Lunch Time

Is there really a better treat than lunch at Chipotle? Thanks, Mom!

Actually, I do need to give them some credit. They have managed to create a kid’s meal that my child will actually eat and is not going to saddle her with diabetes before she knows how to tie her shoes (by the way, when should she learn how to tie her shoes?). A chipotle kid’s meal consists of: A small cheese quesadilla – that we add veggies to -- black beans, rice, and milk. Yes, it is packed with sodium and my guess is that they put a lot more cheese on the quesadilla than necessary, but it is fast food. It is a treat. Like candy. You don’t give it to them every day.

As you can see from the picture, Olive devoured the quesadilla and is pointing to the site of its death.  She has come a long way from this.

(And just if you were wondering…no, I didn’t receive any goods or service in exchange for this post. Simply thought it was a cute picture of a little girl who just destroyed a quesadilla like it made fun of her mother.) 

Cleaning Out the Notebook...

Random assortment of thoughts and recent dealings with two kids:

• Thank you, Disney’s “Pocahontas”, for prompting my first conversation on race with my two-year-old daughter. “Why are they fighting, daddy? Why they no like him?” Chalk this up as one of the many conversations I will be forced to have with my daughter LONG before I am prepared to actually have them.
• Asher is now entering the “I Want To Put Everything In My Mouth” stage of development, which means the “I’m Going to Constantly Have a Runny Nose and Ear Infection” stage can’t be too far behind.
• Do you ever notice that we really ask about other people’s kids so we can have an excuse to talk about our own. “Hey, how is Jane doing?” “She is great, thanks. Starting to walk.” “Oh yeah? Let me tell you about when my kid started to learn to walk!”
• Sticking Olive in a jog stroller and taking her for a run any longer than thirty minutes might be her version of water-boarding.
• Checked out pre-schools in my area today. One Montessori school charges $24,000 a year for pre-school. And they close in the summer and the school day ends at 2:00 PM. I don’t know who this Montessori guy was, but apparently he has a REALLY expensive method of educating kids. Like using gold-plated crayons or having naptime on a mattress stuffed with $50 dollar bills.
• It has been pointed out more than once that I need to update the masthead of the blog to reflect that fact that I have more than one child. Ever think that I just love Olive more? KIDDING!
• Olive has now developed the habit of asking us to make up songs on the spot to sing to her at bed-time. She throws out a topic and we act as composer/improve actor. Last night I had to sing the “Sally and Nick Song”. Olive had to explain to me that they are the characters from Cat in the Hat. This was a new one. I have also had to sing songs about: Captain Hook, Wendy, Peter Pan, Pocahontas, Toy Story, Jessie, Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, Asher, several relatives, friends from day care, and penguins.
• Olive has also taken to telling me to “Just try it” when I tell her I can’t do something. A typical exchange will go like this: Olive: “Daddy, jump on the bed with me!” Me: “I can’t, Olive. I’m too big.” Olive, with comforting voice and outstretched hand: “Just try it. Just try it, Daddy.” She might have a career in motivational speaking.
• Every new day I spend as a happily married father of two who shares care of my children with an amazing wife and mother I have more and more respect for single parents. I cannot even fathom how you do it. I would implode.
• Olive told me that she needs to get her snow hat out soon to keep herself warm. Crazy to think how much two-year-olds remember and understand. She now gets the concept of seasons. Yet she still can’t manage to not piss her pants.
• Asher is a constant reminder to me that I am still a novice at this parenting game and that every child is different. His personality and his first four months have been completely different than Olive’s. Yes, of course I am better prepared, but I’m learning new things every second I spend with my two kids.
• Also, I will leave you with this...little kids in big sunglasses never gets old.

Why?

 “Why, Daddy? Why?”

Olive now says those words roughly 4,729 times per day. We have officially reached the Why Stage. This closely follows on the heels of the Doing Stage where Olive would start off every conversation with a simple question: “Doing?” It could have meant “how are you doing?” or “what are you doing?” or “why are you doing that?” or even, when speaking over the phone “where are you?” Now she is more concerned about why we are doing what we are doing.

As a parent you try your best to give answers, but eventually the little inquisitor breaks you down.

“Daddy, what are you doing?”

“I’m giving Asher his bottle”

“Why?”

“Because he is hungry.”

“Why?”

“Because he hasn’t had dinner yet.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t his dinner time.”

“Why?”

“Hey, would you like to watch some Dora?”

“Yes.”

I’m convinced that if we used two-year-olds to interview criminals we could get confessions for every crime.

“Where are the stolen guns?”

“I didn’t steal any guns.”

“Why?”

“Because I was out with my girlfriend when the guns were stolen.”

“Why?”

“Because she wanted to go out to dinner.”

“Why?”

“Because she said I didn’t spend enough time with her.”

“Why?”

“Oh dear God, I don’t know. Please, just make her stop asking why. I will tell you anything you want!”

Really, when she starts to ask “why” I start breaking out in a cold sweat because I know it will take me a good ten minutes to distract her away from the line of questioning. She also tends to go into a trance-like state when asking “why”…the outside world disappears and all she can focus on is the “why”.

So yesterday I introduced a new strategy, I decided to answer her as honestly and fully as possible. Here is how the conversation went.

“Okay, Olive, we need to go home now.”

“Why?”

“Because it is getting dark.”

“Why?”

“Because the sun is going down.”

“Why?”

“Why is the sun going down?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, do you know how we see the stars up in the sky when it is dark out?”

“Yeah.”

Deep breath….

“Well, the sun is a big star and it is at the center of our solar system. The Earth, which we live on, is one of those planets. Our earth rotates on an axis, sort of like you spinning around. When the earth rotates, that means part of the earth is facing the sun, and some of the earth is facing away from the sun. When the sun rises in the morning it means that the earth has rotated so that the part of the planet we live on is starting to face the sun. When the sun goes down it means that our part is turning away from the sun. The sun is still there and shining, we just aren’t facing it. Kind of like when you turn your back towards a bright light. When it is dark here, the sun is shining on a different part of the earth. It takes one full day for the earth to rotate all the way around. The earth also orbits the sun and one trip around the sun equals a year. Part of the reason it is getting dark now, earlier than it was at the beginning of the summer, has to do with the earth being tilted on its axis, but that is a whole different discussion”

Pause…

“Oh.”

Victory is mine.

I can’t wait till she asks why I am eating so I can explain the digestive system.

Three months...

Three months. It has only been three months. That is a blink of an eye. I mean, the NHL playoffs take two months. That might be the reason why I can’t figure out how this:

Photo: Dan Candura

Became this:

Photo: Brandon Candura

Really, despite still being a skinny little guy, the changes are unbelievable.

Asher has been a good little man. But as the second kid, he definitely takes his share of abuse. Forget about trying to quietly take a nap in the car. Forget about being able to have a bottle without your little sister being read a book at the same time. Forget about being able to lay on the ground and have a few minutes of tummy time –big sister quickly interrupts that by lying down next to him and throwing her arm over his back. “I love you, Asher,” She will say.

That is ridiculously sweet and kind, honey. But can you love him without driving his face into the ground? Love means never having to gasp for breath, remember that Olive.

Some of this might explain his laid back attitude. Sitting there and taking the abuse, or tuning out the background noise is easier than fighting against it. As long as someone is there to feed him and rock him to sleep when he gets tired, he is as chill as the crowd at a Jack Johnson concert. Right now he could not be more different than the whirling dervish of excitement that is his older sister.

Of course, things will change. Maybe he will talk a blue streak like his older sister. Maybe he will decide that sleeping through the night is over rated. Maybe he will end up being allergic to 900 different kinds of food. Who knows? All I know is that things will change. Just got to give it a few months.

Adventures in Potty Training

Olive is officially entering the world of bladder control.

(Too much information? Hey, if you don’t want to hear about this stuff, don’t read a blog about little kids!)

She has been going to the “potty” for several months now, but really, it has always been on her terms. Mostly she would go when trying to delay her bedtime (“if I sit on the potty I know I can get them to read me eight books before they finally pull me off and put me to bed”). But after a series of summer vacations and car trips where a potty-trained toddler would have been more of a hassle than a blessing, we decided to give this training thing a whirl. So one morning I sat her down and said, “Olive, if you go potty, I will give you a lollipop and you can wear big-girl pants with Dora on them instead of your diaper.”

“Purple lolli-pop?”

“Sure, I can get you a purple lolli-pop.”

“OK. I use the potty.”

And she did use the potty (If there wasn’t a purple lolli-pop ,I think she would have filibustered and simply asked “why” for the next three hours). And then she did again in a couple hours. And again in a couple more hours. She was even requesting to go potty. Man, was this going smoother than expected.

But after a little while Olive, instead of thinking of the lolli-pop as a reward for using the potty when she felt like needing to go, thought of using the potty as something she needed to do in order to get the lolli-pop…which she wanted constantly.

At least twice a day, she would randomly jump up from whatever she was doing and declare. “I need to use potty.” And then look at me, hold her finger in the air and say, “I get lolli-pop after. Purple one!”

She then sat down on the potty, gritted her teeth and groaned until her face turned four different shades of red.

“I CAN’T DO IT!” She yelled through her locked jaw.

She even started to request big glasses of water to make herself pee so she could get a lolli-pop.

Uh-oh. This wasn’t good. I was going to give my two-year-old a hernia and/or create a life-long addiction to purple lolli-pops.

But she WAS going to the potty. She WASN’T wearing diapers. This whole lolli-pop bribery thing, for all its sugar-drenched faults, was working. Sure, it might give her early-onset diabetes, but really, the way things are going, by the time she goes to school approximately 98% of her classmates will be taking insulin. Don’t want her to feel left out.

Eventually, we managed to trim down the lolli-pop consumption by creating diversions (“You want a lolli-pop? Wait what’s that over there?”) and using a variety of parental white lies:

· “If you have too many today there won’t be any tomorrow.”

· “Another one will make you sick.”

· “Daddy lost the lolli-pops.”

· “Lolli-pops don’t taste good in the morning.”

· “Your face will freeze like that.”

· “Columbus discovered the Americas.”

Most of the time it works, but other times we just give in and give her the pop to keep the incentive going. Now it has been a couple weeks and she is almost completely trained. She rarely has accidents, and when she does, it is almost purposeful. Like when Leanne left her inside while she went to get something from the car. Olive wanted to go too. Mommy said no. Olive decides, fine, you leave me here. I’ll just piss on the floor. This bladder control thing works two ways.

So we continue to march slowly towards the land of expelling bodily waste on command. A milestone moment for a child and one more moment in parenthood when you sit back and say, “I don’t know how my life can get more ridiculous. Did I seriously just give my child a high-five for taking a poop?”

Long Time Coming

It has been a long time since I have done one of these…like, six months.

A lot has happened since then. Mostly the birth of my son, Asher.

I am now a father of two and a member of a family of four. This change could not have been more wonderful, more frightening, more exhausting, or more exciting.

When I walk in my daughter’s room in the morning, she almost immediately says “What Asher doing?” When we bring him down the stairs after a nap she stops whatever she is doing and squeals “I want to see him!” She wants to know when he is sleeping, and when he is awake. She wants to know what he is doing at all times, why he is smiling, if his hands will always be small, if he wants his binky, and when he is eating. She is either a caring, doting big sister, or is training to be a stalker.

It is a toss-up at this point.

Yes, two is a lot harder than one. Yes, it is more than twice as hard. But it isn’t because of the newborn – all he does is eat sleep and poop. We actually wondered more than once why we thought having one of these things was ever hard. A day spent with a one-month-old is a day spent flipping back and forth between MSNBC and FOXNews to see if you can make yourself black out. With the occasional bottle and dirty diaper thrown in.What makes it so hard is trying to deal with a two-year-old with one hand tied behind your back. you still need to read books and play tag and negotiate potty-training, all while carrying around a floppy ten pound mini human being.

Also, any downtime you had is now gone. When Olive was born, I felt jealous at my wife’s ability to soothe our daughter by feeding him – something me and my poor excuse for man-boobs could never do. But I didn’t envy the hours each day she spent nursing while I slept, watched TV, wrote in my blog, or did any manner of other required or leisure activities.

Now, the tables have been turned.

For the first two months of Asher’s life it seemed that he only wanted to eat when Olive needed to be changed, bathed, fed, taken to the playground, put to sleep, taken out of her crib, put in time-out, or needed help building a fort, playing with play-dough, playing hide-and-seek, or running from her imaginary friends. I would spend my day doing these things while my wife would nurse and watch two back-to-back episodes of Teen Mom 2.

But we are falling in to our new routine and we really don’t remember what the old routine was anymore – we are having so much fun now that we don’t want to.

Writing in the blog has been tough, finding time between baths and diaper changes and play and sleep and work has been more difficult than I expected. Also, I have to change the mast-head and that is just a pain in the ass. But just like how I have gotten used to my new routine as a parent, I hope to get used to a new routine as a writer.

Toys, Schmoys

Over the last 22 months or so I have been compiling a list of things that small children find more compelling than toys. This list includes, but is not limited to:

• measuring cups
• spoons
• zippers
• nipples (both male and female)
• electrical plugs
• the little things you put in electrical plugs to prevent kids from playing with them
• cabinet doors
• Tupperware
• Any object that could inflict serious bodily harm (think steak knives, ski poles, paper shredders, letter openers, etc)
• empty beer bottles
• the buttons on a CD player
• remote controls
• piles of clothes
• sticks
• trash
• plastic bags
• wrapping paper
• tampons (as evidenced by this post)
• cell phones

Really, there have been times when Leanne will be shopping for a baby shower present and I will suggest that we give the parents-to-be a bag filled with measuring cups, an old remote control, a broken cell phone, a stick, a spoon and three ziplock plastic bags. Leanne keeps telling me that this is cheap. I call it practical.

These parents will find all this out on their own, though. There will be a room full of toys, made with love by a Chinese plastic craftsman, 15 feet from their child and all they want to do is open and close kitchen cabinets or jump in to the pile of laundry waiting to be folded. One of Olive’s favorite games in the morning is to press my nipple and say “honk.” She could do it for hours. Even though we have several toys that play music when you press their belly or squeeze their foot or whatever. My nipple is where it’s AT.

I can now add helium balloons to this list. We recently celebrated the coming of little Rocco (placeholder while we think of an actual name) and Olive couldn’t get enough of the balloons. Basically, she would grab a string, jump up and down and yell “I want it! I want it” while the balloon taunted her by bouncing up and down on the ceiling. Eventually someone would give in and pull the balloon down for her and she would tackle it. Literally, bodyslam the balloon. Her victim would eventually escape and float safely back up the ceiling. This video shows some of the action (please excuse the orientation of the video…just rotate your head to the left and all will be good) and also the breakthrough moment when she figured out she could get the balloon by pulling down on the string, resulting in the celebratory “I GOT IT!”



Oh yeah, and we are having a boy.

Snow

I have to admit, I like winter a hell of a lot more than summer. I don't do well in hot weather and my skin and the sun don't get along well. While other people tan, I simply become a deeper shade of pale.

I was really looking forward to spending a great winter with Olive.

Then this winter happened.

Sure, I can take Olive sledding (as we have done down the back stairs of our deck), but anytime we go outside I need to attach an avalanche beacon to her. Maybe I could get an orange flag on a long stick and staple it to her back. Otherwise, she is going to get lost in the 47 feet of snow we have on the ground right now. It also doesn't help that this winter has been insanely cold (by Boston standards).

But we have been able to get outside and enjoy some winter pursuits. Here are a few pictures of us enjoying a little snowshoeing. Luckily, one of the benefits of Olive's recent obsession with Dora the Explorer is that she thinks it is cool to be carried around in a backpack.

Before the front-end loaders came down our street and dumped heaps of snow into our local playground, we could still make quick trips to the swings and slide. Really, what is better than sliding down a slide half covered in snow?

Putting your feet up, watching some Wonder Pets and drinking hot cocoa!

Yes, We Are Going To Be Surprised...

…just hopefully not in the delivery room. My wife and I are finding out the sex of our baby. In fact, we find out next week. Had the date marked on the calendar for a month. If you could tell me now I'd love it. If the home pregnancy test could have told Leanne whether it was going to be a boy or girl, she would have found out and then gone shopping for clothes that afternoon.

What is funny about the “find out, don’t find” out decision, is that it seems to be the first in a long line of parenting decisions that other parents LOVE to question. Until this point, no one asks you if you are refraining from eating soft cheeses, or if you are trying not to yell, or if you are doing pre-natal yoga. But after someone finds out that you are having a baby, almost the first question they ask the mother or father is: Do you know what you are having? Are you going to find out?”

(Quick aside: it sounds really weird when people ask “what” we are having. We are having a baby, that’s what. They are small, floppy, frequently-pooping versions of adults. If you would like to know if we are planning on finding out if it is a boy or a girl, then ask us if we are finding out the “sex” of our baby. Sorry, pet peeve.)

No matter your answer, you are bound to disappoint, maybe offend, a bunch of other people.

“Yeah, we are going to find out. We can’t wait for the ultrasound,” gets responses like:

• "Oh, but it is so much fun to be surprised!”
• “We didn’t have ultrasounds when we had our kids. We did it the old-fashioned way.”
• “I know someone who found out they were having a girl, and then they had a boy!”
• “We waited to find out for all of our kids and it was the best decision.”

“Yeah, we have decided to wait,” on the other hand, gets responses like this:

• “Really!? I can’t imagine waiting! How can you possibly do that! Your will-power is SUPERHUMAN!”
• “You know your kid is going to be wearing green and yellow for the first 12 months of his – I mean her – I mean, whatever, I just hope you like ducks and frogs.”
• “Well, you know, you are surprised either way. This way you can plan. Maybe you aren’t a planner.”

A parent’s favorite pastime, other than sleep, is questioning other parents. This debate opens the floodgates. Soon comes breastfeeding, co-sleeping, blankets in the crib, day care, going back to work or staying home, television watching, whether or not to dress your son up as Daphne from Scooby Doo for Halloween, soccer or football, public or private school, where to send them to college, etc etc. Someone is going to hear your decision and walk away going “I can’t believe they are doing that.” I’m certainly guilty of it, and I am assuming that most people are nodding their heads because they are too, or they know someone who is.

I have friends and family who have found out, and those that have waited. All of them are wonderful parents and are pretty darn happy with what they have. For us? We can’t wait. Whenever you find out it is a surprise, right. We just hope they don’t see one of each.

These Things Cost Money...

This post is another blast from the past. I wrote this soon after Leanne and I found out that number two was on the way. Enjoy.

I don’t know about anyone else, but after the first month of trying to get pregnant and then not actually getting pregnant, I lose all hope that we will EVER actually be able to get pregnant. I think back to all the years I wore tighty-whities and what that might have done to our chances. I start thinking about the number of Phish concerts I have attended and what that might have done to our chances.

Really, it isn’t that I think Leanne and I will never conceive another child, it is just that I kind of lower my expectations. You get that first negative test and you think, “Oh yeah, this could take a while. I mean, people try to get pregnant for months. Why do we assume this will be easy for us.”

Leanne, though, is a woman who likes goals and deadlines and calendars. She knows the exact day that she can first take a HPT and its likelihood of producing an accurate result on that day. The second month, this day coincided with Leanne returning from a business trip. Olive was already in bed. She comes in the door, puts down her stuff, smiles, and says “Hey, do you want to get me to take a test. It will be 80% accurate today.” To which I, with an excasperated and indignant sigh, reply: “You know those things cost money, right?”

Yup. Actually said that.

In my defense, we only had one test left (cause we used three -- all negative -- the month before) and I was pretty sure that this one was going to be negative (with me remembering all the hours I spent with a laptop on my lap, or standing close to a microwave, or talking on my cell phone, or riding a bike.).

Also, those things DO cost money. I mean, pregnancy tests are expensive, especially the fancy digital kind (tip for all you kids: always buy the digital kind. Better yet, buy the most expensive pregnancy test you can find. You buy the generic paper towels and ibuprofen. You definitely don’t skimp on two things: condoms and pregnancy tests. If they sell a pregnancy test that is encased in gold, made by Apple, can stream Netflix, and comes with a home nursing visit, get that one). So I wasn’t all that excited about wasting one and then having to run out three days later and wait in line at the Rite-Aid with a pack of gum, a Vitamin Water and a package of pregnancy tests cause we wanted to “make sure” that it wasn’t a false negative.

Leanne didn’t appreciate this comment very much. Turns out, I was running out to Rite-Aid that night anyway...because the test was positive. For those of you that have taken these tests actually hoping for the two lines or the plus sign or for the word “pregnant” to appear, when it actually happens there are few greater moments. It is one of those times when words can't describe the emotion.

Leanne and I laughed and hugged. We silently screamed because Olive was asleep one room away. We each welled up. We are going to have another baby, we whispered. Then we looked deep into each other’s eyes...

...and we saw fear.

We are going to have another baby? What the @#*% are we doing!?

Re-living the Past

So I mentioned a few posts back that when Leanne and I decided to try for baby number two, that I kept writing short blog posts while we were trying. Well, not WHILE we were trying, but, you know. (Okay, sorry about that. I couldn't help it.) I didn't want to post them at the time, of course, but I thought it would be fun to look back on the summer.


Early July – Really, Time Magazine? You need to do a cover article on the benefits of having an only child a week after Leanne and I decide to try having our second? Really?! If you never saw the article, it does a pretty good job of convincing you that one kid is far superior to three or four. Even that you would be NUTS to have more than one kid. It even references a study that claims couples with one child are happier than couples without children, but also happier with a couple with more than one child. One child is the happiness sweet spot. So basically, Time just told me that it is all downhill from here. Great.

Late July – We are closing in on the end of the first month trying. Boy, am I tired! (Okay, I'm really sorry. That is gross. Promise, no more procreation humor.)
Coming to the end of this month means that Leanne has already taken three home pregnancy tests. All negative. But, of course, these things aren't 100% correct, so you can always take one more!
“Do you want to be pregnant, Leanne?”
“At this point, I don’t care, I just want to know if I am or not. I just want to KNOW!”
This means I need to go out to the store to get the fourth pregnancy test in four days. I think I should think about going to Costco next time.

Also, has anyone at Rite Aid noticed the irony in putting home pregnancy tests right next to the various flavored KY products, condoms, shady erectile dysfunction elixirs, and sensual massage oils? Isn’t that like stocking cholesterol tests next to bacon? Diabetes lancets in the candy aisle?

Trick or Treat

Halloween doesn’t mean much for an 18 month old. To parents it usually means a chance to dress our kids up in adorable costumes and show them off. I guarantee that November 1^st sees the highest number of little kid pictures on Facebook than any other date. Of course, Leanne and I are guilty of that too. The kid doesn’t know what is going on, they can’t eat the candy the get, and they don’t understand that the scary thing is just a person in a mask.

I tried to resist posting Halloween pictures here, but I really can’t. I mean, come on, look at these cheeks.

Old women would elbow each other out of the way to pinch those things.

Also, I love that the costume Olive is wearing was originally made for Leanne when she was two years old. Coolest hand me down we have.

Daddy Depression

My friends are multiplying. If you know me and my friends, you understand this is a rather frightening proposition, but that is beside the point. We recently got together to watch a football game and the room was filled with two pregnant women, a two month old, an 8 month old, and an 18 month old. Another friend, who has a two year old and another on the way, couldn’t make it. It is mildly depressing when you can’t go over to a friend’s house to watch a football game anymore without spending 35% of your time making sure a weebling wobbling little person doesn’t get their hands covered in buffalo wing sauce, or “accidentally” pick up an open can of Bud Light while you aren’t looking.

But it also means we can now, pretty unabashedly, talk about parenting and kids while we pick over nachos.

One friend said something that got me thinking. With a little hesitation, and a little bit of what seemed like residual shame, he said that it took him a while to bond with his newborn. Weeks, in fact. It surprised him, and he wondered if he was the only one.

It was the first time I heard a dad say something like that. Woman have been given free rein to talk about issues with bonding, post-partum depression, and feelings of helplessness after birth. If any of you read the “mommy blog” Dooce.com -- and if you haven't you should check it out --you know that the devotion of the audience is at least partly due to Heather Armstrong writing openly and honestly (and with a great sense of humor) about her struggle with post-partum depression. It struck a chord with a huge audience, and likely helped Armstrong and countless other women through a tough time.

So why can’t guys (or why don't guys)talk about this?

Does it have to do with the whole macho, I don’t show my feelings stuff? Do we think that any post-partum confusion is relegated to the other sex? Have we been instructed that the woman’s role as mother is so much more involved, so much closer, so much more difficult than the role as father that we don’t really need to worry about bonding? I think it is the latter.

I still remember sitting in a breastfeeding class with Leanne (yes, one of the most awkward classroom experiences of my life) and having the instructor go through a whole litany of ways nursing aids the bonding process between mother and daughter. She then said that the father can bond with the child by…

wait for it…

giving the kid a bath.

Right.

So my wife actually FEEDS my child. Provides her sustenance from her own body, food that her body produced. She does this for 12 hours a day. Every day. For a year. And that experience is supposed to be replicated by me dipping my crying child into the kitchen sink for 20 minutes every couple days? Somehow I don’t buy it.

I think a lot of dad’s feel the same way my friend did. He loves his daughter more than light right now, but it took him a while to make the connection. When Olive was born, I remember feeling completely useless when she was crying. I couldn’t do anything to sooth her. But as soon as Leanne got a hold of her, we had a calm baby again. Of course, most of that had to do with Leanne being the one to feed her, but I can’t help but think my daughter wanting to be with the comforting figure, and at that point in her life it was mommy. You would have to be the tin man for that not to effect you a little bit. You are a first time father and your child scream uncontrollably while you rock her and sing to her and hold her, but as soon as mommy is there everything is fine. The first thing that pops into your mind is that you are a bad dad. Tough to take for anyone sometimes.

It will be interesting to see how I handle having another little one to bond with in six months. Will my knowing now what I didn’t know then help me look for ways to bond? Will having an understanding of the process ease some of my parental uncertainty?

At least now I will be able to look at my two year old daughter and ask her to give daddy and hug and a kiss and know that everything works out soon enough.

Number Two

Leanne and I know a lot of folks who are only children. Some of them are good friends. All of them turned out to be wonderful people, despite what society thinks they should be as only children. As a parent, I know how easy it is to spoil your one and only child, but I have learned to reject the notion that somehow, only children turn out to be spoiled adults. All the people we know who are only children are kind, humble, outward-looking individuals who really care about making a difference in their community. None of them give credence to the stereotype surrounding only children.

Knowing these people gave Leanne and I a lot to think about as we debated having another kid. Olive is wonderful. A sibling would be nice, having a gentically similar playmate doesn’t necessarily guarantee she will grow up to be a good person or eliminate the possibility that she could grow up spoiled and/or self-centered.

So why not just have one kid, we thought? Apparently, having a single child is a trend among our generation -- probably because it makes a whole boatload of sense. Certainly, a single child is cheaper, easier, lets you get more sleep, and provides more flexibility in your life than having multiple kids. At the very least, having one kid means you can use both hands to restrain them and both eyes to watch them and make sure they don't touch knives or electrical sockets or fire. It was tough for Leanne and I to think of reasons to have another kid.

Except when we looked at Olive.

When we watched her play and eat and smile and cry. When she started saying MAMA and DADA and TANKOO (that’s thank you). When we looked at pictures of her at 1 week and 1 month and 6 months old and remembered how much fun, without forgetting how much work, it was at each of those ages. When we watched her give her cousins kisses or give the little boy at the playground hugs. We would look at each other and know that we wanted another child.
That all the work and worry and exhaustion was worth it in spades. Parenthood is a drug and we are junkies. We also knew, despite the temptations of additional time and money, and despite the living, breathing, well-adjusted only children that we knew, that we wanted Olive to have a brother or sister.

Both Leanne and I have siblings. Her – an older brother. Me – two older brothers and a younger sister. Neither of us can imagine our childhood, or adulthood, without what they brought to our lives.

Also, we realized it might be nice to have a back-up kid in case Olive ends up on the pole.

The reasons may be silly, they may be trite, but they are our reasons. And they are the reasons why Leanne and I are expecting a new little one this spring.

Yup, Olive is going to have a little brother or sister.




Okay, truthfully, I have no idea what we were thinking. Parents who have more than one kid are probably having a difficult time reading this right now between their fits of laughter (“Oh my God, they are having another kid? They have NOOOOO idea what they are getting in to).

I am at once terrified, excited, nervous, panicked, and overjoyed – go ahead, put all those words into the thesaurus, write down what you find, and I’m probably all those too.

Once we decided that we were going to try for number two, we also decided that we wanted to “get it over with” – i.e. we wanted Olive and her brother or sister to be close in age. Lots of reasons for this: They get to go to high school together. We don’t need to put the diapering stuff away and drag it back out in a year. We want our kids out of the house by the time we are 50.

This little “development” will obviously change the blog. This is now going to be the “Education of a New Dad and the Re-Education of the Expectant Father.” I already have some blog entries that I wrote during the time we were trying to get pregnant (not while we were actually trying to…well, you get it) and over the first couple months of pregnancy that I will be posting over the coming weeks. I’ll also probably be talking about the pregnancy as much as I talk about Olive and the challenges of figuring out how to raise a toddler. This is going to be a fun six months and beyond.

Sleep Patterns

Sleep. If there is one thing that tests every new parent at some point, it is sleep. How to get it. How to keep getting it. How to persuade your young one to submit to it.

I have said this before, but if there is one thing I’ve learned about parenting it is that nothing lasts forever. Patterns shift and change. Likes become dislikes. A favorite toy gets discarded like a used tissue (or maybe for a used tissue, which has somehow become a more entertaining plaything). Kids go from breastmilk to formula to milk to pureed veggies to small solid foods to mouthing an entire apple in a matter of months. As soon as you get used to one, it is time to introduce something different. Everything happens fast and everything changes, usually just as one routine becomes, well, routine.

Sleep is a perfect example of changing habits.

Olive started out as a great sleeper. I wrote about this early on in the blog. We didn’t think we had a real baby. We never woke up exhausted and bleary eyed from late night tussles with the Sandman. Life was good.

But soon Olive decided she wanted to know what the world looked like at 4:00 AM. Then she decided that she liked sleeping with, or on, mommy and daddy. Then came the days when she would sleep easily from 7:30 PM – 6:30 AM – we call them the Golden Days. During this time we fell into a nice bed-time pattern. Change into pajamas (sometimes after a bath), brush her teeth, bring her downstairs, put her in to a sleep sack, and give her a bottle. By the time Double Jeopardy started, you were climbing the stairs with a limp and drooling toddler slung over your shoulder. Sing a quick rendition of “Hush Little Baby” and she was out.

But recently we eliminated the bed-time bottle, and everything went haywire.

When do we put her in to the sleep sack?

How do we give her milk at the end of the day (a moot point since she refuses to drink milk at all from a cup)?

How do we transition from dinner to playtime to bedtime without her thinking it is still playtime?

We struggled with this for a while. And we ended up with some ugly bedtime battles, some early mornings, and a tired toddler. But we think we have solved it for now.

New bedtime routine (which will probably only last for the next four weeks before changing again): bring Olive up to her room to change into pajamas (or get a bath), brush teeth. Shut door to her bedroom and lower lights. Read a parent-limited number of books, usually two or three, in a calm and sleepy-like voice. Put Olive into sleep sack and sing a long song with the lights off. Put in bed. We also spend a lot of time saying things like “…then you’ll go to bed” and “…but after this is time for sleep” and “It is time to say goodnight to daddy soon.”

The last few nights this routine has worked remarkably well. Reading the books seems to give her the time to just sit and decompress and get ready for dreamland that she WAS getting while drinking the bedtime bottle. Closing the door to her bedroom prevents her from running all over the house and thinking she is playing.

We’ll see if this works long-term – long term meaning until Thanksgiving – but the early returns are good.

What have been some of your bedtime routines for toddlers? Go ahead and leave a comment here on on the Facebook page.

Who Likes Oranges?

I'm sick and Olive is sick. Which doesn't make for a very pleasant house. Though I did go out and get one of those fancy battery-powered nasal aspirators and now I can't wait for Olive to get up from her nap so I can powersuck some snot. That will make my day.

You know what else makes my day? This picture.

I'm petty sure my mother-in-law took this a few months ago. I mean, come on, you couldn't fit more cuteness in the frame without adding bunnies or kittens.

MINE!

Hearing Olive talk has always been fun. Seeing her pick up more and more words is a thrill. She is at the point now where she can imitate almost anything you say, as long as she is in the mood. As you can see from the last post, she is becoming a girl that knows what she wants and is starting to be able to SAY what she wants. Where as we used to have to focus on reading her sometimes indecipherable, sometime obvious sign language, not she can firmly say yes and no (or more accurately “eh-eh” and “NNNNO!”). 6 months ago she would run around the house mumbling and you would fumble with various remedies to her distress.

“Do you want this ball? No? How about a drink? Not that either. Okay, how about a piece of cheese? An Apple? Do you want to be picked up? Do you want daddy to punch himself in the face?”

Now she runs up to you, grabs your hand and says “Apple” or “Juice” or “Cheese” or “Ball” or “Up”. It has made catering to her every whim and need SOOO much easier. Of course, you do need to deal with her whining and saying “Up!” over and over again while you push her in her stroller. And you need to figure out ways to get through the rest of the grocery shopping trip after she sees an apple and decides that is the word she wants to say for the rest of the stay. But overall, language is definitely a good thing.

Except for one little pesky word: MINE!

And it really should always be in capital letters like that because she rarely whispers it or says it in passing. It is almost always exclaimed with ferocity that only capital letters can really convey here.

MINE!

Short. Abrupt. To the point. And she says it a lot. We aren’t sure where she picked it up, but we are assuming daycare. No matter how many toys or how few kids there are in a day care, I think that kids learn really quickly to take possession of certain things. No way I’m letting you play with these blocks or those dolls or these books. These are MINE! Ownership. It is core to our humanity. If the apocalypse happened tomorrow you would bet that we would all be hording water and Spam and gasoline. MINE! Kids in daycare are just little, cuter versions of our imaginary post-apocalyptic selves.

MINE!

She says it about her crayons, her dolls, her dinner, her shoes, my dinner, my shoes, etc.
But MINE! Became a precursor to an exciting event last night. It was a gateway word, if you will. While in the bath, Olive was claiming ownership over her various toys. MINE! MINE! MINE! When she very clearly said: “My Duck!” I’m going to go ahead and count this has her first two word statement (I’m ignoring “I love you” which really comes out more as “Ahluvoooo” and “Buh-Bye” which is really one word).

So it won’t be long until MINE! Is replaced by “My ball” and “My cheese” and “My apple”. And then you know what happens next, right? Yup, she goes to Harvard.

Hat!

I now can't leave the house without Olive chanting "Hat! Hat! Hat!" and pointing to her head. I am, of course, very happy that she is talking and learned the very useful word, "hat." I also like that she has started to like hats -- an essential fashion accessory. But this love started towards the end of the summer, when the sun's rays were less intense. I wish she would have liked hats for the first two summers of her life, when she HATED wearing hats, and when the sun's rays shone intensely on what tiny amounts of melanin her skin possessed. I couldn't pay her to wear a hat (of course, that might be because she isn't even two years old and money means nothing to her). I was contemplating getting one stitched on at one point.

Now she hasn't met a hat that she doesn't like.

Olive is Back!

Okay, so it has been a little while since the last post. I recently had a friend ask if Olive had some sort of watermelon-related disaster that caused me to stop posting. Really, it is just that my life has been crazy and the thought of editing videos and downloading pictures and thinking of witty things to say seemed a little daunting. Leanne and Olive and I went six weeks at the end of the summer without being home for a weekend. We had loads of fun, but things like mowing the lawn and dishes and laundry and blogging kind of fell by the wayside. But, Olive is back. The blog is back. I promise.

This is also a bit of a milestone for me as a novice blogger. This is my 100th post. So maybe the pressure of getting the 100th post up just got to me and I froze. Anything is possible, I suppose.

So what is up in the life of Olive? Well, lots. I'll be reviewing the end of summer activities in the coming days, but it is hard for me to figure out what happened when without a calendar and a log of gas station receipts. So let's just try to review this weekend.

Leanne and I took Olive apple picking for the first time. Actually, it was also my first time apple picking. I know, at some point, apple picking became a go-to autumn activity for New Englanders. Well, I never got around to doing it. I don't think my parents were negligent, or biased against farmers, or trying to shield us from the harsh world of tree pruning or something like that. I just think that with four kids, our fall weekends were filled with soccer or dance classes or hockey or some sort of manual labor like raking leaves or painting fence pickets or making Nike shoes. Either way, this would be the first time I had been to an apple orchard.

If you have never been, apple picking is a little like migrant farm worker fantasy camp. You pay $20 for the privilege of walking up a hill and picking apples from the tree. Why we do this, I don't know, especially considering there are bags of apples, from the very same orchard, being sold for the same price, just steps away from where you hand over your money and someone hands you an empty bag. But the kids love it. I guess.

Like other apple orchards there was also a variety of non-apple activities: farm animals, a playground, a fish pond, etc. There was also a pumpkin patch. It isn't, of course, where they actually grow the pumpkins, it is just where they take pumpkins and scatter them in a field to give you the impression that you are actually picking them. Olive decided that to properly pick a pumpkin you must both try to pick it up and, for some reason, sit on it.

Despite leaving $50 poorer after the morning, we did come away with some pumpkins, a bag of apples, and 6 apple cider donuts that I am now officially addicted to. And, yes, Olive did seem to love everything about the day.

Watermelon

Olive is an eater. She’ll give almost anything a try but she definitely has her favorites. Banana. Tortellini. Peas. Even steak. But few foods can eclipse the gastronomical passion Olive has for that elegant and gigantic green fruit, the Cadillac of the melon world, that savior of mouths parched by summer heat: the watermelon.

My in-laws knew of this love affair when they sat Olive down for an afternoon snack this past weekend. They decided to see what would happen if Olive was confronted with not the usual handful of pieces, but with a half of an entire watermelon. Shock and awe ensued.

Olive is presented with the bounty.

“Really, this is all for me? You are joking right? Is this a dream, you know, like that movie Inception?”

“I can’t believe it! My head is about to explode with joy!”

“I LOVE WATERMELON! I LOVE MY GRANDPARENTS!”

Now down to business...

No, they didn’t really let her eat the entire half of the watermelon. Eventually they stopped laughing and taking pictures long enough to give her an appropriate serving size, but something tells me she wouldn’t have had a problem mouthing that whole thing.

(Photos courtesy of my mother-in-law)