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Maddox has been having trouble sleeping at night if he is not very near Vida. It has pretty much always been this way with his daytime naps but it’s new for nighttime. It’s gotten so that he wakes up every hour or two pretty much all night long and will cry until Vida gets him back to sleep… For another hour or two. We end up giving in and bringing him into our bed in the wee hours every night where he will sleep for longer stretches.

Sleeping difficulties are common and part of being a parent, but it’s gotten to a point where we had to break the cycle or none of us were going to get a good night’s sleep again!  So, last night we decided Vida would refrain from going into his room to soothe him after first putting him to bed and I would try to get him to sleep myself.  We knew it would not be easy.

Maddox was very worked up and crying fiercely for over an hour with me going in to try to soothe him frequently.  Most of what I did had little effect at first but gradually he started to calm down a bit and would occasionally be quiet for a moment to listen to my off-key singing of made-up lullabies.  His crying didn’t stop completely for awhile, but it drifted into sobs with occasional whimpers and cries, and then eventually he did fall asleep in my arms with his head on my shoulder.

It was a ’success’ in that I managed to get him to sleep, but it’s always hard to see your little one so upset.  It was a bit of an ordeal for both of us, and it made me feel even closer to him.  As I comforted my baby and tried to soothe his cries for his Mother, it made me also miss her even though I knew she was right in the other room.  His emotions just run right to his core and they pour out of him uncontrollably and you can’t help but feel them as well.

Now that Maddox is 6 months old he’s much more sensitive to sound while he’s sleeping. As a result there’s been a lot more quiet time around our house. To fill that quiet time we’ve been spending more time reading. Whenever I read more it reminds me how much more satisfying time spent reading can be compared to watching the tube or playing games.

To help Vida read more easily while encumbered with an attached child, I bought her a Kindle 2 from Amazon. I’ve seen several complaints that the Kindle should have a bigger screen, a touch screen, no keyboard, less text on the device itself, blah blah… But the fact is the Kindle makes you want to read more and it makes it easier to find stuff to read as well. When you consider its core function, it’s a major win all around. A color touchscreen the size and weight of a magazine would indeed be awesome, but the Kindle we have now is pretty great, too.

Facebook has started showing more ads, and it seems like they may be having trouble getting quality advertisers…

It’s funny because I had to actually resist clicking on the link.  In the end, I did not.

On Christmas Eve, Vida, Maddox and I headed to Fort Funston with our dog, Charlotte, and Vida’s dad, John.  It had been raining earlier that morning and the sky was still very dramatic and the beach was wet.

I took the dog to Douglass Park today and took the camera along for some pictures.

The obvious has really hit me in the last few weeks… the Internet has changed everything.

We don’t have very many friends with babies near us geographically, but we do have friends with babies in other parts of the country. Email and Facebook have become Vida’s primary way of trading baby stories and tips, and it’s how she’s staying connected at 3am.

Similarly we get a lot of our baby info from websites like babycenter.com and answers.yahoo.com when we probably would have relied almost entirely on books and advice from friends and family just 10 years ago.

And that’s only how it’s affecting our own lives. I can only imagine what it be like for Maddox as a kid of hyper-connected parents living in an urban setting. He’ll never know things any other way. Socializing through networked Nintendo DS games will feel as natural as trading scary stories under a blanket by flashlight. Social networks will be as familiar as the playground down the street, and long distance friends will live a lot farther away than just the next town over.

None of this is new information to me, and of course nothing will replace face to face friendships or swinging on monkey bars, but somehow thinking about this is different now. I guess maybe Maddox has changed everything, too!

Maddox, my first child and son, was born almost 6 days ago now. Just a day or two after he was born I was listening to Buzzsaw on Sirius in the car (we have a free trial that seems like it should have ended by now…) and when a Motorhead song came on I thought to myself, “I need to introduce Maddox to Motorhead. He can’t miss out on the awesomeness they are.” Then I started thinking I need to come up with a list of all the great things in life that Maddox simply can’t miss out on… And then I realized that would be entirely impossible. We’ll try to give Maddox the experiences to shape his life, but ultimately it’s his life and we can’t be there every moment of every day. Even if we could, he might find the corral itself more interesting than the pigs inside.

Anyway, there’s no way he’ll miss out on Motorhead, or Aphex Twin, or My Bloody Valentine, or ahi tuna, or the assorted works of David Lunch, or gummi cola bottles with the fizzy sugar on the outside, or driving at least halfway across the US, or the pacific coast highway at sunset, or house music in the desert at dawn, or …

I play video games and I have fun doing it, but I want them to be better.  I find myself getting bored of most games far before I get anywhere near completing them.  I see people talk about games having “a great story”, but I’ve never found any game’s story to be even as interesting as a mediocre movie, let alone a great movie or book.  The story has never been good enough to motivate me to churn through the tedium that every game inevitably throws at you to fill itself out.  I think that’s done by game developers because gamers always complain when a game is too short.  I’ve never found that to be a problem, though… I don’t finish any games, so in my opinion most of them are far too long!

Another problem with games today is ’sequel-itis’.  Game makers are worse than the worst filmmakers about milking a successful ‘franchise’.  I loved Guitar Hero and played it for hours on end, and then I loved Guitar Hero 2 even more.. but I found myself playing Guitar Hero 3 mostly just to unlock all the songs.  I think Guitar Hero 3 is a superior game to its two predecessors, but the concept is already feeling tired to me.  Rock Band was so popular mostly because it took the next step and added an extra layer of group fun, and the ability to play drums and guitar is definitely pretty great.  Despite that, though, I found myself tiring of the game pretty quickly.  They keep releasing new for-pay songs you can download which should keep the game fresh, but I just find that I never really play it any more.  Rock Band IS a great party game, and playing it with a big group of people is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in front of a television, but it just doesn’t have the same appeal when I’m playing on my own.  The newness is gone, and without that there’s just not enough left to keep me interested.  Grand Theft Auto IV had the same problem for me.  It looked pretty, but I felt like I was just pretty much playing the same game I had burned myself out on several years earlier with Grand Theft Auto III.  Give me something new!

Here’s what I think would make games more fun for me…  Game studios should bring in the same level of writing talent as they do programming, design, voice, and graphics talent, and they should release games in smaller, lower-cost (both for them and for us), episode-like chunks.  The very best game developers should still be making full-length games of very high quality, but most game developers do not fall into that category.  Most game developers are really making TV-quality content while they’re trying to convince us it’s high-class film-quality content.  Game studios should also stop killing their best ideas by sequeling them to death.  That probably makes more money in the short-term but it’s just turning off many would-be gamers and ultimately restricting the development of the audience for the game industry.

I know I’m not the only one thinking this, and I think there’s already a movement towards my suggestions (as if anyone in the game industry really cares what I think, haha) so hope is not lost!  The smaller, cheaper, downloadable games on the Xbox Live Arcade, the Playstation 3, and more recently the Wii are breathing new life into gaming.  The games are not all great (few of them are, actually), but they’re small enough in scope that a lot of new ideas are being put into them and some of them are worth paying for just for that.  The episodic concept is being put to the test with games like the Penny Arcade one, too.  I still didn’t finish that one, but I think I got probably 3/4 the way through it, which is something for me!

I bet the people making the games don’t really care too much about what I have to think, but I feel better to have that off my chest anyway.

I want a personal audio cloud so I can have music surrounding me all the time.  People within 3 feet of me would also hear the music so we could listen together.  It wouldn’t emanate from me, but would just be around me in this cloud so my companions would hear it as the same volume as I do.  People farther away would not hear it at all so it wouldn’t bother them.  It would also have an option to let other people relay the cloud so anyone within 3 feet of them would also hear it.  That way a larger group of people could all hear the same music.  This would be awesome for things like bike riding in the city where you don’t want to wear headphones that obstruct your hearing.  It would also be awesome for hiking.

My wife has a baby on the way and we’ve been attending some baby related classes to prepare ourselves a little bit mentally. The class we are in now is about the birthing process and we have heard about a number of techniques, both medical and otherwise, to make the experience more comfortable for the woman. The thing that keeps striking me as so curious is how most of the most up to date “best practices” essentially equate to just letting nature take its course and doing things the way people have done them for hundreds of years. The really curious part is that these are generally cutting edge or progressive ideas about childbirth among the U.S. medical community and are not even widely practiced yet.  How did things get so turned around such that doing things naturally is somehow progressive?