OMG! I haven’t posted in a while.. that’s probably because I switched over to my personal blog and released a bunch of emotion in political posts, which I felt did not belong here.

No Big. 

Okay, so what have I learned lately?   What have I tweaked lately?

• I once again found a reason to write a mega-blog-post of all projects worked on.
• Personally, I’ve been working on some code for tracking hierarchical todo’s; blog post to follow when i get reporting to work correctly. 
• Workwise, on a WPF project, dealing with a fairly complicated screen, working against mocks of controls that are not available yet.
• I got to create a pretty cool christmas card.  I’ll post it after it goes out..  I created a flowchart…

But most of my learning is happening here:

How To Be a Grandpa

I did not have biological kids of my own, so this is my first experience at taking care of babies.

I have learned things like:

• Different strategies for holding baby
• support the neck is crucial, but after that there’s lots of options – the pin, the back-holder, the knee holder, the double handed neck buffer, etc.
• Different strategies for burping baby.  
• I like the over-the shoulder method most, but baby sometimes raises head up, so I have to stabilize between right hand and cheek, while left does the tapping. 
• (the other method is in front, seated, with the baby facing to my right.)
• Lots of baby songs.  Head/Shoulder/Knees/Toes
• Spotify seems to have a very good selection of Kid’s stuff.
• Amazon Prime Music has more repeats.
• Baby Einstein on Youtube
• Diaper-changing.  
• I’m still trying to perfect the vertical positioning, and the centering of the velcro on the front, without causing gastric distress.
• There’s also the quick-shield skill .. baby loves to time things and gitcha with some surprises.
• Bottle-feeding, and cleaning, and fixing.
• That there are many different sizes of rectangular fabric, called by different names, used for different purposes.

I’ve also learned that as a mid-40’s person, I don’t have the resiliency I used to have regarding interrupted sleep patterns.  We take care of baby two nights a week, and one of those nights also translates into most of the next day. 

I’ve also learned that my wife, having been a single mom when she was raising her offspring, is frickin’ amazing.

I’m also discovering that there are many songs, which, while I may not play them for myself, I go back to to sing to the baby.  Because.. baby has NOT heard these songs.

Cheers!