up Devoted Wife and Baby Kate. I'd forgotten that the safety seat mandated by California state law was not yet installed in the car, so I prepared to tackle the task. Given the emphasis that our childbirth class instructor placed on installing the car seat correctly, I prepared for an extremely complex task. After all, our instructor had continually reminded us that if we were concerned we wouldn't get the car seat installed correctly that a number of organizations would install them for free, including most fire stations, child safety organizations and the California Highway Patrol. Since I hadn't had a chance to call Ponch and John to install the seat for us, I decided to tackle it myself. It turns out that the process is essentially (1) take center seatbelt strap, (2) thread it through the slots on the base and (3) snap the seatbelt tightly into place. I'm pretty sure I know what the firemen would have thought about my mechanical skills had I stopped into the fire station for some assistance with that one.

Once I arrived at the hospital, we got Kate's diaper changed and told the nurses we were ready to take her home. We put her in her first non-hospital clothes (again, as you can see, she didn't seem to notice) and the nurse arrived with the wheelchair to take Devoted Wife to the loading zone. DW shot me a brief glance that seemed to say "Hey, we should see about getting one of these things so you can wheel me around everywhere!" Overall, the nursing staff was great and really made our stay in the hospital easy and relaxing. I wouldn't have minded bringing a few of them home with us (hey, they're not that kind of nurses).

We got Kate strapped into her car seat and headed home. A lady from church dropped by some delicious steak in mushroom sauce, which elicited a comment from me that "I'd have that again." I think Devoted Wife missed my hint. Kate has settled down into a good pattern the last couple of days and continues to be a good eater. While we haven't yet determined who she looks like, I'm fairly certain that her eating habits come from my side of the family. Devoted Wife eats to live, I live to eat. Kate seems to also live to eat; in fact, the only thing she does other than eating is rest up for her next eating session.

Devoted Wife's mother is here for the next few days, which is a big help, considering the fact that I seem to be spending far much more time blogging than I had expected. While I check out a number of blogs on an almost daily basis (politics, sports, law, etc.), the family blog is a new phenomenon to me. When I sent a link to our blog to bunch of friends I found that a significant number of them (and the people to whose blogs their blogs are linked) started their blogs about the time they had their first child. Almost everyone posts great photos of their kids, and every one of them thinks their kid is the cutest, smartest, funniest and generally the most newsworthy. I JUST DISCOVERED THAT I'M NOT ORIGINAL! And I'm certainly a far less experienced and talented blogger than most of them. Crushed, I began to devise strategies to distinguish myself from the legion of family blogs out there. I finally realized that I had two basic options: (1) create a sort of "fusion blog" where baby pictures and humorous anecdotes are interspersed with biting social commentary, obscure literary references and the occasional plea to "Vote 4 Mitt" or (2) accept the fact that the only people that are going to read this are the ones who don't really want to hear that much of what I have to say and really just want to see pictures of my greatest creation so far: Baby Kate.

And I'm perfectly fine with that.