Where did I go?

I have a second baby!

My son was born about 2:45 pm on Easter Sunday.

Someday, I will have time to write again.  Maybe...

On Babies and Crying

Days like today are what I expected when I first learned I would be a father.  The upside is that they've happened FAR less often than I expected, and I'm so very glad for that.

The suckiest thing I've had to deal with so far about having a baby is that when there's something wrong they can't tell you what it is, because they only have about four or five responses to stimuli, and really only varying degrees of one response to negative stimuli.

When they're happy they'll smile and laugh and play with things.  When they're content they'll be calm and look around and observe things.  When they're tired they'll rub their eyes.

But when they cry, sometimes there's not much you can do to figure out what's wrong, because they cry whenever anything is wrong, and my baby is no different.

When she's too tired and fighting sleep, she cries.  When she's hungry, she cries.  When she's constipated or gassy, she cries.  When she gets her foot caught in the rails of her crib, she cries.  When she has a headache, she cries.  When she has an ear infection, she cries.  When she has a fever, she cries.  When her gums or teeth hurt because she's teething, she cries.

Sure, some of those we can usually figure out - we can check her temperature, we know when she's being fed an how much, we can watch her on the monitor and see that she's in the middle of her crib.  But at her age, since she's started teething, it's kind of a roll of the dice trying to figure out what is causing her to fuss if we've ruled out the obvious.

Getting back to today... I had about 3-4 hours of sleep last night.  The largest uninterrupted period was around two to two and a half hours.  She woke up and fussed and fussed for about an hour until we got her settled enough to go back to sleep, then she slept for that two-ish hours and woke up again and refused to go back to sleep without laying on Mom or Dad's chest to prop her up a little bit.

All because of a little ear infection.

So I'm at work for the afternoon, but I'm only tackling easy stuff because I can barely concentrate enough to do anything worthwhile.  This post is about the most coherent thing I can muster.

Thankfully, she usually sleeps through the night and this is only the second time she's been sick.  I can count on one hand the number of times since she turned 6 weeks old she's not slept through the night.  But that doesn't help me feel any better today.

To all the parents out there who love and care for their children, I salute you for your effort and hope that the days like today has been for me are few and far between for you...

I'm on a BOAT!

*smiles* I stood in the middle of *OUR* boat and swiped/mauled for 5 minutes straight.  I guess that's worthy of an achievement?  I dunno, but I lol'd anyway.

The Blood Queen escaped last week - some of our team really hasn't figured out how to bite the proper DPS, or stay far enough apart not to die when she rains fire down upon us.  Or something like that.  In any case, we didn't get as close as we did the week before.  But another venture tonight, I hope, will provide the cure!

The good news is that instead of having Dreamwalker and Blood Princes still up, only Dreamwalker remains this week among bosses we have downed.  We 24-manned her last week, so even if we are down a player or two I don't expect a problem there this week, and we can spend most of the night working on Blood Queen and/or Putricide.

On a completely unrelated note, my daughter starting teething while we were at GenCon 2 weeks ago.  She's got 2 on the bottom, and (we think) one through on the top... and she's been amazingly not hard to deal with the entire time.

Before you know it she'll be driving the boys wild!  ;)

The Little Druid that Could

Awhile back I was running some regular commentary about my guild and the progress we'd been making in ICC and whatever other random game or real life thought crossed my mind.  Well... I figure since I took more than a month to write the first post of my Kitty primer I should ramble on awhile about what's been going on, starting, of course, with the most important person on the planet...

WARNING: POOPY DIAPERS AHEAD!

Kaethir's Cub

My little one was born, of course, back near the end of March.  She's grown from the measly 6lb 3oz she was at birth to a whopping 10lb 7oz as of a week or so ago...  Needs more meat on her bones, she's not gonna tank any bosses at that size!

She's doing great, no jaundice or major problems, and she's been sleeping through the night almost since the day my wife went back to work.  She's been "talking" for awhile now, smiling and giggling and generally making our lives wonderful.

Not to say she's perfect, but, well, she's perfect! She has of course the times that she decides to poop while you're changing her diaper... four times in a row... but I couldn't have asked for a better infant.  The few times she's cried there's always been a reasonable reason (gas, constipation, or the doctor sticking her with a giant needle) and so far she's just been a wondrous little miracle.

Sorry, I'm a new Dad, sometimes I just have to get mushy about her.

Movies

I don't recall mentioning much of anything about movies before, but I enjoy good Sci-Fi, Adventure, and Action flicks as much as the next person and I wanted to mention that Iron Man 2 and Avatar are both really good films that have come out in the last few months.  You should see them, or so I would have you believe.

Also, I saw an advertisement for The Expendables.  Anything with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Terry Crews is going to be either really, really good, or really, phenomenally bad.  I'm cautiously optimistic.


One final note on movies and then I'll quit.  In a moment of masochism I decided to DVR Transmorphers when I saw it on Encore.  I noticed this little gem pile of awful awhile back in Blockbuster.  Incidentally, it came out a little before Transformers, which was an infinitely better movie.  I watched about 20-30 minutes of it (that I can't get back) before deciding that there was no redeeming quality to it, at all.  IMHO, and in no particular order, it had bad acting, directing, casting, special effects, music, choreography, and writing, and the plot (which seemed like some inane mashup of the Matrix and Transformers) had to have been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee.  Save yourself.

Epic Adventurers and ICC

On with the show.

When last we left our impaled imperiled heroes, Epic Adventurers had finally downed Deathbringer Saurfang in 25-man mode.  We've had a few changes to our raiding schedule since then, but we've continued to press onward.

Our progression 10-man team (which I, unfortunately, am unable to participate in) has downed Festergut, Rotface, and the Blood Princes, while our 25-man team is regularly one-shotting the first 6 bosses (through Saurfang, plus Festergut and Rotface) in one night.

We run a fun/alt 10-man run on Sunday nights, which regularly clears through Saurfang.  The group I led in this past Sunday took a couple of shots at Rotface but couldn't pull it off.

I have been learning more and more about the intricacies of playing a Feral DPS, and I've had occasional opportunities to tank even on our 25-man runs, which has been a blast for me.  I've been topping 8k DPS against Saurfang, without optimizing my gems.  I share some gear between my sets, so it's impractical to completely optimize for either, and I think I've done well with the limitations I have.

The big team is currently stumbling over the Dreamwalker.  The strategy we've been employing is to have just 2 tanks to hold down the baddies, each one generally hanging out at the point of the wall in between the spawn points on each side of the green dragon, with the melee DPS roughly divided up between the sides and the ranged DPS and heals more or less roaming around the middle, assisting wherever it is needed.  Owing to the nature of the fight, we've been running a little healer heavy.

We seem to be having some difficulty keeping up.  I'm not entirely certain where the problem is.  This is complicated by the fact that due to my reduced raiding schedule, I'm not there every week. 

It has been suggested to me that we should use 3-4 tanks, split up the DPS more, and engage the Adds closer to their spawn points.  I'm a little leery of the idea, but I may propose it to our raid leader as something to try.  I'm sure we'll get it figured out soon.

Two posts in three days?  Is the ground getting cold for anybody else?

The Greatest Achievement!

For all my readers,

It's probably going to be silent around here for awhile.  If I have time I'll put something together, but since I became a father early Wednesday morning that could be awhile.

Thanks always for reading, and I'll be back!

Silence

I apologize for the great echoing wall of nothing around here of late.

I've been exceptionally busy, and unfortunately that will likely continue as my baby is due very soon.

Have faith!  I shall return!

BRRRAAAAAIIIINNSssss....

My head, it is empty of ideas at the moment and I feel a zombie-like need to devour someone else's.

That's ok, it's usually about this empty, and I'm sure something will will shake loose from the cobwebs up there soon.

Meanwhile, in the real world (*gasp*! rl? inorite?), the Colts lost to the Saints in the Super Bowl, and those of us that follow both our own religion and that of football have about 6 months of wailing and gnashing of teeth before the new season starts again.  Congrats to the Saints and the City of New Orleans - now if you could just stop building things below sea level I'd feel a lot better about your mental status.

I kid, I kid.  It was a good game and I really thought it was going into overtime before Peyton Manning threw that ill-fated pass.  Such is life!

Also of note in the real world, within the next 13 days I have the following events for which I must do something that resembles being socially acceptable, in no particular order:  Valentine's Day, my birthday, my sister-in-law's birthday, and my 1-year wedding anniversary.  And my first baby is due in just under 6 weeks.  I suppose that's what I get for going and finding a great woman to marry, but if I randomly disappear here in awhile, you can probably guess what happened.

Back here in the fabricated reality of the blogging world (I refuse to call it the blogosphere), things churn along as they always do.  My reading list has grown so large so fast, that I felt it would be overly burdensone to continue expanding the widget (or gadget, depending on your terminology) over there to the right.  It already consumes more space than I'd like it to.  Sometime in the (not exceptionally distant) future, I hope to have a working gadget which will display, for example, the 5 most recently updated blogs from my whole list, and a link to the entire blogroll.  Maybe I'm just throwing a pipe dream out there, and maybe I'll get a picture up there in my profile someday too.  If nothing else I should be able to provide a page with the blogroll.  I just have to be the little engine blogger that could. "I think I can I think I can..."

Kaethir out.

It's a girl!

I can't remember if I've mentioned it here before or not, but my wife is pregnant.

And we found out today, that it's a girl!