As you can see from the date listings on my last posts here, it is SO NOT EASY to keep up with both a blog and a daughter, however beautiful she may be. So there haven’t been any posts here in forever.

Even more complicated, I’m actually (theoretically) posting in a second blog as well! In reality, what happens is that if I ever have an inkling of an idea for that blog, I end up thinking about this one and how totally neglected it is … and the whole thing dissolves into a mental mess.

So I’m sacrificing the Famblog here. I will certainly have more to say about sweet lil’ Feeburs, but I’m going to do it at the other blog with a “Phoebe” tag. I’m sure all you imaginary readers are just devastated to hear this.

So, see you on the other side!

Just spent the afternoon adding new pics to Phoebe’s Flickr page and captioning like crazy. We’re almost up to date on the pics now … the latest ones are from when she was 5 months old, and today she turned 7 months! So happy Month Day, Phoebe! Yaaaaay!

This morning, the whole crew is making its way to Hammond, LA to get the little Phoebe-girl baptized. Does that seem like a long way to go to get some holy water? Well, yeah, but we wanted to have it done by Father Paul at Grace Memorial Episcopal, the man who married us. He’s a good guy.

There’s a pretty large contingent of family who’ll be going to see this happen. My sister’s family is visiting from Orlando, my Mom’s cousin from Brooklyn, my grandfather, my uncle’s first wife and a couple of close cousins. That’s in addition to the large chunk of family that’s already there. We’re gonna total about 25, which may not seem enormous, but you haven’t seen us all try to eat in the same room.

Pictures will be forthcoming, seriously. Of course, I’ve been pretty bad about posting anything here, so there’s gonna have to be some serious catch-up happening soon. In the meantime, you can always enjoy a Phoebe slideshow at flickr.com. (She’s got her own tag!)

So maybe it was an unreasonable expectation that I might have any time or inclination to blog while I’m learning the fatherin’ ropes. Or maybe I’m painfully lazy when it comes to such things. I suspect I’m merely out of practice … my bloggin’ muscles need a good stretch.

For the most part, Phoebe is an amazingly healthy, well-behaved child. She was a little jaundiced at birth, and one of the main treatments for that is to just “give ‘er a little sun.” That would have been great except that she was born at the beginning of a ten-day gray patch in Mississippi January.

She rarely gets into crying jags, preferring instead to SHOUT us into doing what she wants. (HEY! HEEEEY!) She still loves to stretch and move her limbs. When she’s calm, a tight swaddle helps keep her that way (we call her the ‘baby burrito’), but if she’s alert when we swad, she twists and turns and pulls like a little Houdini trying to get at least… one… arm… out! When she starts talking, I expect a few battles of will.

I can hear you asking now, “What about sleep?” Well there are good nights (baby goes down hard at 10:30, nurses in 2 1/2 to 3 hour increments!) and bad nights (baby REFUSES to go down until 2, then half wakes up at 3 and makes just enough little noises for the rest of the night to prevent anybody else from getting any sleep!) in roughly equal proportion, but the good are starting to outweigh the bad! Mama breastfeeds and Daddy takes care of the other end, when he can.

I stayed home for a week after Phoebe was born, but I had to go back to work again, which is why I have to wrap up this rambling entry now.

(Photos coming really soon, I promise! I’m uploading to Flickr even now.)