Here's Gavin!

Profile Pic
Originally uploaded by karmking1111.

I feel I've been a neglectful daddy. Not to the kid, but about blogging about the kid. I should be telling the world about Gavin, but instead I'm actually tending to him: changing diapers, feeding him, consoling him, basically just trying to figure out who he is. Funny thing, I think Gavin feels the same about me. For the first week or two, whenever I picked him up, Gavin would give me this wide eyed, kind of shocked and scared look, as though he had never seen me before. Later, that look changed to one of mild puzzlement. I could almost see him thinking, "We've met before, haven't we?" Now, we're comfortable with each other. I know him as the joyful, screaming poop monster, and he knows me as the hairy, barren one of the two parents.

The whole parenting thing is an enigma. Kat and I read a lot of the baby books before he arrived and thought we had most things down; however, when the kid actually showed up, we found that we had not a clue what to do. Gavin would start crying and we'd speculate that maybe he was hungry, or wet, or too cold, or too hot, or bored, or overstimulated. This lead us to try a plethora of often contradictory soothing techniques that confused rather than comforted. We'd have him stripped down with the heater on, trying to feed and change him at the same time. If he stopped crying, it was usually in bewilderment of what we were doing.

Now we're all a bit better; us on reading his moods and he on, well, just growing up. It looks like this is a trend that will only just continue. Welcome the world Gavin!