Had a good Memorial Day weekend. Spent some time with family today, and went out to eat with Lydia and Joe and saw Iron Man. Baby is good and fat. Here’s a video of Luke drooling in HD.

Here are some fun pictures of the boy. He’s really become a drooling machine lately. He’s eating 6 ounces at most feedings, but he still only likes to sleep 3-4 hours at night. In one of our baby books it says at 10 weeks they “might” start to sleep through the night. HA! We shall see silly book.

This is his “I’m super fat” pose. If I was a cannibal I think his meaty thighs would look tasty. Reminds me of a good turkey leg.

This is his “I should be in a commercial” pose. I mean look at that face, it’s perfectly round, and save for the almost bald part, he could hawk some diapers or tires right?

This is his “I tried crawling and failed miserably” pose. Technically daddy made him try crawling just so he could take a picture, so I accept all the blame on this try.

This is his “look at my super cute smile” pose in front of the very popular afghan backdrop.

And Andrew, I need your help getting the pictures centered, because the way I’m doing it now is a pain! And Angelo, what you using to get vimeo vids embeded?

I know, it’s been a long time since baby pictures. We haven’t taken very many in the last week because the little dude had a terrible face rash…and we’ve been tired. But it’s Saturday now, so I’ve got a few minutes, and a few pictures!

Our friends Lydia and Joe came over and brought their beautiful little girl Nicole. I don’t know if she uses one L or two, so she’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong with just one. I love this picture because Luke has the crazy eyes!

On Sunday we went to Brian’s baptism and then to Fanny and Mark’s for lunch. As you can see, Luke still had a bit of his rash going on. His poor face looks all swollen. It also seemed to affect his ability to pose for a picture.

Luke is funny lately sleeping in his bassinet. He likes to turn himself to his right until he’s wedged in like this. Silly boy!

We’re heading over to my mom’s house today for mother’s day lunch, and then we’re doing lunch again tomorrow with Stacie’s mom. It’s a jam packed mother’s day weekened!

Today we’ve decided to really hunker down and figure out how to get this baby to sleep. Overall we don’t think Luke is getting near enough sleep, and that’s making life difficult during the day and at night. There are a couple interesting books we’re going to checkout, and something we’ve decided to do is just put him down to sleep more. We think he’s getting used to being held already! Last night he slept for 6.5 hours, but 4 of those were on my chest in bed, and that’s no good for me. Stacie is going to check out a book at the library, so I’ll be sure to keep you posted on our baby sleeping endeavors.

He’s got a pretty nasty rash on the sides of his face (which I think is in part from so much chest sleeping) but here are a few pre-rash on the face pictures.

We put him in his crib the other day, and he didn’t like it very much. That was before we were concerned with his sleeping habits though, so hopefully in the next few days I’ll have a better picture with a sleeping baby.

The Blarg’s hosting service crashed sometime last night and was down about 12 hours. The hosting service went to a backup from the 21st, so my last post was lost.

The htpc is back up and running with the replacement hard drive. It’s getting a super clean reinstall of Windows and I just installed Norton Ghost to make a nice backup in case this ever happens again. I’ve gone to great lengths to set things up, so once I have a backup of the whole thing, I won’t have to go through all the hassle of setup (which really wasn’t that bad a second time around). I bought a neat little cooler that attaches to the bottom of the hard drive and helps to pull some hot air off of it. In my case the hard drive is sort of isolated and no air passes over it, so this is a really easy and quiet way to circulate the air. I’ve even seen a five degree drop in my video card temps.

I started to play Final Fantasy 7 from the original playstation the other night. I remember when Andrew and I got that game back in the 90′s. I think he beat it, but I never did, so I figure why not throw it in and see what I can do. It’s an easy game to play when the baby is lying on your chest. I know the game takes a long time to beat, and I’ve got plenty of other things to do, so we’ll see how long my interest lasts.

Baby is doing well. He’s sleeping longer chunks at night, and already he’s able to spend a lot of that time alone in his bassinet. Hopefully sometime in the next couple months we’ll get him moved to his own crib and a good nighttime routine will be established. Our friend Shannon who lives in Georgia was out here on vacation and stopped by today to see Luke. It’s amazing to see the little changes he’s going through already. You can tell his eyes are working better because he looks around. Stacie walked by him in his chair today and his eyes about rolled out of their sockets as he watched her go by. He does a little bit of smiling, but not a ton yet. I can’t wait until I can tickle him or give him a raspberry and he squeals in delight. Right now when I do it he just looks at me like “what the heck is that!”

The Dodgers beat the D’backs. Woot woot!

Mommy is upstairs sleeping and Daddy is downstairs watching Baby.

Since I went back to work I’ve been sleeping in the second bedroom so I can get enough sleep to function at work. At first glance people think it’s not fair that I make Stacie take care of the baby all night, but we’ve talked about it and decided it was really the only sensible option. While most of her nights are fairly tiresome, because I’m getting a healthy amount of sleep I can actually do my job, and when I get home I’m not a sleep deprived lunatic. That means I can run to the market, clean up the house a little, and make dinner. Then tonight at 8 o’clock she went to bed early, and I’m staying up for another 3 hours to watch the baby before I head off to bed.

I have to say again how nice it was to have so much help over the first few weeks. Whether it was gifts of clothing and diapers or homemade meals, it really made it a lot easier to bring Luke home and get used to this new arrangement.

I’m posting from the laptop, so you’ll have to wait until the next post to get some new pictures. Hopefully this weekend I can get to some video I’ve taken and you can see this little guy in action!

I survived my first week back at work, and Stacie survived staying home with Luke. The first few days were hard, but the last few have been really good. He’s starting to sleep for bigger chunks of time at night, and he’s falling asleep faster. That means less fussing and more peacefulness!

We gave him his first bath the other day. At first he HATED it. The screams coming out of that little mouth were enough to wake the dead, and it’s all on tape. The worst part is that I’m laughing hysterically the whole time. Here’s a much quieter version of what he was doing.

In case I haven’t said it yet, this is one cute boy.

I’d also like to throw in my first Dodger related shout out. We’re off to a 3-1 start, and while the offense has been a little quiet (save for the 7-1 win tonight), the pitching has been pretty darn good. Kuroda looks like he’ll be a huge upgrade to the staff. Dewitt is looking sharp, but Kemp is looking terrible. He keeps swinging at terrible pitches like his first call up, not his last.

I’m back to work. Yay. Stacie is staying home and being a great mother to our fussy little boy. I get the feeling that’s just how things are with infants. They eat, sleep, pee, and poop, and trying to get one on a schedule at 2.5 weeks old is near impossible. The last three nights we’ve given him formula before bed to try and achieve some longer sleep times, but the last two days I think it’s just given him terrible gas, which only leads to mucho crying. Regardless, I’m sleeping in the second bedroom for now so I can actually function at work, not to mention come home and be able to help out. I feel bad leaving Stacie to get less than great sleep, but there isn’t much sense in both of us being so tired we can’t even spell the other one for a few hours.

And without further ado, pictures! This is a very proud grandmother.

Something I really love about the new flash is that the dog no longer looks like the devil! Straight on flashes always turned her eyes into weird demonic pupils, but the bounch flash leaves them looking super natural. This is the proud big sis.

Friday night we went over to see our friends Lydia and Joe. They just had a beautiful baby girl a week before we had Luke. We had planned to go out there to see their new daughter Nicole, but then we had Luke! It was really cute to see both of them together. Obviously they don’t interact yet, but it’s fun seeing their mannerisms and hearing the sounds they make. Joe cooked up a super good BBQ meal too. Thanks guys.

Two nights ago we gave the baby formula for the first time in an effort to make him sleep through more of the night. On average he lasts about 2 hours on breastmilk, but formula should be able to hold him about twice as long, which means more sleep. Two nights ago didn’t go super great. He didn’t want to eat as often which was good, but he was still fussy. Last night we kept him up from about 7-10 pm, then fed him formula, and then went to bed. And last night he slept from 10 pm to 4 am! That’s a new Luke record. Stacie fed him at 4 am and he slept more, so overall it was a very good night. He was in his basinet the entire time also, so hopefully this will lead to sleeping through the night on his own.