But oh, those summer niii-iiights...

The sleepless ones in particular. Yesterday was our first full day home alone, and it was pouring rain through most of the day. That meant chilling out indoors, actually getting caught up on a few things during Zachary's rare naps, and even watching (well, starting to watch) a movie in the evening while Zachary had his supper. We did get to take a nice walk (Zachary's second) during a rare afternoon sunbreak.

Nighttime has definitely been challenging, as all parents had warned us -- he's often up and fussy for hours at a time, and wants to eat every few hours. Doing the math, this reveals that Meh is able to get roughly .002 minutes of sleep at a time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not doing any kind of Rip Van Winkle action, or even getting more than an hour or two at a time, but it still seems a bit unfair and unbalanced. I've tried to take Zachary into his room and holding/singing to/dancing with him for at least an hour or so per night just to let Meh close her eyes, but even that doesn't always seem like enough.

Today was my first brief day back at work. I know, the coworkers were as surprised as you are. Microsoft has a very generous 1-month paid parental leave (and I've got far too much vacation saved up as well), which I'm planning to utilize as Meh's leave wraps up in a few months. The goal is to get through the new year without day care -- though even then, we're only looking at 1-2 days a week with our schedules. My coworkers were all very supportive and congratulatory, and I was able to get somewhat back up to speed in a partial day of work.

Zachary's first professional photo shoot is at long last posted -- sorry for the delay on getting it on the internet, and huge thanks to our friends Simon and Justine (as well as everyone else who has taken such great pictures of our son!) for the lovely shots. Time to start getting some of these developed to start filling the picture frames and albums. One of the 'push gifts' I got for Meh (and promptly left at home when we headed to the hospital) was actually a specially designed pop-up baby album. (There's a flash movie of some of the pop-ups here.) We're eager to start filling its many pop-up slots with pictures of Zachary!