Back to Blogging

The astute amongst you probably note that I haven't posted in a little while. And those of you who do might notice that the last few posts mentioned that my son was born eleven days ago. You might very well conclude that I've been preoccupied with the new demands of parenting.

And you'd have good cause for coming to such a conclusion. The little guy is an adorable terror, composed of equal parts attention-hungry drama, sci-fi reminiscent gag effects, and constant cute ploys to demand my attention. It's like living with a gremlin--Stripe, to be specific--that turns back into a mogwai with the sunrise.

He's on a virtually nocturnal schedule. He feeds a lot in the evenings, crying with a broken keen that has elements of a tortured piglet crossed with a hiccuping rage and a hefty dose of a wailing Marlon Brando from Streetcar Named Desire. Sometimes he'll cry terribly, and ostensibly he wants to feed, but he will cry around my wife's milk jug, proving that he in fact gets the jones for attention just as much as anything else. Which would be fine if it weren't at 1:03, 2:08, 3:01, 3:50, 4:05, and 4:30 in the frakking morning on a work night.

And then there's the baby-funded special effects show. It's like a crash course through 1980s science fiction horror. And that was just the birth. My son--not yet two weeks old--has already aggressively tried to defecate in my wife's face, missing and getting it on her hand and upper arm, and he's peed in both of our faces during diaper changes. And, sadly, I must say that the poop--for now--isn't as bad as I had feared.

"It's like a crash course through 1980s science fiction horror. And that was just the birth."

You see, he regurgitates all the time. It's like he has a second bladder at the back of the throat that ensures he has a ready supply of milk to spit up at any moment. Like a dilophosaurus. It's so frequent that you can't even call it what it is. If I told you that a human being was gurging at least 47 times a day, you'd be freaked out. So now, as a parent, I call it 'spitting up' so you know it's nothing to worry about. Again, like a dilophosaurus.

Even that wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't so darned cute. Every little crinkle of his forehead, the puppet like spasms of his chubby arms or the bizarre dexterity of his ET fingers--those come from me, by the way--is all enthralling on a stupid scale. Truly stupid. I chomp on my son. All the time. By now I have probably spent tens of hours making unintelligible sounds, tickling him, and chomping on his chubby cheeks and poking my nose into his little sucking mouth.

And then he does an impression of Bishop from Aliens being impaled by the queen as milk bubbles out of his mouth. I mean, gorram it, is that really necessary, son?

But I wipe his face, make sure it's dry so I know the puke cooties are gone, and then I go back to chomping on the spitter's face. There is something marvelously broken about being a parent.

So you might very well conclude that I've been preoccupied with the new demands of parenting. That's what you'd think, but you'd be wrong!

You see, I'm a nerd. A big nerd, if you haven't noticed. And a gamer--that's Nerd Bread, my friend. And Dragon Age II came out just two days before my son was born, so if you can imagine me, with a sleeping baby on my lap and an Xbox 360 controller in my hands, swearing at the stupidity of Anders and his fascist mage-terrorist ways, you'd have a pretty good idea of what I've been doing instead of blogging for the past eleven days.

And, of course, since I'm back to blogging, you can be sure of one thing: I beat Dragon Age II this morning. It was sweet, just what I expect from Bioware. I'm sure I'll be reviewing it later, filmateleven.

For now, rest assured that the nerd is in.