Ramblings Upon a Midnight Cloud

[This is about the kids.]

One of the things that Nomi and I have been learning to do for the past five-and-a-half months now is putting the kids to bed in a way that gets them to go to sleep quickly. Whether or not they get to sleep and stay asleep can sometimes feel like a crapshoot; for the past two nights, the girls have gotten to sleep relatively quickly (thanks to Nomi) but then woken up within a half-hour and been unable to get to sleep again until very late. There's also the fact that they do wake up during the night for feedings and diaper changes, all of which contributes to a lack of sleep for both Nomi and myself.

A nice part of all this, however, was developing a bedtime ritual that we thought the kids would enjoy. As it now stands, here's what we tend to do.

First we tend to feed them as much as they'll eat, change them into fresh diapers, and then put them into their sleep sacks. We know the kids are learning because one night we put Muffin in her sleep sack before feeding her, and she got this sad, confused look on her face as if we were planning to put her into her crib without dinner. We fed her immediately, and she ate two and a half bottles of food, and was most satisfied.

After they are in their sacks, we sit them on our laps and read to them. Right now, we're mostly reading to them from "But Not the Hippopotamus" by Sandra Boynton, and they seem to appreciate it a lot. We tend to read them the book twice.

Then we walk them into their room, gently lay them down in their cribs and sing to them. A lot of our singing is from the davening, which makes Nomi think that the girls will spend their lives falling asleep in shul. Sometimes we pick them up and rock them as we sing to them, but we also try to get them to fall asleep without that.

Anyway, that's our usual bedtime ritual with the kids.

Tomorrow, of course, is Christmas. If you're celebrating Christmas, may you have a merry one, full of happiness.

It's also Isaac Newton's birthday, something I always like to commemorate given my background in Physics.

And earlier in the month of December, I celebrated the festival of Chanukah. Let's take each of these in turn.

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So that's it. To all my Christian friends, as I said before, may you have a merry and joyous Christmas. To all my Jewish friends, I hope you had a happy Chanukah. To all my friends who celebrate some other holiday of the season, may it be for good. And for those of my friends who celebrate no holiday at all, may you enjoy a good start to the Gregorian New Year of 2010.

Solstice was celebrated, and the new year has brought me my first real hangover. Now I understand why people are cautious about drinking.

Fun times, though! Thanks indecisionrocks and omly.

One of my day job colleagues is an artist named Steve Rider, with whom I share a love of the TV show Doctor Who. A few weeks ago, Steve was showing me elaborate plans he had found for building your own Dalek, and I mentioned how useful I would find a Davros-style wheelchair.

Next thing I know, Steve has sent me the following piece of original digital art (posted with permission):

Dadros by Steve Rider Copyright ©2009 by Steve Rider. Do not copy.

I'm very pleased to say that as of this afternoon, he has also gifted me with the original sketch, framed.

Now I just have to find something for my daughters to annotate....

Why am I up after midnight? We got the kids to go to sleep on the early side, and then they woke up and would not go back to sleep. Eventually, we got one of them down, but the other just wouldn't go to sleep, despite being tired.

Nomi sat with her and starting reciting "The Walrus and the Carpenter," which gave me an idea. I found my Annotated "Hunting of the Snark" and started to read it to her.

By the time "the Baker had fainted away," so had she.

Good night.

I will be celebrating the solstice with indecisionrocks by staying up all night. Will any of the rest of you be pushing on through this longest night? Shall we be virtual moral support for each other?

This Friday night, like last Friday night, is a Shabbat Chanukah. This means that we light Chanukah candles before our regular Shabbat candles. Shabbat candles are traditionally lit 18 minutes before sunset (lest we come to accidentally light the candles *on* Shabbat, we give ourselves an 18-minute buffer. Many of us end up using these 18 minutes to finish whatever last-minute Shabbat stuff needs to get done (lcmlc has made a whole chicken dinner in the eighteen; I have said in the past that the existence of the Eighteen Minutes is proof that Hashem loves us)), but Chanukah candles are supposed to be lit at nightfall (actual dark, not sunset), and burn for half an hour (some say 20 minutes). But we can't light candles once Shabbat has started, so we light the Chanukah candles before we light Shabbat candles. This does not change the fact that we have to have Chanukah lights burning at least half an hour into the night.

The solution, therefore, is that we use extra-long Chanukah candles that will burn from candle lighting 18 minutes before sunset until a half hour after it gets actually dark (so this week from 3:54 until approximately 5:30).

But what if you're going out to shul or (if you're skipping shul) to someone's home for dinner? You are supposed to light where you're going to sleep. Lighting Chanukah candles and then leaving home is not particularly safe (and is something I have refused to do since Ross and Charlie's Very Special Chanukah Fire of 1990). One could light the shorter candles, knowing they'll go out before the requisite amount of time. Or one could light at the location where one is going to be eating dinner (or at shul), even though they know they aren't going to be sleeping there. But does that lighting then fulfil the mitzvah? Or does pikuach nefesh (literally, "saving a life," something done to prevent death or serious injury) trump here?

Two years ago, Smart Pop Books published Webslinger: SF and Comic Writers on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man edited by Gerry Conway, and I was pleased to have an essay in the book. I grew up in Forest Hills, the same neighborhood of Spider-Man's secret identity, Peter Parker, and as a result I always took a greater interest in the character than I might have otherwise. It didn't hurt that I, like many others, identified with Peter and the difficulties he faced in his regular life. So when I had the chance to contribute to the book, I plumbed my own personal life and wrote an essay about the real Forest Hills, as opposed to the one in the Marvel universe. I explored what Peter's life might have been like had he grown up in the neighborhood of my childhood, noting the actual stores, schools, and sites he would have woven into his background.

Smart Pop Books is promoting their line by running whole essays from their books, and for this week only my essay is available. So if you never picked up the book, but would like to see what I said about Spider-Man (and about my own childhood, come to think of it), check it out here:

"The Friendly Neighborhood of Peter Parker"

I'm not sure how interesting this will be for people, but...

A few years ago, Nomi and I got iPods. But when we got iPhones, I stopped using my iPod as my portable music player. Especially after my Palm device died, it made much more sense for me to combine all my functionality into one device. It's true that my iPhone can't hold as much music as my iPod, but it was easier to carry around only one device rather than two (or the three I used to carry).

Sometime after we bought the iPods, we also bought a Bose SoundDock so we could plug the iPods in and listen to music in the living room. But once I stopped using my iPod, I thought that perhaps that was the end of using the SoundDock.

It wasn't until this past weekend that I realized how foolish I was being.

I dug out my iPod, loaded all my new music into it, and plugged it into the SoundDock. We now have a SoundDock with an iPod always plugged into it, so we can always play music for the room.

I took advantage of this yesterday by playing songs for the kids, and singing and dancing with them. I hope they like Schoolhouse Rock and Peter, Paul, and Mommy.

Any suggestions for music for babies would be welcome.