The RASP Files: Week 3 - All You Do Is Sleep. Get a Job.

01-28-17 - Peacefully being a drain on society, comfortably unaware of the economy crumbling as a result of her apathy and indifference.

Ramona has made great strides in the last week! She has learned to poop in such a way that it had, on one occasion, leaked out of her diaper and onto our once wonderful, once pristine bed. Now we have to burn the mattress. This is the seedy underbelly of parental life that people don't want to tell you about.

But enough harrowing tales of hardship and Desecration via Defecation™, son! We made it through another week of pretty much the same stuff as last week. We have learned that any sudden fits of crying or fussiness means "I'm hungry! Wah!" because she doesn't seem to mind sitting around in a shitty diaper too much (when she actually does indeed shit in it), and we've tried burping her in about a dozen different positions and that doesn't seem to work very well either. So she eats a lot these days, and then sleeps a lot after she eats a lot. Just like her old man.

01-30-17 - The torture of the looming hanger of toys.

The dreaded Tummy Time, the bane of all very small children, doesn't last very long at this stage. There is some head-lifting and clear physical exertion for a couple minutes, but after a few laborious grunts Ramona will fall on one of her hands and start sucking on it as if it were a bottle of liquor after a long hard day in the salt mines.

02-01-17 - Eagerly leaning forward to tell us something, like a grizzled 85-year-old at the VFW hall with a war story.

Sometimes we see facial expressions that we both misinterpret as deliberate attempts to convey emotion, but usually it means yet another poop is on its way out to greet us. Typically, Ramona spends some of her wide-awake time just kind of looking around and flailing about in a comical manner. There are rare moments where she'll be simultaneously wide-awake and perfectly calm. They don't last long, but, shucks, it's so goddamn cute. We've tried taking photos during these moments but it just doesn't do it justice.

02-02-17 - I tried to tell her all about my day at work and she just falls asleep while I talked. Just like everybody else.

We noticed the other day that she's got some Marilyn Monroe thing going on with that mark just above the corner of her mouth on the left side of her face. Scratches have come and gone since birth, but this has remained since the very beginning. Birth mark? My parents say it looks like a scratch to them, but what do they know? Parents are stupid. It's possible that it might fade eventually, she also has a reddish blotch on her left eyelid that hasn't gone away.

Erika's parents noticed today that Ramona might have dimples. She would inherit this facial deformity from me, but I'm absolutely adorable so this will only help her in the long run.

THIS WEEK IN CURRENT EVENTS

-Trump said a dumb thing, and then his dumb press secretary said dumb things too that common ol' dumb people like me can debunk in three seconds.

-Beyoncé is pregnant with twins now because she was pissed that Solange stole her thunder by having a better album than her in 2016.
-Kellyanne Conway said that the Bowling Green Massacre, a thing that never happened, justifies the current travel and immigration ban, a dumb thing that actually is happening now.

THIS WEEK IN MOVIES
-I don't know. Moneyball? I don't watch movies.

THIS WEEK IN SPORTS
-Super Bowl LI happens tomorrow, which is something that didn't happen "this week" but worth mentioning nonetheless because I'm going to completely forget about it forever tomorrow three hours before kickoff.

THIS WEEK IN MUSIC THAT DAD LISTENED TO
Dad (that's me) listened to a lot of really dumb heavy metal bands like Helloween, Fear Factory, Fates Warning, and Machine Head. He's listening to Dexter Gordon right now while writing this, proving that he still has some semblance of taste at least.

RAMONA QUOTE-OF-THE-WEEK
"Buhhhhh. Waah! <growling noises>"

The RASP Files: Introductions and Weeks 1 - 2

Welcome to the first of what I hope to be many, many future posts chronicling the life of my brand-spankin' new daughter Rasputin Cookiepuss McFlanahan. But we call her Ramona for short. And I apologize for bringing up spanking, we don't condone that kind of corporal punishment in our nice, clean house.

I'm going to forever go into conniptions over the fact that my first post about Ramona comes in Week 2, but I was preoccupied with my hesitation to even allow my newborn daughter to have a web presence in the first place to consider this a good idea. I don't have anything against parents who post their children all over Facebook, it's none of my business anyway, but I would have absolutely hated having all my pictures, achievements, and mundane day-to-day childhood inanities published for all my parents' friends and casual acquaintances to see on a routine basis.

But then, on the other hand, I'd love to keep a record of all this and the internet seems to be a pretty permanent place to keep this record (until of course the internet is banned in 47 states in 2019 during Trump's fourth year at playing president). This will really be for me and Erika, maybe some family too if they catch wind of it, and the compromise here is that I'll make it public but I will not advertise this portion of my blog whatsoever. If you happened to have stumbled upon it, good for you, feel free to check back if you're interested, but I don't blame you if you're not. It might not be for you. I refuse to shove it in your face, though, so you can thank my conscientious ass in person about it next time you see me.

Onward!

01-17-17 - 20 minutes after birth. Note the serenity, small features, and perfect facial symmetry.

Ramona was born on January 17th, 2017 at 3:39am, that creepy hour when TV is full of infomercials and Little Rascals reruns. This was her due date, so punctuality is already a key trait of hers that I'm very proud of. She was born with grey-blue eyes and a head full of dark hair, and she wasn't too banged up from the experience (one nurse told us it's rare for Caucasian babies to have that much hair, but both Erika and I were born with a lot of hair, so we were all "pffft, duh" about it). The cord was loosely wrapped around her neck, but not dangerously so. I was fairly delirious at the moment of birth, but I don't remember too much crying or yelling. In less than 20 minutes she was wrapped up and sleeping soundly.

Luckily I was too tired to have any major panic attacks for the next couple of days, because now I suddenly had a living, breathing human being to take care of. How am I supposed to start saving for her college when I'm still paying off my own loans? Do babies like eating Doritos? How can I effectively teach her that Elmo really fucking sucks ass? These are all questions I can't answer right now. Ask me again in a week.

01-18-17 - Left: Deep in thought, wondering why she doesn't yet have a sagely wizard beard.

Right: I make this face too when people tell me how good anime is.

So on the afternoon of 1/18 all the doctors and nurses deemed us too goddamned healthy to be hanging around the hospital wasting their precious oxygen, so they kicked us out forthwith. It was another four days of visits from both Erika's family and my family before we were completely on our own on Sunday afternoon, 1/22. Erika would continue her maternity leave, I was going back to work the next day like a chump, and life as we knew it would be returning to "normal".

And for the most part it has returned to normal, at least on my end. Work is work, and then I come home, eat dinner, hang out, try to go to bed before 4am like I do every day. But now there's Ramona, who needs to eat every 45 nanoseconds, who poops in the middle of diaper changes, who cries when you put on her pants, who cries when you take off her pants, who cries when she is in the vicinity of a pair of pants, etc. But it's all good so far, I have a lifestyle that's compatible with raising a newborn. All I want to do is hang around the house anyway, now I can do it completely guilt-free! I haven't watched this much Seinfeld in one week since I was 16. It's awesome.

So, I'll let this part of the blog evolve on its own overtime and we'll see where it goes. If this isn't a motivator to write more I don't know what is. Maybe even Erika would want to contribute once in a while, if you don't mind reading her dreck. Awful writing, though. Just rubbish.

01-27-17 - Bemused by colors and shapes, a characteristic that runs in the family