What’s up with Sage?

 

Supermodel Sage

Sage strikes a pose.

 

Sage has been traversing the country for the past three weeks, spreading smiles, drool, and her passion for mismatched socks.  Ok, so she seems more passionate about taking the socks off her feet and shoving them into her drool filled mouth, making them soggy, and then dropping them on the floor with a splat.  Despite her appetite for a non-edible product, she is a wonderful spokesbaby and tirelessly displays her colorful feet while being carried around various convention centers, airports, and hotel lobbies across the country.

Solmate Socks is a company that my Mom started 10 year ago, and their niche is colorful mismatched socks for adults and kids.  Both Lisa and I have been involved in the product photography, website, and wholesale trade shows for the company for many years on a part time basis.  Now Lisa has been working full time for the company for the past three years, and I’ve been full time for a month.  Part of our job is to travel to wholesale trade shows around the country to display the product to wholesale buyers and write orders.  Another part of the job is to cart around Sage as the infant sock model; like a shorter, chubbier, breast-fed version of Kate Moss.  Like a supermodel, she turns heads everywhere she goes.  When walking through the aisles of a trade show you can the hear whispers of her adoring fans.  “Look at the sock-baby”, “sooo cute”, “what booth did she come from?”.  Her attraction spans all demographics, elderly grandmothers, gay men, and especially middle age women, who are reminded that their own babies are now insufferable teenagers, and they tell us exactly that.  I think I finally understand why someone would want to be part of a supermodel’s entourage.  The attention is addictive, Sage’s appearance turns heads, and although they aren’t looking adoringly directly at me, it is in my general direction, and that is close enough.

Centerfold

 

The only time she doesn’t draw the hungry eyes of fans is while boarding an airplane.  It would seem that her cuteness is best absorbed when the viewer can choose the length and proximity of their exposure.  It’s much like watching  solar eclipse, but instead of going blind the worst that can happen is extreme annoyance.  I understand exactly where the other passengers are coming from, since I have always been wary of being in confined spaces with anything potentially noisy, smelly, or regurgitating, which explains why I tend to avoid punk concerts or frat parties.  I too used to glare at babies boarding a plane, praying that they wouldn’t sit next to me, or worse yet, directly behind me, where they would kick the back of my seat and their screams would be a mere foot from my head and in surround sound.  So now when we board a plane I hold Sage high and let her look around and greet our neighboring passengers with a smile to warm their hearts to her presence.

So far she has been on 8 flights, which at 7 months old sets an impressive standard.  Most of them have been cross-country, and most have them have been relatively flawless.  She in a phase now where bouncing on our laps, playing with ice cubes on the tray table, and taking occasional milk induced naps can keep her occupied for hours.  This system has it’s weaknesses, since she is on our laps the whole time our own endurance is required to keep her bouncing, playing with ice or sleeping .  Also, it really helps if she’s had a good night’s sleep and the flight is in the morning.

Trade show travel is not light, three rolling suitcases, two carry-ons, a diaper bag, a car seat, a stroller, and a baby in the chest carrier.

Allow me to back up for a moment, two and a half weeks ago, back on the 12th of January, Sage, Lisa and I left Portland for our first tradeshow as a family.  We skidded on the icy streets to the Portland airport, only to land in Atlanta which was covered in even slipperier ice.  Seriously, I think I saw a Zamboni driving down the street.  We met my mom at the Atlanta airport, and together made our way downtown by train.  We didn’t pack light, and our short walk from the train station to the hotel resembled a Charlie Chaplin film in a banana factory, except nobody fell down and we weren’t accompanied by ragtime piano.  Sage traveled really well the whole time, and the time difference didn’t seem to affect her very much.  We were in Atlanta for a week, the show was a success, and Sage had a chance to hang out with her Grandma Marianne, who adored her like only a grandma can.  It is a wonderful thing to watch my mom play with Sage, talking to her and showing her off to her trade show friends.  We also spent some time with an old Solmate Sock employee and friend Lisa and Bennitt Weinstein and their beautiful daughter Eleanor.  Atlanta is a wonderful city to walk around in, especially when led on an urban hike by locals after the ice melts.

A Booth-Baby in her natural habitat.

Next we flew from chilly Atlanta to sunny LA, with 70 degree weather and the kind of rush hour traffic that makes you not care that the weather is so beautiful.  We stayed with Lisa’s parents in Simi Valley, and the cross-country trip from door to door took 11 hours.  Ironically, the flight across the country lasted five hours, which is almost how long it took to deboard the plane in LA, get our luggage, rent a car, and get to Simi Valley in rush hour traffic.  By the end of it Sage was a getting impatient, but as soon as she was in her other Grandmother’s arms, all was right with the world.  We stayed in LA for a little less than a week, driving to the convention center downtown, which was either 45 minutes or 2 hours away depending on the traffic-gods (who are spiteful), and had a decent show.

Sage in the LA booth with Lisa, Grandma Jojo and Grandpa Toto

Lisa’s mom, Mary Jo had a blast with Sage, lauding after her and speaking to her in Spanish (she is a Spanish teacher).  It’s so great to hand Sage over to Grandma Jojo, as she prefers to be called, and watch them wind each other up in a feedback loop of smiles and babbling.  Grandpa Tom, or Grandpa Toto also featured a neat toy called a mustache on his face, which Sage seemed to think was perfect for pull-ups. Grandma Jojo had a little red throne ready for Sage, although the family dog seemed to think it was for her.

Coco likes the new mini-throne.

After we finished the LA show, we flew up to Portland.  Being home was great, but we were only scheduled to be there for 36 hours, doing laundry and re-packing for the next show, and the weather-gods had different plans (also spiteful).
New York was our next destination, but it got hammered by snow the day we were leaving.  Our ideal flight at 8 in the morning was canceled.  Ideally, it was going to be a direct flight from Portland to Newark, it was going to leave at the perfect time for optimal Sage endurance, and it was going to get us into New York in time to set up the show.  The next best flight was the worst option, a red-eye flight to Houston with a transfer to LaGuardia.  The midnight flight was delayed for three hours, and we boarded a plane at 3am already exhausted with a baby that couldn’t believe we were actually getting back onto another plane.  The first flight she did alright, but holding a half-sleeping child on a narrow seat while trying to sleep oneself is a tiresome task.   About midway through the second flight Sage decided that enough was enough, no amount of milk could get her to nap, no amount of distraction could stop her from squirming, and she wound herself up like, well, a wind up toy that then starts to fart and cry.
She squirmed like an interpretive dancer, expanding with an arched back and then contracting her forehead towards her toes, it was all I could do to keep her from slamming her body parts into the seat in front of us.  Lisa and I passed her back and forth, trying our various tricks, but she was tired and bored, and we were two exhausted parents who were out of energy to keep her calm.  Finally, her moans of displeasure turned to full on crying.  Normally I would be embarrassed to put the neighboring passengers through this, but one advantage of complete exhaustion is that you loose all sympathy for other peoples discomfort and only focus on your own; at least they didn’t have to spot an infant doing some god-awful contact improv on their laps.  Finally, the exhaustion got the best of her, and through tearful moans we were able to get her to drink a bottle and go to sleep for the last hour of the flight.  14 hours after we left our house in Portland, we arrived at the New York hotel room, took our pants off and indulged in room service.
Right before bed we bathed Sage, and I accidentally let more water get on her face than she was used to.  She must have inhaled water through her nose, because she started to cry, then scream, then wads of watery snot dribbled from her nose.  Her attempts to inhale through her nose sounded like gargling snorts.  We tried to give her a pacifier, but it forced her to breathe in through her nose, which she didn’t like. Drinking milk had the same problem.  I knew that if she would just blow air out her nose she would be fine, but no amount of back patting, different body positions, or comforting would calm her down.  Much like Spinal Tap, our daughter can sometimes get noisy, but this was the first time she ever went up to 11.  She was livid, bright red, and if she had control of language, she would have been swearing and screaming “I wanna go home”.  After 15 minutes Lisa and I were out of ideas.  I don’t remember who started jumping around like a court jester, but somehow parents doing jackass clowning antics confused her enough to make her calm down.  She settled, fell asleep, and we soon followed suit.

I never like seeing Sage get upset like that, I never want her to be unhappy, and as a parent it is my job to help her be content as much as possible.  We’ve learned some good techniques on these trips to foresee problems before they arise, and deal with problems as they occur with various objects and antics.  We really are getting better at this as we go along, and in the end we feel like we will have a more flexible, socialized child than if we were to not travel at all.  It’s a learning process, and we aren’t experts yet, I mean she doesn’t even crawl yet, and mobility will be a real game changer, but we’ll figure it out.

Sage back on top.

After a couple good nights sleep Sage seems to have returned to her smiling self.  As any supermodel might do, she tries to eat paper and looses control of her bowels, but she is also a professional and knows when to turn on the smiles and strut her stuff.  My Mom is also at this show, and will be at the next one in two weeks in Philadelphia, so there is more grandma time to be had and four more flights before winter trade show season will be over.  Sage has been a trooper, and as long as we can avoid another perfect storm of red-eye flights, I think we’ll make it.  Anyway, all this is cross-training for our trip to Ireland later on this spring, now if we could only figure out how to pack lighter.

Of course, there are some pessimists at the trade shows who say that in a year, Sage will be upright, and it would be a nightmare to take a waddling toddler to trade shows.  I shrug my shoulders, but in my mind I think “Sage won’t be waddling, she’s a supermodel, she’ll be strutting”.

 

Six months old

Dear Sage,
You are six months old today, half a year, one thirty-sixth of the way to going away to college (or whatever it is you want to do when you turn 18). There is something about this day that delineates your infancy for me, as though you’ve reached a tipping point, or an escape velocity. What I mean is you are becoming a real person. For the past six months you have been growing bigger and stronger, you’ve become more aware of your surroundings and the people who love you. You are rolling over, babbling and sitting up (mostly). But you are also so innocent, you have little understanding of the things around you and no way to control them. Recently, I have felt a change coming on, like wheels we have been spinning will gain traction soon.

Last night I was feeding you your night bottle and singing to you and although I could see you were very tired, your eyes kept popping open. I decided to close my eyes, hoping that you would see closed eyes and mimic it, and drift off to sleep. As I sat there with my eyes closed I realized that someday you will see my closed eyes and understand that I can’t see you. You might use the opportunity to pull a prank on me, or try to get away with something I told you not to do. Someday you’ll be sneaky, someday you’ll plan, and someday you’ll have motives and the ability to act on them, either stealing a cookie or stealing cash from my wallet. I don’t assume that you’ll be a trouble maker, but I don’t assume you’ll stay innocent forever either.

I opened my eyes and you hadn’t fallen asleep yet, and you saw me look at you, and you smiled a big goofy toothless grin, milk dribbling out of the corner of your mouth, and my heart swelled. You are so beautiful, and so genuine, and pure. You have no ulterior motives yet, you live in the moment, you are amazed by the world.

I know that this won’t last forever, and that the next stages of your broadening perspective will expose you to language and locomotion (and associated injuries). I know that you will learn the word “no”, and you won’t be afraid to use it. But you’ll also learn the word “why”, and that will be my opportunity to do my best to explain the world to you as you learn more and more what it means to be a human. I will be cautious in this endeavor, since there are many ways to explain the world, but only some that let the child keep their wonderful perspective. As an old professor Jules Engel used to say,

“It’s not what you give the students that’s important, it’s what you don’t take away”.

I ran across another great quote today:

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” – Roald Dahl.

Love,
Your Dad

 

Ad Bibz pt. 3

More AdBibz, enjoy!

Skee Drool!

 

My Baby Stole My Brain

So my voice has been noticeably absent from this blog since Sage was born. Several reasons for that.

One – new mommy brain. Sometimes called the breastfeeding stupids. I’ll have a really interesting thought or witty notion that I think will make for good blog fodder, but in the time between having the thought and getting to the computer my mind is a total blank. There’s moments when I’m lucky I remember my own name. Back in early July I was making an appointment for Sage and the person on the phone asked me Sage’s birthday. I had no clue. Total blank. I had to open my calendar to see what her birth date was. You’d think I’d remember that kind of thing!

My favorite moment of forgetfulness was when I put two eggs in a pan to fry up as an afternoon snack. I then went up stairs to my office and promptly forgot about them. Suddenly I heard this noise… it sounded just like that scene from Ghostbusters when the eggs started bursting out of the carton and frying on the counter top in Sigourney Weaver’s kitchen. Suddenly I remembered the eggs. I dashed downstairs, relieved to find them still perfectly edible. I stayed with them until they were done cooking. Then I brought them upstairs to eat. A short while later I took my dirty plate downstairs and found I’d left the refrigerator door wide open. My only thought then was “Huh. I really am that ditzy. I don’t even remember opening the fridge, but somehow I’ve managed to leave it open for half an hour.”

Two – new mommy schedule. Or lack thereof really. I’ve been told that around month three (if we’re lucky) that Sage will begin to develop a schedule of sleeping and awake times. I’m pretty sure that will be a time to celebrate – probably more so than Christmas. I’m in a constant state of eat, sleep, work, feed baby, change baby, play with baby (and not necessarily in that order). And I never know when any of those things might actually get to happen. Blog writing doesn’t seem to easily fit in that schedule, though I wish it did as I’m wishing I would write down more of the precious & hilarious moments we’ve had in the last 14 weeks (has it only been 14 weeks?). At least Randy is doing a good job of preserving these early moments.

Three – new mommy melt-downs. Not easy to admit, but I’ve definitely had my fair share. And very easy to admit is that without Randy I wouldn’t have survived this far with what sanity I still have. I know I’m not operating on full sanity anymore, but with his help most of the time I’m at a pretty okay level.

Once we got out of the hospital my melt downs have mostly been over feeding issues. I could now spend five paragraphs talking about my dislike for the hospital satan worshiper pediatrician that was assigned to Sage and how scaring us into introducing bottles when Sage was less that a week old has set us up for a difficult time in breastfeeding… but then I have to remember that Randy being able to bottle feed at 2am for me has also been a blessing. To further complicate breastfeeding we’ve been battling thrush for now nine weeks – more than half of Sage’s life. I don’t wish this on anyone. It’s painful and annoying and just icky. Along with that Sage was recently diagnosed with a slight case of tongue tie, so we had to go to an ENT (ear-nose-throat) for a frenotomy – she had to have the frenulum under her tongue snipped. So between the bottles, the thrush, and her frenulum, breastfeeding has been a challenge. But in the last week or two things have started getting a lot better – I’m hoping that continues.

Four – over-sharing. Randy says I over-share a bit…well, he says specifically I can be a bit too detailed, probably more so than most folks want. Now I initially wrote down some examples, but after walking away and coming back I too realized that it was a bit of an over share.

All that said, I’m hoping to get a bit better about jotting stuff down and contributing to the blog.

To prove just how ridiculous it is for me to try and get something posted to the blog, I wrote this two and a half weeks ago, when Sage was 12 weeks old (she’s now 14.5 weeks old”).

 

Take 1

Sept 12th, 2010

Today marks a very emotional one year anniversary. Not too many people know about our first pregnancy, we kept it under wraps since it was over before it really got started, but now a year later we can share the experience with the contrasting joy of having Sage in our arms, and knowing that the first one was never meant to be.

At this time last year we were 10 weeks into our first pregnancy. It was too early to know much about the embryo, but when Lisa started showing some signs that there was a problem, we had an ultrasound done. All the ultrasound tech said to us was that the embryo was a little small for 10 weeks, she let our doctor tell us the rest. Lisa spoke to the doctor on the phone, and from the look in her eyes I knew that our world was about to fall apart. The embryo had stopped growing a few weeks earlier, and it was only a matter of time before Lisa’s body would reset itself.

We returned home from the hospital and latched together for support, alternately leaning on each other and carrying each other, emotionally waltzing through the experience. We had some decisions to make.

It was Friday, September 11th, 2009. A miscarriage was imminent, and we were slated to join our Nossa Familia Coffee friends on Cycle Oregon, a week long bike ride in Southern Oregon beginning the next day. Accommodations would be basic, tents and porta potties, showering in semi-trucks and the entire camp would re-locate every day to a new site up to 100 miles away. To me, the thought of going on this trip was a bit reckless, but Lisa wanted to forge ahead and be far away from our home so as to not associate home with a miscarriage. I relented eventually when she agreed that if she became uncomfortable we could go to a hotel.

By Saturday morning, none of the tell-tale contractions had begun, so we packed up the car, picked up Jeff, a friend who was joining us, and started the four hour drive south. We let Jeff know what was going on, and he was incredibly supportive as we drove south to Medford. A few contractions began during the drive, and by the time we rolled into camp Lisa and I began walking the campsite holding hands waiting for her body to do what it needed to do. There were 2000 cyclists bustling all round us, setting up tents, assembling bicycles, local musicians performed on a stage, and the beer garden was rollicking. Amongst the crowd, we sat hugging on a picnic table, in our own little bubble, the contractions getting stronger and closer together. Eventually, Lisa passed what was to be our first child. We held each other for a long time afterwards, knowing that the worst was over, and grieving the loss.

We called family and close friends that night to give them the news, since not too many people knew about the pregnancy to begin with, the list was short. There was something about putting the experience into words that solidified it for me. My parents and brother reached out to me over the phone, and Lisa’s family did the same for her. It was hard to share the pain, but it was wonderful to know that they had us in their thoughts. I still have the text message in my phone from our dear friend Andy that reads; i am carrying your hearts in my heart. you do not have to carry this all on your own. xo.

Sunday morning, Lisa warms her hands on the milk steamer, it's cold at 4am.

So it was done, the next morning we got up at 4 am, started the generator, and with the 6 other Nossa Familia crew we went to work making hundreds of espresso drinks as the sun rose. Lisa was feeling pretty good all things considered, and being the primary barista, stood up the whole time making delicious beverages as I pulled espresso shots next to her. After most of the riders left camp, we packed up our stuff and some of us rode bikes while the rest drove from Medford to Yreka. It was a day that I chose to ride, and grinding up and over the Ashland pass on a 70 mile day was a great way to clear my head and let out some of the emotion that had been pent up over the past few days. Lisa drove ahead in one of the vans, and we met up that evening feeling like things were slowly returning to normal.

Monday, the following day, we were up long before the sun and again made enough espresso drinks to caffeinate a small city. Then Lisa and I, along with some other Nossa Familia and Dragonfly Chai crew, hopped on our bikes and rode westward along the winding Klamath river towards the town of Happy Camp.

Two days after the miscarriage, on our way to Happy Camp.

It was on this 50 mile ride that I came to appreciate even more this person who I had been married to for over 4 years. Lisa’s strength is staggering. Her ability to strive ahead into something as scary as a miscarriage while on a week-long camping trip only to hop back on her bike two days later blew my mind.

Along the Klamath river we go

I think if our roles were reversed, I would have been couch bound at home, seeking all the comforts of the familiar. But Lisa didn’t want to wallow in misery, she knew that it happened all the time, that miscarriage was a natural thing that her body could deal with. She would physically survive and we would both emotionally recover. The trip was a good temporary coping mechanism, and as the days rolled on we got up early, made coffee, hung out with some amazing people, and ate fantastic food.

We confided in our Nossa friends Jeff and Jason on the trip, and their support really helped us get through it. It was a very personal thing, so we played our cards close to our chest.

Once we returned home, there was still a lot to deal with emotionally, and one of the trade-offs of postponing acute greiving is that it got spread out over time; I think it took longer to recover, but maybe the pain was duller.

We came to call the first pregnancy “Take 1”, and although it was a pretty terrible experience, I came to appreciate the tenuous nature of gestation. I had always expected that pregnancy equals baby, but there’s a lot of unpredictable things that can happen when two cells become millions. Take 1 also reinforced to me how emotionally ready I was to be a father, maybe it’s the tendency to want what you can’t have, but once Sage’s pregnancy set in, I didn’t take any of it for granted.

Now, as I write this a year afterwords, with Sage sleeping on my chest, it becomes clear to me how well it all turned out. We may have our fussy moments, our frustrations and times when she complicates simple things eating a warm meal, but we have her, and she is healthy.

And she is beautiful.

My two beautiful ladies.

 

Poopocalypse Now

Happy baby at bath time.

As of last Friday, Sage is eleven weeks old. By that math, it means she is over 1/5 th of her way along in her first year of life, which seems ludicrous at this point to have made any real progression to being a one year old. Other parents always say that it all goes by so fast, and before you know it they’ll be potty trained and sleeping through the night and thinking that animation is really cool. They make it sound like a bad thing, but it doesn’t sound so shabby sometimes, especially a few weeks ago when we learned what having a fussy infant is all about.

Sage’s first six weeks were relatively fuss-free. We would tell other parents about little Sage, and you could see their eyes squint when we said that Sage would rarely cry, and how family and friends would hold her peacefully, and that we brought her to restaurants and we would eat as she slept. At the time, I thought the eye squint was out of jealousy, but now I believe that they knew what we were in for, and like not wanting to rob a child of their belief of Santa Claus, they allowed us to believe that Sage would be a quiet angel forever.

It wasn’t all easy in the first month, we were tired from the night feedings, Lisa was recovering from surgery, and we were all struggling to rearrange our lives around this little being, but overall Sage’s behavior was exemplary. It turns out that luck didn’t last forever.

About a month ago began a phase that snapped us out of the daydream. Sage had a few rough nights of bad feedings and a few hissy fits, nothing too abnormal, but it started taking its toll on our sleep and confidence. Then Lisa took Sage to New York for a business trip, something she will have to do a lot more of this winter and we decided this would be a good test run. Lisa had a lot of wonderful support from my Mom and some of our close friends Andy and Jenn, which made her time there as a solo parent much easier.

Sage in her chill room under a tower of socks.

The flight out was calm, Sage slept most of the time and didn’t seem to even notice the takeoff or landing. When I mentioned this to some other parents, I saw the familiar eye squint, but shrugged it off. Their return flight, on the other hand, was full of fussy, and my somewhat threadbare wife arrived back in Portland with a different baby than had left.

Now, I’m going to warn you, for those who are particularly fecal-phobic, look away.

At first, there were a few evenings of inconsolable crying, mostly by the baby but we joined in when it seemed the most dire. Now I don’t like throwing around words like “Colic”, but the behavior seemed to match what we had heard about, specifically the baby crying a lot and the parents wondering what the hell we really got ourselves into. Then came the dreaded 5 days without pooping, which we refer to as the “Dark Days”, “The Great Poop Famine”, and “Summer Screamfest 2010” synonymously. The screaming was tremendous, as though she were trying to turn herself inside out.

Sage reinforcing the validity of her shirt.

Feeding her during this time was akin to packing a musket, and although she was peeing plenty, the digestional discomfort caused so much grunting and squirming during the feedings that Sage would turn her head away from the bottle or breast quickly and emulate a milk lawn sprinkler. It was a difficult week full of empty diapers, inconsolable crying, and a new family pushed to their wits end.
Then, finally, as I was feeding her with a bottle at the end of the 5th day, I felt a rumble coming from her diaper. Then a loud whoopee-cushion noise confirmed that our troubles were nearly over. After about 30 seconds of sustained shitting, a glazed look passed over her eyes, I don’t know, maybe she saw God for a moment, for she was entering the “Poopocalypse”.

The Horror.... The Horror......

A brief sidebar:
Lisa, ever the clever one, figured out that each diaper wipe we use costs 5 cents. Therefore, the severity of a diaper mess can be measured by the number of wipes used. For example, an average poopy diaper change is about 10 or 15 cents, earlier today she had a 25 cent-er, but this mother of all baby turds cost enough to pull our country out of the recession. You’re welcome Obama.

She had four “aftershocks” in the next day, and then our smiling baby was returned to us. Although the screaming fits seem to be behind us for now, we now know the destructive powers of a 10 pound baby and are weary of what 30 pounds of fussy may have in store for us.

I should stress that going for up to a full week between bowel movements is quite common for babies, and not dangerous in the least. But it is not comfortable and should it happen again we have an arsenal of experienced parent suggestions and gripe water to help alleviate it before it becomes dire.

When I tell other parents about this experience, they nod their heads and smile, they’ve been there, they place a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, but their eyes still squint ever so slightly. Part of me wants to know what they’re hiding, but then again, maybe it’s better that we just walk into it blindly and figure it out, and know that in a few years we will squint at new parents, wishing them the best, and letting them believe in their own version of Santa Claus for another day.

Smiling Eyes

 

Where does the milk go?

In a desperate attempt to find order in the chaos, I present another baby-inspired chart.

 

World’s cutest…

A few biased statements from a new parent:

1. Sage is the most photogenic child ever born.

2. If I chase Sage around with a camera all day she will continue to make cuter and cuter faces until my lens shatters in a cute-splosion of awesomeness. Which I am tempted to try just to experience the physics of it, if only lenses weren’t so expensive.

3. If Sage had been born before digital cameras, we would have needed a second mortgage to pay for the film processing of all the photos I take of her.

4. cuteoverload.com has nothing on my girl.

In fact, Sage was even wearing a onsie the other day declaring that she is the World’s cutest alarm clock.

here is Sage demonstrating both the visual cuteness and audio shrillness that earned her the title

I believe this statement to be true, since these other “cute” and “awakening” things don’t overlap.

These two groups shall not overlap.

However, this diagram clearly shows Sage as the only option.

Now, there are a few alarm clocks out there with “cute” designs, but they are so specific to the tastes of the owner, that they fail to be universally cute, as judged by the International Cute Underwriting Trait Evaluators (iCute). This organization is contentious, not only because the word “cute” is both in the full title and the acronym, but also because Apple has already patented iCute for Steve Jobs’ grandchild.

Of course, whenever someone displays outrageous claims on their clothing, it only invites cynical critique. There are 1000 metric tons (1 Giga shit ton) of t-shirts out there claiming that the wearer are the world’s best Grandpa, Grandma, Father, Daughter, Mother, Sister, and every other conceivable relationship (world’s best second cousin, once removed). It seems unlikely that any of these claims are accurate, since if a grandmother is actually great enough to be in the running, she probably wouldn’t need a t-shirt claiming so, and would instead rely on her intense grandmotherlyness to speak for itself. You don’t see Chuck Norris walking around wearing this t-shirt. If you’re not careful, one could enter an infinity loop as seen on this t-shirt.
That said, other claims written on t-shirts are either laughably contradictory, not worth arguing about, or speak the awful truth.
I don’t know the full story of one of those truthful mug shots, but the fact that the “W” in “world” is the symbol for the “World Wrestling Federation” and the file name includes the words “sex sting”, I doubt the declaration holds any truth at all.

Recently, my own personal hygene has been downgraded in priority to just under dog grooming, and I’m starting to take on the look of a person in a mug shot. If I’m not careful, I may earn this hat, by accident.

Back to Sage’s clothing. Alarm clocks and I have a long sordid history. Mostly, alarms have been attention hogs, always screaming out asking for immediate alertness. Consistently, I have neglected them by turning a cold sleepy shoulder, or worse, with snooze alarm abuse. A year ago, I hadn’t met an alarm clock I couldn’t ignore. Now that Sage is the new alarm clock, and purportedly the cutest, she seems to have transcended my previous relationships with alarm clocks. Since we’ve already scientifically proven that her onsie claim is accurate, I’d like to suggest a few refinement to the statement that she is the “World’s cutest alarm clock”.

Since the purpose of an alarm clock is to wake you up at a specific hour of the day when you WANT to get up, she may have earned a “World’s most adorable alarm clock if one wants to wake up randomly and repeatedly” shirt. By that definition, Sage has more in common with a smoke alarm which beeps whenever it senses something wrong than with a timepiece that cares about “hours” and “minutes”. Living with a seven week old is like playing russian roulette with your REM cycle.

A couple more:

I try to have enough photos of Sage in here to offset the blabbering text, and since the ratio thus-far is leaning towards the babble, here’s one last photo of Sage to tickle your eyeballs.

Is it possible to have too many polka dots? I think not.

click to enlarge.

 

Night feeding flowchart

Sometimes, when woken up by Sage in the middle of the night, I’m too bleary to figure out the best course back to sleep. Here’s my cheat-sheet. Click on the image to enlarge:

Click to enlarge