Remedial Snowman Building (retraction)

A few days after I published my Remedial Snowman Building post, there was a knock at the door. Standing out front was a local attorney, retained by my mother to deliver the photo below, which was accompanied by a formal Cease & Desist order forbidding me to "further discuss in public forum any childhood deficiencies as they may relate to parental instruction or lack thereof with respect to snowman construction."

That said, and given the fact that I can't afford another snowman-related lawsuit, I'll take this opportunity to correct my snowman post. While it is true that to this day, I have absolutely no talent when it comes to snowmen, in my lifetime I have clearly built at least one with moderate success.

On the plus side, this means if Babe-O ever gets mad at me for not being able to build her one, I can show her this photo and point out that I USED to be able to build a snowman, but I must have pushed the knowledge out of my brain to make room for learning how to build all of her baby contraptions, which fit together like Erector sets from hell.

So there, I said it.

I have built a snowman. I was raised properly.

Oh – and one more thing: The snowman Polaroid was not really delivered by an attorney. It arrived along with a box of baby stuff and other goodies. Many thanks to the 'rents/grand'rents!

“You suck, Daddy”

Today was a heart-breaker.

At 7:15 this evening, Babe-O and I were where Babe-O and I always are at 7:15 in the evening – playing in the kitchen sink. We were about half way through bath time and I noticed my little girl, who was quite smiley just moments before, was giving me a kind of strange, stern look. In that moment, I felt a little like the soon-to-be loser of a quickdraw gunfight: by the time you realize you've made a mistake – you're dead.

In less than a second, the quiet stern look turned to an angry shouting look. She looked me right in the eye and started to cry very deliberately in my direction. I quickly realized that I had let her catch a little bit of a chill during her bath, so I turned the water back on and waited for it to warm up before pointing it towards the chilly baby.

Once the water had heated up (5 seconds in people years, 35 seconds in dog years, nine days in screaming baby years) I grabbed the spray/hose/nozzle thing and gave her a warm-up squirt…without taking into account that the sprayer needs to spit out that first bit of ice cold water before the warm stuff comes out.

SCREEEEAMING ensued.

For the very first time, I got what was very clearly a "You suck, Daddy" look. I was able to identify this particular look because when Mom-O came running in (the scream was very alarming), Babe-O immediately reached for her while glaring at me. At that point we aborted the bath project, and even as Babe-O was being carried upstairs, she never broke her angry gaze, which was aimed directly at me until she was out of sight.

All in all, tonight was a little bit of a heartbreaker, but it was still pretty adorable to catch another little glimpse of another side of Babe-O's personality.

So now it's your turn, fellow parents: when was the first time that your baby got really, really mad at you? Share your story in the comments below!

The handliest hand she’s ever seen

Right now, we're kicked back watching Supernanny on TV while Babe-O lounges around, probably amused by how long ago her bedtime was. We were doing some visiting this evening, which led us to missing our 7 p.m. bath/bed routine – which was fine until it wasn't.

Babe-O was delightful for most of the visit, being cuddly and wonderful, but once it started getting past that magic 7 o'clock hour, she got a little prickly. She slowly went from happy to sleepy, then from sleepy to pissed.

And I really mean pissed. She cries when she's upset, but she screams when she's pissed. She pretty much shouts deliberately right in your face. Then, when she gets really mad, she starts enunciating angry little sounds, which I'm pretty sure in her mind are the worst swear words a four-month-old girl can muster. My little sweetie.

So now we're back at home, cat in my lap, baby in Mom's lap, and dogs strategically arranged on couches.

Babe-O is acting like she always does when she's up way past her bedtime and is fighting sleep, which to the untrained eye might make her look like a little stoner. Right now she has rediscovered her left hand and is waving it slowly in front of her face, obviously amused by the handliest hand in the history of hands. When that got old (which took longer than you'd think), she looked up and noticed the ceiling fan, which, incidentally, is the fanliest fan in the history of fans.

As I'm writing this, I can see she is drifting off. Here's to a sleepy Friday night...

 

...I wish my hand was that cool.

Intro to sitting

Babe-O gets cooler and more fun to hang out with every day. Her latest advancement is sitting, which I now realize I've been taking for granted for quite a while now.

For years I've been going from office chair to meeting chair to desk chair to car chair to dinner chair to home office chair to recliner chair (rinse and repeat). But until the last week or so, Babe-O couldn't really sit anywhere, at least not without some help. But now she can finally sit up on her own, which means that we can stick her in her high chair or her Bumbo sitter and let her chill out in the room with us while we do stuff. She loves it and will either watch us bustle around doing our thing or will amuse herself with her toys.

The Bumbo sitter is a really cool invention, because it can actually prop up a baby pretty well even when the baby is too small to sit up solo. We could put Babe-O in hers when she was tiny, although until recently she would either tip over to one side or get tired and start to cry if she was in there for more than a minute or two -- much love for the Bumbo.

Anyway, the product is great but the marketing is quite terrible. If you are ever at the baby store, be sure to check out the Bumbo box. Just as a preview, Below is the photo they use, which features the two ugliest babies I've ever seen in print. And best of all, they look like tiny versions of the guys from TV's King of Queens. 

How's this for an obscure television reference?

Remedial snowman building

Today I was less of a baby parent and more of a dog parent. For starters, I spent lunch at work eating a god-awful ramen noodle "just add water" concoction and missed my usual noontime date with Babe-O. Then, because I had some client work to do this evening, Mom-O took over the bathtime ritual and left me to my own devices. 

Before long, the baby was sleeping happily and I was done with my work and puttering around the house with no one to play with.

At about ten o'clock, I headed outside with three dogs and a splash of whiskey in a coffee cup.

I knew it had been snowing outside, but it wasn't until the back door wouldn't open all the way that I realized just how much. Last night I cleared off the back deck and spend a little more than an hour snow-blowing and shoveling out front. By the time I went outside tonight, it didn't look like I had done either.

I started over on the back deck, first clearing the door area and then brushing the rails, carving out the steps, and doing all the heavy lifting. As I did this, the dogs just watched me, which was odd, until I realized that there was so much snow in the back yard that they couldn't even move around out there. The littlest and most enthusiastic one would hop along like a furry swimmer doing a very cold butterfly stroke, but the other two weren't having it.

So with my sweat pants tucked into my boots, one black glove, and one blue mitten (I was in a hurry to get out there), I started trudging. Oh, and I'm not usually a sweatpants kind of guy, but in the few minutes I spent with Babe-O today, she managed to pee all over my jeans.

Anyway, I trudged my way through the almost waist-deep snow until there was a big oval. This activity was much more tiring then I expected.

Once the oval was in place, the dogs had a blast running around like greyhounds at the track. The big dog was the only one tall enough to see over the edge of the trench, so unless you were standing up on the deck, you couldn't even see the little dogs. But there they were, going around and around until they were completely whipped.

At that point, I was roasting from trudging around in circles and didn't want to go inside yet, so I made them stay out a little longer to keep me company. I planned to stand out on the deck and finish my drink, but by this time it was thoroughly frozen to the deck rail that I couldn't even pick it up. When I finally did pry the thing off of the wood, my mitten-wearing hand lost its grip and send the thing flying into a three-foot snow bank. My littlest dog found it immediately and signaled the location like he had just spotted a downed bird.

With my (empty) cup perched safely on the doorstep, I figured I would take a few minutes and make a snow man. Then, if there was time, maybe a snow baby and a snow BMW.

Well, it turns out that I couldn't make a snow golf ball, much less a snow BMW. After a few minutes, I thought back a little bit and realized that to the best of my knowledge I've never made a snowman in my life.

What kind of childhood rip-off is that? As of my sixteenth birthday I could tell you how to shoot a potato through a garage door, open a beer bottle with the edge of a coffee table, and pull a quick U-turn using the parking brake. But apparently I missed that day in third grade where they teach you how to make a damn snowman.

I guess that's what HR types refer to as "distinct skill sets."

After staggering back inside, my skill-rich wife promised to take me outside for a lesson in snowman building later this week. Which is good, because otherwise I'd eventually have to endure Babe-O's what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-my-daddy-and-why-is-he-using-duct-tape-and-a-basketball-to-make-me-a-snow-man look a few years down the road.

Table for Three

My wife and I have a nasty television habit. It isn't so much that we watch a lot of it; it's just that the stupid thing is on all the time. Constant background noise. All day, all night – it's just sort of always there.

Which is fine. Every once in a while it feels like I've got voices in my head and need to grab the iPod (like now) or work outside (too cold). But other than that, it's fine.

At least until Babe-O came along. Babe-O also enjoys the TV and her little eyes jump at the thing every chance she gets. We'll catch her watching with one wide eye while she's nursing, or enjoying the flickering of the TV's reflection in the window.

Basically, we try to discourage that sort of thing. Except, of course, during dinner.

Dinner time has always been in front of the TV for us. Maybe that's pathetic, but the TV trays stay out day and night. The kitchen table is pretty much a catch-all for modern day debris like the mail, little piles of baby laundry, and the diaper bag.

Well, tonight it was time to take a stand. As soon as I got home today, Babe-O and I suited up and went to work ("suited up" referring to Babe-O being strapped to my chest in her Jeep baby sling).

We cleaned up the kitchen quickly, while she hung on my every word as I told her what all the kitchen crap is (spoon, fork, digger thingy, little chopper guy, giant spoon, another &%$# giant spoon, etc). Then we unearthed that kitchen table like a couple of Siamese archeology majors.

Once everything was cleared off, we gave it a quick wipe-down, using lemon juice and water at the recommendation of our slightly hippyish pediatrician ("mercury-based vaccines are no big deal, but Windex will kill your ass"). And if I do say so myself, it is a good-looking kitchen table. Many thanks to my Aunt-in-Law for donating it to us when we got our first apartment.

Anyway, we got the table cleared off and then stuck one of the chairs in the corner to make way for Babe-O's high chair (thanks for the high chair to another Aunt-in-Law).

Then, for the first time, we had a little family dinner together. Babe-O is still 100 percent breast fed, so she just watched us and played while we ate. She was obviously a little uneasy about the situation at first, but eventually settled into playing with a spoon and a cup and even made a little conversation with the occasional cooing.

I enjoyed it much, and think that the girls did, too. Call us retro, but I think we've got a new routine on our hands.

Written, produced, and directed by Dad O.

Today was a tremendously snowy, crappy day. The major declared a weather emergency, and all that jazz.

While I was battling the elements trying to get the work, my snowbound wife was battling a cantankerous baby who was outdoing herself with respect to crankiness. By the end of the day, the cranky baby was still being a cranky baby, and Mom-O had a doctor's appointment fast approaching. To avoid Babe-O being dragged out of the house into the snowy afternoon and then into a boring appointment, I came home from work early and took over baby duty.

That meant Babe-O and Dad-O were home alone for a few hours, which doesn't happen very often.

Whenever Babe-O and I are on our own, we try to keep things interesting, just because it's an unusual thing and we don't always get to hang out as much as we'd like. Today we broke out the camera my parents gave us this Christmas to shoot a video.

Ever since she was quite tiny, Babe-O loved for me to sing her Dire Wolf, by the Grateful Dead (with lyrics modified slightly to exclude references to murder and whiskey). My lack of milk-producing boobs means that when she's upset, our little song is often our only hope. So we shot a little music video, complete with scenes starring Babe-O's favorite cocker spaniel. 

We had fun doing it and she got a kick out of watching it on the big screen when we were done. And maybe, if things ever get really ugly and I'm not around, our little video just might save the day. When all else fails, try the homemade Dire Wolf music video.

12 pounds: mostly baby, some snot

So we're coming up on about a month of on-again off-again sick baby. Nothing serious – no fever, no 360 degree head spinning, no pea soup on the ceiling – mostly occasional fussiness and a nearly constant flow of snot and goo out of her little head.

This means that several times a day, Babe-O has a date with Mommy, a bottle of nasal saline, and her little blue snot sucker.

It goes like this: saline up the nose, screaming, snot sucker up the nose, screaming, suck – squirt, suck – squirt, screaming…you get the idea. Technically, I think it qualifies as waterboarding, but that's for Geneva to decide.

Whatever you call it, I feel bad that she has to go through it and I feel bad that her Mom has to be the bad guy about it so often.

I did a little snot-sucking while I was doing her bath tonight and it pretty much broke my heart. And that's without the saline.

The doctor insisted that it wasn't a big deal and that we should pretty much expect her to go through about 10 colds a year. If they all run as long as this one, that doesn't leave a lot of time for being healthy. That said, I'm hoping that this one runs its course and she never has another cold as long as she lives. Or at least as long as I live.

Plus, there's the whole possibility of allergies, which would be a huuuuuge pain, considering our three-dog, one-cat household. Fortunately, we are told that kids who grow up on farms are dramatically less likely to develop allergies than those yuppied-out, paved-road-driving, indoor-plumbing-having kids. And our house is about as close to a farm as you can get around here without running into zoning issues.

So wish us luck. May our noses stay dry and our snot-suckers collect dust.

The doctor washes his hands (of our vaccination schedule)

So today was Babe-O's four month well-baby visit, which is a bit of a misnomer because with her cold she isn't feeling like such a well baby. Regardless, off we went, knowing that we'd have to have the potentially awkward "we're not hippies, but we're not down with the traditional vaccination schedule either" talk. He was very upfront, and told us plainly that we were more likely to die in a car crash on our way home than to see any complications related to the vaccines – due to metal content or anything else.

Fortunately, he is also aware of the fact that she is our baby and it is our call. Besides, we aren't doing anything crazy. We are just spreading the shots over more appointments than the standard recommendations. So today, instead of getting a fistful of shots all at once, she got half a fistful today and will get another half a fistful next month at a quickie appointment with the nurse. The doctor simply said that he'd do whatever we wanted, but if she contracts Polio or Amish or something due to the funky schedule, he's not responsible.

Bottom line: today was a home run. Rewind to Babe-O's last set of shots (which were administered per the recommended schedule): she was stuck with needles until she screamed and hyperventilated until she threw up. After that, we got her home, where she spent the rest of the day tired, cranky, and looking ill.

This time around, her first vaccination was administered orally, where she just had to suck on a sugary little medicine wand for a bit. She was thrilled.

After that, she had to deal with one needle stick, which means Mom whispering happy things into her cheek while I held her little arms down (traumatizing for all concerned). Babe-O cried for about twenty seconds and settled right down.

After that, I headed back to work, but reports from the field indicate that the baby was happy and upbeat for the rest of the day. Big improvement over the last time around.

Most Valuable Lunch (and vaccination theory)

It was one of those days… by about 10 a.m. I was stressed out and agitated. It doesn't happen all that often, but today is sure did. I was on generally tired, on deadline for freelance work, and playing post-holiday catch-up at the office. Plus I had to skip my shower this morning and for some reason was walking around smelling like a cross between white bread and feet.

I was planning to work through lunch, just to keep the productivity train moving, but before long realized that if I didn't catch a breather I was going to have a little freak-out. So…it was a good time to pop home for some time away from the office.

Lucky for me, Mom-O needed to run out to an appointment and I got the chance to let her fly solo and to hang out with Babe-O for a while. It was reenergizing to say the least.

My little girl was a delight as we played together and hung out until Mom got back and I scurried back to work. Things were looking up as I drove back, though I still wasn't really thinking about anything except getting back home at the end of the day to see her again.

I guess that was a short, uneventful little story, but it was certainly the highlight of my day.

As far as things go that aren't the highlight of my day, now I'm sitting down to a stack of childhood vaccination research so that we have some decent information at hand tomorrow when we take Babe-O to the doctor for her four month well-baby appointment. Last time, we went to the appointment not expecting any discussion of vaccinations at all, but apparently she was due for her first few. We were caught unprepared and our perhaps overzealous doctor pretty much plowed through a bunch of medical mumbo-jumbo and stuck a bunch of needles into our kid.

We aren't planning to do anything crazy like skip vaccinations altogether, we're just looking into a more spread out schedule. We're just thinking that when we're talking about a twelve pound kid it is probably best to err on the side of caution when it comes to injecting metal-rich concoctions into a little body. So, long story short, instead of two shots this week, she'll get one this week and another one next week. Twice the doctor visits, but other than that it seems like a win-win.

Happy reading…I'm off to hit the good old Vaccine Book.

Babe-O’s big Saturda(dd)y

Today was cool, because we had a lot to do but nothing that couldn't be done with the little one close by. It was great to spend a full Saturday hanging out with my littlest girl.

I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and the living room while Babe-O rode around strapped to my chest in her Jeep baby carrier (who says GM is over-diversified?). The carrier is awesome, and she is now big enough to hang out in there without getting too tired from holding her head up. So as I did stuff like unload the dishwasher and wipe down counters, she got to watch me work.

After a good hour or so in the carrier, she did start to get fussy, so I took the excuse to quit cleaning and headed up to her room with her where Mom-O was working. As she grows and acquires more stuff, we need to keep juggling things around in her room so that it all fits. While Mom-O plugged away at that, we sat on the floor and played together. It was a good time had by all. Or at least for me and the baby.

That got us through the morning, and Babe-O slept through a good chunk of the afternoon. She's been a little on the sick side and wasn't particularly happy unless she was curled up with her Mom cuddling and eating.

Later, once she was up and at 'em again we headed out to the store to pick up some baby supplies – mostly clothes because this kid just doesn't quit growing. Going out with her has become a whole lot cooler in the last few weeks, because now she is big enough to ride in a big stroller seat instead of having to stay in her car seat, which doesn't really let her do anything but sleep. The car seat is great for front, rear, and side impact, but crappy for rolling through the grocery store. Now that she can sit in the bigger seat, she can look around, play with toys, and generally enjoy herself.

More important than that, though, is that I have somebody to hang out with while my painstakingly careful shopper of a wife does her thing. So now, instead of discussing the merits of changing laundry detergent for forty-five minutes, I can hang out with Babe-O, either hovering close by or cruising the aisles looking for neat stuff to play with. Today I did just that, that is, until the poor little girl got sick of listening to me talk and fell asleep slumped over to one side of her seat. Funny enough, she zonked out within a few minutes of her usual bedtime (which we were obviously out way past). She is a little routine machine sometimes.

Once we got her sleepy butt into the car and back home, we were wondering what kind of mood she would be in, but she perked right up when she heard the word "bath." Even on a busy workday, bath time is a Babe-O and daddy thing, so I was happy to spend some more time with her in the kitchen sink. Aside from a mildly traumatic incident where she snorted a bit of splashed bathwater, all went well. I was surprised she wasn't more sleepy given how late it had gotten.

We tried to finish her night as we usually do – out of the bath, upstairs to get dressed, downstairs to get fed, and upstairs to bed, but Babe-O felt more like watching the TV then eating (her daddy can do both at the same time quite effectively). Mom-O was watching Sleepless in Seattle, so maybe it was just a chick thing. We figured that it was okay for her to stay up and watch a crappy romance flick if she wanted to, so we put her in her swing and let her hang out with us while we did our thing (clack away at our respective laptops – we rock).

Regardless, she was sound asleep after about five minutes. I don't think she has yet acquired the female taste for romantic comedies.

Dad-O is now on Twitter

Are you on Twitter? If so, please give us a follow: username Dad_O.

Twitter is a microblog, which allows me to post 140 character updates (tweets) throughout the day from my PC or phone.

If you're not on Twitter, all tweets will be displayed in real time under "Josh On Twitter" on the right hand side of this blog. To look at the tweet history, just visit my Twitter profile.

Babe-O and I hope you enjoy this new feature. 

I like this kid

You know, I really like Babe-O. You'd think that would go without saying, but really it doesn't.

Everybody loves their kids.

You have to. It's the genetics. It's the law. You just do.

But nothing says you have to like your kid. And I imagine that there are a lot of people that do love their kids, but never get around to particularly liking them.

I like Babe-O. She's great. She is genuinely fun to hang around with.

Granted, she's only four months old, but she is really cool. She's funny. She's nice.

And I have a feeling that it only gets better from here. (Just keep snide remarks about teenage girls to yourself.)

So tonight was a great Friday night. I got home a little on the early side, hung out with Babe-O until right about now (when she had to pop over to see Mom-O for her dinner), and in a few minutes it will be time for me to do her nightly bath and put her to bed. In the couple of hours that I've been home, we've played with her toys, done tummy time, and danced to the CD that came with her Rhinoceros Tap book. That is an awesome book, by the way, and she squealed with delight and flashed big crazy smiles as we bounced up and down to the music.  She's a very musical kid, which is cool.

Anyway, here's to a short post for the moment, because hanging out with my kid is a whole lot more fun than hanging out with my computer.