I keep meaning to write down all the quotes I hear from Hannah, and figured this might be a good place to put them.
So, we are driving and hit an uneven spot that kind of rocks the car.
Hannah: “Daddy, the wobbly spots make my head hurt”
Me: “I see. You know what else can make your head hurt?”
H: what?
M: whinging
H: no dad, that only makes your head hurt.
So you know the cup stacking thing? You know, this one?
Well, we have been playing a variation of that around our house, except it takes two players.
Heather or I frantically stack Hannah’s stacking cups, and she flails her her little arms and laughs manically. Well, maybe not manically, but it makes better word picture that way right? 🙂 Whatever the case it’s actually a lot of fun, I just haven’t fully adjusted to the fact that games don’t end on my time anymore.
Hannah has been quite the hand full over the past month. I think she has cut two or three teeth and gone into a weird drama phase over the past week. We don’t really know what the story is there, but as Heather always says “kids are a mystery”
It’s possible she is picking up on how stressed Heather and I are… it’s been a crazy, crazy month (more on that in a future post!) but I didn’t think we were that obvious about it. I suppose a meaningful percentage of her intuition is tuned to perceiving everything she can about mom and dad right now, so I might be selling her short.
Oh, and we took a trip out to Colorado for a few days, dropping her off in Nebraska with my parents. It was a great trip, and she apparently had lots of fun with Grandma and Grandpa, but I suppose a few days away from home plus 14 total hours in the car could, perhaps have contributed to her unrest 🙂
Speaking of that car ride, I don’t know how you are suppose to handle hour six of seven, but Hannah and I used an apple and a hat:
It seems to have worked ok… she looked better in the hat than I did.
-Jordan
Here was the plan for our weekend:
Sleep in Saturday, then Heather would go take some pictures for friends, and Hannah and I would hang out during the morning. The afternoon would be open for whatever, and then we didn’t have any plans beyond Church Sunday.
Let me tell you how things actually went:
2:00AM Hannah wakes up screaming, she was unable to explain why. One bottle and lots of rocking later, she is peacefully sleeping again. Veteran parents may have developed a system wherein both parents aren’t completely disrupted by this kind of thing. Heather and I haven’t really gotten that down. Or maybe we just forgot already. When Hannah woke up every night, we had some sort of system and I think we both felt we were sleeping ok, but now that a middle of the night wake-up is so rare we both end up being disrupted.
5:00AM The On-Call phone rings (thanks to some changes at work I am back on the roster for on-call) and a key system is throwing errors the front-line support guy doesn’t know what to do with. I did a little digging (three cheers for being able to VPN into our systems from home) and talked to the help desk guy and we decided there was a chance this was being caused because some elements of the system weren’t up from their overnight maintenance mode yet. Had I done a little more due diligence prior to heading home from work I may have been quicker to realize what was going on, but my on-call skills are a little rusty. 🙂 Back to bed by 5:45ish
6:00AM Heather and I agree that we are probably done sleeping. Somehow we have lost the sleeping in skill. I start on the traditional Saturday pancakes… right after starting a large pot of coffee. Hannah wakes up a few minutes later, and we have a little family breakfast!
6:30AM Help desk guy calls back, things are still broken. Armed with coffee, I review the error logs again and realize this must be due to an upgrade performed the night before. Queue two hours of phone calls and e-mails working to coordinate a least-downtime solution.
11ish AM Heather is taking pictures and Hannah and I are keeping busy around the house. Hannah by finding everything her little arms can reach while on her tipsy-toes and grabbing it, me by looking for quick-hit chores I can do while keeping her occupied. Wash the sheets! That’s an easy one, I will pile the blankets over here, and as an added intensive to stay out of trouble I will let Hannah play with my phone on top of the pile of blankets. That should about be her ideal distraction for a few minutes.
So, I started the wash, and sat down to see what kind of games Hannah and I could improvise. But wait, somehow Hannah managed to bury my phone deep in these blankets… Nope not in the blankets… maybe under the … nope. Not to worry I have SeekDroid setup on my phone I will just cause it to ring and know what she did with it…. “Unable to contact device” Up to this point I had been a little foggy I suppose, between the short night and the post-crisis-rush feeling I wasn’t anywhere near my sharpest. And yet, it really didn’t take too long to realize where my phone was!
You may have heard of someone who dropped their phone in some water and was able to dry it out with a bag of rice or some similar approach. Those techniques may in fact be effective, but I am willing to bet not on phones that were placed at the bottom of a running washing machine for several minutes!
And really, after that the weekend was fairly uneventful. 🙂
-Jordan
That’s a milestone right?
Hannah picked out a great one at daycare, and then carefully cultivated it before lovingly sharing it with mom and dad.
On the one hand, she wanted to cuddle, and that is rare these days, on the other hand she was unhappy, and holding her didn’t soothe her as much as she would have liked.
That picture was taken before the cold really hit Heather or I. Two weeks and a prescription for antibiotics each, and Heather and I are almost back to normal. Somehow Hannah kicked this thing much faster than we did. 🙂
-Jordan
P.S I suppose I am obligated to admit that I am aware that I haven’t posted in like two months, and that this post is a little light on the word count, so um… noted 😉 I can’t say if this is a trend I will be able to reverse or not.
Well, there was a time when I worried that having a child would dominate the blog.
As it turns out, having a child dominates my time, making doing anything on the blog kind of hard. I do have plenty of time to reflect on things that might be interesting… and then talk myself out of posting them…
I have a few observations I wanted to remember someday, so I will share here.
I suspect these things may not be as profound a year from now, but it’s something, and I enjoy taking a minute to reflect. We talk to parents with kids nearing two and they can’t seem to remember a single detail from the “not yet crawling” phase, so I guess there is a never ending stream of new experiences awaiting us in the days ahead.
-Jordan
As Hannah’s eighth week draws to a close a few patterns are starting to emerge. I think about these a lot, given that it is my job to put her to sleep each night.
I have thought about this enough to provide a helpful chart of the bedtime process:
Sometimes we skip that initial “Upset” blip, but almost never do we skip the “end of the world” cry before passing out.
On a very positive note, she has slept through the night for the past three nights. We hope this is the start of a trend, but it’s too early to know for sure.
On a final note, waking up is really cute right now:
-Jordan
Ok, so maybe someday I will find myself detailing the pros and cons of a diaper bag. Today is not that day.
What I do want to talk about are a few items I owned pre-baby that have proven very useful with an infant in the house.
First up, a tablet computer. Now it’s a bit of a stretch to say this was a pre-baby item, because I used the impending birth of our daughter as the excuse I gave myself to justify spending all my post-gift buying allowance on a single item. I purchased a Nexus7 from Google. I don’t know how I would feel about the tablet if Hannah hadn’t arrived about a week after it did. Without a child in the mix I don’t find surfing, or playing little time waster games all that engaging when I have a real computer 20ft away.
That all changes when you have a baby in one arm. The tablet is wonderful for keeping up with light reading online, or doing real basic e-mail etc. The N7 is light enough to easily work one handed, although you need a second hand to do much interaction. I haven’t had much time with an IPad, but I think in this use case, the smaller tablet is probably more useful, simply for the one-handed option. Little time waster games or random online reading make it a lot easier to wait that extra five minutes to make sure Hannah is really asleep before trying to lay her down at night.
The second device that has come in handy is my Kindle. I wasn’t using it a lot early on, in part because I was so sleep deprived I was afraid my retention would be so poor as to make the reading completely useless. I don’t know if that really would have been true, but whatever the case I am not so sleepy now and have really enjoyed reading books again.
The place where the kindle shines, much like the N7 is one handed operation. The kindle is truly a one handed device, where the N7 only kind of is, and a book really isn’t when it comes time to turn the page. One of the other advantages the kindle has over the N7 is being a more paper-like screen so I can light the room with a soft lamp instead of blasting myself in the face with a bright screen. This may sound trivial, but it’s hard to peek down and see if Hannah’s eyes are close when your eyes aren’t actually adjusted to the rooms ambient light.
I suspect this may be the least interesting aspect of a new baby for anyone reading this… but so far I haven’t distilled much else down to an idea for a post yet. 🙂
-Jordan
This will probably be a short post, and perhaps not the most profound, but a post nonetheless.
I have pondered what to cover here and what would be so utterly mundane as to be annoying to read. After much more thinking than typing(holding a baby kind of enforces that) I have come to the realization that blogs are inherently filled with naval gazing, and the fact that my stated purpose for the blog is to have a record of life as it happens.
Our daughter is six weeks old. Our days all run something like this: up at six, but Heather has already been up once about 3am to feed Hannah, but now we are both up. I take Hannah and work on breakfast as best I can one handed (getting pretty good at it) while Heather showers and gets ready for the day. I go to work, Heather does whatever Hannah will let her get done.
At noon most days I am able to come home (something we are very grateful for) but it’s less of an extra dose of family time and more a chance to change a diaper and give “mom” a short break.
In the evening, I am primarily responsible for Hannah, with perhaps a small hand-off to run down to the gym. It turns out the 6 to 9 block of time is her most active, although not particular interactive yet, time of day. We play to the extent she can, and maybe read, all of that eventually leading up to bed time.
It has been my job to put her to bed, which consists of trying to convince a 6-week old that being wrapped up like a mummy and laid in a basket is not only ok, it’s the ideal time to sleep! Some nights this is easy, some nights it can take hours, but so far she has eventually conceded the point, if only from fatigue.
( actual swaddled baby not pictured)
Stay tuned for more posts detailing the exciting new changes Hannah has brought to our household! 🙂
-Jordan
Now that things have settled down to a somewhat predictable, if very different than before, life with a baby in the house, I thought I would take a minute to go over some parts of my “go to the hospital” plan that didn’t work so well, and maybe a few that did.
Before that I suppose I should give a quick rundown of events leading up to the birth of Hannah. Tuesday December 18th, Heather and I both went to work as normal. About 4:30 that afternoon, she called me to ask that I come straight to her office and take her to the hospital. This meant that we simply asked Heather’s mom, Pam, to pick up the bags we had packed for this very event. It also meant that the first of a few mistaken assumptions on my part were exposed.
Assumption one: I will be the one to pickup the bags. We had attached a list to the bags, detailing daily use items such as a toothbrush that would need to be added at the last minute. The list only contained items for Heather, because I only needed a couple extra things added. Namely, toothbrush, deodorant, kindle, nexus tablet, charger for all three devices.
Assumption two: Because I would be picking up the bags, I could pull on the sweatshirt that wouldn’t fit in the backpack. Warm clothing for me has the unfortunate habit of taking up an enormous amount of space in a bag, so I decided to just wear the clothing at least until we got to our room.
Packed items that I overdid:
Granola bars: A few of these were nice, given that Pam and I were acting as backup nurses basically all night, and couldn’t really leave the room. What we didn’t need were two entire boxes of bars.
Distraction items for Heather: We had movies, music, massage lotion, books… you name it, we had it. None of it got used during labor. Heather did watch a movie or two in the postpartum room.
Distraction items for Jordan: I had made a point of loading up my kindle with a bunch of books, and had queued up a nice backlog of interesting articles on my RSS feed. The reality was that pre Hannah I needed to be attentive to Heather (even when she didn’t need anything per say, she just wanted to feel like she wasn’t going through things alone). Post Hannah I was too tired to think about pleasure reading.
Vending machine money: This seemed like a great idea, but I already had granola bars, and if I had time to go down the hall to a vending area I had time to hit up the cafeteria and get real food.
Unexpected wins:
My tablet. I purchased A Nexus 7, expecting to read and maybe play a few games on it while at the hospital. What I ended up using it for was for communication. E-mail, Facebook and Skype all worked surprising well, and were a much greater priority than I expected them to be.
A blanket. Yes, the nurses brought plenty of blankets into our room… or they probably would have been plenty if the “cot for dad” built into the wall wasn’t built into “floor to ceiling windows on 3 sides” alcove, and Hannah didn’t come right before a blizzard. The blanket was theoretically for Heather I think… I can’t actually remember what I packed it for. Given that I didn’t have a sweatshirt, a nice soft fleece style blanket was a lifesaver.
I think that covers the majority of the adjustments / reflections I had regarding the items we packed for the hospital.
-Jordan
Nelsons 