Post-Christmas Sub-adventures

So other than massive holiday festivities, this break has had a few other nice highlights. Here’s a sampling of them:

-Jess knows a lot of people with Babies that are around our age. And what with our first on the way, we’re getting a lot of advice and some significant practice. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of practice with the baby that Mom Swanson babysits most days. We’ll call him Rental Baby. Rental baby is about a year old, and very even tempered. Suspiciously so, in fact. I suspect that he’s being all nice to us so that we get over the initial fear of being parents, and so that by the time we have our own and realize it’s all totally different, it’ll be too late for us to do anything about it. Tricky baby.

Lifestyle changes notwithstanding, I have managed to get several important skills well practiced. The best is my new Baby Bjorn, one of my Christmas presents from Jessie. We put it together and looked over the instructions, but nothing beats practice with the real thing, so we loaded Rental Baby in and went out on the town for a while. After a few times, I was strapping him in and taking him out with well-practiced ease, and he really seemed to like the thing. it had plenty of support, he felt nice and safe, and I had my hands free to wander around Best Buy to make a fancy new laptop purchase for Mom Swanson.

I also got tips from Mom Swanson on changing diapers (she is a master!) and I got to practice feeding Rental Baby, too. A bottle one day, and baby food the next. The bottle went just fine, and I very nearly transitioned him neatly into napping afterwards by rocking and humming afterwards. The spoon feeding was nice, too. He definitely knows how the system works, and we got down the applesauce without effort. The veggie-food he didn’t feel like eating, and he did make the cutest face in the world to show is disapproval. We did manage to sneak some vegetables into him by feeding him fries and alternating them with green beans. He could tell there was a difference, but his body-programming just kept putting stuff into his mouth. He would have done better if he possessed more teeth, but I give him full marks for the effort.

I also got a taste, and just a taste, of what being a parent feels like. It’s just having this completely dependent person with you all the time. Clearly there are other emotions and concerns involved, but you really feel the difference when you realize that you have to add ‘and a baby’ to everything you do. Possible, but definitely different.

- Jess and i spent wednesday meandering around Ft. Lauderdale by car. We stopped off at the swap meet where we wandered around and looked at a whole bunch of stuff we didn’t want, and then we wandered by the farmers market on the way out. I got a 5 feet long piece of sugarcane. Turns out the only culinary thing you can do with them is chew on them, turn them into juice, or use them as skewers for something else. But for three bucks, it’s worth the pictures alone.

We also wandered around some shops near downtown and found a chocolatier, in much the same vein as we had found in Belgum when we went. There were definitely some flashback moments when we bought a bunch of little chocolate treats and then went out on the street to try them out. We got extras of the truffles and Spicy Aztec Chocolates. Yum.

-N