Lyle Lovett had it right, anyway.

The mystery masked man was smart
He got himself a Tonto
'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free
But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my @$$ I bought a boat
I'm going out to sea

But I digress.

Yesterday was my wife's first day back to work after 7 weeks off for maternity leave. One week ahead of the standard six was for elevated BP. Being a Stay-At-Home Dad, that made it my first day of Full Time wrangling in a long, long time. And the first with an infant and a toddler.

I'll get into details later, but for the first day, there were a lot fewer complications than I expected. I got an Itzbeen timer in one of the DL Live drawings a while back. It came in really handy for predicting whether the fussing was a diaper, bottle or sleepiness. With our first, I was already in tune. Now, 2 years older and with a lot of attention diverted to the toddler (who is currently riding his bulldozer on the edge of our couch....) I wasn't in tune with Tristan's timings or cues. So, I just jumped in.

Everyone seems to ask two questions of us. First is how Duncan has adapted to having a brother. The second is whether we're finished. Duncan seems to know how to work it. When he really wants attention, he gets all lovey with us and his brother. By noon, he's probably kissed his brother 15 times. He does pretty well, but he's starting to grab his brother's chin to turn his head for the full-on frontal kiss. We're working on that. As for future plan, we don't know. Not for a while, I can tell you that, at the very least.

One thing I am not proud of at this point is the amount of time the TV is on. I had set an aim to keep it down to 2 hours or less prior to the birth. It was working until the MiL showed up and figured that it was good enough for her kids.... Now, it's just easy to use it as a buffer. There's a train show called Tracks Ahead that we're recording on the Tivo that the toddler really digs. It's a PBS train show with real trains and real scale model trains, so it's easy to think is has value. Then there's Phineas & Ferb... So we have some work to do.

Right now, the adults are exhausted. We had a double Feature Freak out on Saturday night. Duncan woke up at 2am and it took me over an hour to get him back to sleep. At 3:30, Tristan woke up enough to wake me, quite a feat. The adults were dragging though a very busy Sunday. Monday wasn't a good day to recover and the week's just getting worse. We may be making a last minute trip to Columbus, OH for a surprise party on Saturday. It doesn't look like we'll catch up on sleep for another 20 years. That's life, right? It just seemed like it was much easier with the first. Maybe it's traumatic memory. I think it's more likely that we were so upset with each other that we didn't feel bad letting the other suffer for the sake of our own sanity. This time, it's much more civil. But our united force has two battles every night.

We're getting there. And I'll be stuck at home for at least three more weeks. It's just not easy to get out of the house in this weather. It's not the weather as much as the time it takes to get all packed up with coats involved.

Well, that's a start. We'll see if I can add some more tomorrow.

Any questions?

Sometimes I wonder if we did it the easy way or the tough way by having twins (not we really had a say in it) but as I read about your adventures it is helping me remember the early days of having kids (2 years ago) as we begin to consider moving to a zone defense in our family. IF we do decide to grow our clan it will be 2 three years old when we have a baby. Wowzer. Thanks for the narration.

BTW, huge fan of Lyle Lovett. Love'n the reference.

What a freakin' day. It got better.

last night, we had to punt and take our boys to spend a couple hours with their grandfather while we helped celebrate a friend's 50th birthday party. the waitress was overwhelmed so it took nearly two hours to go from asking for a bill to signing a credit card receipt. Mrs Ben left to get the boys (we drove seperately because I didn't know I was playing hookie from Philharmonic rehearsal) around 8. The boys went to bed rather late. This ALWAYS results in an early and very mean-spirited wake up for our toddler. He was up and screaming at 5:30 this morning. That's my work bell.

So at 5:30 I was up, trying to feed breakfast to a toddler and waiting for the alarm to chime on the newborn. He was up and hungry by 6. He drank an ounce and went back to sleep. From there on, it was a tangled mass of the toddler doing attention things and the baby either sleeping or crying in 10 minute intervals. Every 30 minutes it was either a diaper or a bottle. Never more than an ounce consumed. A lot of formula went down the drain today since he normally drinks 5 ounces every three hours. So, roughly, every two hours I was making a 6oz bottle that would expire before he'd drink 2 ounces.

Then the cable guy showed up to install a CableCard in our Tivo. Not a big deal. Took a while to get the information he needed to activate it, but nothing too bad. He leaves and I try to get the new HD Tivo settled. Duncan, the toddler, gets to watch Sprout in the morning. So I tune into channel 263 and the screen goes gray. About half of the kids channels are missing. They all work on our cable box...

Then lunch and an eventual nap time. I managed to get both boys satisfied by 1 and they give me a solid hour to figure this out. Browsing support sites for both Verizon FIOS and Tivo, it takes about 45 minutes to learn that the package we have for HD doesn't include the same "Basic Channels" in the package for the cable box, even though they're not HD channels. But at least we know now.

So I get all that figured out and settle in for some R&R. The baby wakes up.

Oh well.

But as everything starts to pick back up, the toddler coming out of his post-nap stupor, the baby wants fed, I get the alert that my package to DL arrived. And then they post a video of opening the package. Righteous! Made my day. Granted, not a hard feat today.

Thursday and Friday are a blur.

One of my wife's great loves in life are her fingernails. Being an engineer, she prizes the moments when she can remind herself of being a woman. So every other Thursday, she heads out to get her nails done. This always makes things tough. This week, though there were two complications. She had an appointment with the "lady doctor" in the afternoon. Nothing bad. But then I had my Pipe Club (First Rule of Pipe Club?) about 20 minutes from the house. Pipe Club starts at 5 and her nail appointment starts at 4. Well, add that she was in need of some stuff and needed to stop at Target. I was able to get showered at 6pm. Rush, Rush, Rush.

The real triumph of Thursday was that the boys managed to take their afternoon naps together so I didn't feel guilt taking time to participate in DL Live. Good show guys. Adding alcohol sure loosened things up.

Friday. What can I say? Slow morning. Because Duncan, the older boy, is out of control when we get to the library, we're not doing Toddler Story Time until he's manageable. He is easily 200% more enthusiastic than any other child there. Sometimes it's funny, but it often transitions into being aggressive with timid children. No hitting or anything like that, but aggressive hugging and directing most of the kids there causes a good bit of fear. I wonder if that's the difference between the "normal" SAHD and SAHM child personality. Duncan gets a lot of rough play and encouragement to be independent.

The snow storm hit after Mrs Ben came home. We had some supplies to get and headed out for some shopping. By the time we were done with dinner at the restaurant, the storm had our car covered. We aborted the mission and came home to do our usual night routine.

One week down. It got better as the days went on. It's definitely not just twice the work right now, though. It's made it so apparent just how flexible a toddler's schedule it. With the newborn, the toddler's flexibility has it's moments, good and bad. If I let things slide with him, too much, I end up with two crises instead of handling one minor event at a time.

But life is good. One week down.

Gee, whiz. Week 2 is almost over. Two snow storms kept us home almost all week. We hit a peak of tiredness and the inevitable breakdown in marital communication. We rebuilt and went on to fun and excitement.

The next week is apt to cause some stress. We're packing up to go brew some beer at a friend's house with a bunch of church friends. That means my wife will chill in our friend's basement with some Veggie Tales or Disney movies and the boys and whichever other kids show up. Then next Friday I'm scheduled to help some ministers make beer as part of their workshop. That's about an hour from home and as soon as I get home, I need to head up to Frankenmuth, MI to judge a beer competition. For as much praise as I get for having a productive hobby, every time I do anything with the hobby, I have some sort of undeclared penance to perform. We'll see what two days and a full weekend do to my scoresheet.

Day to Day with the boys has been much better this week. Tristan is starting to progress toward something resembling a schedule. Duncan is getting better about being self-sufficient. Is sure helps that he's walking up and down steps on his own now. He still needs a hand to stabilize n the way down, but he reaches the handrail without stretching now. Not even 2. He's going to be a tall boy.

We're making good progress.

Probably the best reward from being home with my boys occurred this morning. Duncan and I were doing our wrestling thing and I pulled him into a hug and said "I say Duncan and you say..." I filled in "Daddy" for him a few times and then he started saying it really quietly. Then he got the courage to blat it out there. So proud. Then I asked him if he could say "Tristan" and he did, quite clearly. But the next time I tried the "I say..." routine, he filled in with "Truck" and "Train" and "Car". He's gotten a streak of shy lately, so when his mom came home early, he was reluctant to perform. He did do it on accident with me once, though.

A good day.