...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.
Friday, 27 July 2012
Sunday, 22 July 2012
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!)
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!)
Sunday, 15 July 2012
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!
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!
Monday, 9 July 2012
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.
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.
Monday, 2 July 2012
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.
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.
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