Well, the big news that I utterly failed to blog about here is that at about 1:30 AM on January 13, my wife Lauren gave birth to our baby son Van. I say that I failed to blog about it here because I was tweeting the whole thing and doing periodic updates on Facebook. I posted pictures on Flickr. I e-mailed. I did almost everything that I needed to do except post about it on my own blog.
Note : after I wrote this, I posted a piece on The Huffington Post with more details : My Son Was Born On Twitter.)
Van Stranahan, about 1 hour old.
And I think this is one the reasons I blog less — really anybody who is trying to keep up with news about me probably follows me on Twitter or Facebook and if they don’t and if someone we are fairly close to, I e-mailed them.
But enough blogging about blogging; the important thing is that Van was born happy and healthy at home, and he’s doing great. This was Lauren’s third unassisted birth and like her births with Jack and Olivia everything went great. Her labor started at about 11 o’clock, and so really only lasted about 2 1/2 hours. The kids were very excited and Shane (who is 17) was a tremendous help throughout the entire thing. Some people worry that a homebirth might be dramatic for the kids, but actually, nothing could be further from the truth. It was like Christmas for them, and every morning in the four days since the baby was born they come in to see him first thing when they get up.
This was also the first person that I was in the room for. I didn’t do anything. Well, I was tweeting. But really the whole point of unassisted birth, is that it’s Lauren’s deal. I did little things like handing her a towel or getting are more ice water. But I didn’t do anything idiotic like remind her to push or tell her to breathe. Had I done that she would pimp slapped me. It was was a pretty incredible experience being in the room. When our baby was born now. She reached under herself in the bathtub and pulled out a brand-new person.
There are more pictures on Flickr if you’re interested.
Another new thing that’s happened, is I got a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the popular voice recognition software. In fact this entire blog post isn’t being typed at all by me, it’s being dictated by me. This isn’t just techno-geek showing off. I have tendinitis, that makes typing extremely painful. I get shooting pains in my lower arm around my elbow. I can type — it just really hurts a lot.
Maybe this is another reason that I haven’t been doing too much longform blogging.
Well, actually — I know that’s a reason that I haven’t been doing as much longform blogging. It’s also kept me from doing all sorts of other writing that I want to be doing; fiction, nonfiction articles I want to write… all sorts of things. Being able to talk instead of type is amazing and the software really works well. One nice thing is that I can use the microphone that I use for voiceovers. Instead of a headset. Wearing a headset is kind of a pain. This way my dictating just involves me sitting here and talking.
There is another big advantage to working this way and that’s that it forces me to stop multitasking, which I’ve mentioned previously is one of my goals for the year. The process of talking like this keeps me fully engaged and present in the moment when I’m working. So far I’ve tried dictating fiction and nonfiction, and they both work great.
I have a big week coming up; three interviews and a whole bunch of work on my businesses, but more later.
