Date Night No More

Every Christian marriage conference or premarital counseling program you attend will drive this point home: continue to date and pursue each other after the wedding day! Granted, dating your spouse is vastly different than when you were single, but it is worthwhile in keeping the marriage strong.

True to form, it gets complicated after the kids arrive, for three reasons: childcare, financing, and scheduling. Until Moses was 4 months old, we brought him along on our date night outings. When he got older, it was easy to drop him off at friends' houses on our way out. Eventually, a better arrangement emerged, where we enlisted another family to watch each other's kids once a month when we needed a night out. This worked well while it lasted, especially that we each had one child and the children were about the same age. These friends moved away to another state, halting our sweet dating program.
To make matters worse, we went and had another kid. Arrangements between families to watch each others' kids suffer when there are more kids per family to watch. And often, the more kids a family has, the better it is that childcare happen at their house, at least until the babies are older.

While family and friends can be helpful in enabling us go out once in a while, we do not want to impose on them or burden them with frequent requests for childcare. Indeed, a two-kid situation is a different dynamic than a single-kid one, and not many are prepared to handle it. Besides, it is too much of a hassle to shuttle the kids somewhere so you can go out for a couple of hours. Even if you can find a childcare provider that can handle this dynamic, they won't be cheap. A provider from care.com, for example, can charge upwards of $35/hour for two kids, effectively doubling or tripling your date night budget.

Further more, our current sleep routine does not favor night outings or other obligations after dusk. We also find that it is not worth it to interrupt our babies' evening schedules so we can get out and eat steak. The best scenario would be for someone to come to our house and do this evening routine with them while we are out on date night. Otherwise, we pay for it down the road in thrown-off sleep cycles and the effects of inconsistency, lessons learned from Moses.

So with all things considered, we decided to not do date night for a little while. Instead, we will do "date day" (need a better-sounding moniker): we'll schedule it on a day when the babies are at childcare, meaning it'll have to be during the day (most likely in the afternoon). Immediately, the time of day we go out on a date changes what it means, how it feels, what we can plan to do, and where we can go. It also means we both take an afternoon off work, which is in effect an additional cost, depending on how you look at it. We understand why many couples forgo the idea altogether, but we are determined to still make it work, as long as we can.

Engineering the Sleep Dynamic

It is true that having two kids (or more) changes the family dynamic immensely, starting with sleep. Four individuals with different sleep schedules can be overwhelming, but if you consider this an engineering problem that can be "solved", there is hope. And that's exactly how I decided to handle it: to find a way for everyone to get their sleep on without adversely affecting anyone else. We did this with Moses too, but it was simpler then.

The first dimension is the "how much" of sleep: Nelson is still on a 3-hour cycle all day long; Moses sleeps from 7-8pm to 5-6am (10 hours); Angelene needs 8 hours; and I need 4-5 hours. Night gives us only 12 hours, so the problem to solve is how overlaps will work.

The second dimension is the "when" of sleep: if Moses goes down at 7:30pm and is out for 10 hours, we won't see him again until 5:30am. For Angelene to have 8 hours of sleep, she'd have to hit the sack at 9:30pm and wake up when Moses awakes. But before she goes to sleep, she'd need to feed/change Nelson at 9pm, and set him asleep. I can get my 4-5 hours of sleep then if I go to bed at 7:30pm with Moses and wake up for Nelson's next feeding at midnight. I would do the two night feedings (midnight and 3am) with pumped milk, and he would resume normal breastfeeding at 6am.

Notice how Moses' sleep schedule is really the pivot of this whole plan, not Nelson's; if it's off, we suffer. The other key is the 9:30pm-midnight block when all 4 of us are asleep: if we miss this window, toss the plan out. But we have an advantage in the fact that I am a short-sleeper and night owl, which I can bring to bear for this plan to work.

The third dimension is the "quality" of sleep we each get, measured by how many times we are interrupted in our allotted blocks of sleep time. I reckon sleep interruption is practically worse than foregoing sleep altogether, so we want to limit that number. As parents though, we can hear our babies' squeals in our deepest sleep, and are bound to awaken thus. So our solution: Nelson care happens downstairs so that whoever is sleeping upstairs can have quiet (as in, forget the bedside bassinet). The only hiccup is the 9pm-midnight window, when Nelson is quietly brought upstairs to our bedroom (presumably already asleep). I normally do not hear much of that, although Nelson's been quite restless and loud some of the nights that I awake. Angelene then uses earplugs so she won't hear much of the midnight waking later. When I wake up a little while before midnight, I quietly take Nelson back downstairs.

The orchestration can be a hassle but it pays off when it all works. To help it work, Angelene must pump so we have reserve for the night feedings (or we'd need to use formula), and fixing two extra pumping sessions in a 3-hour cycle can be tricky. Sickness cannot happen because it throws the whole dynamic off. Outside commitments are foregone or limited to allow this orchestration to work. And we must stay on top of things at all times, including eating all meals of the day on time.

Surprisingly, this plan affords us unexpected opportunities: we can have breakfast and dinner together, since those are the junction points on which the night hinges (6pm and 7am). An early start allows me to be back home from work early enough and spend time with the family before night kicks in. The midnight-6am chunk of time (minus 3am Nelson feeding) turns out to be a great time for me to work on personal stuff, read, do some programming, etc. This is when you are likely to see responses to emails and other communication. I have sometimes taken another nap towards the morning, but I like that there is some predictability in the mayhem, that sleep depravation can be avoided with a little engineering creativity.

Meet Nelson Bwambale

We are pleased to announce the birth of our second born boy, Nelson Bwambale. He was born on Jan-19, 2016 in Colorado Springs, Colorado about 9 days ahead of his official due date. Even so, we was "fully baked", weighing in at 7lbs 13oz (3.5kg) and measuring 19in (48cm). Both baby and mother are doing well.

Uganda Trip: Safari

The fourth phase of our trip to Uganda was a safari in Queen Elizabeth National Park, just an hour's drive from Kasese town where we were staying. We had planned to start the day early (5am) but our driver was missing in action until pretty much at dawn (7am). It is recommended to hit up the park before dawn if you want to see big cats before they retreat further into the park for the day. And we did ...

As soon as we got into the park, boom! A pride of 6 or so cubs and lionesses, along with this male lion, way off in a distance, returning from a hunt. The rest of the morning offered up baboons, water buffalo, hippos, kob, elephants, pelicans and flamingos, warthogs, and more.

Sadly we didn't see zebras, rhinos and giraffes because a few years ago they were relocated 8 hours north from this park to Murchison Falls National Park. But it was nonetheless exciting to see wild animals on their turf (as opposed to the zoo).

In August when we toured, it was the conclusion of a dry and dusty season in the park, with rumors of heavy rain in the air. By about 10am, it's so hot that you will scarcely see animals in the Park. So we headed up to Mweya for lunch and to await our next adventure. Mweya has two restaurants: the hotel being a whole lot more expensive than the lodge. Earlier on, we had managed breakfast at a small community deep inside the Park. Apparently, the park has various communities where people have settled within the game reserve. It is a common for wild animals to show up their front yard, and people cohabit among them without problems.

Later in the afternoon, we hit up Kazinga Channel (connecting the two main lakes that are part of the Park, Lake George and Lake Edward. Can you tell yet that Uganda was a British colony? Everything is named after the Queen and British royalty.
We toured the Channel aboard a water vehicle (called a "launch"), with other tourists and a Park guide pointing out various sights of interest.

On this leg of the tour, you may see water eagles, crocodiles, big lizards, an assortment of birds, hippos, elephants, various animals showing up to drink, and "losers" (buffaloes or hippos that have been kicked out of their herds, or are too injured to keep up. They seek sanctuary in the shallows of the lakes, until they die). I can not remember what else we saw after my camera went dead, with no battery backup. The 80x optical zoom was great for some of my shots, but terrible for battery life. The pictures I have from this day represent a little more than half of what we saw that day. Uganda is definitely rich of wildlife, well worth the day.

As far as costs go, you will usually pay for the safari vehicle (but we had our own), separately for a tour guide (supposed to know where the animals are in such a huge park), gate fees for each vehicle (we had two), and park fees for every person except babies (around 8 of us). For foreigners, park fees are about $90 (for Angelene, although I don't recall them checking passports). As a Ugandan passport-holder, I paid an equivalent of $30. All the other tour activities might have cost around $400 in total. By this time in the trip, we were no longer keeping track of our expenses, so this is an educated guess.
We also brought our own iced water along for how hot it gets out there. We managed a nap for Moses in between adventures, but a long day overall for him. A whole day in the wild like this (and in a vehicle) is not conducive for young babies who won't remember a shred of it.

But what do we say about phase four of the trip? Success! Many thanks to my sister Esther and brother Zablon for organizing the day, and accompanying us throughout. We became tourists for a day.

Uganda Trip: House and Land

What trip goes without disappointments ever? Not this one! The first setback was having no battery juice for the camera on the day we visited my land and also inspected my house. Although I had 3 battery packs for backup, I had forgotten to bring along their charger. As such, there are no current pictures of the house (except the glib below) and none of the land.

The second disappointment was the size of my house. It turns out that on my father's orders, the house had been shrunk from the size called for on the blueprint I kept back in the US, mostly because he thought it was too big. I had not been informed of this change beforehand, only finding out when I commented that the house looked smaller than I thought. Its length was reduced by more than 35 feet, for example, and while the floor plan was kept the same, all the rooms are proportionately smaller than I would like. In fact, we'll end up not having enough dining/living room space and must lose one of the bathrooms because the shrinking left it practically a sliver barely enough to fit a toilet seat. To say I was supremely pissed doesn't describe enough how I felt. If it wasn't near completion, I would have sought to tear down the house and start all over -- to specification (and maybe a different floor plan). Nonetheless, I will work with what we have there.

The house is in the background, seen from the front.

What is left to do about the house are final touches, painting, and furnishing. The doors and windows will need to be redone, the landscaping and grounds spruced up. The plan is to put the house up for rent or set it up as a (tourist) guest house when it is complete, until we retire into it.

The land is out in the village, about 70 miles away from Kasese town (where the house is) off the road towards the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. My mother has done an excellent job maintaining and growing all kinds of staples on it. The only problem I see with it is that it is landlocked and not near the main road. To reach it, you must traverse small paths along other people's land. The plan at this point is to buy the piece of land directly in front of mine (between mine and the main road), or find another nearby that is next to the main road. Land is exponentially more expensive in that area, in what seems like a "land rush" of sorts. Those with bigger chunks of land are growing eucalyptus trees or pepper for export, amidst the usual subsistence crops. So it might take a little while for the landowner in front of me to sell, or for us to find another suitable piece of land adjacent to the road. But whenever that happens, our plan is to build another house and setup poultry farming on it. Poultry is surprisingly a good business in the area, both for eggs and meat.

When we went to visit the land (in background).

The takeaway from this third phase of the trip is that seeing things with your own eyes makes all the difference. I had seen pictures and taken Skype tours of the house and land, but my expectations were still quite different than the reality (especially with the house). But having seen it all, I'm better prepared to plan for and direct development of these properties. I was not impressed with the house, but I like the prospects of the land.

Further out, this is where we plan to retire: into that house (and the new one on the piece of land we are yet to acquire), and to farm the land we own. In retirement, we imagine we will spend half the year in the States with family and grand kids, and escape the colder months to Uganda for a season of farming (cultivation through harvest of some crop). Until then though, we'll visit the country every 2-4 years, do vacations or holidays with family there, or find missionary opportunities in that part of the country. It is a growing trend for Americans to retire abroad, and we are jumping on that bandwagon. We envision our retirement (30 years away still) to be quite active and full of travel or mission work, God willing.