Changing perspectives

My New Year's resolutions post has been playing on my mind a lot since I wrote it, and it has definitely motivated me to be more focussed on Jake when I'm spending time with him. It's hard not to, to be fair, as it's almost too enjoyable watching him sort everything and rough and tumble (I can no longer lie on the floor without being pounced upon and ridden like a horse). 

This, however, is not the main thrust of this post. I know that I've been guilty in the past of judging other fathers for conforming to traditional stereotypes, but since writing my last blog post, I've made a conscious effort to spot fatherhood being portrayed more positively. So far, this change in my expectations has seen a change in what I've seen, including:

• Many more posts/pictures on Facebook from my male friends with kids, all singing their praises and all actively engaged with their kids. For some, I'm not friends with their wives/girlfriends, so I only see one side of their family life, but even so it's comforting to know that there are so many other men out there who take pride and pleasure being a father.
• Runners with strollers. It may be that January is a big time for runners of all persuasions as people try to shake the Christmas pounds, but there were a good number of men out with their babies at Park run last Saturday and again it makes me feel better, that I'm not doing something strange by taking my baby out running with me. Admittedly, I saw most of them as they overtook me, but this only motivates me to get out training more and come back quicker next week.
• Publicity. Just before we left the US, I saw a couple of adverts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inxDmPi15yk is one) which led me onto some interesting research. www.fatherhood.gov is a fascinating site, full of ideas to do with your kids, an interesting blog and a mentoring program that I would desperately love to become a part of when we move back to the US. I'm not sure if something exists in the UK, but given the amount of support that was available to my wife (she still remains in contact with some her mum and baby group members 19 months later on), it seems that there is a gap to be exploited to engage as many new fathers as possible.

All of these have helped me to change my outlook, and it's much easier now to find examples of good fathering. Resolution 1, ticked off (but will be ongoing). What's next?

New Year's Resolutions

We were sitting this afternoon with Kelsey's parents, her aunt and uncle and naturally the discussion turned to New Year's Resolutions. The usual ones of eating healthily, going to the gym and being more patient were thrown about, but when it came to my turn, I wasn't sure. My default setting with resolutions is that I shouldn't need a specific time of year to kick start a change in my behaviour, but given the changes in my life over the last year or so, I started thinking.

My brain immediately went to my work life, but that is so fraught with different targets, goals and ideas that it would be hard to pick just one. The sparsity of posts on here made me think that resolutions focussing on my job as Jake's father might make sense, so I started making some notes:

1. Look for the positives in others - I take pride in being a fully engaged father and like making sure that I'm taking equal care of Jake both at home and out and about. However, I know that I've been guilty of looking for other fathers not stepping up in the same way that I do, so my first resolution is to take note of other fathers doing a good job. After all, one of the big things that I've learned about being a father is that there is no one right way to go about it, so I need to judge less and appreciate more.

2. Be in the moment more - I need to be a little careful with this one as the pressures of my work life does mean that I'm tired easily at home, and also putting a lot of stress on my wife in terms of my emotional needs. This combination means that sometimes in the evenings or weekends, Jake wants to play, but I just want to zone out. Fortunately, he's a happy little bear and will entertain himself running from room to room for a while. Whilst this works well for us, having had 2 weeks on holiday where I've been much more relaxed and ready to play at all times, I'm aware that I want to keep this "in the moment" approach going where possible.

3. Listen more - I'm incredibly fortunate to be married to and parent with someone who's personal views on raising a child are incredibly close to mine. At the beginning, it was easy to present a consistent approach as Jake was effectively an eat-sleep-poop machine. As Jake develops his own personality and begins to explore boundaries, it will be increasingly important to listen to each other to make sure we're giving Jake a united front, even in the face of some of his more hilarious antics.

4. Be more creative - This is possibly the biggest, change that I want to make. My current form of playing with Jake is very physical, chasing him around, picking him up and spinning him around, and whilst we also have some quiet construction and reading time, I want to try and incorporate more creative times. We attempted painting once with funny side effects and he does various creative things at nursery, but I want to try doing more artistic and musical things at home. Hopefully his new percussion set and finger painting kit from Christmas will help!

5. Blog more - I forget how much I enjoy writing until I start doing it again, so I'm going to aim to write at least once a month, and hopefully more. Hopefully.

NB These are all dreams of what I'd like to improve on this year. I'll hopefully come back and examine them in a later posts, but with no promises that I'll have reached them all!

Subtle changes

After writing last time about my favourite times with Jake, I spoke with some friends who we normally see regularly but haven't seen in a month or so. It's not until people see Jake after a while that they see different things about him, but it's also an interesting time to reflect on changes in the way that my wife and I parent Jake.

Sometimes they're forced on us by Jake. It still amazes me (and always will, I think) that he is a conscious being with desires and preferences and the older he gets, the more able he is to express these desires. A good example here is feeding himself. Since starting on baby led weaning, we've been happy to let him pick finger food but have always fed him things like yoghurt and main meals ourselves. However, he's learned (sort of) how to use a spoon and a fork and now will refuse to eat anything proffered to him on a spoon by us. However, the minute that he gets the spoon himself, he will happily eat anything and everything in front of him. This is a good change all round as he is more control of what and how much he eats, though it does tend to mean more of a clean up after dinner times!

Sometimes they happen by apathy. Not apathy as in we don't care about Jake, more apathy as in happy accidents. For example, up until a month or so ago, we would religiously take Jake's baby monitor (Doodle Radio as we dubbed it) everywhere so we could listen in on him wherever we were. One day we were at a friend's house and hadn't brought it with us. Rather than driving back to get it, we just made sure that we kept a careful ear for him. We got home to realise that we had unplugged but hadn't taken it with us and we somehow never got round to plugging it back in. We've found that we can hear him perfectly well in the mornings, and he will cry loud enough if he's in trouble during the evening or at someone else's house. It's a good change as it's one less thing to take with us and have around the house.

Sometimes they're as a result of coincidence. For a while, we've been talking about how and when to get Jake off his morning and evening bottles of milk. We've not done any reading and as always we're not sure if it's too soon/early to do so, but we both had a general feeling that with the amount of solid food and drinks of water that he's getting through each day, he shouldn't really need them any more. However, neither of us wanted to brave a night without his evening bottle as we've used it as a way to make sure that he was full enough to sleep the whole night. This weekend we went to visit my sister and forgot to take any formula or bottles with us. It seemed like as a good a time as any to try it out, and whilst for the first night or two he cried for longer at the change of routine, he now accepts that bedtime means bath, cuddle, book and bed. It's a good change as it makes us feel like we're at the next step with Jake and as he's walking and communicating more, he has definitely moved on from being a baby to toddlerhood.

Half term simple pleasures

You can tell that I'm on break from school by the fact that I've managed to write two blog posts in the space of a week after a gap of almost 2 months! This week is half term, a break in the longest term of the school year, and whilst it's still a busy working week for me to get fully ready, it's also a time to reconnect with Jake whilst my wife is at work. In amongst the daily pleasures of his big smile when I go to get him once he's woken up and playing peek a boo in the bath, these are some of the simple pleasures that are particular to this week:

• Family dinner times. I think because Jake is slowly learning to feed himself and wanting to make the most of both the time before and after he goes to sleep, we find ourselves cooking and eating once Jake has gone to bed. Not being at work this week means that I've got time to cook again and Jake isn't completely wiped out of energy by 6pm after nursery. This combination allows us to sit and eat together as a threesome and I think we all get something from it. Jake appreciates the company and the modelling of good eating habits, whilst my wife and I love watching him, chatting to him and catching up with each other.
• Walking with Jake. The normal speed of school life means that there's not a huge amount of time to be spent at Jake speed, especially as he's slowly gaining confidence on his feet. My wife will often hold his hand and walk from the car park to the house, but I always seem to be out of time in the mornings. This week has been different. There is something quite magical and heart warming about holding your child's hand and have them take their first stumbling steps alongside you, knowing that this is something that we'll do together many times over the coming months, years and decades. It requires time and patience, but the steady stream of smiles and babbling that goes along with it means that I never want to actually get to the car.
• Playing in bed. My wife isn't always the best at waking up in the morning, but there's always one way to make sure she wakes up with a smile. Jake loves to play peek-a-boo around door frames, and this is especially true when he spies Mummy, leading to gales of laughter. It's wonderful to then have the time to bring him to bed with us and rough and tumble him around. He sees the bed as a climbing frame and will happily crawl, pull and shuffle himself around, giggling all the while.

I guess the theme running through is having some time to slow everything down and appreciate the here and now. I know that teaching may not be conducive to this way of life all the time, but I think I will appreciate the breaks in between even more than before.

One small step for Jake...

I think it started with the walking up the stairs. This quickly became his favourite game, and part of his night time routine is that we'll put him down at the bottom and allow him to walk upstairs to the bathroom. It's very cute, but we have to be firm when he starts trying to come down again!

This turned into cruising where he pulls himself up on just about anything and then totters along, holding onto the side of whatever object he's near to. He finds this hilarious and you can track his movements from another room by the sound of the giggles as he moves round.

This in turn turned into supported walking behind Hurry Scurry (a dog on wheels courtesy of my older sister) or his car. The car was an inspired £10 purchase at a nearly new sale and has been useful for all stages of his walking development. The new favourite game is to walk to the front of the car, press the music button and bounce and dance along behind until the music stops, then repeat. The dancing cracks us up as well and puts a big smile on Jake's face too.

This is slowly coming into independent walking. The first sight we had was him standing up by himself in the middle of the living room and giggling maniacally as he fell down pretty much straight away. He then started taking one or two wobbly steps every now and then before dropping to his bum and shuffling the rest of the way.

My wife decided that to encourage this, she'd start walking short distances from the car to the house and from nursery to the car which I've been doing for the last couple of days. It does mean that it can take 5 minutes to cover the 50 yard distance, but the little puffs of effort and giggles from Jake holding onto my hand fills my heart with so much joy that all other worries fade away.

This decision to help him practice was compounded when I went to pick him up at nursery tonight. Normally he hears my voice, smiles and shuffles over as quickly as he can. Today, he heard my voice, smiled and took over a dozen steps towards me. It was such a wonderful sight to see, one that I know will stop being magical at some point, but one that for right now changes everything in the most wonderful way.

I can't wait for half term next week to do some more practicing!

New tricks

As we hurtle towards the end of a wonderful two week holiday with my parents in Italy, and towards the end of the summer holidays in general, it's time for a little Jake update on his whole range of new tricks. We've always noticed with Jake that his development seems to come in fits and starts, doing a lot of the same thing for a month or two then making several big leaps in the space of a few weeks. I don't know if it's been the sheer amount of parent (and other loving family member!) time on this holiday or just a big boost in his development, but these are just some of the new skills Jake will happily show off next time you see him:

• Pulling himself to standing - this, according to Jake, is one of the funniest things that could ever happen to a baby. Either that, or he laughs when he's really proud of himself. In either case, this skill has taken a few weeks to perfect, but he's now confident enough to stand on the wobbly plastic chairs in the cafe in town, hold onto the back with one hand and gesticulate to his adoring public (aka shoppers walking by), giggling and babbling all the time. On one occasion last week, this did develop into cruising, and he happily used a semi circle of chairs to walk himself around. Since then, he's not shown a huge amount of interest in doing it again, but I'm sure that time will come.
• Getting to sitting from lying on his back - Jake has never liked to be prone on his back and still dislikes being on his stomach (although with his new rolling ability he now sleeps face down most of the time) and I think that this is why he woke up from all naps crying to be picked up. When he first got back from a short trip to the US (jet setting baby!), he woke up crying in the night and I went in to find him sitting up. I was sleepy myself, so didn't think anything of it. 
• (added about a month after I started this post!) Climbing the stairs - the need to stand and move about is incredible to watch, and after many months of watching Jake try to backwards bum scoot up big obstacles, he's now able to combine standing up with some nifty leg action to get himself up our stairs. He sits at the top giggling to himself and then scoots back down ready for another ascent. The most terrifying part is when he gets halfway down, realises that he wants to go back up and swings up himself around, grabbing onto a stair for grim life as his legs flail to find purchase. I'm sure he'll work out a smoother motion but in the meantime there will always be someone ready to catch him.
• Standing up alone - this has only happened once or twice in the last couple of weeks and again is completed with a massive giggle and hand clapping, almost as if to say "look Dad, no hands!". I'm sure we'll see more of this as he continues on his journey towards being able to walk. 

I'm sure that there are others that we just don't see because we're with him every day, and there are still more that are coming on (using a spoon correctly, using a toy on wheels to walk to name but two) which I'll cover in another post. In the meantime, we're enjoying watching all of these new tricks being learned and can't wait to see what his brain works out next!

Teeth

Teething has been a big part of Jake's life for the last 6 months or so, and after an initial torrid time where he was in pain trying to push his first few teeth out, he's now developing a nice full set and every day seems to bring along a new white bump. I don't if it's because they're all come coming quick and fast or because he's got used to it but his teeth don't seem to be bothering him as much now as they did.

The arrival of teeth comes with many benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, eating is an obvious benefit. With teeth, he can suddenly access larger chunks of food and it's quite an impressive feat watching him eat a banana in ever increasing bite sizes.

Molars also mean that he's able to chew his food a little more, meaning that we can be a bit more adventurous with what we're feeding him. He's now able to manage chunks in his food as well as harder biscuits and bars.

On the flip side, cute games such as "gum on daddy's nose" are now no longer viable, and teeth marks are slowly appearing on the pages of his favourite books. The biggest problem, for me at least, is that sometimes when he's in a cuddly mood, he likes to curl up and nuzzle into my shoulder. On a couple of occasions recently, this nuzzle has turned into a bite (surprisingly painful!) and it's a tough situation trying to convey what "no" means to Jake. I've gone for saying no, frowning at him and moving him away from my shoulder to do something else, but whether this will work in the long term waits to be seen. I know that little kids use their teeth occasionally, but I'd rather not be called from nursery about Jake biting someone, so for now I'll be trying to encourage him to use his teeth for good rather than evil.