El Regreso de los Bebés

After a pretty good run of sleep the babies have seemed to return to their sleep habits of 3-4 months ago. Teething has kept Martin up late most nights while an insatiable hunger has caused Elliott to wake several times in the night. Both of them have become extremely apt at sleeping through their feedings. Even their mother has become pretty good at this. Unfortunately I have not yet perfected the art of sleeping while I feed them. I just cross my fingers that it will be Elliott who wakes up since he eats about four times faster than his pokey older brother.

Martin's nighttime crib-journeys sometimes leave him with various limbs sticking out of the crib which I postulated may cause him to wake up. Since I'm so incredibly smart I figured I'd purchase some breathable crib bumpers for him so that this wouldn't happen.



That was a huge waste of time and money.


In other news: Jen recently instituted a period of each day where the guys have to wear hats while they zip around in their walkers. This has not seemed to hamper the Wombats' playtime and has brought their mother pure, unbridled delight.


As the babies settled down in bed I put together this salad with greens, sliced blood orange, pomegranate, macadamia nuts, avocado, olive oil, and juice from a Seville orange. I had intended on putting slices of Seville orange as well but by the time I had peeled the orange I was left with a completely destroyed orange and all the seeds had popped out over the cutting board in a gruesome scene of citrus homicide.


For the main course I made a pan-roasted pork chop from Lucki 7 Farms in upstate New York. I also made creamed kale with garlic, butter, cream, salt, pepper, and nutmeg; and sweet potato with a little cream, butter, and chopped candied pecans.


Part of the way through dinner we learned that Martin's screaming was not going to stop. When we took him out of his crib he immediately stopped crying and we put him out on the floor to play while we finished dinner. It seems that the only thing that can stop him from crying is the simple knowledge that he is not sleeping.

Even though he is completely exhausted.


For beer tonight I cracked open a bottle of 120 Minute IPA from Dogfish Head. I've been sitting on these since 2011 and haven't tried one yet so after more than a year of aging I thought it would be appropriate to pop one open mostly because 120 minutes is about the average amount of uninterrupted sleep we can hope to get these days.

This beer was completely different than I'd expected. At approximately 20% alcohol I could only deal with half of the 12 oz. bottle. It was probably the most complex beer I've ever tasted and I really didn't find it to have much hop bitterness at all. Perhaps after a year of aging the bitterness had mellowed to all the fruity aromatics that I experienced.

This is not really like beer, it's like an after dinner brandy or port.


This beer was a little too much for Jen which means that I inexpertly wrapped up her half, in hopes of preserving its combination, and stuck it in the fridge. We'll see how it handles this.

Perhaps it will be what gets me through tonight's 3:00 AM feeding.