Ezra Nelson Garber

Ezra Nelson Garber is a grade-A engineer with Hilton Worldwide. He always goes above and beyond for customers of the hotel. Ezra always has a positive attitude and has proven himself capable to handle a wide variety of tasks without supervision. Ezra Nelson-Garber

So great when the last post is bookmarked by references to my desire to keep at it, and that post is now about a year old.

Enzo is 15 months. He's running around like a maniac and he's started to look like a real kid, not just a baby. He's developed a little bit of a temper. His latest plaything has been the garbage can that our dog food is stored in. He loves to take handfulls of the food and chuck them across the room. He always makes sure to lock eyes before he does it, as if he's saying "hey dad, check it."

Anyway, I am not a huge fan of this game, so I recently picked him up to take him away from the dog bucket. He lost his bananas. I brought him upstairs and he fought me until I set him down. He sobbed and cried for a long time. Eventually, he worked it out of his system. He drank a solid 8oz of water in one big slurp; I'm sure all of that screaming hurt his throat.

Anyway, that's about as bad as it gets. I'll be starting a new job on Monday. It'll be a huge adjustment to go from working from home to spending my days in an office, but I'm optimistic. It should be a fun work environment and there's a lot of potential for this company...

Update(s)

So it's proven to be awfully difficult to take care of a kid, work from home and maintain a blog. No surprise that the blog has therefore fallen by the wayside... I really want to keep it up, mostly because I'm hoping to look back at this as Enzo ages and be reminded of all of the awesomeness that has ensued.

He's now just a hair over three months old. He eats like a champion and, at least according to our shoddy scale at home, weighs over 15 lbs. He's been sleeping through the night for over a month now which is absolutely fantastic. In fact, I think we're getting off too easy with this kid, and our next one will be a little domestic terrorist.

We've got Enzo going to a neighbor's house for day care on a pretty regular basis. It's a really fantastic situation as we get to have him just two doors away and we've got a good handle on how he's being treated. Even though we found a day care that we really liked, it was still a little scary.

Since he was born, we've gone out exactly once without him. Claire and I went out for our birthday dinners while the MIL was in town. It was nice, but we ended up spending half of our time talking about Enzo anyway. We'll be going out again this weekend for the med school prom. Hopefully it'll be a blast.

Anyway, I'm going to do my best to keep at this. I want to have the record, and without this, it's not going to happen.

Long overdue

Clearly I haven't had many opportunities to write in the recent past. Our little bundle of joy, Enzo Vieira Garber, was born on November 11th at 8:48pm. It was an awe-inspiring experience. I can't say that it was easy for Claire, but we checked in at the hospital at 2pm and Enzo was here before 9. Considering the horror stories that we heard during the pregnancy, we felt pretty lucky. He was also a large baby, so the delivery was somewhat unpleasant. For Claire, that is.

Anyway, the last two months have flown by. It's amazing how much he's grown and changed since he was born. He's already interactive and engaged. He's also a very easy baby. He sleeps pretty well, laughs, and is great to be around. It's been a little tough to get much work done because all I want to do is hang out with him. I'd consider that a small price to pay.

Sports

This morning, as I sit, dejected, in my 2006 NFC CHAMPIONS shirt, I have to wonder: Will I subject my son to being a fan of such a disappointing franchise? Can I really make him root for the Bears, knowing that he'll be frustrated and let down countless times? Is it even fair to impress your personal fandom on to your offspring?

At least I'm no longer a Cubs fan, so with any luck, my boy won't have to deal with that mess.

Work

I work from home. I've been doing it for a little over a year now, and it's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I can spend my moments of downtime tidying up the house or doing laundry instead of screwing around on the internet. On the other, I feel like I'm at work all the time. When my phone rings at 7pm while I'm making dinner, I feel an obligation to answer. I'm not actively sitting at my computer, but it's still work.

Anyway, one of the perks that I anticipated with working from home and having a baby was that I'd get to spend a lot of time with the little guy. We've visited day cares in the area and can't get excited about any of them. I was raised by a stay-at-home mom and think that it worked out pretty well in my situation. I'm not a fan of dropping my new baby off with someone else and having them raise them... However, I need to work. With the wife in school, there's really no option. I was just hoping to have the best of both worlds.

Right now, I have a lot of people telling me that it's not realistic. One of them is my boss. We're going to have a sit-down next week to discuss. I'm nervous.

Bender

So in advance of the birth of my son, I've been on quite a bender. There's a part of me that feels that the frat boy part of my life is coming to an end so I ought to take advantage when I can. We've had baby showers, weddings, fantasy football drafts, and random weekends with family and friends, and almost without fail, I've overindulged. Bad? Yeah, probably. It's a lot harder for me to recover from a hangover at 29 than it was at 22. After a long weekend such as the last one at Claire's brother's wedding last weekend, I'm downright exhausted. Still, though, I feel like I'm getting it out of my system before I have a tiny dependent.

Another thing I've noticed about benders as you age is that you really try to squeeze the maximum amount of fun out of every gathering. We had 10 guests in town for my league's fantasy football draft. It was outrageous. Almost every inch of floor space was covered in inflatable mattresses, and every other surface (couch/bed/futon/bizarre blanket nest) was full. We drank crappy light beer from 11am to 4am. We saw a minor league baseball game, went to a bar called Mullet's, and indulged in other activities that shall not be mentioned on the internet.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend. I was sleep-deprived and hung over, but it was worth it. Cleaning the house on Sunday cleared that hangover right up...

Anyway, this is pretty off-topic, but I've always been a person who was excited for adulthood and with the kid less than two months away, I feel like it's really here. There are so many reasons that I can't wait.