Busy, busy, busy...

Man oh man, I am just forgetting all about you guys too often!  Since my last post was in October, obviously many things have transpired.  I’d love to blame the holidays for my lack of action… so I will!  First Thanksgiving, first Christmas, first New Year’s, first MLK day, first Groundhog Day, and soon his first birthday!  Busy, busy times…  Well, he’s developing quite the grill piece, we’re up to 7, almost 8 teeth I think now, and he loves to show them off.  Such a happy little guy!  In tune with his happiness, he is also developing quite the affinity for dance.  He gets that from his daddy, as I have been known to cut rugs on the reg… (Unsubstantiated claim)  He also has a couple walkers now, and he uses them.  He can pick himself up to his feet from behind one of those things and take off, usually towards something he shouldn’t be interested in, which brings me to my next point.  What the hell is a “terrible two”?  This kid’s not even one yet and I can’t imagine him getting into “more” things than he does now.  His favorite activities now include removing everything from our “lazy Susan” corner cabinet and turning on and off every piece of equipment housed in our entertainment center!  Our little condo is covered in toys, and all he wants to do is take the Lawry’s seasoning salt and hide it in my wife’s nightstand.  Oh, “childproof” you say?  Let’s talk about that…  I haven’t yet devised a way to childproof the corner cabinet, but everything else he can reach (or at least what he could reach 2 months ago) is childproof-ed.  I have turned my entire condo into an aspirin bottle, and he can sniff out the one freakin’ cabinet that can still be opened!  Childproofing does nothing for me other than make it a pain in the ass to live in my house, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.  I can tell that I’m moments away from rambling about nonsense, so I’ll just cut it here.  Updates to come, especially since the big first birthday is on the horizon.  Stay tuned!

Wait... What month is it?..

Wow, did I really just miss the whole month of October on this deal?  I guess I’ve been busy, or lazy, or… I don’t know, pick one.  Where should I begin?  Ian had his first trip to a corn maze/pumpkin patch last month, thanks largely to his overgrown child of an aunt who decided that completing “corn maze” was a bucket-list able event.  The place was Fritzler Corn Maze in Greely, which was admittedly amazing.  They had fair food, a barrel train (uh, yeah, like a train made of barrels with wheels, with elementary school plastic chairs inside them, being pulled by an ATV at like 30 miles per hour), several inflatables for bouncing, slides, and of course two cannons, one firing ears of corn and a big one for blasting punkin’s.  Oh, and the 2 corn mazes they had generated the elegant form of one Peyton Manning when viewed from above.   With all that, I felt they deserved an endorsement.  I will say that a place like that does a lot to remind us of why we decided to raise Ian out here.  You just don’t see events like that in an urban setting.  Soon after came Halloween, where Ian was a “chicken”.  Why is “chicken” in quotes, you might ask?  It is my belief that the costume purchased for Ian was a mosaic of multiple costumes that somehow found their way together… Ridiculous, I know, but I also know that I’ve never seen a chicken with webbed feet.  Then this month was a birthday party for Ian’s betrothed wife, which was a good time with plenty of squealing, crying, laughing, and diapers.  That’s about it for recent events.  As for physical change, Ian has four teeth out now, and it’s making the sleep situation ridiculous.  He actually has been running a fever for the past few days, too, which makes him super happy, as you may imagine. Also, in writing this I realized why I didn’t write anything in October… we moved!  Left our giant rental house behind for a smaller place, mostly since we were tired of cleaning that 6-bedroom place, as well as cleaning out our wallets when the utility bills came.  I guess that’ll about wrap it up for our top stories, so until next time.

Those who can't do...

So, when we were pregnant with Ian, I was well aware of my skill deficiencies in all areas of infant care.  As a result of this consciousness, I pretty much jumped at the chance when I learned there were several “new parent” classes available at the midwife practice we were using.  One such class, called “Daddy Boot Camp”, was of particular interest to me, since as the name suggests, it’s just for dads and focuses on FAQ’s in a sort of crash-course manner.  It turned out to be a lot more of a group therapy thing than an informative thing, but I digress…  This past Saturday, I was invited back as their “Veteran Dad” so I could share my vast amount of acquired knowledge about babies with all the nervous soon-to-be’s.  Little did they know, right?  Anyway, I was perceived as a master of the newborn universe thanks greatly to Ian.  This class is 3 hours long and he was totally perfect the entire time, even without his mother being there.  He smiled at everyone, played on the floor quietly with some stuff I brought, showed everyone how he’s already got a tooth and he’s crawling and pulling himself to his feet, and then he even took like an hour nap.  I was pretty ashamed of myself for bringing my perfect little baby to show off to a bunch of guys who statistically aren’t going to have nearly that easy of a time, but then I realized that perhaps some, like me, who were the most scared of the sleepless nights and wailing babies could actually be relieved to see that not all the horror stories are true.  You’ll lose sleep, but not necessarily all of it.  They’ll cry, but not necessarily all the time.  They’ll blow creamy peanut butter out of their ass, but not necessarily all over your lap.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a new dad (and again I feel I’m pretty spoiled with Ian), it’s that no matter how bad you thought it was going to be, that little face will always make you remember how not bad it really is.

Do me a solid...

While Ian has apparently mastered the phases of liquids and gasses (yes, that's a fart joke), he is merely an amateur at the solids phase.  Ian has had about a week now of "real" food, adding all manner of fruits and vegetables to his previous rice-cereal repertoire.  He currently eats avocado, carrots, zucchini, apples, pears, bananas, and probably other things that I'm already forgetting.  He's even eating them in a high chair, thanks to his Abuela.  Along with his first foods, he has also recently had his first cold.  I suppose it could be said that we've been luckier than most on the infirmary front, having had over six months without so much as a sneeze, but it can still break your heart listening to him breathe through his mouth because his little nose is too plugged up.  His eyes are always red and watery, and he just can't get comfortable enough to sleep any longer than half an hour at a time.  It's been a while since I've felt as helpless as I do when I just can't seem to help him, or even explain to him what's wrong with him in a manner he'll understand just to soothe him a little.  After a day or two, he finally had his first unscheduled doctor trip, where we were assured that it was just a little cold, and we could only help by putting a humidifier in the room (which sounds completely ridiculous to a person who fled from Florida, by the way), and the occasional doling out of children's Tylenol.  He has since rebounded, and although he's still a little under the weather, he's definitely been showing signs of life again, and the return of his little smile is enough to mend your previously broken heart.

Man of the cloth...

Save the trees!.. Save the whales!.. Save the ozone!.. Save the planet!.. Whatever most people's reasoning is for doing cloth diapers, ours is more of a "Save the money!.."  After  the baby showers we had before Ian was born, we had quite a stockpile of disposable diapers, but now (almost 6 months to the day) we are finally running low on them, meaning it's time to start the somehow-more-disgusting task of wrapping Ian's little tushy in a beach towel.    My wife is all about the cloth diapers, but I've got to say I'm not totally convinced yet.  We've had a few dry runs with the cloth (no pun intended, especially since there was nothing "dry" about them) and I just find them to be a little more cumbersome than expected.  We've got several of the regular 2-piece kind, meaning the aforementioned beach towel which gets covered up by some rubber pants with several-thousand buttons on them.   You know what's fun?  Trying to wrap that beach towel around Ian's ass while he does triple-axles on his changing table, which now touches both the top of his head and the bottom of his feet simultaneously.  If you're lucky enough to get that Sham-wow into a position where there's only a slight chance of leakage, which is your best-case scenario, all you have to do figure out which of the several-thousand buttons match up to form the vague shape of a diaper, which is a bit like folding your leftover Chinese food up in an elegant foil swan, assuming your leftovers are flopping around like a headless cat.  We also have several all-in-ones, which are one piece as the name suggests and are therefore only half as difficult to get him into.  I suppose I'll have to figure it out eventually, or I could just sneak out like a closet-smoker at 3 am to buy disposables from the convenient store...

The root of all evil...

No, no... It's not money like normal people's struggling parents told us when we were young... It's teeth!  I know,  quite the shock... allow me to elaborate.  Ian has began the apparently long and arduous task of sprouting teeth, and it's amazing the amount of difficulty that comes from growing teeth.  And here I thought that sore gums were the major part of it, but was I ever wrong.  So, I suppose the main thing that I wouldn't have guessed is that apparently having teeth makes you shit more.  Since his one little tooth has broke through the gum on his lower jaw, he's been blowing it out his ass like never before.  A couple days ago, he even had his first "big-boy" shit, which evidently means he stops merely staining the back half of his diaper and instead fills it with the Sam's Club size creamy Jif.  And the smell is unexpected as well, like a dead donkey pickled in ammonia.  He's started doing some serious business just in time for us to try and switch to cloth diapers... great!  Also, he has regressed to sleeping for only two hours at a time, which is especially difficult since he now sleeps in his own room, so we have to actually get up.  Anyway, the moral is that he's much more irritable, much less sleepy, and much more efficient at processing what he eats into a aromatic heap of Pampers.  It's enough to make you think that toothless hillbillies are really on to something...

"Today's episode is brought to you by... the number 5"

Ian is 5 months old now...  Seems weird, like only yesterday he would just lay in your arms and stare blankly at you, or anything else making noise, and now he won't stop air-humping the floor when you put him on his tummy.   I'm told this is a natural progression before he figures out his limbs are required to crawl, but I still can't help but laugh when he does it (possibly because "Humpin' Around" by Bobby Brown always seems to pop into my head).  He did make a conscious effort to crawl to his daddy a week ago, and took two full strides to reach me, but I call that a fluke and am still waiting for him to become mobile.  We've just returned from my parents' house in Junction, where Ian was able to have a meet-and-greet with a few aunts and uncles he had not yet met.  It was no surprise to us that everyone seemed to adore him, especially since he pretty much just smiled and laughed for the entire long weekend.  As usual, a trip to his grandma's yielded many spoils, but the most enticing was a "bumbo" seat from a recent yard-sale expedition.  It's pretty cool that he can now pretty much sit up on his own with it, and it also has a little tray from which he received his first meal of rice cereal.  Oh, and does he devour rice cereal like a pro...  I find it particularly amazing watching him and seeing first hand just what kinds of instincts we are born with.  He was able to eat the whole bowl we made him, with a spoon and everything, like he had been doing it for years.  He didn't even slop it out of his mouth very much.  I've seen babies that have been fed with spoons for months that dribble more on the floor than Ian.  He's just like his daddy, I guess, since I don't waste much food either.  Our little boy is growing up fast, and in no time he'll be crawling towards the stairs and jamming cutlery into electrical sockets, and not long after that, I'll make him mow the lawn and get a job.  Ah, the future is bright...