Advice

A friend told us today that they're expecting a baby. Once our initial excitement had calmed down, it was fun to have some reminiscing time about this time last year when we were making the same announcements and having the same conversations with each other that our friends are no doubt having. This got me thinking about all that we've learned in the last year, both from listening to other people and stuff that we've worked out ourselves.
My wife asked me to talk to the husband in the couple about being father and after careful discussion with Jake today (i.e. we went for a walk and he listened very closely to what I had to say), I want to pass on these bits of advice:

1. Your baby will not be normal. Not in a horrible "it will have 10 heads" or "it's going to be a goth" way, but in the sense that you need to take anything that talks about "normal babies" with a pinch of salt. Of course, it's comforting to see Jake making developmental milestones at roughly the recommended intervals, but there are plenty of things that he can do that his peers (at his baby groups) can't and vice versa. It all comes out in the wash, however, and you've just got to enjoy what your baby can do at that moment in time.

2. It's a partnership. I know this is something that I've touched on a lot, but you need all hands on deck right from the word go. You need to make sure that you share responsibilities between you, and whilst it might not always be a perfectly even split, you both need to have some down time away from the baby and to feel that you're not doing all the work. This can be hard for fathers coming home tired or wanting a lie-in on the weekend, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of support my wife and I offer each other even when both of our energy levels are low. Jake just inspires/requires that you dig deep, and if you can't then your partner needs to be there to take up the slack.

3. Patience is a virtue. It helps in every walk of life, but you need it especially in the middle of the night when your baby's crying or when you're trying to get out of the house. It takes a lot to remember that Jake's just a baby sometimes and hasn't managed the ability of doing things deliberately to piss us off (yet). If he's crying, something's up and it's down to us as parents to sort it out.

4. Make time for them. As much fun as I have when it's my wife and I together with Jake, and as much as Jake adores his mother, some of my favourite times are when I scoop him on an adventure, just the two of us. This might be playing upstairs in his room, going for a walk in the woods or going food shopping (Monday nights are the highlight of my week!). In any scenario, I talk a lot to Jake and find different ways to make him smile and laugh. It's a strange feeling knowing that he sees me as his dad and I want to make sure that it's a positive feeling.

I doubt that I'll sit and go through these bullet points with anyone, but I hope that when I talk about fatherhood, the sheer enjoyment and pleasure I get from being Jake's dad come shining through.

Feeling complete

Jake turned six months on Thursday last week, but I wasn't there to see it. My wife's grandmother had been taken very ill, so we had decided to fly her home for a week or so to see her and to provide some moral support to her family. In the PBE, I would have looked forward to a few days by myself as an opportunity to relax, see some friends and potter around the house. Whilst I did do these things this time round, it was amazing the difference that Jake has come to make to my lifestyle and just how much I missed whilst he was gone.

The one time when I missed him less was at night, and the first few days that they were gone, I slept a lot, simply because I could. However, after two or three days, I started waking in the middle night with my subconscious panicking that I couldn't hear Jake. Now that they're back, I'm sure I'll be cursing when he wakes up in the night, but part of me has missed that quiet time when the world is still and it's just me and Jake (and some milk).

I also didn't realise just how quiet the house would be. I wouldn't say that my wife and I are noisy people, but when Jake's around, we're constantly talking to him and he's normally chattering back so the house feels full of noise. When it was just me alone, I had to have the radio on or leave the house to see people to stop the silence. The house, as well as my life in general, felt very empty, and it's only now that they're home that I realise how complete everything feels, as much as I hate the word complete.

I think it also helps that Jake has come back even more smiley and even more chattery than before, and seeing his beam when he stepped back into the house into familiar territory warmed my heart no end. Being a father has created and awoken feelings in me that I didn't know that I had, and that I didn't know that were possible, but now that they're hear, I miss them when Jake's not around. How I'll go back to work on Monday now, I'm not sure!

Occupying Jake

After the initial rush of excitement when my wife told me that she was pregnant, there was a little voice of fear in my head. This voice asked what on earth you do with a baby beyond feeding it and keeping it clean. As I work in primary schools, I know how to entertain children as young as four, but below that I was very unsure.

It's a question that I'm still grappling with today, almost six months into this adventure. It can be daunting when Jake wakes up at half 6 and you know that he won't be ready for a nap for the next two hours or so and you know that he's likely to scream if he gets bored. You can eat up a certain amount of time by feeding him and changing him, and this often turns into a little conversation as he quite likes being on his back on the changing table with his feet to play with and an adult to smile at.

Beyond that, I've found little routines help to keep him occupied. We'll sing songs for a bit until he gets bored and then try reading some books. We then normally go downstairs where I put him in a chair and potter in the kitchen. He likes to play with different toys there as well as watching me, the cats and the washing machine intently.

The other thing for Jake is that taking him outside will always keep him happy. I decided to test this today by taking him by bus into town and exploring the city museum. He was as quiet as a mouse for the whole trip and started babbling halfway round the museum quite contentedly. It was an outrageous success and kept us out of the house for four hours and one that we'll be doing again.

I guess a certain part of it is that you find something that works and do that until he's bored and ready to move on. He's very good at telling you when he wants to do something else and as he grows up he'll start being able to do more and maintain concentration for longer. For now though the little voice is being kept quiet as I build my repertoire.

Day care

-WARNING- This post may turn into a little bit of a rant, but stick with me.

Over the last few months, my wife has very diligently been going to various day care options around Leeds, turning up unannounced with Jake in tow to see what's going on. She finally found one that she liked and we went to visit last week. What I saw was a well run operation, running out of a two storey building. The first floor is for babies and has one large room split into three different sections and two smaller rooms, one for sleeping, one that acts as a multi-sensory room. When we went, the main room had three workers and five children who were sat in various positions singing songs. The rest of the area looked very much like a large living room with toys and play areas. The multi-sensory room has some fairy lights, a disco ball and lots of things to play with. On the whole, it feels like somewhere that I would be happy to leave Jake for the day as we both got good vibes from the workers.

All well and good so far, until you start to talk about money. This is one of the cheaper options for daycare that my wife found and they still charge a whopping £40 a day. For five days a week, this would work out at £800 a month. Fortunately this day care allows you to choose a term time only contract, so we only pay for the 39 weeks that I'm at work. However, this still comes to over £500 a month which is more than our monthly mortgage payment. They also expect you to pay a £100 registration fee to assure your child a place.

For the majority of people in the UK, where the average annual salary is around £22k, this is an enormous expense. My wife's paid maternity leave runs out in January and even if I was earning my previous wage, there would be no way that we could afford for her to be a stay at home mother. Our only other option, therefore, is to put Jake in day care, which leaves us only marginally better off each month. I just find it incredible that in a time when the government wants people back in work, in particularly women, that there is no help available (bar the £80 a week we get for child benefit) to help make ends meet. Fortunately, we have saved up for this eventuality but still it sticks in my craw that the options are so limited.

I guess it's a problem of our own making, so to speak, but it's not something we had fully considered when we made the choice to get pregnant. We've now signed up and Jake is due to start at some point in the new year, so watch this space for updates.

Jake at 5 months

Today is Jake's five month birthday which seems absolutely incredible. It seems hard to remember what life was like before him, and almost impossible to think about what we possibly did with all our spare time in the days before Kelsey got pregnant. He changes on an almost daily basis so it's hard to try and make a list of all the things that has changed, especially since my last post on here.

However, we thought that a list of his current likes and dislikes would make for fun reading. It's amazing to think that within 5 months of being born Jake is able to express pleasure and disgust with different things and that he has opinions that he likes to make known. An non-exclusive list includes:

Likes:
Being outside
Looking outside
Thinking about being outside
Women with blonde hair
Belly raspberries
Standing up
Pretending to walk
The Jumparoo
Food shopping with daddy
Being tickled on his feet
Britney Spears
Mummy saying "mama" over and over again
Being thrown in the air and getting caught again
Interesting light fixtures
Gnawing on apple cores/his feet/his fingers/other people's fingers/menus
Sunny, Elsa and Beatrice (his favourite toys)
Stretching out after a long nap
Grandpa blowing gently in his face
Row row row your boat

Dislikes:
Any sort of pureed food
Sitting down
The first 5 seconds of being in the car seat
Having a wet nappy
Being offered food when he doesn't want it
Loud laughs
R.E.M. (in particular, daddy playing REM on the guitar)
Tummy time
Anyone talking about tummy time
Anyone thinking about tummy time
Cold milk

It gives you a quick snap shot into Jake's day to day life at the moment. I would say that he spends a lot more time smiling, giggling and chatting nonsense than he does crying which makes life a lot easier all round. The older he becomes, the more fun he is to be around and there is still nothing to beat the big gummy smile that greets me as I step through the door after work each day.

Cloth Nappies

One of Kelsey's most in-depth pieces of research in the run up to Jake's birth (and there were many of them, rather her than me!) was about reusable nappies. We had talked to some friends in the PBE and got conflicting views. Some said that they felt that they were a waste of money as it took so long to get them ready that they had to use disposables too, whilst others called them a god-send and a money saver. We were interested and had some money in our American account to put towards them.

The first thing that strikes you is just how bulky they are compared to regular nappies. You can fit around 40 disposables in the same space as you can put 8 resuables. This does make putting clothes on a little more tricky, especially onesies, as the snaps at the bottom sometimes fail to reach. In the summer this won't be a problem as the nappies are all brightly coloured and patterned so he can get away with wearing them as shorts, but for now he may start wearing more "real" clothes when he has a cloth nappy on.

The second thing that strikes you is the price tag. Like with any market, there's a wide range of prices and like any market, you get what you pay for, by and large. Ours range from £15 - £25 per nappy, which does cover the insert which means that it's a big initial outlay to get to the point where you aren't having to do a full wash and dry every single day. However, considering that the cheapest disposables on the market come out around 10p per nappy (though the ones we prefer are 16p...), you can see that it takes a while before they pay for themselves. However, at the start, Jake would go through at least 10 nappies a day, and whilst we've only started using them in the last couple of weeks, he still goes through 5 or 6 each day. Boring maths says that at this rate it would take us around 9 more months to break even. However, they're reusable so we'll just keep hold of them for baby #2 in the future.

We were sold by the idea of not contributing to the landfill created by disposable nappies (the stats say a new born creates something like a tonne of waste in nappies in the first year or two iirc) and the idea of not having the regular expense of disposable nappies each week. What we weren't sure about was the amount of effort involved in using them. Going into our third week now, it's not as hard as I thought it was going to be. The only complication is that we have 3 or 4 different brands of nappies, meaning that it can be hard to work out which inserts go with which outer layers. Fortunately, Kelsey has taken this on as one of her household chores (though she's keen for me to learn!) so I can just pick up and go. On average, we wash them every two or three days, but they're all ok for the tumble dryer so it doesn't take too long to restock.

The main bonus that we've found is that they are much more absorbent than most reusables (unless you're willing to pay top dollar) meaning that we use less and Jake can happily sleep through the night with a surprisingly heavy nappy. The main drawback we've found is when it's a dirty nappy and you end up having to spray the excess with the shower head...not a fun job!

All in all, we like using them and part of me wishes that we had been able to start using them sooner. As with this whole experience, however, you live and learn. We'll be professionals next time round!

Working in the dark

Regular readers may have noticed a distinct slow down in the number of posts in September. In part this is due to my new teaching course which when combined with being a father means that I have little time or energy to write. It's also in part because Jake has reached his next developmental stage meaning that he is waking up a lot during the night. The result of our swaddling experiment was that there was little or no difference whether we put him in the Wombie or not.

I was resigned to endless nights of broken sleep and hard days at work (or days fueled by strong coffee!), but fortunately Kelsey had other ideas. When she took Jake to get weighed today (15.5lbs for those counting) she also asked the midwife about his sleeping habits and apparently we've been coming it at it from the wrong approach for a while:

Our belief - only put him in his Wombie at night so he associates it with a longer sleep
The advice - whatever you do at night, do for his naps during the day so he associates a certain pattern with sleep rather than catnaps. This may explain why he's never really been one for long sleeps during the day, meaning that he gets cranky in the evenings.

Our belief - he's just been getting hungry at night
The advice - a kid of Jake's age and size should be able to sleep through the night (and indeed he was when we were in the US). He has gone through a growth spurt recently meaning that he needs more food, but that should come through the day, and we've gone out and bought "hungry" milk on their advice. By feeding him in the night, we may have been creating a pattern that would be hard to break which makes sense to our way of thinking. My only concern is that we're going to have a lot of crying over the next few nights and I don't want to think that my baby is lying in the dark, hungry and upset. However, this may be something I need to deal with if it helps him develop good sleeping patterns and gets me some much needed sleep.

Our belief - getting him to sleep downstairs is a good idea as you avoid any crying or fighting sleep when you put him to bed
The advice - he's at the age where he can learn patterns and routines and if rocking or singing him to sleep is done all the time, then he may learn to depend on this which may make falling asleep alone harder. We put him to bed in his own room tonight and tried to set up a simple routine of food, change into a night nappy, story and sleep sack. His eyes were still open when we left and there was around 5 minutes of noises but there's now been nothing for the last hour.

I'm really pleased that Kelsey got the advice today, but I'm also a little frustrated that it wasn't given freely as part of our exit from hospital or as part of the health visits early on. The leaflet they gave us is full of good ideas and reasons behind and match up with our own reading and thinking. It worries me that we could have gone on just accepting a lack of sleep without any strategies to try.

P.S. For those people who have children of their own and have their own stories to tell about sleep training, it would be good to know your strategies, failures and successes. However, please accept that this blog is also a personal diary for me to look back on rather than a prescriptive journal on how I think all babies should be treated. With that in mind, keep coming back as I'll be posting about the success (or lack thereof) of these approaches over the coming days/weeks/months.

Swaddling

Those who have met Jake will know that he is an extremely active baby. Even when he was in the womb, Kelsey could feel him constantly moving to the extent that it took her 4 hours to get his heartbeat measured because he wouldn't lie still. This means that he likes to be on the go a lot and when he's not being moved by someone else, he will sit and flail his arms and legs like there's no tomorrow.

This is all well and good until he tries to go to sleep (or we persuade him that he's tired and wants to go to sleep). Right from day one, he will startle and flail in his sleep which often results in him hitting his face or just generally jerking himself awake.

A few weeks in, we found the Wombie which will be our gift of choice to anyone we know who has a baby in the future. It's effectively a baby strait jacket that zips from top to bottom making him feel swaddled without having to worry about swaddling technique and whether he'll fight his way out of it. After a couple of minutes of struggling, he will settle down for a good long sleep.

Recently, however, he's woken sounding frustrated and pushing against the Wombie which has led to a discussion about how long we should be swaddling him for. On the one hand, it still helps him fall asleep quickly. On the other hand, we're moving him into his room this weekend and I can't help but wonder if, with his 4 month birthday coming up on Saturday, whether we need to start getting him to sleep without his arms pinned by his side.

The books and internet are their usual mix of parents who have never swaddled their babies and think it's inhumane to those who still swaddled at almost a year. The usual advice of "what is right for your baby is right for your baby" is good, but not entirely helpful. Matters are also slightly confused by the fact that he has been waking in the night the last few weeks absolutely starving around 2am after being able to sleep through when we were in America.

It may just be a phase, but part of me wonders if it's to do with the Wombie, so tonight we're experimenting without it so we'll see how he gets on. As I type, his arms are stretched out gripping the sides of his crib but he's fast asleep and fairly peaceful. Watch this space for swaddling updates!

A balancing act

"There's only one of him, and there's two of us. How hard can it be?" Immortal words I uttered in the last days of the Pre Baby Era, and ones that I still live to regret. It's one of the things that they don't mention in the baby books about just how tiring it can be looking after a baby, even if there's two of you. At the end of the day, even if there's another person in the room with you, the majority of your attention is still on the baby, making sure he's ok and not about to scream the place down.

It therefore makes sense that caring for Jake needs to be a shared operation with enough down time away from the baby to keep us both sane. During the long summer holidays, it wasn't a problem as we were both at home, and it was actually quite nice to be able to send Kelsey out with her sisters or parents and have some quality Jake time at home. Coming back to the UK has meant that I'm back to work and that Kelsey is back home with Jake all day. I've recently started a teaching course meaning that I'm out of the house for a good 10 hours a day. This means that on my return, Kelsey is ready for a break and most of the time I'm more than willing to take him (let's be honest, I miss him during the day!).

For now, whilst the evenings are light, it's easy to keep him occupied by going outside for a walk or to look at the trees in the garden. In the winter, it's going to be a little tougher, and hopefully Kelsey will be able to meet his need to go outside each day where possible.

The balancing act comes in when I come home tired and it's sometimes tough to make the transition from being a trainee teacher at work to being a father at home when I walk through the door. Fortunately, just seeing him puts a smile on my face and gives me the boost of energy I need to scoop him up, even more so when he's in a chatty and smiley mood. My aim is try and keep school work at school so that when I come home I can give my full to Jake and Kelsey.

Guest Article - Grandfatherhood

Whilst this blog is principally about my experiences of fatherhood, at times I'm aiming to have "guest" authors to write articles about their experiences of fatherhood and parenting. To kick start the series, Kelsey's dad has written us a piece about being a first time grandfather (or Papa as Jake will come to know him):

I became a Papa on May 22nd when Jake entered the world. While his tardy and sidewards entrance was exceedingly tough on my daughter Kelsey, Jacob was none the worse for wear. That first night at the hospital I noticed something about the splendid new role of grandfather that I now occupied; it contained all of the joys of parenthood without the anxiety and sense of being overwhelmed.

Our time together in Leeds was amazing. Karyn (a.k.a. Young Nana) and I were able to
appreciate the magic of the first week of life like never before. We helped Kelsey and Ben as they needed it, lined up for sufficient cuddle and feeding time with Jake without depriving the new parents of their bonding experiences, and generally provided the kind of calming influence that comes from experienced parents. Unfortunately after eight days we returned to the States and resorted to long distance phone and Viber updates about Jake from the new parents.

That all changed on August 24th when Kelsey and Ben arrived in Boston with the now two month old Jake. Kelsey provided my next lesson in grand parenthood when she noted how I ran to the stroller to see Baby Jake and forgot to first acknowledge my first born child...opps!
After a quick apology and hug I ran back to see Jacob. When I pushed my face close to his for a proper hello Jake grinned at me and my heart melted. Little did I know that soon we’d be holding regular laughing exchanges, double dimples and all!

As amazing as it was to be holding Jake and reveling in all of his new tricks (smiling, cooing, holding up his head, etc.) watching the new parents in total control of their roles, and working like a well organized team was even better.

Despite the prolonged infections, pain and discomfort that Kelsey had experienced for the first months of Jake’s life she had formed a wonderful relationship with her son. That special mother child bond was in full bloom. For his part Ben was a highly involved, attentive and engaged father who delighted in all of his child’s
abilities and promise.

For five weeks Karyn and I started and ended each day with Jake, Kelsey and Ben. We mastered the universal sign language for “pass me the baby” and retrieved all of the old songs and goofy language that we used with our own kids. Of course we now had the help of 2012 technology. The Iphone allowed us to take great pictures and share them widely, and Pandora gave Jake two radio stations for his very own...imagine our surprise when we discovered Lullabies set to Aerosmith songs.

But even 21st century technology couldn’t buffer me from the sadness of sending Jacob back to England. I was hugging him just before Kelsey and Ben packed him up for the drive to the airport. Jake is usually a pretty busy boy when he is wake and you are holding him. His arms and legs are in fairly constant motion and he occasionally head butts your shoulder if you are not careful. But on the walk for the porch to the car Jake was as quiet as I had ever held him. He nestled against my chest in such a peaceful state that he nearly took my breathe away. And that will be my memory of him until he returns with his parent this Christmas, to show Karyn and I
all of his new tricks and to steal our hearts all over again.

Hopefully this will be the first of many guest articles, feel free to volunteer if you feel that you'd like to write something!

Jake at 3 months

As I write the title for this blog, it amazes me how quickly times flies. It was around this time last year that we found out that we were having a baby and I distinctly remember the butterflies that hit my stomach when the test came up positive. A year on, and Kelsey has gone through the whole pregnancy experience and we have a wonderful 3 month old baby on our hands.

His third month has largely been spent in America with his mother's side of the family and he has been thoroughly spoiled, not just in terms of presents but also in terms of attention. It's a rare day when he won't be cuddled by at least four people and with every day he seems more and more able to interact with people.

The smiles from the second month have become giggles and almost laughter, and he now has a wide range of noises to show his approval. Jake also engages in basic exchanges, so that when you make a noise at him, he'll make one back (providing he's in the right mood). The big change mentally that we've all noticed is his ability to track and notice faces. He's now drawn to anything with eyes, nose and a mouth and will actively move his head if he thinks that a face is nearby. Again, it's great to be able to watch these small steps build up to big changes over time.

After many weeks of having a long but scrawny looking baby, Jake has definitely started to bulk up over the last couple of weeks. His head is growing larger and he is finally developing the big rolls of baby fat on his thighs and arms that we've seen on his cousins and baby group friends for a while. Whilst this a good thing for him physically, it brings a new dimension to carrying him around as he's getting almost too heavy for one arm holding. It feels more comfortable and natural to carry him laying down but unless he's really tired, he will scream to be sat upright again.

We're also marking his 3 month birthday, and his ability to hold his head up straight for extended periods of time, by turning him face out in his baby sling. He thinks this is the best thing ever and it's hard to forget that he's only little and can only handle so much visual stimulation at one time. We took him out into the woods behind Kelsey's parent's house yesterday and got lost for time among the trees and rocks. We got back about an hour later and he cried for a while through being over tired. However, we live and learn and today we took him out and remembered to put him back in his pram after 25 minutes, which seemed to work much better.

So we've got a few more days here, then back to grey England and the start of the next chapter in all of our lives.

P.S.
If you want to see pictures of Jake, I'm posting them to albums on Facebook which you can access here:
ttp://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150984045132363.491901.509472362&type=3&l=f1454ce72

Changing Jake

Back in the PBE, if anyone asked me if I wanted to change a nappy on their new baby, I managed to politely refuse every time, putting it carefully in the "things I'd really rather not do" section. Now, I'm changing his nappy four or five times a day (with Kelsey doing the others) and you get to the point where you don't even think about it.

Early Days

After getting peed on a few times at the start, I started to get sneaky with strategically placed baby wipes and getting the next nappy ready asap which seems to work. There is still the occasional leakage, generally from one or other of us putting a nappy early in the morning before we've fully woken up, but it's amazing how quickly you get the hang of it.

Reusables

When we first found out that Kelsey was pregnant, we decided very early on that we wanted to use cloth nap pies as a way of reducing our landfill impact. So far, we've used disposable ones all the way. At the start this was due to the general panic about Kelsey's condition and then it was the run-in to the end of term and getting ready for our trip. We have a large pile ready to go, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to make the transition to reusable nappies when we get back in September.

Location, Location

One of the things you learn very quickly as a parent is packing a nappy bag. The number of times that Jake gets caught short whilst we're out and about would be embarrassing for anyone else. Most of the time we're at someone's house, so it's not a problem to pitch up a portable changing table on a spare surface. When we're out, however, it can be a little more tricky to find somewhere clean and quiet to sort Jake out. My favourite random locations so far include:
- on a bar at a breakfast restaurant. I sadly didn't have my camera to capture Jake trying to pull his first pint.
- in the back of the car at a petrol station in the rain.
- in the tiny toilets on an aeroplane.

Changing Expectations

You quickly find that as a father that a large number of eating establishments are not geared up to help men with babies. Most of the larger supermarkets that we've been to (i.e. those with toilets) have either a dedicated baby changing room or have baby changing facilities in both sets of toilets. In restaurants, however, if they do have baby changing they are typically located in the women's toilet. In some cases the women's doubles up as the disabled toilet, but it can be frustrating when my options are to risk going in to the ladies loo or to try and find some space on a floor in the mens. A straw poll of my female friends shows that it's probably OK for me to use the ladies if that's where the changing facilities are. However, I still feel it would cost so little to install a small fold down table and an extra bin for nappies in the men's loo that it seems churlish to only put the changing table in the ladies. (a final note to say that there are some enlightened restaurants of which I'm slowing making a list for a future post).

I think my favourite thing of all about changing Jake is how happy he is afterwards not be wet or dirty. It's a great time to talk and get some big gummy smiles from him and even if we're in someone else's home, I'll still take a couple of minutes to play with him before we go back.

Citizenship

One of the best things about being in America this summer is that we get to watch most of the Olympics in the morning, leaving the afternoons and evenings free for visits and walks. It also means that we're not caught up in any of the traffic or the mild hysteria that seems to have taken over most of the UK population in some way shape or form. I wouldn't consider myself a British patriot by any stretch of the imagination and it's interesting to see my friends showing British pride and excitement over the comparative success of Team GB. Being in America right now does put things in perspective as barely an hour goes by without another American medal and it makes for a very different sporting experience when you're watching with people who expect continual success in just about every sport.

The whole Olympic experience has made me think about Jake's citizenship and what it actually means. At the moment, he holds a British passport but will also be able to claim American citizenship through Kelsey. It is our intention when we get back to England to make an appointment at the American embassy to register his birth (though part of me doesn't understand why we can't do it whilst we're here) and thus allow him to carry both passports.

However, our current game plan is to get my teaching qualification and move to the US at some point during 2014, meaning that Jake will have only spent 2 years in the UK and will spend his formative years over here. This will probably mean that my son will sound more like his mother than me and will grow up learning about the world from the American perspective. Will that make him truly American or will the fact that he has a British father and a whole half (ish) of his extended family lives in England give him a British aspect to his personality.

For me, Jake brings into question what we mean by being a citizen of somewhere. In one part, it's the real sense of passports, voting, paying taxes and where you live. In another part, it's about the values you hold, your cultural references and your view of the world. For example, whilst Kelsey has lived in the UK for most of her 20s and has the right to live there permanently, she is still American to the core, regardless of how much her friends and family tease her about her faux English accent.

What being American or being British means is hard to pin down as it varies from person to person and region to region. I think what we want for Jake is for him to be raised with the values and world view of his parents, extended family and friends as they are the ones that we feel will help him best in this world. Some of these will be British, some of these will be American, but all of them will be Jake.

Role Modelling

For the most part, this blog has covered issues that apply to both parents of new babies and while I write from a male perspective, the thoughts and ideas could apply to anyone. However, this post aims to be a break from the norm as a couple of things have happened recently to make me think about my role as a father and how others view this role.

I spend most of my working life being a positive male role model, both for the children and school staff. It's not something that I think about a lot or try to make a particular effort for, but it's an important part of my work that I can and will continue to offer in the classroom.

As a father, however, I think about what I'm doing and saying most of the time. For example I try to spend as much time as possible when we're out and about with Jake in front of me, either in my arms or in the pram. My work colleagues will say that this is in part because I like to be in charge. It's also partly due to the fact that Kelsey spends all day at home with him so I like to give her break, and also I miss him so it's a good chance to catch up. However, for the most part it's to try and change some of the common stereotypes of fathers. A couple of things brought home the importance of this role modelling recently:

- We went for breakfast this morning (one of my favourite things to do out here) and we were talking to the ladies at the next table who were naturally admiring Jake. He started fussing to be changed and as I'd finished my food I took him. They were very impressed that I'd done that and whilst there was nothing malicious in their comments, I knew that they wouldn't have batted an eyelid if Kelsey had taken him.
- A new TV series is starting in the US in September about three dads and their babies. The trailers appear full of stereotypes about men not knowing how to take care of their babies effectively and whilst I'm hoping that the writers are sensitive to the guys and give them space to grow and learn, the fact that this is set up as a comedy irks me.

To be clear, I don't want to make myself a martyr to fatherhood, and i certainly won't take over from Kelsey as it's an equal partnership throughout (as far as possible). However, I will continue to take care of my son in public and to play with him and talk to him as I see fit wherever I am. I won't shove my ideas down others throats but I hope to make some changes to people's perceptions of fatherhood through my words and actions towards Kelsey and Jake.

Perspectives

This post is motivated by the sad and untimely passing of the father of one of our close friends. She sent out one of the most beautifully written emails I've ever read which acted as a way of breaking the news and as a way of paying tribute to her dad. She talked about her memories and what she had learned from him over the years and it was clear to see the closeness of their bond over the years. Having met the man myself on numerous occasions, you could see the high esteem in which he held my friend and how much he meant to her.

Talking to her after the event made me realise just how much of an impact our fathers have on us and how much of an impact I will have on Jake over the course of his life. It puts my relationship with my own father into perceptive and it pleases me that we're in regular contact and able to spend quality time together. It's interesting that over the last couple of years our relationship has changed slightly from father and son to adult to adult, able to talk properly about his life as well as mine. When we told him that we were pregnant, we spent a long time talking about his parenting style and I can begin to see my childhood from his perspective. A lot of things that I took for granted such as spending quality time with just my dad or cooking for the whole family take on a whole new look when you realise that they were planned events organised by my parents. It also gave me a lot of good ideas that I want to put into place with Jake and his siblings as he grows up. One thing that is for sure is that I am beginning to fully appreciate the hard work that my dad, and my mum, put in to giving me the opportunity to be the man and father that I am today.

The passing of my friend's dad motivates me to maintain a positive relationship with him and to teach him as much as I can about my approach to the world in the hopes that he'll see me as a role model for how to live his life. I just hope that when my time comes that Jake feels moved to write an equally impressive tribute as my friend wrote for her father.

Jake on a plane

...and a train, and a car. After leaving our house in England at 6pm local time on Tuesday, we arrived safely in New Hampshire at Kelsey's folks house at 3pm EST (around 8pm UK time) on Wednesday. This sounds like a long trip, but we broke up the journey with a hotel stay in the airport to make it less stressful for Jake and ourselves.

The short story is that it was an easy trip. Traveling with a 2 month old baby is very different to traveling with adults and there's some good and bad points to this difference:

Pros
- Everyone is that bit more friendly and will relax a little as you have a built in conversation starter
- You get priority seating even on busy trans-atlantic flights
- You board early and get to sit near the front of the plane (loads more legroom for long-legged fathers)
- the pram means that you go through the fast lane for security (although you then have the hassle of breaking it down for the machine)

Cons
- Bringing baby formula on board is hard. We had called the airline four times and were assured that we could bring pre-made formula with us through security without question. When we got to Manchester airport however, we were forced to open 50% of our formula (fortunately we had 6 packs...next we're bringing 7 to mess with their heads) and had to taste it (it is faintly sweet, for those who are interested)
- You still have to wait for the pram meaning that you're off the plane first but through immigration last
- Tiny bathrooms on a plane make for very interesting baby changing facilities
- The sky cot on Aer Lingus is actually just a cardboard crate that they stuff with pillows. It also blocks your seat, tray table and little TV...needs a bit of a redesign!

Lessons learned
Travelling with a baby was always going to be a massive learning experience. We had most things thought of and prepared, but there's still things that we'll do differently for the ride home. Firstly, we'll buy the formula in the airport once we're through security. Secondly, we'll probably try to fly from Leeds airport to cut down on the overall journey time. Thirdly, we'll pack a little less in his carry-on bag as it started to get heavy after a while. Finally, I think we may try tying the pacifiers onto our wrists or bags as a couple of them hit the floor throughout the day and we didn't want give them back to Jake.

The tough part now that we're here is to try and reset his body clock. Whilst it generally takes Kelsey and I a day or two to adjust, Jake is still operating on quasi British time. This means that he falls asleep for the night around 7 and wakes up hungry at 1. Hopefully we'll be able to keep him up a little longer each day to get him onto a more sociable timetable! In the meantime he'll just have to make do with lots of grandparental cuddles to keep him occupied.

Jake at 2 months

I know I had rather grand dreams of updating this blog once a week with Jake's new achievements, but it's not really feasible. Partly this is because it's hard to work out what has actually changed in the course of a week, and partly this is because there are some weeks when Jake just carries on being Jake. However, once a month (or later on, once every few months) I think it's a good idea to have a post like this as a record of his (and our) progress.

Jake's biggest development by two months is the ability to focus on faces and smile at them. The first time he does it to you, your heart actually beats a little faster and you instinctively smile back at him. He's also developing preferences for certain things such as songs, places and toys which I find incredible. I know it's meant to happen but my understanding of the baby brain is terrible, so I find it amazing that part of his brain is working along the lines of "ooh, yellow monkey, I like that, activate smile!". He's spending more and more of his awake time looking around and smiling at things which makes all of the crying and grizzling worth while.

The other big change is the settling of a very basic routine which again I find fascinating. After my concerned post about his sleeping habits, he's found a rhythm whereby he's tired and ready for bed around 9 and will sleep through until around 4 or 5 depending on when we last fed him. Whilst getting up at that time is a pain, I'm now on summer holidays so I'm hoping that by the time that September rolls around we can convince to get up with me at 6 or so instead. During the day, he spends up two hours awake at a time then has a nap, wakes up hungry, feeds and repeats the cycle. These timings are little less precise but it makes it easier to work out whether he's likely to be hungry, tired or wet when he cries.

For us, I think the big change by two months is the slow realisation that this not just a stint of extended baby sitting and getting used to having Jake as part of our lives. We turn 30 today and were talking yesterday about how our lives will never be the same again while age is just an arbitrary number. You get used to the idea that your free revolves around Jake and my worries about how the frick you play with a baby disappear when he's on his changing mat wiggling and smiling away.

The big lesson for me is that constant reminder that for right now, nothing he does is "on purpose". It's hard to find the right words because I know he smiles when he likes something and cries when something is wrong, but at 4am when he starts to cry and refuse his milk, I have to repeat the mantra "he's just a baby" to help me deal with those feelings of frustration and tiredness. Once you've got that in your mind, you can deal with anything because you're then "on his side" working together to find out what's wrong and to fix it. There is no better feeling than to calm down a screaming baby (even if you are the one who made it scream!)

Travelling Heavy

In the PBE, I remember looking at my friends and family who had kids and marvelling at the sheer amount of stuff that they brought with them everywhere that they went. Even for a short visit, there seemed to be more bags than people and I was pretty sure that the stuff outweighed the family. In my naivety, I believed that we would be much more streamlined when we finally got round to having children.

Ha. I feel that I need to apologise to anyone who I ever judged for packing the world when they took their baby out. Even venturing out for dinner requires military precision to pack everything into Kelsey's small car. We arrived at a friend's house last week and when they opened the door, they queried whether we had come for food or to stay for the night.

This weekend, things were even worse. My parents live in Milton Keynes, which is around 3 hours by car from Leeds so when we go to visit, we typically go for a weekend. Beyond the simple holdall of our clothes, we took:

- a car seat
- a bassinet which clips into the pram base but also serves for a useful nap spot downstairs
- a small holdall full of clothes, nappies and wipes
- his rainforest playmat, complete with a giraffe with a rainbow poking out of it's head
- his nappy bag for short journeys
- a jute bag with 11 sterilised bottles and a packet of formula
- the feeding pillow
- the baby monitor kit

Before there's any comments of overpacking, we used everything that we took with us. It's just incredible how much stuff someone that small needs!

Talking to babies

There is a lot of literature about how you should talk to your baby at all times to get them used to the sound of language and somehow imprint the idea of vibrating air particles as a means of communication. Indeed, I spent a lot of time at high school researching different theories about how children acquire language and the environment that needs to be in place for this to happen. I find it very worrying working with children where these basic conditions of lots of words, eye contact and conversation practise haven't happened and they find it hard to express themselves in primary school.

The flip side of this is how do you actually talk to a baby. Like with many posts on this blog, this question stems not from wanting to give Jake a good start, but to give him the best start possible. The big problem is that you're used to talking to people who can read your body language and intonation and will respond with words and non verbal communication of their own. Whilst Jake is now at the point where he will regularly smile (pictures when I can get hold of Kelsey's phone!), it's no substitute for a real conversation. Looking at my own approach, and those of my friends and family, there seems to be three main ways of trying to engage in conversation

- talking to him - this is my preferred approach and involves talking to him about what's going to happen that day, what things he can see and current issues in the news. It makes it very hard to do and sometimes his silence makes you feel self-conscious and stops you from talking more.
- talking with him - using eyebrow lifts and tactical pauses in conversation tells Jake that something is expected from him and it's amazing how often he chooses to fill the gap with a coo, a gurgle or some other sound. I guess that this are real conversation skills being learned and people doing this tend to talk about Jake "aren't you a cute little baby? do you want a puppy?".
- responding to him - the third approach is to make his noises and gestures back to him. Last night, for us, and last week, for my mum, we found that he particularly likes it if he pokes his tongue out at you and you then poke your tongue back at him. We had him smiling for a long time just going back and forwards poking our tongues out. I think this is where he learns the importance of eye contact and facial expressions from.

As with all aspects of raising a child, I don't think that any of these approaches are any better or any worse than the others and I have no fear in my mind that Jake will grow up to be fully articulate. It's just going to be fascinating watching him learn how to do it.

Sleeping

I write this post slightly bleary eyed and with a certain sense of karma coming round to bite me. Over the weekend, we had managed to get Jake into a reasonable rhythm where he fed at 10pm and then would sleep right through till 4am. Feeling well rested, and not a little smug, we thought that this would be the way of things from now on. Indeed when someone asked me the usual question about sleepless nights I was able to respond that actually he was sleeping well.

Jake apparently had other plans. I think we should have picked up on his warnings yesterday when every time I called Kelsey to see how she was doing, I could hear his cries in the background. He eventually settled down in the evening but when he fed at 8 and fell asleep, we decided to leave it there. The positive is that he did sleep for another 6 hours, but failed to settle down after that. He also didn't each as much as he normally did and lay there at half past 3 cooing and gurgling to himself. Whilst I love Jake immensely, he has trained my brain to wake up when he starts making noise, so I was up with him, trying to work out whether to try and ignore him or to try and cuddle/sing him back to sleep.

This is a recurring issue surrounding Jake and sleep, and I think it's one that there's not a huge amount of advice about. On the one hand, you're told to stimulate your baby and on the other hand you're told that as a new born it's entirely natural for him to sleep the day away. At 6 weeks old, as he is today, it's hard to find any guidance about how much he should be sleeping for. I know that the rational part of my brain says that he'll sleep for as long as he needs, but does that then mean that we should be up with him if he's wide awake at 3am and burbling away?

Up until this point our approach was that if we were in bed sleeping, then he should be sleeping, or at least in his crib ready to sleep. This in theory is to get him used to getting himself to sleep at night, and on the whole it seems to be fairly successful. If he cries in the night, we meet his basic needs of feeding, changing and swaddling and put him straight back down which seems to do the trick. Last night felt like a step backwards and even as I type he sounds like he's waking up after only being down for an hour. Let's hope that this is a blip rather than a new pattern of behaviour.

Date Night

In the PBE, I don't think we ever quite realised just how precious our time together was. Many people had told us to make the most of it, so in the last few months we did go to the cinema more and out on random dates, but it wasn't until Jake arrived that you find out how much time he eats up. Even when he's asleep on an evening, we're either so tired that we just want to sit down or we're making up the next batch of bottles or doing laundry. You spend time together, but not quality time together.

This is why Tuesday of this week was a momentous occasion (beyond being Jake's 5 week birthday). My mum made us an incredibly generous offer to come up to Leeds every Tuesday and spend the day with Jake freeing us up to go out. I feel this is a win win situation as it must be hard on my parents (and indeed Kelsey's folks) as Milton Keynes is a long way away so their Jake time is limited. It also meant that on Tuesday afternoon Kelsey had a bit of respite to go into town and meet a friend which is always surprisingly energising. When I came home, we went straight out on our first date night. We had heard stories from other people about how they could only bear 40 minutes on their first time leaving the baby alone, but I think the combination of absolute faith in my mum's ability to care for Jake and the fact that we've made it a point to give each other time away from the baby meant that we could go to the pub at the top of the road and have a relaxed 2 hour dinner without feeling guilty. Indeed, the only time pressure that brought us home was making sure that my mum could drive home in plenty of time rather than panicking if Jake was ok.

The date night highlighted a couple of things for us. Firstly, we can live up to our own expectations of being relaxed enough to let other people care for Jake. Secondly, that it's important to have that touch-base time between us which we've tried to incorporate a little each day either through cuddling more whilst watching a movie or chatting to each other during Jake's naps. Lastly, that having a baby changes everything in your life and whilst you sometimes pine for the PBE, we'd rather have him in our lives and find different ways to do the things that we like.

Time Management

It's been a long time (comparatively!) since my last post and I feel obligated to get something down today to mark Jake's one month birthday. This got me thinking that your sense of time changes as you grow up. Just in the last four weeks, we've had to switch from talking about Jake's age in days to weeks and as adults you measure in years and then early, mid and late decades. It's interesting, however, that when you talk to parents of toddlers, they still measure their child's age in months rather than years. For example, my cousin came to visit last weekend and brought my lovely first cousin once removed (what we believe the relationship between me and her child to be). We hadn't seen them for a while so I asked her age and was told 20 months. I guess it makes sense instead of saying 1 year 8 months, or almost 2, and it seems to be standard across parents of very young children. My question therefore is at what point do you start to measure your child's life in years? Quite probably when it becomes a hassle to convert it into years: "Yes, Jake is now 132 months old"

Whilst I'm talking about time, it's amazing how quickly you settle into a routine and rhythm. Even Jake is starting to get in on the act, and while we're still feeding him when he's hungry, you can still be sure that once it gets to the evening, he'll sleep for around 3-4 hours which makes planning our nightime shifts a little easier. It's a hard one to work out, because at the end of the day, someone has to get up and feed him at 2 am and neither of us are keen to do so. However, the system we currently have worked out is that he's my responsibility before 12 and after 5am, meaning that Kelsey gets some downtime in the evening when I get home from work, I get some rest so I'm not a zombie at work and Kelsey gets a "lie-in" after the 2am shift. It seems to work as a system, especially as Kelsey is slowly re-discovering the joys of daytime napping.

It also means that I get some quality Jake cuddles before I go to work. Once you've got past the screaming blue murder as if you've not fed him for days, he looks so content when he feeds, especially as we keep him swaddled up till Kelsey wakes up. In theory, we're trying to make it so that during the night, we change and feed him and then put him straight back to bed so he gets used to sleeping when it's dark out, but at the moment it's light when he feeds at 5. The house is quiet, the world is restful, he's very warm and snoozy so we often sit for a while before I take him back to bed. It's a very peaceful experience whether he has fallen asleep in my arms or is awake and looking around (and sometimes at me) and easily one of my favourite times of the day.

Returning to work

The title for this post gives the reason for the lengthy delay since the last post. I've now completed my first full (ish) week back at work and while I've managed to survive, it's a very different experience to the PBE. I want to make a note of the good, the bad and the ugly about this last week, and going back to work with a newborn while it's still fairly fresh.

The Good
- Normality. The first weeks with Jake seemed very disorganised, as we spent a lot of time sleeping at odd times, spending hours just watching him and constantly talking about him and our parenting approaches. Going back to work brings a structure back to the day as well as forcing you to think about other things beyond the baby.
- Distraction. It's easy to get caught up in the neuroses of the new parent, worrying whether Jake is too hot or cold, whether he's sleeping too much, eating too little etc. Work distracts you from these thoughts which can give you some clarity.
- Appreciation of our successes. The work that I do brings me into contact with a lot of children who haven't had the same start in life that Kelsey and I will be able to offer Jake over the years. Returning to work makes me realise that just the safe and calm environment that we've fostered here puts him at a great advantage in life and this is still the stage where he is only concerned with his most basic needs.

The Bad
- Fatigue. After 3 weeks at home where I could sleep at any time, I had to force myself to go through a couple of training days where I had to be up, dressed and ready to leave the house by 7.30am so that Monday morning wouldn't be a surprise. Whilst I managed to do it, my energy levels are still at the mercy of Jake's night time wakenings, regardless as to whether it's my turn or Kelsey's to sort him out.
- A change of focus. In the Pre Baby Era, I would get to work feeling entirely motivated to put my all into trying to make a difference for the children of South Leeds. While this motivation is still there, part of me is just concerned with getting through to the end of each day so I can get home to see my baby. I don't think that my practise will suffer as I have high expectations of myself for my child facing work, but I can definitely tell a difference in my attitude towards the surrounding paperwork.
- Getting home. This is something that I'm sure every couple goes through when one person goes back to work. The other person who stays at home has to deal with the baby throughout the day, whether he's crying, sleeping or being playful. Either way, it's a full on responsibility. When I get home, Kelsey is ready for some down time, and while I'm delighted to see my son, I'm also on the tail end of a long day. It hasn't caused any issues so far as he still sleeps a lot, but it's one that needs careful thought and discussion to make sure that all three of us get our needs met at the end of the day.

The Ugly
- Thursday. I have never been so tired in my life. We had gone to bed a little later than normal, and Jake I think had become overtired. When he woke to feed at 2 am, it took around an hour to get him back to sleep, and he was up again at 5. The difficulty with him sleeping in the room with us means that even if it's not your turn, you still wake up, and I struggled all the way through Thursday. Fortunately, my boss is incredibly understanding and sent me home early. I slept solidly for two hours when I got back and felt like a new man.

I still feel that 2 weeks paternity leave (I managed 3 by combining it with a half term break at school) is a shamefully poor amount of time for a father to spend at home with a new baby. So many of the children that I work with lack any sort of male role model and it seems strange that we still expect the mother to always be the primary care giver. I guess it makes sense for those still breast feeding, but in cases like ours where we bottle feed, either one of us could stay at home with him.

I want to make the point that Kelsey is an entirely competent mother and my concerns about the briefness of paternity leave are selfish. I feel as time goes by I will miss out on certain key moments through being at work and that I desperately want to be an equal partner in raising Jake.

There is legislation being discussed in Leeds that would allow parents to share the years worth of maternity leave between them, and this makes sense to me. If the British government is serious about the strength of the family unit in society, then we need to give fathers the full opportunity to be key figures in the lives of their children.

Important NB!
My thoughts about paternity leave are very British-centric, understandably, so any complaints that I make are to be taken in light of the system here rather than in comparison to the rights of new fathers in other countries.

Jake at 3 weeks

Just typing that title seems incredible. We've now moved into the stage where we're measuring Jake's life in terms of weeks rather than days, and the changes have only become apparent to me as I've returned to work. On the wall is one of the first pictures of Jake that I emailed to my colleagues just after he was born and you'd barely recognise him now.

The big changes that have happened this week on Jake's part are mainly physical. All his behaviours stay roughly the same, though I am writing this on the back of one of the best night's sleep I've had where he slept for almost 6 hours. It wasn't quite uninterrupted sleep as we both woke slightly panicking that something was wrong as he normally sleeps for 3 or 4 hours during the night at a time.

Anyway, I digress. Physically, Jake is starting to change shape. His face is becoming a lot rounder (which may be due to the 12 ounces he put on last week!) and while he spends less time resembling an old man, he's definitely progressing into his teenage years like the picture of Dorian Gray. His forehead and cheeks are covered with a light case of acne while if you catch the right light you'll see a fine wispy beard on his chin.

Fortunately, this means that the oils in his skin have started to work, meaning that his eyes are little less gunky (though it does make it look likes he's welling up at times) and the skin around his wrists and ankles isn't flaking as badly. This may be helped by the fact that we've taken to putting some aqueous cream on him most days as part of a mini baby massage.

For us, the big change in this week is my return to work. As promised, I'm going to make a separate post on this in the next day or two, but one of key differences is just how much Kelsey is learning about Jake while I'm away. I guess when it's both of us at home then you just get on with looking after him, while when it's just Kelsey at home she has to develop specific strategies to help her manage her own needs as well as his.

This was brought home to me when I got in last night, went straight for a cuddle and Kelsey recommended that I left him for a bit as he seemed to be enjoying his own company. I was desperate for a Jake cuddle, so I ignored her advice and picked him up, at which point he started to scream. I put him back in his cot and he settled immediately. This kind of knowledge is delightful as it helps Kelsey to feel more in control of her time at home with him.

Let's see what the next week brings as we've move closer to Jake's one month birthday! In the meantime, here are my favourite Jake pictures from this last week:

A view from the other side

I remember when I first started driving around Leeds after years of walking and biking everywhere. Up until that point, I had spent a lot of time cursing aggressive drivers who cared nothing for my safety on a bike or the rules of the road when it came to pedestrian crossing. The minute that I got behind the wheel of my beloved Ka, however, everything changed. Suddenly there were these pesky pedestrians who stepped out in the middle of the road when you were least expecting it and cyclists who cut across your path or who held you up at traffic lights. It took a while to be able to put myself in their shoes again.

Having a baby has brought up this whole set of feelings, with a slightly different twist. It wasn't that I was frustrated by people with children, but more that I just wasn't aware of some of the difficulties that they face. Now with a child and a buggy (pushchair? pram? everyone seems to call it something different, and I change it's name depending on who I'm talking to) I'm much more aware of the view from the other side. Here are some of the examples that I've come across in the last few days that I wouldn't even have thought of in the pre-baby era (PBE perhaps?)

- Pavements (sidewalks for those reading on the other side of the Atlantic). While the pavements here are reasonably good quality, the height of them means that you have to walk quite far to get to a place where you can realistically cross the road without dropping your buggy six inches. This becomes exacerbated when inconsiderate drivers park up on the kerb without leaving enough space for a pedestrian, let along a father with a buggy. You then have to work out a way to go round the car without waking up the baby. I'm seriously considering making up my own bad parking tickets for these situations

- Parking spaces. I will admit that I'm not the greatest at parking, but it becomes a whole lot more tricky when you've got to get a car seat in and out of the back of your car. A couple of times recently I've come back to the car to find someone has parked incredibly close to my space. This is fine if I'm getting in as I can squeeze, but Jake's car seat is pretty inflexible. You're then left with the difficulty of pulling your car out into traffic, parking and putting the car seat in while everyone sits and stares. I would try to park in the parent and child parking spaces, but these seem to be taken up by people without children who fancy parking close to the shop. I never realised this would irk me until now!

- Space. One of the greatest pleasures about having a buggy is that Kelsey and I can go out and about and bring Jake with us. Walking around is fine and easy (until you come to an awkward piece of pavement) but the inside of most shops and restaurants aren't conducive to buggies. Again, I'm not expecting them to be as people with babies probably make up a tiny fraction of their clientèle, but nevertheless it's frustrating when you want to browse the aisles and there's not enough room for your buggy. You're then faced with another dilemma. Do you go elsewhere in the hope that there'll be room for Jake, or park him up somewhere in the shop and quickly dash to get what you need? It's easy when there's two of you, but shopping alone I feel will be an art form to be mastered.

None of these will stop me from venturing out with Jake and indeed my plan is to take him to the Leeds parkrun next weekend (a free 5k race around Hyde Park) to see if it's possible to run with him. However, it's just another series of changes in both thoughts and behaviours that we're making as we're learning the ropes of parenthood.

The same but different

Today marks the last official day of my paternity leave, and while I've still got the weekend to go, the return to work on Monday morning looms ominously. I'll leave my thoughts and feelings about paternity leave to one of my posts next week, as I'll be able to talk about how it's been being back at work.

The reason that I start today's post with that thought is that Kelsey and I have been trying out as many different trips and visits as possible over the last week or so. This has included packing Jake up to go to see our friends, testing the length of the walk to Horsforth high street (answer, about 35 minutes there and 30 minutes back) and a trip into town today. Part of these is because part of our aim for Kelsey's maternity leave is for her and Jake to leave the house at least once a day and these trips will be some of the journeys she'll make. Part of these is to see what of our pre-baby life is still possible and what changes need to be made.

In short, everything remains the same but with some subtle differences. We now have to start getting ready in shifts, so actually getting out of the house takes longer. You have to try and second guess Jake's bowels and hunger and pack the right number of nappies, spare outfits and bottles without going over the top. Our friends have gotten used to the fact that Jake is a surprisingly lengthy topic of conversation and that he may scream and void his bowels in their house at any given time. When we went out for lunch today (Bar Burrito on the Headrow in Leeds, scores very highly on my child friendly restaurant list) we had to order a bowl of boiling water to heat his bottle with.

However, it's still possible to maintain a semblance of normal life as people are eager to meet Jake and we are determined to make him as part of our life as he is making us part of his, if that makes sense. This will hopefully continue when I go back to work, when everything promises to be the same but different in a whole load of different ways.

Jake at 2 weeks

The first week of Jake's life seemed to go so slowly. Maybe it was the steep learning curve, maybe it was that the nights seemed as long as the days to begin with. The second week has fairly raced by in a flurry of family and friends visiting over the Jubilee weekend. We've crammed a lot into every day which in part is down to the fact that everything seems to take that bit longer with a new born.

Just leaving the house to go shopping means that you need to get a bag ready with food, wipes, nappies and spare clothes, not to mention the car seat and pram that amazingly folds down into the boot of Kelsey's car. Even around the house, the constant cycle of feeding, changing, burping and cuddling seems to eat up time, to the point where my sense of how much time has passed since I last looked at a clock has severely diminished. I worry for my return to work next work, not only because Kelsey is still taking her time to recover from the birth but also that my job relies on good timing and I fear my practise may suffer.

We marked Jake's two week birthday with visits from a few friends and my parents in the evening, and it's clear that while being 150 miles away in Leeds works when you're at university and then forging a career for yourself, it becomes a lot harder when you have a baby/grandchild. We're currently working out how to increase the amount of time that my grandparents get to spend with Jake, especially as we're on a two year plan to move to the US.

I said last week that I'd try and list new Jake behaviours as well as things that we've worked out. The list is shorter than last week, but it serves as a good test for me to see what changes have happened.

Jake
- Sleeping in his Wombie (see picture) is great
- Black and white are the most fascinating colours
- The taste of orange leads to food (got to love Infacol!)
- To lift his head off my chest a little during a cuddle
- Baths might not be the worst thing that can possible happen

Ben and Kelsey
- Jake needs to be burped regularly during feeding or you suffer the consequences
- The checklist of reasons why he cries is getting a little longer - he sometimes now responds better to being left alone somewhere quiet than being constantly cuddled
- You have to trust your instincts a little more
- Add an extra 30 minutes on to any deadline/meeting time
- Not all Jake noises require immediate attention
- Everyone is happier when there's flexibility in the 3am handover
- Taking funny pictures of Jake never, ever gets boring.

And with that in mind, here are a few of my favourites of Jake's second week:

Taking Advice

Some parents complain that children don't come with an instruction manual. I disagree. Right from the moment that you decide to conceive, you can lay your hands on dozens of different books that will tell you all sorts of different ways to raise your child. Add onto that the amount of information and advice you're given by various midwives, nurses doctors and health visitors and your own family and friends and you start to suffer from information overload.

I think part of the preconception of stressed out and over protective first time parents is partly because it's a whole new ball game, but it's partly due to the stress of wanting to do the best for your child but not knowing what that best entails. For example, take the issue of sleep training. Our book says that you can't start it realistically before he gets to six months or so and you should help him to sleep if he's upset. Our local health centre midwives reckon to get him used to falling asleep by himself to make our lives easier later on. Family members from both sides suggest making sure that he gets enough sleep and worry about sleep training when he's ready. The stress for me comes not from the fear of making a bad decision, but the fear of not making the best one.

In the end, though, I think you have to make your own mind up. Both sets of grandparents have now been to visit, and I'm sure that there have been things that we've said or done in their presence to do with Jake that have made them wince internally. However, they have all had the right attitude, as far as Kelsey and I are concerned, which is to let us make our mistakes and offer advice only where appropriate. I think what this allows us to do as Jake's parents to find the advice that works best for us. There are dozens of different ways of raising your child and Jake is his own person. It's not about following one particular approach rigidly (we would have already failed the breastfeeding route!), instead it's about picking out the advice that helps us in our situation, or the advice that seems to make the most intuitive sense to us. I'm sure we'll make mistakes along the way, but Jake will be none the worse off for it.

More pictures and a weekly Jake update tomorrow (if I can find time...busy day planned!)

Tears

It would be an understatement to say that the last 9 days have been an emotional rollercoaster. There have been some excellent highs such as the first time we managed more than 2 hours sleep, and some epic lows, when everything that could be wrong was. We couldn't have made it through without Dan and Karyn Forbes, Kelsey's wonderful parents who have been with us up till today. Even though we've thanked them every day for their support and help with getting us through these tough times, I wanted to express my gratitude on here. From the first time that Dan came and took a crying Jake off my hands after a sleeplessness night to emotional support offered to Kelsey by her mum, I think it's fair to say that we couldn't have done it without out them. Before I get started on the subject of this post, I want to celebrate them with some photos we took today:

So on to today's subject. Tears. I have to admit that I've never been a big one for crying. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those guys who have never shed a tear, but I tend to keep my emotions in check, or at least I did until Jake turned up. I have cried more in the last 9 days than I have in the last 9 years, yet the tears represent so many different things.

There were tears of fear in the operating theatre when I didn't know or understand what was happening to Kelsey. There were tears of excitement when I first held him and tears of fatigue on the first night at home when we got to sleep at 7am. Last night there were tears of pure joy as I lay on my back with my baby boy lying on top of me, fast asleep and cozy as could be. When we first decided to have a baby, I had some images of what it would be like to have a newborn. Most of these included Kelsey by my side doing various different things, but this was the first time that reality had lived up to my expectations. I think they were also tears of love, a sort of overwhelming feeling to care for and cherish this little person sleeping on top of me.

As things become more settled around here, I feel that my tears will fall less regularly, but I don't think that feeling that I experienced last night will ever go away.

What We've Learned

After what felt like a serious post last time, I want to celebrate the fact that we've managed to keep a small human being alive for a whole week with something fun. Below are two lists of what Jake's learned this week, and what Kelsey and I have learned too. I'm going to try do this every Tuesday for the forseeable future while his rate of development and our learning curve is very high. I'll also put in some of my favourite Jake pictures from that week too.

What Jake's Learned
- it's always sunny in Yorkshire
- eye contact is important
- sleeping for more than an hour
- everyone who comes into contact with him thinks he's handsome
- pooping on yourself feels horrible, peeing on other people can be fun
- crying will always get you what you want, eventually
- being on the outside is better than being on the inside (of the womb)

What We've Learned
- how to cope on cycles of less than three hours of sleep at a time
- the world is a better place with coffee/pepsi
- watching someone else poop is disgusting
- that we both know more songs to sing in the middle of the night than we would have thought possible
- how to do many things with a baby in one hand
- gaping is a horrible word
- swaddling is amazing
- the change in mindset that says that poop in a nappy is a sign of good health
- the simple joy of cuddling your own child

Who knows what the next week will bring? In the meantime, here's some of my favourites from week 1:

Decisions

I thought that writing this blog would be easy to do every day with the amount that Jake sleeps. However, it doesn't factor in the amount of time it takes to clean up around him, as well as getting some well need rest and relaxation for Kelsey and I! You end up living your life in hourly sections, so making any sort of plan is tough. As we speak, Kelsey's parents have gone out for the evening and Kelsey and Jake are napping upstairs, so I wanted to get down some thoughts while they're fresh.

The big change that's happened is that Kelsey and I have decided that we're going to formula feed Jacob. There's a whole host of reasons behind this decision, and as I've always said, as long as the decision is based on the best information you have available, it's a good decision.

Some of the factors are physical, in that Kelsey has been in a lot of pain through breast feeding and is finding it hard alongside the pain from her labour. Some of it is practical. I've always wanted to share the raising of Jake as evenly as possible and it's hard when Kelsey was the one who was up every few hours in the night. Formula feeding means that I can do it too. Last night we alternated his feeds and it meant that we each slept for around 5 or 6 hours, which has been unheard of so far. Some of them are emotional, as Kelsey has found the whole breast feeding experience difficult, she sometimes got upset when Jake wanted to feed. This way round, she looks forward to spending some quality time with him each time he starts to chew on his fingers or tries to suckle on my biceps. Some of the reasons are for health. Jake's digestive system wasn't working properly during breast feeding, but since we switched to formula yesterday morning, all systems are go, and I've now suffered the indignity that every father of a son goes through of being peed on during a nappy change.

Having given those reasons, it's an incredibly hard decision to make. All the health care professionals that we've come into contact with hardily recommend breastfeeding, so going against their advice makes me feel anxious. There's also tales from our families and neighbours about people in similar positions who pushed through, which makes us wonder if we're not being tough enough. However, it's a decision based on keeping Jake happy and healthy as well keeping Kelsey happy and healthy. As for me, if those two are doing ok, then everything is alright in my world.

P.s. For those looking for pics of Jake (and our little family) I will post some on here soon. In the meantime, go here

The first few days

Another adventure calls for another blog. This time round, it's going to be longer than marathon training and be about more than just food. In part this will act as a way of sharing my experiences with you, dear reader, and in part it will act as a permanent diary for me as a record of all the changes and lessons over the coming months and years.

I've been meaning to start this blog for a while now and keep coming up with different topics that I wanted as my first post. Rather than write lots of different posts, I'm going to make this a long first post and then try to stay on top of things from here on. I also want to be as honest as possible about the whole experience of being a father. Please don't mistake this honesty for a lack of love for Jacob, who I adore even more than my cat Pollo.

The Birth

Nothing quite prepares you for the moment when the midwife passes you your newly scrubbed baby and you look down at him. In the movies you always get the strings and big hearts in the eyes, and for me it was a little like that. My main emotion however was that of shock, that something that had always been an idea and a dream was now a reality. The honest truth is also that newborn babies straight out of the womb are not the prettiest of things. Jake was definitely purple and grey in places, covered in dry blood and with some nasty looking red marks from the forceps. However, I was still determined to hang on to him until they made me let him go to be weighed.

Working It Out

The parents of the kids I work with often complain that there's no manual for a baby and while there is plenty of advice and support out there, your baby is completely unique and you have to work out what works for you. The first full night that we had at home was horrendous. Jake had been very well mannered during the day at the hospital, sleeping a lot and even allowing himself to bathed and tested without complaining too much. I'm not sure what I thought our first nights would be like, but I had imagined a few hours sleep interrupted by some feeding and comforting. Jake had other plans. While we could comfort him and get him to feed ok, he found it hard to sleep by himself in his crib. We both shed some tears as it got on to 5am and we still hadn't slept. I could have hugged Kelsey's father Dan when he came in at 7am to offer some support and we managed a couple of hours of sleep. It's all trial and error and I think that Karyn put it best when she said that you spend your time working out what works for him and you for right now.

Steep Learning Curves

No matter how bad things get, as long as you're working together, you do come through the other side, often with lots of learning under your belt. Babies need to be burped. If he's awake, he's awake and doesn't want to sleep. Be calm and he'll be calm. Tag team parenting means that at least one of you can sleep at a time. It's then a question of remembering these lessons and being able to apply them to the next time you hit that scenario. Our second night was a little better as we made sure we burped him a little and swaddled him well. We got around 4 hours of sleep, and discovered the fun of taking him for walks around the kitchen. I sang to him, trying to work out what songs I knew and what songs I could remember my parents singing to me. Kelsey apparently timed herself for loops of the kitchen island, giving Jake a baseball style commentary as she went. He's getting to the point where if you hold him close enough he'll watch your eyes and mouth with interest, which is an amazing experience.

Friends

You don't realise how much of a support network you have in your friends and family until something big happens. The number of people who have offered help, support and advice over the last 3 days has been breathtaking and makes you realise that you're not in this by yourself. In some cases, just knowing that you can ask for help makes the problem go away as you know that you'll find a solution somehow. In other cases, it's the emotional strength that just having your friends and family around that helps. We had our first social engagement last night for a few of our friends and while they took great pleasure in seeing Jake, we both took great pleasure in catching up and having conversations that weren't exclusively about the baby. The fact that Jake has such a large number of interested, excited and engaged aunts and uncles (as opposed to blood related Aunts and Uncles, as I was explaining to him at 3am this morning) will mean that he'll get so many different viewpoints and understandings about the world that it makes me feel excited for his future.

That's about it for now. Hopefully future posts will be limited to one subject. If there's anything you want to know about or for me to expand on, leave a comment.