Month Seven Musings

Graduation. It’s official – I have a genius baby. Just like a young Doogie Howser, Jackson is quickly progressing through the ranks of the classes at his school. Shortly after turning six months old, he graduated from the lowly “Tadpole” Room at school to the much more exciting “Frog” Room. It turns out, you don’t actually have to be exhibit any extraordinary degree of smartness to move from one classroom to the next, but rather just annoy the teachers by being waaay more mobile than all the other babies in the class, and they’ll quickly graduate you to make their lives much easier. In Jackson’s case, all it took was being the only baby in the Tadpole class to attempt to break out of the room when the door was open, throw everything on the shelves onto the floor, and literally crawl laps around every other baby in the room.

I think there’s an important life lesson here. Jackson, someday when you’re struggling with Chemistry class in high school, just be a handful for the teacher and they’ll graduate you rather than having to put up with your hijinks for another year… although maybe make sure that you don’t accidentally cause an explosion before throwing things on the floor. It’s not a big deal with diapers and plush toys – but chemicals might be a different story.

The interesting thing about being such a genius baby is that Jackson has quickly gone from being one of the bigger kids in the Tadpole Room to being the absolute runt of the litter in the Frog Room. Is it better to be a big fish in a little sea? Or a little fish in a big sea? There are definite pros and cons. On the one hand, observing the older kids should (in theory) lead to Jackson learning new tricks faster. You know, things like crawling on his hands and knees instead of his stomach or eating food like a civilized person that can keep carrots out of their hair and eyebrows. On the down side, it’s going to be a bit trickier to pick up chicks in the new room since the older boys can drive (toy) cars and walk circles around Jackson. The good news is that Jackson is so mild mannered that if an older kid comes and takes his toy away, he just stares at them, processes what just happened*, and then happily moves on to find something else to put in his mouth… or hit himself in the face with.

Picture yourself as a young baby. You are finally realizing that your hands are not only connected to your body – but that you have control over them. You figure out that they can be used to reach and grab things and bring them closer to you. It’s a fantastic feeling of power and control over the chaos of the world. What do you do with this newfound ability? Whack yourself in the head with everything, of course.

It’s not like Jackson doesn’t know it’s coming, and that it’s going to hurt. He flinches in advance of smacking the toy to his face – but that doesn’t stop him from doing it. What’s up with that? Soft toys suddenly become the best toys ever because there is no chance that Jackson playing with them results in the authorities arresting us for child abuse. Hmmmm… maybe he’s not the baby genius I thought he was – or he’s just preparing for an illustrious career as a professional wrestler.

Baby Chaos Theory. Or, maybe this is just another component of my newest theory about babies, which I’ve coined the “Baby Chaos Theory”. In a nutshell, babies absolutely hate order. You stack up blocks, they can’t crawl over to them fast enough to knock them to the ground. If I put a box of toys in front of Jackson, he’ll go through, grab each toy and throw it on the ground until it’s empty… then move on to something else to play with – unless you start to refill the box with the toys he has already thrown out, in which case the game may continue forever.

But the best example of Baby Chaos Theory occurs at mealtime. You give Jackson a toy to play with in their high chair, he can’t wait to swing it around and throw it on the ground. At mealtime, it’s an exercise in futility, yet I continue to play along – picking up the toy, putting it back on the high chair tray, then waiting ten seconds for Jackson to pick it up and throw it on the ground again. The good news is that I’m getting a little bit of a workout and Jackson is getting a little bit of free antibodies from the ground, since I long ago stopped rinsing off the toys before giving them back to them – although the evolution of this was hilarious. When first born, we would actually wash off toys (with soap!) before giving them back to him. Then it became a quick wash in warm water… then a splash of cold water… then me picking off any visible cat hair and dirt off the toy before giving it back to him… then finally to just blindly grabbing it and handing it back over. The bad news is, if he’s testing me to see how long I’ll keep picking up something that he keeps throwing on the ground, I’m failing miserably and Jackson probably thinks I’m an idiot – or can’t understand that he wants that toy to be on the ground.

Then it comes time to actually eat. Jackson knows exactly what to do with a spoon. He knows how to hold it and where the food is supposed to go… yet after he eats most of the food off the spoon, he finds the need to whack himself in the face with it and get food all over his face. Why? Because a clean face represents order – and getting carrots all over the place represents chaos.

Similar rules apply to most things for Jackson. Put him in a room with a hundred toys of various shapes and sizes and one extension cord tucked away behind a bookshelf in the corner, and he’ll quickly move over to that bookshelf and yank on the cord until it comes out far enough for him to chew on. In our house, we’ve accepted the fact that Jackson is going to do things like chew on the air register and try to pull books off our shelves. No big deal. The only thing that can really create a mess is the cat’s water dispenser in the kitchen. Over the course of the past month, Jackson discovered it and realized it’s his favorite thing in the world. He’ll lie in front of it and pull the water out of it all afternoon long, leaving a huge puddle of water on the floor – and him soaking wet.

According to my iPhone Baby Guide, babies are like Doubting Thomas. If they can’t see it, they don’t believe that it exists. In theory, this means that every time you hide a toy from them, they assume it’s gone forever. They can’t comprehend that things exist when they are not visible. Jackson Thomas does not believe in this theory. How do I know? If you place him in the living room and leave him to his own devices for five minutes, he’ll quickly crawl into the kitchen and make a b-line for the cat water. He knows it exists, even when he can’t see it. People always wonder what babies dream about when they sleep. In the case of Jackson, I’m pretty sure it’s the cat’s water.

Cats and Dogs. Speaking of cats – this month Jackson came face to face with his first dog. One would think that there is no difference to a baby between a cat and a dog – both are roughly their size, furry, and have sweet water dishes to play in. However, this is not the case. While he is pretty indifferent to the cats, Jackson is absolutely fascinated by dogs. He crawls for them, touches them, gets in their face, and goes nose-to-nose with them. Part of this might be because cats are somewhat cautious of babies, and tolerate them for about five seconds before running away, whereas dogs approach babies like they do most things in life – they sniff them, lick them, and want to play with them. The more I think about it, the more babies are just like dogs…

• They love people and want to be friends with everyone.
• They spend their lives on the floor.
• They eat food designed for them, but long for regular people food.
• They will put anything they find in their mouths.
• They require you to put nice things on higher shelves.
• They are equally fawned over by the general public.
• They both come home from day care exhausted from playing with the other babies / dogs.
• Their owners spend their time cleaning up their poop.

So I suppose based on all these similarities, it makes sense that babies would like dogs more the cats. The good news is that thus far, Jackson isn’t one of those kids (you know, the weird ones) who is afraid of dogs, which bodes well for my – I mean “his” – eventual Christmas present someday of getting a puppy.

Sick. One quick correction from last month. If you recall, I talked about all the fun that goes along with having a sick baby and taking them to the ER. I foolishly said “I'm going to go out on a limb and say the peace of mind that we received from the visit isn't going to be worth the many hundreds of dollars we're going to be paying the good people of Children's Hospital.” Turns out, I should have said “THOUSANDS of dollars”. Absolutely absurd. Jackson is not going to the hospital again unless he is missing a limb.

Having said that, this month KB and I go to enjoy the fun of being sick yourself while having to take care of a baby. Holy impossible. Do you want to know the last thing you want to do when you feel like death and are fighting to avoid puking by lying perfectly still on the couch? Following around a six month old baby to keep them out of the cat water. Absolutely brutal. It’s times like these when I wish Jackson was old enough to let the TV do the parenting and plop him down on the couch next to me to watch a Disney movie marathon for eight hours instead of building cognitive abilities by playing with toys and muscles by crawling all over the place.

On the other hand, the one thought that we had the entire time we were sick was “please God don’t let Jackson get sick”. One, it would be super gross and he wouldn’t be smart enough to get to the toilet when he needed to puke. Two, even if he did, he’s not tall enough to reach over the toilet. Three, he would be so confused as to what in the world was going on and would hate it more than anything. I dread the first time that he’s actually sick, and hope it’s a long time away… and occurs when I’m away on a business trip.

Buttons.  KB and I have both made realizations about baby clothes over this past month. She has discovered since Jackson crawls all over the place, dark colored clothes are far superior to light colored clothes. They make your baby less gross looking, and make you look like the type of person who keeps a clean house. Now Jackson has a closet full of white outfits that are just hanging there waiting for the day when he starts crawling on his hands and knees… which means that he’s cycling through a rotation of about five other outfits that are dirty-proof. If variety is the spice of life, Jackson’s fashion style is brown rice cereal (inside joke for all the babies out there – I mean, come on – give me some more flavor parents!).

Me on the other hand, I’ve realized that people who make baby clothes that have real buttons on them instead of snaps have never actually dressed a baby. I know what you’re thinking – how much harder is it to close a button vs. snap something? The answer is a million times harder, especially when you have a child who finds lying on his back to be the worst torture in the world and can’t wait to flip on his stomach and crawl away to the nearest air register / extension cord. If I’m lucky, I can get one button closed each attempt, which means a shirt with 5 buttons on it takes me a solid 10 minutes to close up… and then there’s the absolute worst feeling of the world of finishing the second to last button and realizing that they’re all out alignment and need to be shifted down one hole. If that happens, you’re looking at a solid half hour of getting dressed. Absolutely brutal. Jackson has two outfits that have a number of buttons and snaps – and honest to God, I can’t even begin to put the one on him without calling Kate in for assistance. I don’t know if it’s supposed to go on head first, feet first, or somehow just wrap around his back and fasten in the front. Baby clothes are supposed to be easy, one-piece affairs that have a maximum of three snaps on them. Anything more than that is just inefficient. I look forward to the day when Kate goes out of town and I take Jackson to school in a white onesie and baby mesh shorts… although then I guess he would come home in a black onesie and baby mesh shorts – but eh, what can you do.

The Good Life. Finally this month, I just want to note how great Jackson's life is right now and he doesn't even know it. Jackson lives in a world where the Cincinnati Reds have a ten game division lead and it's only a matter of time before they clinch a division title. He lives in a world where the Bengals are praised for their drafting prowess, open their season on Monday Night Football, and are coming off a playoff season. He has never seen Notre Dame lose a football game - but instead assumes that they always win close games and beat Top 10 teams on the road. It's like a young Brian living through the late 1980s and seeing the Bengals make the Super Bowl, Notre Dame win a National Championship, and the Reds win a World Series... and being too young (and sober) to fully appreciate it. Here's hoping that this is only a taste of things to come for him, and the good times continue to roll until he's old enough to appreciate it.

Speaking of tasting things - as if the month couldn't get any better - Jackson topped it off with his first taste of delicious Skyline chili! Being a responsible parent, I didn't let him load his coneys up with hot sauce, but rather put some chili on my finger and let him taste it. He thought about it for a second... then grabbed my other fingers hoping to find another one that tasted as amazing. It's no wonder he's too good for brown rice cereal now. 

* and by “processes what just happens”, I mean “plots his eventual revenge”. Someday you will pay for your treachery Soren! Someday…

Month Six Musings

Six months already? That's half a year, getting closer to the point where normal society will track an age, as opposed to the silly "ten weeks" or "three months" measurements that are only used by parents of new babies (read: mothers. If it was fathers of new babies it would be like "um, I think like three months-ish?").

No - hitting the six month mark is an actual mark, as Jackson is officially a half a year old. The good news is, he's already accomplished quite a lot in his short time with us. Just in the past month, he's...

1. Gone to the emergency room.
2. Learned to crawl (or "scoot" as people call it, I was unaware there was a difference. He can move from one place to another on his own, whatever that is classified as)
3. Eaten his first fruits and vegetables.
4. Cut his first tooth.
5. Attended not one, but two minor league baseball games.
6. Officially been professionally photographed more times than his dad

More on all these items later - but they raise a very curious dichotomy in parenting I've noticed. Parents want their children to be advanced. They want them to be smarter than the other kids - better than the average baby. Some of it is perfectly logical. The sooner your baby sleeps through the night, the sooner the parents get to sleep through the night and thumb their nose at those sucker parents who still are awoken multiple times throughout the night by a crying baby. On the other hand, some of it represents the baby actually "growing up" - which is not always as well received. It's exciting to see your child doing things like crawling or eating for the first time, but in the back of your mind is the vision of your child no longer needing you - suddenly going away to college and hanging out with questionable friends, no longer wanting to be associated with his parents. 

As a dad, I have very little of these thoughts. To me, from the point when Jackson was born, the clock started ticking until the point when he would be able to play sports and video games with me. We're not there yet, but with every passing day, he's getting a little closer. I anxiously await the day that I can claim "father son bonding time" when we sit on the couch and watch football, taking breaks in between to play video games from 1996 (because modern ones are lame) and toss football in the backyard (for exercise). 

Kate on the other hand, as a mom, is the exact opposite. Sure, she wants Jackson to grow and develop - but with each passing day he's one step closer to not wanting to hang out with his mom. He's starting to outgrow those cute baby outfits we bought before we knew if Jackson was going to be boy or a girl. He's less likely to want to hang out in her lap without attempting to crawl off it and tumble face-first onto the floor below. The introduction of real food is the first step into not needing her for 100% of his life-sustaining needs... and that can be difficult to accept.

The one thing that makes it easier is that Jackson gets way cuter and more fun with every passing day. Remember when Kate gave birth to a small Asian baby and I demanded an immediate paternity test? Well, the good news is that Jackson now is a mini-Brian who smiles at everyone, constantly wants to be moving and playing, and loves TV and hates books just as much as his dad. Looking at pictures from six months ago to today, he barely looks like the same kid - but it's all been change for the better. The unfortunate thing for him is that he's probably rapidly approaching peak attractiveness for his life - sometime in the next year or two - and then it's all downhill until he tricks a pretty girl to settle and marry him twenty-five years later.

But back to the fun from this past month...

E.R. Although Jackson had been sick before, this month brought his first case of "what the hell is that!?!" - a rash that spread all over his body. After two days of assuming it would just go away, his demeanor (crying all the time, generally hating life and letting us know it) drove us to Children's Hospital on a fateful June weekend afternoon. I felt dirty for being the stereotypical "overreacting parents", but I guess I would have felt worse if Jackson actually had some life-threatening skin disease... if those even exist. Although we haven't gotten a bill yet, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the peace of mind that we received from the visit isn't going to be worth the many hundreds of dollars we're going to be paying the good people of Children's Hospital.

Let me break down how the experience went:

1. Check in, have someone take Jackson's vitals.
2. Wait in Waiting Room #1
3. Move to Room #1, have someone else take Jackson's vitals.
4. Wait in Waiting Room #2, where people who clearly aren't that sick glare at your screaming child.
5. Move to Room #2, where a nurse takes Jackson's vitals.
6. Wait in Room #2, thanking God for iPhones and the ability to follow Reds games in moments like this.
7. See a Doctor, who takes one look at your child and then disappears for 30 minutes.
8. Have the Doctor report back that "kids get rashes, nothing to worry about" and disappear again.
9. Ask the Nurse for a more detailed prognosis and instructions.
10. Have the Doctor return and give very vague instructions and information.
11. Leave three hours later.

Needless to say, they did a very good job of giving the impression of moving through the hospital without actually giving any real information. And again, you can't put a price tag on peace of mind - but this experience makes me even more confident that we can successfully raise our child using only the internet rather than relying on these so-called "traditional doctors".

Crawling. You know the stereotype is that babies (and kids in general) always gravitate towards the things that are off-limits? Kids to fireworks, grown-ups to shots, babies to electrical wires? Well, it's 100% true. In an exhibition that will surely land KB and I in the "Parents Hall of Fame", the first thing that motivated our soon to crawl across the floor was the opportunity to put an extension cord in his mouth and bite down on it. That's right, in a room full of Babies's R Us approved toys of all the colors of the rainbow, making the most entertaining sounds and colors imaginable, Jackson scooted all the way across our living room to pick up a boring brown extension cord and put it in his mouth.

What really makes us good parents? After witnessing this, I went and got the video camera and dragged the extension cord across the room to entice him to eat it again, so that I could get his first crawls on camera. 

The funny thing is, this isn't a one-time experience. In any given situation, the one thing you do NOT want Jackson going after and putting in his mouth is the one thing he immediately gravitates for and won't stop until he reaches. Things like dirty shoes, dirty newspaper, full bottles or cups of beer, sharp metal objects, or high-priced electronics. Those are his favorites.

Part of me wonders if kids can somehow sense that you don't want them around these things, which makes them all the more appealing. I decided to perform an experiment by placing an empty cup of water just out of  Jackson's reach on the table, and telling him that he couldn't have it. Low and behold, he strained and reached for it until he finally got it, then munched on it for a while before realizing that he couldn't cause any trouble, and quickly moved on to dumping a cup of beer on the floor. But the moral of the story is, kids somehow know what they should - and shouldn't - be doing, and naturally gravitate towards the bad. I'm going to chalk this up to nature's way of toughening up kids - forcing them to build up immunities and thickening their skin a bit through a few jolts of electricity or scrapes and bruises. Survival of the fittest!

Of course, the other problem with all this newfound mobility is that we can no longer leave Jackson laying on the floor to run to the bathroom and expect to come back and find him exactly where you left him. Give him thirty seconds, and he'll travel across an entire room (provided there is something dangerous on the opposite side of it). We are rapidly approaching the final transformation of our house. We started out with a very "put together" house with nice pictures on the shelves, candles, and things made of glass adorning each room. Everything had a color scheme and there was an overall "feel" to every room.

Then we started to integrate more color - the brighter and louder the better. The rooms got a bit more cluttered as Jackson's things found their place alongside our things. We rearranged rooms, did our best to keep his toys put away as much as possible, and tried to maintain a balance between our pre- and post- baby lives... and I think we did it quite well.

Now that Jackson is mobile, the party is over. It's time to start locking down the rooms, removing all movable objects from bookshelves, hammering said bookshelves into the walls, and putting up gates to create mini-cages for Jackson to play in without it resulting in broken glass and electronics. Gone are the days of being able to change Jackson on a changing table without him attempting to roll off the edge onto the floor. Gone are the days of being able to give him a bath without him doing at least two flips in the tub to end up on his stomach. Gone are the days of him sitting in a stationary chair or swing and happily staring at things around the room. He's got the entire world to see (and put in his mouth), and he can't wait to do so.

Again, for me, it's exciting. One step closer to being able to throw a football and kick a soccer ball. For the females in the relationship, it's goodbye to their perfect cute homes and hello to stark walls and empty bookshelves. All we need is a couple of posters attached to the wall with push-pins and I'll feel right back at home in the Delta House... in more ways than one.

Cleaning. I would have never claimed to have a clean house. Kate and I have a very "put together" house. There's not crap all over the place. Everything is in its rightful place before Kate and I go to bed at night, and before we go to bed in the morning - just in case we die in our sleep or at work, people who come into our house will think we lead very organized lives... but not clean ones. 

You never really comprehend how dirty your house is until you have a baby crawling around it. Want to feel depressed about how clean you keep your house? I'll put Jackson in a white onesie and let him crawl around on your hardwood floors for thirty seconds. He'll come up with a black chest, with cat hair in his mouth and dust bunnies in his hair. As Sully puts it, he's gaining "free anitbodies" to protect him from future diseases, but it is a bit disgusting... and disheartening to see your baby reveling in your own filth.  We're getting to the point of either needing to take vacation days from work to do a good cleaning of the house, or becoming fancy-pants east side people who pay someone else to clean their house. It sounds crazy, but when you think about it, wouldn't everyone rather spend a few hours playing with their child instead of cleaning their house? Fifty years from now, I'd rather have a bunch of memories of watching Jackson eat extension cords rather than of watching Kate clean bathrooms (because I don't do such things since bathrooms are gross).

Still, it's funny how having a baby totally changes your life. I would have never thought in a million years I would be having a serious conversation about paying someone to clean my house. Then again, I also never thought I would be "doing stuff" for 16 of the 18 hours a day that I'm awake, leaving precious little time for things like exercise, watching TV, blogging, or reading. But here I am, super busy all the time with a kid eating dirt off my floor. Something's gotta give.

Food and Teeth. Speaking of eating, Jackson is now well on his way to being a good carnivore and tearing into some animal flesh. His first tooth has sprung, leading to a lot of excess drool and opportunity for me to pull out obscure Simpsons references I never even realized I had. When I discovered that Jackson had his first tooth on the way, I started calling it "Ol' Chompa" in a grizzled old prospector voice. I had no idea where it came from... until I decided to Google it:

That's right - one episode of Simpsons I probably saw 15 years ago and haven't though of since somehow permanently burned into my subconsciousness, even though I can't remember conversations I had with co-workers two days ago. God bless TV.

At any rate, although Jackson is not yet enjoying his first delicious taste of Skyline Chili or Cheeseburger, he's working his way through the gauntlet of canned baby food. As a surprise to no one, he's wolfing down everything we've thrown his way. Carrots, bananas, even peas (gross!) - he chomps them down, gets a decent share all over his face and hair, and comes back for more. You have to think at some point we will come across a food that he doesn't like - but thus far, we're either starving our child to the point where he'll eat anything, or all those food TV shows I watched and cooking magazines I read to him while he was in utero are finally paying off. 

Picture Pages. Lastly, with Jackson turning six, it was time for his six month pictures. By my count, this marks the fourth time that Jackson has been professionally photographed. Once in the hospital, once for his one month pictures, once for his three month pictures, and now for his six month pictures. By my count, I have been officially photographed twice in my life. Once on my wedding day, and once when we got "engagement pictures" taken three years after we had been married after three years of hearing Kate complain about the fact that we never got them.

Don't get me wrong - the pictures are great, and I'm glad we have them. But it is funny how Jackson has already discovered what a camera is and uses reverse baby psychology on them. Similar to how he's so attracted to things that we don't want him to chew on, he's the happiest, smiley-ist baby you've ever seen... until the camera comes out. Then it's all serious business-man Jackson, attempting to read your soul through the camera lens, thinking about solving the world's great problems, with no time for such frivalry as smiling for a picture. He's even smart enough to understand that an iPhone or iPad are the same thing as a camera. He sees those come out, and goes from Smiles McLaugherson to Concerned McSeriousface. Luckily, I'm still able to draw his attention away and get a few smiles out of him (mostly through singing the DMB jam "Anyone Seen the Bridge" - seriously), but it's ironic that for a kid who spends 95% of his day smiling, when the professional photographer comes around, we get about 10 pictures worth of smiles before he's done with it.

I guess the good news is, she'll be back around three months later for another opportunity to get more pictures of Happy Jackson. At some point we're bound to get that elusive family picture where he's smiling, I don't look tired as hell, and Kate isn't unhappy with the way her hair looks... even if it's when Jackson turns 16. Someday...

With that, I think I've used up my quota of two free hours of time for today. Back to work! 

Month Five Musings

Books. There are a lot of great, creative things out there for babies. We’ve got a stroller that turns into an easy-to-carry package with one quick pull of a string. We’ve got a high chair and a crib that are basically transformers, designed for Jackson to hypothetically use them for the rest of his life by adding or removing a few pieces here and there. Clearly an insane amount of thought and innovation went into the creation of these items, which make you appreciate them for what they are, even if you don’t get to personally enjoy them.

Then there are the books that are written for babies. I use the word “written” very loosely. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that babies can’t read. I understand that the main purpose of these books is to feature colorful pictures and be made of quarter-inch thick pages that babies are able to gnaw on without hurting themselves. Still, is there some rule that these books have to be completely illogical and devoid of storylines? Maybe I’ve been spoiled by a lifetime of Pixar movies that are enjoyable for kids of all ages, but I was really expecting more from these books. Early on, KB and I decided that a bedtime story would be part of Jackson’s bedtime routine. Five months into his life, I’ve pretty much read through every children’s book in our house – and I’ve discovered the following trends:

1. They’re crazy short. I understand that the attention span for babies is super small. Heck, Jackson can’t sit still for more than two minutes at a time without attempting to roll over onto his stomach and start playing with anything besides a book. But I can’t tell you the number of times I sit down with him to read a story, flip three pages, and it’s over. Really? The worst is when it’s one of those books with inch thick pages. You settle down with a decent sized book only to find that it’s six pages long… and don’t get me started on the ones where the second half of the book is really just a bunch of pages glued together to give the appearance of being a longer story. Given that these books are usually closer to $10 than $5, it’s highway robbery. All I’m asking for is a story that takes me longer than thirty seconds to read to Jackson – is that too much to ask?
2. When they’re sappy, they’re ridiculous sappy. It’s not enough to have a simple story about a child that loves his parents. It needs to be a child gushing over how fantastic every little thing his parents do on every single page, featuring a ridiculous amount of hugging, snuggling, and kissing. Besides setting kids up for a crushing disappointment when they grow up and realize that everything their parents do isn’t really that great (Daddy watches sports on TV! He’s the best! Mommy washes dishes! Let’s smother her with hugs!), the overly sappy writing is simply a cover-up for the fact that these stories usually have zero storyline along with them. But WHY is Daddy watching sports? What inspires Mommy to wash those dishes? Where’s the character development? Boring.
3. They make odd choices. If you were going to make a book about colors, using animals to illustrate those colors, there’s some very obvious choices. Sheep are white. Frogs are green. Stuff like that. Not in our books. Instead, it’s “green like iguanas” and “white like dogs”. Really?! Maybe they’re stretching for creativity, or maybe the authors are really bad at drawing things like sheep or frogs – but I can’t wait until the eventual day that Jackson is able to talk and we’re reading a book and asking “what sound does an iguana make?”.
4. They’re somewhat inappropriate. Sometimes you have to wonder if these authors are throwing things in their books just to make the parents chuckle when they read them out loud. I present to you a page from “Guess How Much I Love You”:

Really?! These publishers seriously need some teenage boys on their editing staff to catch stuff like this!

(Granted, this makes the book far more interesting, overcome it’s uber-sappiness, but it’s still ridiculous that someone approved these character names, right?)

Okay – enough for my crazy ranting. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is “yes, I should quit my job and start writing children’s books.” I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a story about a young boy who wished the Bengals to a Super Bowl victory… but at what cost? Or a book teaching counting that features the numbers from Lost and background images steeped in Island mythology? They’d sell like crazy.

Sick Kids. Long before Jackson was born, it was pretty obvious which parent was going to give the tough love, and which one was going to be the one the kids ask for candy. Perhaps it’s my harsh upbringing (no cable TV until I was 18 years old! How did my parents not go to jail for that?), or the fact that I’m a jerk, but I knew it was going to be my job to be the bad cop that doesn’t let Jackson do whatever he wants all the time. Unfortunately, I found out that you aren’t really allowed to start administering this “tough love” until the baby is like 6 months old – so I have yet to put this theory into practice, although this past month taught me that there will be at least one situation where all the tough love goes right out the window – when Jackson gets sick.

One of the benefits of sending your baby to Day Care at an early age is that it exposes them to germs at a very early age – leading to a higher portion of colds and sickness in the first few years of their life, but then making them much less likely to get sick later in life due to all the anti-bodies they’ve built up. After about six weeks of going to school, Jackson finally got sick for the first time. It was just a run of the mill cold, so he was a token gross baby with a running nose, sneezing, coughing, and generally looking like he hated life. Jackson leads a pretty simple life. He drinks boob whiskey. He plays. He takes naps. He repeats. So when you see him miserable, you try to come up with anything to make him feel better – but there aren’t a ton of options. You can get out new toys, but he’s really not that interested in them. You can hold him, but he’d prefer laying on his stomach on the ground anyways. However, there is one thing that he loves more than anything else – TV. So when he was sick, you better believe I propped him up in front of the TV and let him watch it to his hearts’ content. It really didn’t matter what was on – I started out with cartoons and whatever was on ABC Family, but then realized that I could watch whatever I wanted, like sports and whatever was on ABC Family. It always calmed him down and put him into a happy trance, giving him temporary relief from feeling miserable. It worries me a little that when he’s older and sick and says “you know what would make me feel better? A puppy”, that I’m going to have a tough time resisting him. Looks like it’s going to be mom’s job to take care of the monkey when he gets sick…

One more thing - you don’t really appreciate how great it is to be able to blow your own nose and stop the dripping until you see another human being who can’t do it. There’s only so much blotting of a nose with a tissue that you can do before realizing how futile the effort is and letting the snot run like a faucet. Thankfully, I bought a “nosefrida” snot sucker shortly after Jackson was born, which I could finally put into use. For those unfamiliar with the product, you wouldn’t believe it until you saw it – and if there is a more disgusting way to get snot out of a child’s nose, I haven’t found it. Basically, you put a tube in one side of their nose, and suck on the other end of it – literally sucking the snot into a tube that you can then discard. It’s filthy… but it works. Highly recommended.

Traveling. In addition to his first illness, the past month also presented our young family with our first official road trip – a four hour drive away from home. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Jackson is much like his father – he starts to get antsy as soon as he gets outside the 275 loop (where one becomes more suspect to attack from rival cities), and anything more than two hours away is about an hour too far. For one, Jackson isn’t a huge fan of his car seat. He tolerates it, plays with his bugs that hang in front of his face, stares down his evil twin in the mirror, and then is ready to stretch his legs and move around. Unfortunately, Johnny Law says it is illegal to even think about unbuckling one point of his five point harness (even though it’s fine for Kate to climb from the front seat to the back seat while the car careens down the highway at 75 mph to entertain him), so he remains confined in his car seat jail, being tortured by the bugs dangling above his head and mocked by his evil twin in the mirror.

If you can get him to fall asleep for a portion of the drive, you’re in business – but given that his max nap time is about two hours, that’s about as far as you can get without it requiring some serious creativity to keep him happy. That sets our acceptable drive radius at roughly Columbus / Indianapolis / Louisville. The good news is, this means that Jackson will never be too far from the closest Skyline Chili. The bad news is, this is going to make it very difficult for Jackson to enjoy a real beach, mountain, or Bengals away game against an NFC team for a while. We’ll see if this changes with time, but for now, traveling any further distance just feels like cruel and unusual punishment.

Best Sleeper Ever. Remember a month ago when I mentioned that after freaking out about Jackson’s lack of sleeping when he first started school, he took his first three hour nap in a crib? Well, this kid has taken napping and sleeping to an art form. His average day now includes an hour nap in the morning, a three hour nap mid-day, another hour nap in the afternoon, and then sleeping from about 7:00 pm until 6:30 am the next morning. He gets more sleep in a day than I get in a weekend. Even better, he’s somehow figured out that bed / crib = sleep. Feed him, drop him down in the sleeping area, and he follows a predictable routine.

• Stretch out a little
• Flip over to his side
• Put a thumb in his mouth
• Roll over to his stomach
• Fall sound asleep

The whole routine only takes a minute or two, and is pretty fascinating to watch. It’s like a reflex at this point, and is sometimes pretty shocking at how easily he goes from wide awake and babbling to sound asleep in his crib for the next few hours. If there was some kind of international sleeping competition, I would enter him in it. On the other hand, if there was an international sleeping competition, it would probably be the most boring sporting event ever to watch.

First Food. Finally this month, we crossed another milestone off of Jackson’s list – his first “food”. I use the word “food” lightly, since it’s this rice cereal concoction that looks like dehydrated mashed potato flakes, and is then mixed with boob whiskey to form a colorless, tasteless paste. Yum-o! Welcome to the world of high cuisine, buddy! Given Jackson’s tendency to chug bottles and cry when the boob whiskey stops flowing, I suppose it comes as no surprise that he took to eating food like his Daddy to guacamole, which is to say “give me all of it, I’ll lick the bowl clean, and then ask for more.”

I guess he’s been watching us eat meals for the past month, but it’s still shocking to see him grab the spoon and guide it into his mouth where he sucks it dry and then grunts for more. Jackson is now five months old, and I’ve never seen him act full. He goes through an entire bowl of delicious bland paste, and chases it with a solid half hour of boob whiskey. If there was a baby triathlon of eating, sleeping, and pooping, I’d put down some serious money on Jackson as a contender to win it all. That is, unless there was a TV in the room, in which case he would stop everything and sit slack-jawed in front of it.

That’s my boy.

Month Four Musings

The New Normal. As we enter the fourth month of life with Jackson, we finally have entered into the “new normal” routine. Since this isn’t Europe, the maternity leave vacation is seemingly over as quickly as it began, sending Kate back to work and Jackson off to school (some may call it “day care”, but “school” sounds a lot better to us – plus he gets a daily report card. More on that later). As with any change, I don’t think we’ve quite settled into a comfortable rut with the new routine yet. Mornings are still huge variables dictated by when Jackson wakes up. Do I shower first? Does Kate? What time will I be able leave for work? As a guy who likes to plan things like dinners three nights in advance, not knowing what each morning is going to hold has been a little bit stressful, but nothing compared to the stress that Kate has experienced with taking Jackson to school.

The good news is, she prepped herself for Jackson going back to school by imagining it was going to be the worst thing she has ever done in her life, that should we be dropping her baby (that she has lovingly cared for during the first three months of his life) into a cold, heartless, cruel world where people would throw him in a crib and leave him crying for hours on end. While school is surprisingly cold – seriously, they probably keep their thermostat at a crisp 60 degrees, compared to our house, which in the summer time might dip into the high 70s depending on how generous I’m feeling with the AC that day – the teachers there seem to be pretty nice and have already learned that Jackson hates his crib, meaning that he is always getting attention in the main room… and monopolizes the swing (suck it other babies!)

But the biggest thing that’s helped the transition into the new normal? Jackson freaking loves school.

The first day we dropped him off, and stood him on the ground next to another baby, you could see this look in his eyes like “whoa whoa whoa – there are OTHER people like me out in the world who are my size and actually move around, unlike garden gnomes? SWEET!” 

If Jackson is mesmerized by watching TV, he is hypnotized by other babies. It’s honestly shocking to hear the stories of how quickly he’s interacting (dare I say “playing” with other babies at school). It really makes you think that this is how nature intended things to be. Babies weren’t meant to spend all day hanging out with grown-ups. They’re meant to be hanging out with other babies, which is probably how things worked back in caveman times. All the women folk hanging around the cave with their babies talking gibberish to each other while all the men folk are out working at the Stone Quarry on top of dinosaurs.

Of course the problem with this 8-5 entertainment is that it makes napping a much lower priority on Jackson’s daily to-do list. Why would he waste time sleeping when he could be laying the groundwork for a future make-out session with one of the ladies at school? I understand his point, but this has been the biggest cause of concern for Kate in the new normal. The Monkey basically went from napping 3-5 hours a day at home to napping for 1-2 hours his first week at school.

• Was he still happy? Yep, smiles all around.
• Did he sleep like a champ in the evenings after school? Yep, like a dog that spent the day at doggy day care. 
• Did we still spend hours Googling “how to get your baby to sleep at day care” each night? Yep, and it turns out the search results are pretty weak, mostly comprised of crazy moms on internet message boards.

In the end, our logic was that Jackson hated his crib. When he was home with Kate, he’d nap for hours in his swing, or in Kate’s arms, or in the Maya Wrap – but very few times in the crib. Determined to overcome this “problem”, we vowed to put him through some crib training each weekend, forcing him to nap in it whether he liked it or not, buying a music machine that attaches to the crib, and committing ourselves to putting in the hard work required to make him a better crib sleeper.

(Ironically, before we had a chance to actually do any of these things, he slept one day at school in his crib for three hours.)

But the point is – when sleeping in a crib vs. a swing is the biggest of your worries about sending your baby off to school, things are going pretty good. However, there are a number of things I’ve learned about “day care” in the first two weeks that Jackson has been there…

Regardless of how often they tell you that they clean the place, it still feels dirty. I sweep my house maybe twice a month. I can’t tell you the last time I mopped my floors. Jackson’s school is cleaned, sterilized, and disinfected using a three-step method on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Lab tests would undoubtedly prove that his school is the cleaner place for him to be crawling around on the floor… yet it still seems dirty. I’ve come to the conclusion that when you’re in a room with seven other crawling, drooling, pooping babies, no matter what you do, it’s going to seem gross.

The ladies that work there have to be a little crazy. I can’t help but picture the first grade teacher in Billy Madison who is super sweet, loves all the kids, is a great teacher… and puts paste on her eyes when no one is looking. I mean honestly, can you imagine taking care of eight babies all day every day? Each one is a like a ticking time bomb that needs constant attention and supervision to keep the room from becoming total chaos. Plus, you’ve got crazy parents who are constantly second-guessing everything that you do (even though you’re probably taken care of hundreds of babies in your life compared to their one or two). I know day care is expensive, but good God – you couldn’t pay me enough money to do their job.

The fact that everyone buys their baby stuff at Babies R Us is painfully obvious. A quick stroll around the room and you’re guaranteed to see duplicates of every car seat, mobile, toy, and outfit… and that’s in a room with the super small sample size of eight babies. It makes your stuff seem a little less special… but also gives you confidence that if you’re buying all the wrong stuff for your baby, at least you’re not the only one.

But most importantly, it’s showed me that not all babies are created equal.

Comparisons. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the guy who thinks my child is the cutest thing the world has ever seen and all other babies pale in comparison. I’ll be the first to tell you that Jackson looks like a middle aged banker, and looked like a chubby Asian baby when he was first born. I’ll also be the first to tell you that ANY picture of a cute puppy trumps ANY picture of a cute baby, my own included. But being completely objective – there are a lot of weird looking babies out there.

I first noticed this trend on Facebook a while back. People would post pictures of their new babies and be met with a hundred comments of people saying how adorable and cute their child is… compared to my reaction which would range somewhere between “Eh” and “Ugh!” It makes you wonder – are people just obligated to give these same standard reactions and comments regardless of what the baby looks like? Or am I the only horrible person in the world who has ever said the phrase “Gross. I’m glad that’s not my baby”? Like I said, Jackson looks like a middle aged banker, but the kind of middle aged banker that you would do business with. Some of the babies out there look like grumpy old men who have been hardened by the war and would chase kids off their lawn with a Civil War sword… and they’re baby girls. I’m sorry, but nothing about matches the Facebook comment of “sweetheart” or “doll”.

The good news is, in life’s race to being pretty, it’s how you finish, not how you start – so we really shouldn’t care what babies look like. My wife didn’t peak until later in life, and I’m thankful for that. I’ve been slowly getting less cute since I was about 4 years old, and I’ve accepted it. It just seems like as a society, we should be strong enough to give honest opinions about the appearances of babies, knowing that they’re going to change dramatically over the course of the next 18 years of their lives. Someday when a super model looks back on her baby pictures and thinks “man, I was ugly”, wouldn’t you rather be honest with her and say “yes, you weren’t the cutest baby” so that she respects your current opinions on her appearance? Or would you rather she assume that you think everyone and everything is pretty, thus lowering her current hotness factor? Plus, I’m fairly certain there’s something about telling the truth in the Bible.

Still, with the start of school the comparisons start. Who has the smartest baby? Who has the cutest baby? Who has the happiest baby? With two weeks of school under his belt, I can confirm that Jackson is in the running for “cutest baby”. One area that he’s not going to win? Cleanliness.

I mentioned before that we get daily report cards for Jackson. They’re similar to the report cards that you get later in life, only these track things like how often your child pees, poops, and sleeps. In his first two weeks, Jackson has also gotten a few written comments, one of which I hope he never sees on another report card for the rest of his life:

NEEDS MORE PANTS.

Apparently, Jackson is awesome at pooping – so awesome that sometimes it sneaks out of his diaper and stains his pants… and sometimes so good at it that he ruins multiple pants in the same day. This makes me think a few things:

1. How are the people at school changing Jackson? By turning him upside down first? Because I can’t remember the last time that he pooped out of a diaper.
2. A little poop on the pants never hurt anyone. Wipe it off, move on with life.
3. Pants should be optional.  At home, Kate is big on making Jackson look like a real person every day by wearing things like pants and socks. I’m all about putting him in a white onesie and calling it good enough (at least until he’s big enough to fit into his baby mesh shorts).

I just hope this report card doesn’t go into his personal file to haunt him for the rest of his life. I can just see Jackson applying for a job someday and having the person ask “so tell me about this situation where you needed more pants”. How embarrassing.

Toys. Last but not least this month, we’ve added some new additions to our arsenal of Jackson equipment around the house. First, a high chair, which brings him up to our level while we eat eat – and making him seem more like a person (eating at the table) than a dog (sitting in a bouncy chair on the ground looking up at us while we eat). Second, we finally set up the long-awaited exersaucer, a toy which we thought he would love ever since he was a few weeks old and we discovered that Jackson loves standing up more than anything.

Kate disagrees – but to me, this is the first major “toy” that Jackson has had. Sure, he’s had little stuffed animals and balls since he was born, but those required some grown-up intervention for him to keep interest in them (you know, moving them around, giving them names and voices, having them solve pretend crimes, the usual). He’s even had the bigger things like a swing – but that was more for sleeping than entertaining purposes. This is a full-fledged entertainment center for a baby. When Jackson sits in it, he’s got a variety of things to play everywhere he turns. Most importantly, it’s the first thing he has ever had that has the potential to entertain him – on his own – for an extended period of time (besides his fingers and feet). Now I won’t feel like I’m neglecting my child leaving him in a swing for a few minutes while I’ve got other things to do. Instead, I’m giving him the all-important “independent play time”. Less work for me and more fun for him? Everybody wins!

Immediately my mind fast-forwards to his first Christmas, birthday, and other upcoming events when we can actually give him toys that he’ll be excited about… and even further down the road when he’ll be able to toss football and play video games, which I can claim count as “father son bonding time” instead of “Brian playing time”. Sooner or later, having this kid is going to start paying off by getting me out of household chores. Booyah!

That’s all for this month. Time for me to celebrate my first Father’s Day the way our forefathers intended… putting my child to bed, pouring a whiskey, and watching sports. Happy Day!

Month Three Musings

Smile. Somewhere between month two and month three, having a baby starts to pay off. Granted, there is something intrinsically special about having a baby right from the start… you feel like God, having created life, you suddenly have justification for your house being a mess, you have an excuse to stay in on Friday nights and be in bed by 9:00 pm without your friends judging you, etc - but during those first two months you are doing a lot of internal justification and rationalizing that your baby likes you. Phrases like the following are running through your pretty frequently over the course of the first two months of having a baby:

“The baby sees me more than anyone else, they know I’m their parent.”

“The baby loves me – I feed / clothe / bathe him.”

“The baby would miss me if I wasn’t here. They like me more than their swing… or the lamp.”

Sure – those statements might be true… but you have no way to know for sure. For the first two months, you could perform a test on a baby - give them the option of either looking at you, a smiling, talking, real-life human being who is calling their name and motioning towards them… or looking at a blank white wall – and there’s probably an equal chance they’re going to pick the wall. It’s a little disheartening.

Then, one day, your baby becomes a real person. One day, you’re talking to your baby and they actually look you in the eyes. You see the little wheels turning inside their brain. They start to think “wait a minute, I’ve seen this guy before – he generally seems like a pretty cool dude, and doesn’t seem to mind when I suck on his arm or pee on him. I think I’ll smile at him to show him that I like his style.” And then they smile.

Suddenly, you have some evidence to back up all your crazy thoughts. Sure, they might also smile at the lamp from time to time, but there’s a pretty good chance that they do actually recognize you and appreciate all the blood, sweat, and tears that you’ve dedicated to them over the course of the first three months of their lives. You finally start to get some return on your investment!

For me, this is probably the moment when a baby starts becoming a person. It’s the first step towards social interaction, the first step towards being able to communicate with the outside world, and the first step towards Jackson being able to appreciate all the hilarious things I say to him all the time. The smiles become a measuring stick for how much a baby likes you, a pick-me-up after a crappy day at the office (hypothetically speaking, of course), and an elusive sight that quickly vanishes as soon as the cameras come out, much like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Any day that you get some smiles is a good one.

Of course, the next step in this communication evolution is the laugh. Thus far, Jackson gives a “talking laugh” – you know, the kind you would give if you didn’t really think that something was funny, but were actually saying the words “ha ha ha”. I’ll classify it as a laugh for now, but either he hasn’t quite mastered the belly laugh yet, or my jokes aren’t actually that funny and he’s just humoring me.

The other interesting thing about babies? The line between laughing and crying is razor thin. One second they’re smiling and talk-laughing at you… then without notice, it becomes a cry. “Ha ha ha ha… waa!” It’s mind-boggling. On numerous occasions Jackson has gone mid-laugh into cry and mid-cry into laugh. On some occasions, he’s even done the elusive laugh-cry, where’s he doing both at the same time. The eyes say “I’m not happy”, but the mouth says “you are entertaining me. Keep it up, large person who cleans up my poop.”

Stress. But life with a baby isn’t always smiles and laugh-cries. It can also be stressful… like the most stressful hour of my week each week – the sixty minutes each Sunday that I’m at church. Babies inside churches (or any other quiet place for that matter) are a ticking time bomb that could go off at any minute. It’s horrible. You nervously keep one eye on them at all times, looking for any cracks in the armor or signs that loud noises might be coming. Church time is spent unleashing one preventive measure after another upon your child in hopes of avoiding a loud outburst. Rocking. Pacifying. Picking the baby up. Shaking the baby. Passing the baby to someone else like a hot potato so that if he does start crying, the congregation will look at them and think “what horrible parents, they must be sinners” rather than looking at you.

The good news is, this leads to plenty of prayer going on in church, although most are some variation of “God, please keep my baby quiet”. I guess all those prayers must be paying off, since thus far Jackson has been nearly silent in every church he’s ever attended. Heck, he even slept through his baptism, and that involved forcing him to wear a dress while a stranger dumps water on his head. What is this, a fraternity initiation? Still, the prospect of a mid-mass melt-down, especially during one of those “quiet reflection” portions of church is absolutely terrifying. I can’t wait for the day when Jackson is old enough to develop Catholic guilt so that I can shame into behaving at church.

Baby Books Become Useless. One of the things that Kate and I have discovered is that all the baby books that we have become utterly useless around month three. Up until this point, they’ve been giving us day-by-day, week-by-week instructions on how to properly raise our child. We’ve followed them pretty closely, and they’ve worked pretty well. Jackson is a very happy, calm baby who sleeps a ton. The problem is, every baby book either ends on month three – or jumps from month three to one year. There is literally no advice about what to do during months four through twelve. The authors cop-out and say things like “each child develops differently” or “congratulations, your baby is well on their way to being the happiest baby on the block”, and then just assume that everything is magically going to work out for the next nine months.

Clearly, someone is putting far too much faith in me as a parent.  

I’m fairly certain Jackson isn’t self-sufficient quite yet – maybe next month – which begs the question - what do we do now? Some talk of “tough love”, letting a baby cry it out, teaching them that the world is a cold, cruel place that they need to learn to tackle on their own. Others say this will make your child grow up to listen to goth music and hate you. On the other extreme are people who continue to baby their babies, attending to their every need and desire, teaching them that the world is caring, loving place full of sunshine and puppies. However, this risks creating a child who grows up thinking that everything in life should be easy, guaranteeing that they will never be able to become a Bengals or Notre Dame fan. It’s a pickle! I’m sure the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but without a so-called “expert” telling us how to get there, we’re left to navigate the treacherous waters of child-rearing on our own…

Back to Reality. Or are we? Month three marks the hardest part of every mom’s life, at least according to my unofficial research of females that I know – wrapping up maternity leave and heading back to work. Their lives have been fully consumed by one thing – taking care of their baby - for a quarter of the year… and suddenly, the party is over and it’s time to return to the reality of work. For fathers, this was a much smaller event that took place a week or two after the birth of their child – like when the NCAA tournament ends.  For mothers, many have literally spent every waking moment for three months staring at their child – it’s more like the end of the NFL season. It’s a hard transition. Work is like baseball. Sure, it fills the time in the day and keeps you entertained, but the same level of love and affection isn’t there. You spend your free time thinking about your fantasy football team – er, your baby – and can’t wait for it to return.

The silver lining here? In the case of Jackson, he’s going to start going to day care where there will be a staff of people who have degrees in things like “How to Care for a Child”, “Teaching Babies to Nap in Cribs”, and “Advanced Sock Puppetry” – critical skills that people like KB and I lack. We do our best to make up for these deficiencies with things like unconditional love and undivided attention, but it’s somewhat nice to think of day care as a safety blanket – someone else that can ensure we’re not missing anything crucial to successful child development… and if we are, someone that can take steps to fix our mistakes. It’s like an insurance policy for our parenting skills – and I kinda like that.

So while I know it’s going to be an absolutely brutal few weeks as we get adjusted to the “real life” or working and having a baby, I take solace in the fact that it’s a critical step in making Jackson a well-adjusted human being who can go out into the world, make friends, and learn things like baby sign language and Spanish. Over the past three months, we’ve done the best we can to arm him with all the defense mechanisms we can – a thick layer of body fat to get through the lean times, cuteness to help him receive favor from his teachers, and now the ability to smile and talk-laugh, which should help him get out of any sticky situations with day care bullies, and also help pick up day care chicks.

It's a big beautiful world out there. It's time for Jackson to start experiencing it.

Month Two Musings

It's already time for ANOTHER blog post? It seems like only days ago that I was writing about the first month of life A.J. (after-Jackson) - but here we are at month two. Or is it week eight? Or year 1/6? It's all very confusing. I mean, I understand the need to communicate with others about how old your baby is, since saying "he's zero years old" doesn't really paint much of a picture - and sounds weird. But should I be counting his age in weeks or months? Or days? Or just making the days count?

Tracking a Baby's Age. Girls obsess over this stuff. They have books that tell them what their child is supposed to be doing at each stage of their life for the first year - but the problem is that some publications count in weeks, and some count in months. Jackson was born on February 16. So does that mean he's not "two months old" until April 16th? Or, since the average month is 4 weeks long, is he two months old when he's 8 weeks old? In that case, it would have been back on April 12th. It's only 4 days, so it really doesn't make that much of a difference - but it's of tremendous importance when it comes to things like taking "two month pictures" and sending around Email announcements about what's been going on for the prior month of Jackson's life. It's also important to be able to stack rank your baby against your friends' babies to make sure that your baby is better than theirs.

As for me, I've got one resource for tracking my child's development - an iPhone Baby Center app that tells me what should be going on each day for the first year of his life. I don't read ahead, so I'm not spoiled - but that does make me somewhat clueless about what exactly is going to happen in this first year. When do babies start walking? When do they start talking? It could be next week or next year, I'm not sure - but I'm sure the iPhone will tell me about when I need to know about, no sooner and no later.

So what should be the standard tracking metric? Well, like any good American, I don't really understand fractions, so using 1/6 of a year is out. If I've got my handy iPhone app to help me out, I will easily be able to tell you that Jackson is 8 weeks old - if not, there's no way I'll be able to remember how many weeks old he is. It seems like the only logical choice is to track based on months, so that's what this Blog (and I) will be doing. The only tricky thing is going to be when someone asks me how old Jackson is and we're not close to the 16th of a month. I guess in those cases, I'll just round down to the prior month - effectively setting Jackson up to under-promise and over-deliver on those developmental milestones. Smart.

Admitting You Are Wrong. Speaking of the iPhone, I'll be the first to tell you that it's easily been the most life-changing thing I've bought since my first 13 inch TV when I was 16 (which I'm still using in my bedroom to this day). But it's also something that I resisted for years, telling others that I didn't need such a fancy phone - and my good old flip phone that just made phone calls was fine by me. I was stubborn and fought the good fight for years before realizing that I was unable to fully live my life without a smart phone. I now look back on the past five years of my life and wonder how much better they would have been if I had an iPhone all along.

Similarly, before Jackson was born, Kate thought we should get a video monitor for his room. I told her that this was crazy, and a good old fashioned audio monitor would be fine. Then, on one fateful day this past month, the wife decided it would be a good time to cash in all our Baby's R Us gift cards on a breast pump and a video monitor... and just like the iPhone, I can't imagine life without it.

Before you're a parent, you don't really realize how many noises babies make all the time. When they're happy, when they're sad, when they're sleeping. There are very few times when Jackson isn't making some grunting / honking noise. There is very little difference between his "I'm sound asleep and dreaming" grunt and his "I'm suffocating myself face-down in a bed" grunt. But having the video monitor allows you to quickly confirm if he's happily dreaming of boob whiskey fountains or somehow gotten himself into mortal peril. I have to assume if we didn't have it, each night after he went to bed, we'd be running upstairs to frantically check on him every ten minute, which would really cramp our TV watching schedule.

Also? These video cameras are amazing. The one we got came with two cameras, which you can control with the display. Want to pan left or right? No problem. Want to look up or down? Yep. Want to use the camera as a walkie-talkie? It does that to. It's like a home defense system / spy camera rolled into one. I can to use this to spy on people in our house when we leave the room to make sure they're not talking about us - or when we're still using this 15 years from now and can use it to spy on a teenage Jackson and his friends in the basement to ensure they're not drinking beer or making out with chicks*.

There are some things in life that are worth spending money on. Video baby monitors are one of them.

New Developments. As I mentioned, Jackson is now a real person who sleeps in his own room, instead of some mooch who has to crash on the floor of our bedroom. That's a pretty big development - but I'd say the bigger one is that he's now able to look at and recognize things like his toys. I was really starting to wonder why we got so many bright-colored, animal-filled things for him to lay in and play with, when all he really wanted to do is look out the window, the black and white pictures on the wall, or the lamps. It would have been much cheaper (and fashionable) to just have him hang out in our house with our existing decorations and chairs - but everyone told us that we needed to get all this baby stuff for him.

Now I understand why.

He'll sit in his Rainforest Bouncer and watch the monkey swing back and forth for a good twenty minutes without blinking. He's so intently focused on that monkey. It makes you wonder what's going through his little head while he's watching that monkey. Is he trying to figure out what makes it move? Trying to figure out what it is? Making sure the monkey doesn't come to life and attack him? I have no idea. But it's good to see him doing something productive with his time, like guarding us from evil plastic monkeys. Although he's not really using his hands to grab things yet, I look forward to the day when he gains that skill set - just in case the monkey does come to life, he'll be able to grab it and retrain it until the authorities can step in and assist.

Cuteness as self-defense. Although he can't really use his arms or legs yet for anything useful, I realized that he does have one very powerful defense mechanism. He's pretty adorable. I have to think at some point along the evolutionary timeline, God realized that people wouldn't want to take care of something that requires so much attention and only repays you with crying, pooping, and sleep deprivation... that is, unless it's pretty cute. This rule doesn't just apply to babies though - look at nature. There's a reason why puppies and kitties get adopted and the hot girl at the bar doesn't pay for her drinks even though she's super annoying - it's the ultimate self-defense / preservation mechanism.

This past month, Kate made the foolish decision of visiting Jackson's future day care... and came home really upset at the prospect of leaving her poor defenseless baby out there in the cold, cruel, world all alone. "He's so little!" she cried. While this is true, I reminded her that there's a really good chance that Jackson is going to be the cutest baby in his day care class - and therefore will get the most attention from his teachers and will be taken care of better than the uglier kids in class, so he'll be just fine.

I'm not going to act like it's going to be easy to drop him off at day care - it's going to be terrible... and as a parent part of you kinda hopes that your baby actually is going to miss you. But let's be honest, there's probably a strong chance that as a three month old baby, he's going to have no idea what's going on. As long as he gets to drink boob whiskey, sleep, and guard against evil plastic monkeys, he's going to be happy. Also, although my iPhone hasn't confirmed this yet, I have a sneaking suspicion that babies have memories like gold fish - and to Jackson, a full day of us abandoning him at day care will really only feel like we abandoned him for a few minutes, which feels much more responsible.

Here's hoping I'm right about that.

Holidays. Although technically, Jackson celebrated St. Patty's Day last month, he celebrated his first "big three" holiday was last week with Easter. It's kinda funny that although he's totally oblivious to everything that is going on, he still received not one - but TWO Easter baskets, complete with the whole "hunt for the Easter basket" activity caught on film. Although KB is clever, and filled his basket with toys and books that he had already received, but had yet to be used (money savings!), it's still a little bit funny that we're already going through all of the normal traditions that we'll do when he's old enough to remember them. We dyed Easter eggs, hid baskets, sung Easter songs (okay - technically I think there's just the one, but we threw in some church songs as well), etc. We have a lot of this caught on film, so that one day when he's older, we can get these pictures out and prove to him that we didn't cheat him out of a single holiday in his life - but it's also nice to start establishing those family traditions.

Although technically the merging of family traditions start when you get married, it becomes for real once you have a kid. All the sudden, I'm responsible for Jackson having the same memories and expectations of holidays that I have from when I was a kid... and that's a lot of pressure. But I must say, as anticipated, holidays become infinitely more fun when you have a baby / child to share them with - all the sudden hiding Easter baskets seems like a perfectly logical thing to do, and they are actually filled with candy and toys as opposed to candy and booze, like they were B.J.

Gym. Lastly, this week marked my triumphant (embarrassing) return to the gym after a two month hiatus. The good news is that I remembered where it was and how to operate the machines. The bad news is, I was pretty much spent after five minutes. When people ask me what the toughest thing about parenthood is, I have to say it's the time management - and actually, that's probably been the only tough thing about having a baby. It turns out the Lion King was right - there's more to do than can ever be done. Life has suddenly become much more of a juggling act between work, home, friends, and baby - and it seems like no matter what you decide to do, there's always this nagging thought in the back of your head that you're neglecting some other area of your life... like going to the gym.

Back in the day, the gym was a mandatory stop on the way home from work. If you didn't go, you felt guilty. It was like being a Catholic. But now that I think about only having a few hours with Jackson after work on the average weeknight, it seems crazy to waste that time ogling the girls at the gym - I mean "working out". However, then I remember that if I don't go to the gym, I'll revert back to "chubby Brian" days, become a fatty, and probably die sooner in life - which would result in me being able to spend quality time with Jackson when he's older, and we're able to ogle girls at the gym together. So I suppose I can't play the "I have a new baby" card excuse forever, and this is yet another ball to juggle in life.

Still, that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to make the decision to go there again anytime soon, especially since their stupid non-digital cable doesn't have the Travel Channel anymore -unless of course Jackson is screaming his head off at home. In that case, I'll have to put my personal health above spending a precious hour of time with my baby. Sorry buddy, but you'll thank me one day.

That's all for this month!

* and by "beer", I mean non-Miller Lite / Beast beer. By "chicks", I mean uggos.