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.