July 2026
1
Huge break here lmao. Kinda fell off on the blog updating due to some increasing depression as well as just general malaise to want to do anything. Regardless I wanted to get back on the wagon due to some extremely happy news.
My wife and I welcomed our beautiful little baby boy back in the beginning of June. Words cannot describe how much love I have for this little guy. It's funny, you always hear about parents having a mentality shift the moment you meet you baby and I just could never connect the dots in my mind. Well. It's 100% true because the second I saw that little guy come out just a wash of warmth went over my brain and it felt like all the problems I've been struggling with this past year were simply just gone. It was euphoric and I've never ever felt that feeling before. For any dads out there, please for the love of fuck be involved with the pregnancy and especially the birth. Doing some skin to skin time with him within an hour of him being born was bonkers. Again it was just felt like my whole body was wrapped in a beautiful warmth. And I've done acid.
Also my wife was an absolute badass and did the birth unmedicated, so no epidural. I know it's not for everyone but I would strongly recommend considering it as she loved the process and being in tune with her body to push out our child.
Thankfully my job provides six weeks of paternity leave, which unfortunately isn't the most common in the ole US of A. It's criminal seeing my European colleagues get literal months off. Regardless, I am very much enjoying my time off just hanging out in our new family bubble. Hilariously enough we've been watching the show Family Matters of all things. It's just the right amount of engaging, decently funny, but also doesn't require my full attention while I take care of the baby boy.
But all good things come to an end and I do have to go back to work next week on July 6th. I did only take 4 of my 6 weeks so later in September I'll take the final two weeks once my wife goes back to work and before daycare starts for him.
In my downtime during this leave I've been occupying myself with a few things. So far I have - Completed the first part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake - Wrapped up a Go program I was working on before our boy was born - Did some homelab hardware swapping, specifically migrated my older TrueNAS host to a new one
Also during this time I had my wife watch the Dune movies, to my surprise she was absolutely hooked. Which is great because the final movie comes out in November I believe. We've also watched the Dune Prophecy show which is pretty interesting as it goes over the origins of the Bene Gesserit, cannot wait for Season 2 of that. Also on the watch list is Dark Matter, which is an insane show. My god. Go watch it.
That's really all the updates I have for today, I'm hoping to actually follow through this time and do more frequent updates similar to a journal. I'd love to finally share this blog with my wife for her birthday next year as a compendium of my thoughts after he was born.
2
Look at that, an actual follow up. While ideal there is no way I'm doing every single day follow ups.
Right now the wife and I are doing shift work essentially. Where when it gets to the evening I will stay up with him from around 9pm-2am and she does the 2am-730/8am shift. It sucks not being able to sleep in the same bed but at the same time, neither of us would be getting consistent sleep if we both were trying to sleep at the same time.
The weather here has been horrifically hot. Both of us were excited to not have a winter born baby so we could take walks outside, well we still can't because it's just wayyyy to hot for him. Hopefully will cool down in the next few days so we can at least take some short walks.
My last few days of paternity leave are happening now and I'm definitely dreading going back to work but also was really wishing I could just stay home longer. For him but also really for the wife, going to feel like a crappy husband hearing him crying from down in the basement while I work unable to assist.
4
My wife and I are notoriously horrible at remembering to take photos. Even with the birth of our first kid I'm shocked at how many photos we did end up taking. Unfortunately I feel a little bit like a dud as I forgot to snap some memorable newborn photos. Specifically a photo with my wife and mother in law while he was still in his fresh newborn look. Simply won't get that opportunity ever again. While I'm sure there will be life moments we'll both miss of his due to random circumstances I do feel particularly awful about missing that one.
This year it's the 250th anniversary of the ole US of A. Certainly does not feel worth celebrating with the current state of the world and this country. Everything is the most expensive it's ever been and the country feels so divided like two sports teams that hate each other. I certainly hope progress wins out and we truly get back to greatness. With it being the 4th we will hopefully go to my MIL's, albeit quite a bit later in the day since the boy can't regulate his body temperature just yet.
7
For my own sanity going forward I'm going to refer to my wife as N and my baby boy as M. Already sick of typing out their verbs.
It's been a few days since my last update and I'm back to work unfortunately. Fortunately the first day back wasn't as mentally taxing as I thought it might be so that was actually pretty nice. The company I'm working for might go public soon so while I'd like a new job, feel like I should stick around to cash in on those RSUs. With me being back at work N is now being full time mom while on her maternity leave, I do get the benefit of working from home so whenever I can I get the chance to pop up and say hi. Also heading back to band rehearsal today, miss playing music in a group and excited to get back into it.
M started really throwing back the milk this week, he most definitely is going through another little growth spurt. We'll have to get larger bottles here pretty soon hahaha. Other than that he's doing pretty great! Stil cute as ever and man does he already look different even just a month out. Excited to see him grow over this next month.
Oh man I'm also planning to finally go back to the gym tomorrow. I took a full month off becuase of M and while it's been great, I can tell my body is yearning for the weights. I also need to lock in on the food because also over the last month I pretty much just said fuck it. Can't wait to be wildly sore over the next few days.
10
M hit 1 month. Wild it's already been a month. He already looks so different!! Still as fuck tho. So excited to see what he looks like in another month. We tried to do a cute footprint keepsake and we just totally blew it lmao. Got our hand prints on the special paper and everything. Maybe next month.
First week back at work wasn't too bad actually. I've been pretty busy in a good way and I've been enjoying the work so far. We'll see if that stays true but so far so good. Now that M is born I did have a little bit of a mentality shift of "deal with it" if that makes sense. I need to provide for the little dude so the smaller problems bounce off a little more now.
Tomorrow is my nephew's 3rd birthday party. We'll see if his absent father actually shows up, and if he does show up, will he be bringing his new baby mama. I certainly hope not, I do hope he shows up but my hopes are not high. Through his actions I've really never seen him care about his second child. It's actually wild to witness. How can you do that to your own kid. fatherhood.gov
13
Holy shit I'm wiped today. I'm back on that workout life, don't want to end up a fat piece of shit so now I'm trying to balance shift work with M, sleeping while he sleeps and then sleeping for a few hours once N takes over. Honestly so far it isn't terrible but I'm curious how long I can do it for. Granted as he gets older M will sleep longer between feeds and diaper changes so it is only temporary.
Right now I just spun up the course to build your own http server from scratch in Go. It's been pretty cool so far and I would love at some point to migrate the blog to utilize my own http server in Go rather than the one I built in Python, which you using right now. I know right now it's doing a markdown to html conversion that I can't exactly remember how I set it up but I'm sure I could do something similar.
The bday party for the nephew went great! Food was crazy good and the cake slapped. It was cute watching him open his presents and get honestly equally excited about each one.
Just got word from work that I now need to bill any learning that's not specifically assigned to me as a cost of business. In short me using my downtime at work to learn programming and other technologies will now technically look worse on paper, which is fabulous. Shareholder value amirite.
15
Da boy had another baby OT appointment today. He's getting a lot better now that we found the correct bottle type for him but for awhile there he just would not latch. Adult doctors are very smart but I baby doctors are wild because they just don't have a way to communicate with you. The boy is also going through a bit of a growth spurt right now so he is just THROWING back the milk haha. Today I'm going to take a little mini road trip to the other side of town, just the two of us. Cheesy but I'm excited for it.
N shyly brought up the fact that she might want to try Ozempic in a few weeks. I know losing weight has always been a struggle for her and she's feeling pretty down about her post birth mom body. I still think she's beautiful but I also know that it's important to have yourself like yourself. So I told her to go ahead and do it, I mean why not right? At least see how it works with your body and you'll either love it or hate it. We also have a wedding in a pretty tropical location next year so I would also like to "tighten" up to say. I have been back hitting the gym so ideally I'll be on a good track to feel good about myself as well.
21
M doesn't look like a newborn anymore. Super sad how fast that flew by. But I will happily take the fact that he sleeps longer through the night now, god send. Sounds like we are going to take a little family vacay up to my FIL's cabin the Wisconsin northwoods in a few weeks. Actually really excited to take him up there as it's so reminiscient of where I grew up in Minnesota. Plus it'll be a fun lil memory for his cousins that are a few years older than him. And he's on the CUSP of cooing and smiling. Fuck me I can't wait.