Well, thus far, 2012 has been chaos– managable chaos, but I am looking forward to next week– the first real work week in 2012 for Lili and I… Nothing makes you miss work like a nice long vacation followed by 3 snow days… but that is how I am feeling. You get things started slowly and then BAM, everything comes to a slow crawl again as people are “working from home”, which means they take a long time to answer email and get focused… which is fine, but I was fresh off of three weeks of vacation, time where I spent thinking of new projects and new ways we can do things– not to mention that a new year always brings a new freshness to everything a person does, from work to home.. and I feel that motivation draining by the day… but I love SNOW.. I really do– and it’s really perfect here in Seattle, where we get it for a couple of days on average and if you want more, well there is always the mountains, which are less than an hour away…
..and then, then there is Elliott. It’s hard to keep up with! He is almost four months old now! Crazy how fast all of it goes by, every couple of days I notice something new that he is doing– it is slight changes, but things you want to document, things you want to think yeah, he is doing that now… He is smiling almost all the time now and he smiles at things I say– even when he is grumpy or crying. I think the biggest thing about him now is the way he stands– not by himself, but when you bring him up to stand, he does it and kind of locks his legs together and is very stable– not stable to where I would want to test him (he is only three months old!!), but you can certainly tell that he wants to stand. He also loves to look around, especially at new things. I am just so happy of where he is at right now. I must admit, I didn’t think I was going to be a big fan of the newborn–>toddler stage, but the whole process of having a baby, from birth to now– it’s nothing but a constant reward that keeps on giving. When Elliott was born, I was aside myself and I thought, well, this will change– but it hasn’t– I still can’t believe that we have such a beautiful baby, a baby whose disposition is just so pleasant that I am laughing and smiling so much– when he is happy we are happy.
That being said, it’s really difficult to think about much else than him and I think that is why I was so energized to get back into the swing of things with work and a schedule– because we really need it. We need to know a schedule– it is really a major factor is parenting. Keeping a schedule with virtually everything is recommended, sleeping, eating, daycare, etc– all of it, if followed, makes for a happy baby, which, in turn, makes for happy Hogg’s. Keeping a schedule, on the other hand, is tough work– very tough and it can cause alot of tension. It’s easy to get behind on things with everything that a day throws at you. Most of my life, everything was optional, therefore a schedule was optional. For the most part, the only thing that governs anything is a job. If you have to start at a certain time, you have to leave at a certain time– which means that everything before that moment when you HAVE to leave the house is basically up to you– sleep in, skip breakfast. Eat breakfast, skip a shower, etc. With a little one, prep time is triple what it used to be. You have to share duties with your significant other– she showers, you feed the baby, you shower, she gets the bags ready and puts the baby in the outfit of the day– which 3 out of 5 days, he will go potty in right bfore you head out– especially if you are late. It is the rule of the gods and us mortals must simply rise to the challenge. I don’t miss the single life at all– but that is because I gave it a fair shake. 18 years of being a kid, 18 years of the wierdness of moving through life on your own and now, 18 years of looking after someone else, ensuring that everyday of their life is what they want out of it.
As a final note, television is beginning to sicken me. It feels like as a culture, we are just losing it. The final straw is happening right now, while I watch Lili’s show, Project Runway– but this one is a tribute to Ms. Piggy, who, last time I checked… is.a.puppet. You have these people who have designed something for a muppet and all of these people are acting like this this thing is real. Watching these designs march down the runway and watching people with these serious looks on what is a total farce is just going beyond the absurd for me. When you mix this with the current absurdity of the local news outlets making their rounds in this “snopocalypse” that we have a brewing here in Seattle, it makes me think of throwing this overly large television into the snopocalypse.. Project Runway, I can accept– this reality TV is fluff. No harm, no foul. News media, on the other hand, is much different. The news has been a constant over the last three days– daytime shows, cancelled to bring breaking news– hoards of reporters on the streets, giving the up to the moment reporting as the storm comes and goes– and then when the storm calms, lets go to the weather man and see what is coming next… which I think is fine, if they were a constant news reporting agency. The fact that snow gets this kind of response in Seattle and NOTHING else does– well, it says a lot for us here. All of us. All of us because we, as a people, allow this kind of thing to happen. Weather is a easy thing to report– it comes, it goes and it is totally unpredictable. Causalities and calamity and mayhem (thanks Allstate) are all at bay and it’s no one’s fault. No terrorists, no political will.. just a little mother nature. God only knows what these people would do when Mt. Rainier erupts… “The King5 Yellowjackets reporting from Paradise here on Mt. Rainier…”
Thanks for listening…