Sawyer's Getting Ferberized

I'll start this with a few pictures. For some they will suffice as an update, for others, the bottom adresses recent parenting adventures.

"Milk coma"

About a 10 minutes walk, behind the temple, 

is this hill that overlooks Laie.

The ocean seen in the distance.

Just hanging out.

We finally made it out to the swap meet at the

Aloha Stadium. After making our rounds we were all tuckered out, 

but only Sawyer had someone who could carry him around.

A quick park visit before I had to disappear

into the library and lab for the night.

On campus is a small museum. Sawyer saw some new animals!

Man, as of late, the stars, moon, satellites, planets, and grains of sand in the ocean and on the beaches have all really got to align in order for me to get any writing in. It seems impossible to put any updates here. Kudos to you, Mrs. Nat The Fat Rat, and other well known bloggers. (Sarah recently said, "I want to be like Nat The Fat Rat", and is now looking for opportunities to instagram, insisting, "well you're already our blogger").
It's been 2 weeks since my last post, and a big recent baby update is responsible for what you now read.
To set this up, Sarah has a great routine for Sawyer:
Around 7:00 or 8:00 she get's him stripped down to "naked Sawyer" as we accurately call him, and gives him a nice bath.
She then bundles him up into his towel with a hood that makes him look like a little ewok or frog or something, and takes him to our bed.
There, she whips out some kind of smelly good lotion and gives him a little baby massage, making sure to hit all his growing muscles.
After the massage she sits down in our rocker and reads him a story.
Post story comes a nice feeding with, not one, but two servings of the goods.
Now he's ready for bed, and in his crib he goes; this occurs fairly consistently between 8:00 and 9:00. At this point he has the understanding that his next interaction will follow several more times in the night when Sarah promptly awakes to his shuffling and grunts telling us he's in need of some form of comforting.
You can imagine how at peace he must feel with this maternal pampering, especially considering his paternal care consists of dive bombing couches and beds, exercising in the form of squats, front to back rolls, and holding his own bottle, as well as enduring pokes, prods, growls, and weird noises that all attempt to invoke a smile or laugh.
To his dismay, we are adjusting everything that happens after 9:00; we are officially limiting his nightly feedings to none. We are taking the initiative to help him established nightly independence so we (Sarah) can begin to get better rest as well as whatever benefits there are for baby. This week marks his 4th month, and some as early as 3 months are sleeping through the night. Our 1st night trying this was very rough. From what I remember, he woke up at least 3 times, and cried for 20+ minutes each time until we eventually caved in and fed him early in the morning. Tonight will be our 4th night of enduring his screams and pleads for attention. Yesterday, his last feeding was at 9:00pm and he didn't eat again until 4:00am when Sarah woke up too sore to hold off any longer. She actually had to wake him up to feed him, which is such a change! Between those 7 hours, he only woke up once but he made sure to scream for at least 20 minutes straight. For those of you who have experienced this, you know how incredibly difficult it is to sit through that. By now you are acquainted with your child's cries. You know one another well enough to ease their suffering quickly, and if not right away, then you have quite the bag of tricks to definitely resolve the issue in a matter of 3 minutes. Our nightly trend is relief in seconds; basically just the time it takes for Sarah to get up and to the crib since all he really ever needs is to eat for a few minutes before falling back to sleep. Instead we now lie there both pretending to sleep. For those of you soon to experience this, I'm not out of the woods yet, so I can't tell you it'll all be worth it, though I'm pretty certain it will.
I'll write again soon to give an update on what comes of this. We have read story after story of how parents felt hopeless, thinking their children would never get over the needed night time attention, but in each of these stories it only took 3 or 4 days of agony, and the babes completely changed, sleeping the night away. Tonight is night 4, and we shall see...

Running With The Zimmermans

What to blog about...
Well there's a start, blog is a noun and a verb. I like words like that. "Pinch". "Wow". "Fancy", which is not only a noun and a verb, but is also an adjective. That is neat.

It's a Sunday morning worthy of a movie, and as such Sarah and I find it appropriate to watch only Sunday movies. Conveniently for us, any movie that is playing on Sunday qualifies as a Sunday movie. Today we find ourselves watching Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. And by "watching", I mean I'm blogging, Sarah is recapping Sawyer's delivery from her perspective for the boy's baby book, and Sawyer is asleep, probably thumb in mouth.

This week marks Sarah's first full week back to work. From what I can see she's happy to be back with her class, while being sad to be away from her very own, which can be expected.
My schedule keeps me away from home Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 8:00-Noon, and all day Thursday (labs may be the death of me). On those days the cub is with one of our 2 sitters. I don't have class Tuesday, so that's when soy sauce and I cause havoc. You know, clean, study, dishes, laundry, and other things of the like.
The pup is now a little over 3 months (14.5 weeks). He rolls from stomach to back with ease, and wants so badly to roll back onto his stomach, but can't quite get it yet. He no longer has problems with bottles, which as you may know, was the thing that caused us the most anguish and loss of hope in child rearing. My favorite thing with the bottle is that he will grasp my thumb and pinky, on either side of the bottle, and pull my hand, and the bottle, toward him. One day I moved my hand, and he just held the bottle himself. I now try and get him to hold it every time. He's drinking about 5 oz. every 3 hours. Another pupdate (pup update, get it?) is that he recently discovered his thumb; we now have a thumb sucker on our hands.

In parenthood updates, we are still enthralled with our newly enlisted duties. Parenthood is fun, with its challenges, but overall, not much has changed. Sarah still puts random stuff in the refrigerator, and I still get distracted by friends and games. Sarah has been so driven to get back into, and keep, her pre baby body, and I'd say is doing a FINE job at it. Yesterday morning I woke to the sound of the unreasonably fit Canadian lady giving instruction on post baby pilates. She was the same lady who did the pregnancy pilates, and there is no way this lady is a good representative of pre or post delivery individuals. I digress. After that video, Sarah immediately did the P90X Ab Ripper video, a pattern she's been at since being approved by the doctor to work out. All of this, while I decided if I wanted to try and sleep for another 20 minutes. I decided at the start of the year that I wanted to try and be a runner. I got the Nike+ Running app, and it has made all the difference. From January 4th to date I have gone on 8 runs for a total distance of 25.16 miles. My average pace is 9'35"/mile, and my average distance is 3.1 miles, with my fastest mile being 7'27". My longest run was last night. I had the goal to do 10 miles, a goal I set for myself 2 weeks ago when I was running more consistently. 2 weeks ago though, I stopped running, and laziness set in as it often does. How could I, though, not go for a run last night when my neighbor approached me stoked on having just run over 8 miles?! How could I not accept that challenge? I disregarded the fact that I had just had pizza 2 days in a row accompanied by more soda in the last week than I've probably had all year thus far. Nonetheless, I laced up my shoes, tighter than usual, got my app set in order, and with despair I said to Sarah at 9:30, "well... I should be home by 11:00", and started out the door. Long story short: by mile 6 I felt pain in the top of my right foot, by 6.5 it spread as my form got worse, and by 7 I knew I would struggle to finish. I pushed on for as long as I could. I thought a break would help, so there I stood pacing off of Kam highway, in front of the post office. I thought I was ready, but when I began to run, I couldn't. 2 or 3 strides in and I submitted to the discomfort and walked a long slow walk back home.
My success: I remembered to pick up the laundry for my wife before walking in and admitting my defeat.

Sneakin' pictures of Sarah's workout. 

Last night when my run landed me in front of a 

statue in Kahuku, the next town over.