By my lack of activity on my blog, you'd think that I have been very busy since the birth of my second daughter. But I'm not. In fact, I think it's the inertia of doing nothing all day long that has been keeping me away.

For the past nearly two weeks since Shelly and Annie came home, our little family has settled nicely into a pleasant rut: Everyone gets up around 8, we eat breakfast, Ellie begs to either play with the choo-choo train tracks she got for her birthday or to see some random Playhouse Disney TV show, so we all head downstairs. Annie sleeps in the bouncer seat while Ellie does her thing and the parents take turns showering and trying to check email and news on the computer while Ellie constantly pleads "Daddy play train tracks. Daddy play train tracks. Daddy play train tracks!" So I play some train tracks with Ellie.

Eventually it's lunchtime, so we move upstairs and Ellie picks at her PB&J or leftover Relief Society casserole. We put her to bed for a nap, and for the next two or three hours Shelly and I seem to enter into some sort of time warp where all the good, productive or entertaining things we were intending to do while Ellie was asleep go undone despite our best efforts. I don't really have a good idea what we do do. (Admission: I'm typing this entry in the afternoon while Ellie is sleeping, but this is the first time THAT has happened in over two weeks!)

Ellie gets up, we head back downstairs to play more train tracks, or perhaps head out to the grocery store or Wal-Mart (which I swear I have visited at least 4 or 5 times in the 12 days since Shelly and Annie came home). Before you know it, it's dinner time, then bath time, then bedtime for Ellie and we adults waste the rest of the evening watching something stupid (last night, for example, it was the Dancing with the Stars results show -- yawn) on TV.

We've been staying up till about 11:30 or midnight most nights, and Annie has done us the favor of going to sleep at that time, waking up at about 3 or 4am to eat, and then going back to sleep till 7 or 8. She really hasn't been very difficult at all. At this stage, she mostly just sleeps. When she's awake and not screaming for food, we just hold her and look into her steely gray eyes and marvel at how much she looks like Ellie and how we have to go through everything we went through with Ellie all over again.

My parents are arriving this afternoon for the next week and a half, and my brother and his family are coming down from NYC for turkey tomorrow. So I have only another hour or two of this kind of lifestyle.

Shelly on more than one occasion has remarked that it would be so wonderful if we were able to live like this always, but even after the Parade of Family ends (Shelly's parents arrive the day after mine leave), I will be at work and the honeymoon will be over. Long live paternity leave!