{"id":133,"date":"2008-10-26T20:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-27T01:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=133"},"modified":"2008-10-26T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-27T01:12:00","slug":"ramblings-of-a-man-on-paternity-leave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=133","title":{"rendered":"Ramblings of a man on paternity leave"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>[cue <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Kkr5Zo6zJak\">Doogie Howser<\/a> theme music]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Dear diary,<\/p>\n<p>Google is probably one of the only companies in the U.S. that gives an actual paid paternity leave (7 weeks!)&#8230; why, it&#8217;s almost as civilized as living in Europe.  It not only gives us a chance to bond with babies, but try to reset our lives as we walk around in a sleepless stupor.  Highlights of my downtime so far:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When mommies and babies are sleeping, it&#8217;s still possible to practice the banjo with the magic of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.banjohangout.org\/classifieds\/detail.asp?cid=3113\">Mike&#8217;s Mute<\/a>, the mostly highly rated of mutes on all of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.banjohangout.org\">Banjo Hangout<\/a> (where the cool kids are!).  The photos don&#8217;t do it justice.  It just clamps onto the bridge and makes your banjo as quiet as an unplugged electric guitar&#8230; yet it still sounds like a banjo!<\/li>\n<li>Did you know that the bottom of a newborn baby&#8217;s foot, being completely unused, looks exactly like the bottom of a hand?  Delicate little lines everywhere &mdash; the same ones palm readers look for.  It&#8217;s amazing to think that those features are hiding under the thick dead layer of smoothness on the bottom of adult feet.  In that same vein, did you know that when a newborn straightens out his arm, all one can see is a single puffy tube of flesh?  <em>There is no visible elbow<\/em>, no indication of how or where the arm bends&#8230; thus proving my scratchy elbows are a product of nurture, not nature.<\/li>\n<li>As the temperatures drop into the 40&#8217;s in Chicago, our pantry is overflowing from potatoes delivered by our local <a href=\"http:\/\/www.angelicorganics.com\/Vegetables\/vegetablescontent.php?contentfile=vegetables\">community supported farm<\/a>.  It&#8217;s time again to dig into my favorite recipe for <a href=\"http:\/\/effrecipes.red-bean.com\/recipe\/5\/\">potato leek cheese soup<\/a>.  Seriously:  just boil some potatoes and leeks, add cream cheese, and you&#8217;re in heaven.  Blending with a stick blender is strictly optional;  I can&#8217;t get enough of the stuff.  Go make this soup right now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Back to the diapers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[cue Doogie Howser theme music] Dear diary, Google is probably one of the only companies in the U.S. that gives an actual paid paternity leave (7 weeks!)&#8230; why, it&#8217;s almost as civilized as living in Europe. It not only gives us a chance to bond with babies, but try to reset our lives as we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banjo","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}