I'm not sure what happened to my little boy, but something significant has changed. Maybe it's the age, maybe it's the pressure from Lily's birth, maybe it's the sudden discontinuation of naps, maybe it's something we're doing wrong. Or maybe it's all of those things and more.

photo by helloheather

I've not written anything in a long while for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because I don't have anything to say that wouldn't sound selfish and lame. There is no doubt that, compared to a huge percentage of the world, I am a very, very blessed man. And for me to complain about our problems at home or my problems at work seems arrogant at best. But that doesn't make the struggle any less of a struggle.

I love him so very much. I wish I could figure out what's wrong and help him (and us) through this change. But most of the time I am floundering and gasping for air.

We're still trying though.

Edit/Update: It seems really unfair of me to focus on just this past month and just the problems of this past month at that. I'm going to write something more balanced in a couple days.

I'm still amazed that we have another child. It feels so different from when Nate was a newborn: helloheather and I could concentrate 100% on him when we wanted to. With Lily, I feel a lot like the 3rd wheel (despite clearly being the 4th...) in our family. Nate takes a lot of energy and time and with Lily nursing, there's very little time for me to spend with her.

In many ways, she feels like a stranger. It doesn't help that I don't get much of a chance to photograph her. I think with Nate I got to know him, in part, by simply observing and photographing him. And it doesn't help that, most nights, she cries from about 6pm (when I get home) until about 10pm.

But last night she was content and happy. Last night she fell asleep in my arms (and against my chest) as I walked around while helloheather and Nate ate dinner. And last night helloheather took some photos of us.

We're having a visit from friends a couple times next week, which will be great. Then Lily's baptism-combination-Mother's-Day-celebration with family on the weekend.

And we will see how the next month progresses. I'm hopeful we can help Lily adjust more in the evenings and figure out how we can become a better family of four.

We've had a family member pass away suddenly and unexpectedly. We've had other family members hospitalized and/or have medical procedures. We've had family members lose their jobs. We've had medical problems ourselves, some of which are still unresolved.

We have stress thinking about the pending birth of our second child (a child who still doesn't have a name) and the changes that will bring.

Oh, and our cat is sick. She has to be put on an even more special food than what she's already been taking and will start getting cortisone shots which, if the diagnosis is wrong, could actually make things worse.

I'm trying to think positively though. I'm still employed and financially things are improving for the company. Also the company went 100% business casual which is a nice change. The weather has been improving and I've been able to get out during lunch. Also bernhard.us et al will be migrated to new servers in a couple weeks which should make things much faster and more stable.

It's a half-mile hike through the snow in Coral Woods with four stops detailing some of the history of maple sugar and maple syrup: from Native Americans sugar production in a hollowed-out log to modern sap collection. At the end, where they have an evaporator set up, you can sample the syrup they do make from the sap being collected. As the program only runs for two weeks there's only enough syrup to give out the tastes at the end, so none to take home.

This years warmer temps and sun made for a great time. Nate was very interested and participated at all the stops. He also received a number of complements from people in our group with how articulate and involved he was. By the time we were done with our tour, the number of people at the park had probably quadrupled. So we had clearly arrived at just the right time.

During the drive home, I failed to keep Nate awake (and who could blame him after our morning), which re-set his clock and left helloheather and I with a lot less time to work on house stuff. So...

Off Nate and I went again; this time to the Crystal Lake Nature Center. It's a small but fun building that is part of the Veteran's Acres park. We read books, looked at some of the animals they have, and then hiked in the slush and snow around the pond.

It was a good Saturday. The kind of hints-of-spring type day (we heard sandhill cranes flying north while at Coral Woods) that really can reinvigorate.

Nate went through a growth spurt not too long ago, where he grew over an inch in just 2.5 weeks. He was hungry all the time (no wonder) but now the appetite is more normal, so I think things have slowed.

I made a ha-ha-lame joke last night about how it's better to be European than Europoopin' and then had to explain the joke to Nate. He loved it and I'm just such a great dad, right? (You should have seen the look helloheather gave me...)

Nate's time at his new preschool seems to be going very well. A small class of kids more his age was definitely a good change. Our school-art-on-display collection is growing again, which I love. Having stuff on the cabinets, doors, etc. is so cool. When helloheather cleaned house (we had completely run out of space to display stuff) it felt so empty and naked in the kitchen.

Child number two is rapidly approaching his or her birthday. We've changed doctors (yes, somewhat late in the game) but we're both very glad we have. The previous practice was not being supportive or informative. The new doctor also delivers at the hospital 5 minutes from our house rather than the one 25 minutes away. An added bonus.

My parents (and paternal grandfather) felt the 3.8 earthquake we had in northern Illinois on February 10th. They were only 5 miles away from the epicenter though. People as far away as Madison, WI felt the quake actually, but neither helloheather or I woke up.

We did have an addition to our family, photographically speaking, at Christmas. Thanks to a generous gift, we're now the owners of a Canon T1i Digital Rebel. It's a very good upgrade to the Rebel XT that we've been using since 2006. The auto-focus is faster, the ISO range expanded, a bigger and brighter viewfinder, the shutter is quieter, and it has a big and detailed LCD. Exciting stuff.

This was the first time Nate and I were home alone.

We did not thwart the bumbling efforts of two would-be criminal types. John Hughes would not have been impressed.

Still, we had fun. I built a fort in our front room on Friday night and Nate and I had a camp-out. He did ask if we were going to have a camp-fire but alas, prudence dictated no open flame in the foyer.

I built our fort out of the kitchen chairs, a blanket, a couple strong clips, and our Therm-a-rest (tm) sleeping pads. It was fun. I have very fond memories of my dad building me a fort like this when I was a kid and it was nice to be able to do this for Nate.

Most of the time we just hung out. We played a lot of Cars (tm) which he's /really/ into right now. This was, in part, because I gave him a new car ("Sheriff") as a gift for the weekend. We also visited with another dad, who's wife was on the weekend retreat, and had lunch with him at the Burger King (which has a play area).

We had so much fun with the fort that we slept there again Saturday night, even though helloheather had returned home.

Christmas was busy, as usual, with events every day from the 24th through the 27th. But, despite the big snowfall, and the driving around, it was really all very good. Nate was a trouper and really seemed to enjoy visiting the family. Lots of photos need to be posted.

We visited the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum after Christmas, mostly to see the Butterfly Haven they have there. I really thought Nate would enjoy it, but he was not impressed. There were other exhibits he liked though, and overall the visit was a good one. Also, with so many people being off work the week between Christmas and New Years, we had no problems driving into and out of Chicago.

Nate and I also spent a lot of time outside in the snow over break, which was really great. I'm very glad we've had all the snow and that it's been cold enough to keep it from melting. Though, I did hear on the news last night that, if it warms up on Wednesday or Thursday, it'll be the first time since Christmas that we've been at or above 32 deg F. So, it's been a little chilly!

Being back at work for a full week (last week) was tough. It's really easy to get into a habit of being lazy and family-oriented around the house and very difficult to get back into work-mode mentality. However, I've managed to chase the mid-day blues away a bit by bringing a DSLR to work and walking around in the cold and snow. Boots and thermals have been a must.

So 2010 is here and the end of March is rapidly approaching. I'm still not really ready for all of this but it's certainly not waiting for me to catch up.

Recently I've given Nate one of my film cameras, an Olympic Stylus Epic, and set him up with a couple of rolls of black and white film. He's prefectly happy to just press and press and press the shutter button photographing nothing or photographing us. He was having a ton of fun and I was planning on freeing up some space in my film/beer storage fridge.

This weekend helloheather went to Target to shop and to drop off his first roll of Ilford XP2 only to discover that our Target store is no longer developing film. Now they only have a send out service and it takes 7-10 days. My experience with send-out services has been...less than pleasant. I'm expecting the scans to be pretty bad. I'm expecting the negatives to look like they've been walked over by a dozen people.

For better or worse, the world of film is certainly not doing well... I enjoyed using it this summer as it, once again, forced me to slow down a bit and consider the shot. It helped too that I was limiting myself to a single focal length (50mm). I enjoyed the color palette I was getting from (expired) Kodak UC 400. And yeah, I cleared out a little more space in that fridge. But I especially enjoyed the 1-day turn-around CD's for so little money at a location that was right on my route home from the train.

I guess if we want to shoot any more film we're going to have to go just a little bit further and pay a little bit more.

It started off with a few tears, mostly because the week before, we all had visited the school in the evening, and he thought we'd be staying again. On his first day, after he started to cry a bit, his teacher quickly shepherded him off to a distraction. I understand it is important for her to maintain some semblance of order on the first day and I understand that getting any child into the routine can be good for everyone, but I didn't get to say goodbye to him before he was hauled away. It's silly to be bothered by this, I know, and yet I still am.

But there were no problems after the first day, and now he can barely be contained in his drive to get into the classroom to begin his day.

I said "near as I can tell" before, only because I'm pretty sure he's being trained by CIA agents in proper techniques to resist divulging sensitive information if captured. I don't really know what he is actually doing at school. Questions about his day, his activities, etc either go unanswered or are returned with a very teenage-sounding "nothin'." I realize this is fairly common for preschoolers and so I just roll with it. I'm grateful that the teachers send home a little newsletter at the end of the week so we have some idea of what has been going on.

Every once in a while little snippets make their way out: he'll start singing a song we've never heard before or he'll say some series of sentences that we've never uttered. helloheather and I will just look at each other and smile.

Today is class picture day for Nate. And that by itself is something that amazes me.

We've had a busy late spring/summer. It's been difficult to sit down for a bit and contemplate his 3rd year.

(photo by helloheather)

Nate is three years-old now. When I think about his first few weeks after his birth I can't help but think of the blooming of the hostas in our yard. I think about, of all things, the All Star Game and the night I sat watching the tv with him, fast asleep, on a pillow on my lap, the sun setting behind our linden tree and the warm air skittering in through the open patio door. He was so small...so fragile...and I was so afraid.

And now, as the hostas again are blooming, he sits and reads books with us. Now he asks question after question after question to the point where he has so much momentum going that he'll ask us things like "what's 'milk' means?" even though he has been drinking milk for two years. He is amazingly curious and perceptive. He knows, right away, when helloheather and I are starting to have an argument and does everything he can to stop it or distract us. It's sobering and sometimes frightens me to think of what else he has absorbed and is absorbing.

As most children his age, he pushes the boundaries. We try very hard to respond appropriately to these forays into freedom. We try to be firm but fair and we try to be instructive throughout. It's tough though and sometimes we fail. If nothing else, Nate keeps us on our toes.

His love for books continues unabated. We seem to run through these phases where I forget how much he loves to read and we end up playing cars or pirates or "chase me" or whatever game he wants and then have only time for a single book in the evening. So the pendulum will swing back and we'll end up reading a dozen books together and he'll ask questions the whole time through. He doesn't just sit there and have a book read to him...he participates and he is engaged.

He's figuring out the rules of this universe, and we're trying to figure him out as well. He's so enthusiastic that sometimes it takes my breath away. Happy Birthday, Nate.

Length of Day - 15h 16m - Tomorrow will be 0m 9s shorter
Source: http://www.wunderground.com/US/IL/Crystal_Lake.html

I always get a little melancholy around the summer solstice because it seems like I'm just getting into a summer stride when our evenings begin to peel away like that of the skin of an apple. Slowly as we revolve and rotate, the length of our day is stripped and discarded. And so I have striven to celebrate our summer solstice each year. I want to revel in the maximum amount of light afforded us on this day.

Sunday I was awake close to, but not at, sunrise in order to view (and photograph) the last event of this years Great Galena Balloon Race. The weather did not afford us much sunlight, however, and we had to make due.

After arriving home in the early afternoon, we hatched a plan to eat an early dinner and headed out to a CL institution: The Freeze. Nate had his very first ice cream cone last night and I think that is celebration enough. He enjoyed the ice cream and was amazed when I took a BITE of my cone. (He actually said "wow!" when I showed him what I had done.)

We followed up ice cream with a visit to Veteran's Acres for swings and playground equipment and a pond with various bull frogs, turtles, fish, ducks, and one confused goose (who seemed to treat a mated pair of ducks as friends, if not parents).

While we missed the actual sunset of solstice, this was a very successful solstice celebration.

It feels really good to have it done. I, of course, couldn't have completed this without lots of help from my father and the fathers-in-law. They were all quite patient with my "measure ten times, cut once" assembly procedure.

It was completed in time for the Big Visit of 8 adults and 8 kids. We had fine weather and even a little rain didn't keep us from the back yard for too long.

Yay!

-----

The other night he was asking in a very earnest (and not whining) way to watch "Lightning McQueen" and specifically "the race and the lady singing and Lightning McQueen comes out of Mack." (By which he means the beginning of the movie which features a Sheryl Crow song.) But we were eating dinner and were not going to be watching tv any time soon. So I thought I would offer a treat/compromise. I grabbed the soundtrack (a recently acquired item that he had not heard) and started to play the Sheryl Crow track.

Poor guy, he was so confused. He was looking around and around for a TV thinking I had put the DVD in somewhere and he just couldn't quite find it. When I explained to him it was just the music he wanted none of it. And I can't blame him. I should have know that it was not a good substitute. It would be like asking for ice cream and instead being shown pictures of someone else eating ice cream.

Every visit to the state park makes me want to go back for more. We are rather lucky in McHenry County to have a rather large number of conservation areas and three state parks. These are areas we need to take advantage of more often.

On Saturday, Nate ran ahead to the end of a wooden walkway (one that extends over the bog/wetlands area at Moraine Hills) and sat down. When I caught up with him a small snake was wiggling by and into the grass below. We also saw a Great Blue Heron take flight from its nest on the edge of the waterway. (Actually, I missed the take-off because I was busy shooting a macro photo of what looks like part of a jawbone from a critter.)

I discovered today, on the website FreeSound.org, user Tom Haigh (aka audible-edge) made a recent (March 14th) recording of the ambient sounds of Moraine Hills.

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=69252

I think it captures the park quite well.