BayDad

One of the problems that we have in our house is all the marginally useful junk that we’ve collected in the last 15 months that we just ‘keep using’ for some reason.

The thing that comes to mind is the Baby Trend Zanzibar High Chair.  I think we got it as a gift, so please don’t take offense from what I’m about to say, but I’ve come to basically hate this chair.  If you haven’t bought one, here’s what you should look for in a high chair:

1. Easy to clean.  No fabric at all would be perfect.  Easy to remove fabric would be okay. Being able to put the whole thing in the dishwasher is even better.
2. Baby sits upright.  No reclining.  He/she should sit, using their own power, in an upright position.  I don’t know why this strikes me as so wrong, but it really does.
3. No complicated mechanisms.  Remember: You’re going to be dealing with a squirming wiggling writhing mass of baby, pureed yams, milk and cheerios.  You don’t want to be fussing with levers and switches when getting baby in and out.
4. Lets baby sit “at the table” like an adult.  This will make baby happy, and give you a way to transition him/her to being a real “table sitter” later in life.

So, the funny thing is that we also own one of these Fisher Price Healthy Care Booster Seats, and it absolutely fits the bill.

I’ve been wondering why we don’t just use the Fisher Price one all the time.  Its a better chair, Mr. Busy Belly likes it better, and it fits every chair in the house, so we can use it at the dining room, outside, or wherever.  Its easy to clean (plastic!) and helps keep him upright all the time. I think its just that we wouldn’t know what to do with the Baby Trend high chair if we decided not to use it.

And, that leads me to my real pont:  What do you do with all the useless junk that you keep using?  We’ve got so many toys that Mr. Busy Builder doesn’t really like anymore, or that’s either too young for him, or too old for him.  We’ve got all kinds of things like play mats and motorized swings and daiper wipe warming boxes, and I just don’t know what to do with it.

Much of it came to us as gifts from friends & relatives, and some as hand-me-downs from our other friends with older kids, but not there’s so much stuff that we basically have a whole room overflowing with unused baby junk.

What do you do with this stuff?  What if you’re having another kid?  Did you reuse it all?  Are there things that just aren’t good the second time around?  What about all that stuff that seemed like a nice present, but is now just taking up space in your crowded house?  Help!  I’m buried in baby junk!

My wife and I have always struggled over something really simple:  The changing table.

I come from the point of that says:  When I’m dealing with baby poo, I want things to be very functional and usable.   Easy access to wipes & diapers is paramount.  I don’t care what it looks like.

My wife says: All changing tables are ugly and I wish we didn’t have to have one in his room, so what’s the minimum we can do to get by?

Of course, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the picture.  I saw on Daddy Types this Kawa wall-mounted changing table, and I think it looks great:

We certainly can’t justify the EUR 269 price (nearly $400 USD), but boy, I’m just waiting for Ikea to copy this design, and sell it for $39.99, and we’re set!

Here in the Bay Area, there are a couple really common places to have your kids.  And by ‘have’ I mean ‘give birth to’.  El Camino Hospital, or ECH, is one of the more common ones.  It seems to have the right combination of good facilities, good doctors, and is close to our home, so we don’t have to go far when the time comes.

So, we’re planning our second stay at ECH.  For those of you who don’t know me — this means we’re expecting our second kid!  Huzzah!

Although, I’m sure its going to be different the second time around.   Mr. B is going to be 20 months old when the little one arrives, and we’re certainly going to have our hands free for a little while.  But, I still can’t help thinking:  What would I like to do differently?  How could the process have gone more smoothly?  What should I have done differently?

With Mr. B around, I’m not really sure how things are going to work out.  I don’t think I’ll be sleeping at the hospital like I did last time — since I’m not sure that Mr. B would really understand whats going on and what’s needed of him.

Do any of you out there have ideas about how to make the ECH experience as good as it can be?  Are there any tricks?  Here are the things we learned on our stay:

• The weird refrigerator-looking thingy is actually full of warm blankets for mommy & baby
• If you don’t like your delivery nurse, then you can kindly ask to see another.
• Nurses seem to be on 4 or 8 hour shifts anyway, so you’ll likely have several nurses.
• It’s unlikely that your wife’s doctor will actually be there for the birth.  Get yourself mentally prepared to have a doctor you’ve never met come in, deliver your baby, and walk out.
• They’re going to give your kid a pacifier unless you really tell them not to, and even then, they may still do it. (Mr. B came back from the nursery with a pacifier in his little cart several times…)
• That baby heart rate monitor thing is a huge pain in the ass.  You can ask for a wireless version, and if it’s not in use, they’ll bring it in for you.
• The most comfortable place for dads to sleep is likely out on the couch, not in the room.  This is especially true if you’re not in a private room.
• Your new kid will be visited by several pediatricians while you’re in the hospital.  This is a good time to figure out who you like, and think about choosing them as your regular pediatrician, if you don’t have someone already lined up.
• Jaundice is common. Ugh.  I could go on and on about this one.
• Hospital food isn’t as bad as you thought, but it does get tiring pretty quickly.  The best entrees at ECH were the Indian food selections.
• Lots of other advice for Moms to be that I don’t really feel like it’s appropriate to share here…

What about dealing with the second kid?  How’d you handle that?  Were there grandparents involved, or did you do it by yourself?  Inquiring minds want to know!

After reading BayDad Zeigen’s post “The Web 2.0 dilemma: Public vs. personal personas” I thought I’d pose this question to the other Dads out there:

What do you do about your children?  I’ve certainly met other dads that say things like: “It’s okay if you put that picture of my kid on the Internet, just don’t use my name or his name.”  I also know there are other BayDads and BayMoms that use pseudonyms for their kids.

You may have noticed that just after starting BayDad, I changed all references to my son’s real name to things like “Mr. Busy” or “Mr. B.”  It’s a nickname that I came up with after having him in backup daycare for a week.  They used to always circle the adjective “Busy” to describe how he was behaving that day.   So, now he’s Mr. Busy.

I’m actually not that privacy-minded, and I think that only my friends and family will ever read this, and I don’t think its really huge deal if you know his real name.

But, the argument can be made that an archive of this page will exist on some other server forever, and that he may not want his name associated with these posts.  He may grow up to be a politician or big executive.  What do you think McCain or Obama would think if they had well-publicized baby photos and essays by their parents available on the Internet?

I think the next decades are going to be a brave and interesting time.  College kids are sharing their entire lives and real names on Facebook.  Whats going to happen when these kids are the power-executives and politicians of tomorrow?  How much dirt will we be able to find on Google about the presidential elections in 2048?

Do you feel like you have an obligation to keep your kids’ anonymity on the Internet?  Why or why not?

This BayDad has a secret.  He’s spending his evening alone writing an entire week’s worth of posts, and setting the publishing dates in the future so they show up one per day.

Pretty sneaky!

Every BayDad on my street has the same accessory: The DSLR.

Mine was a birthday present from my wife that I got about a month before Mr. Busy was born.  I thought it would be a good way to document our first kid, and boy was I right.  I’ve taken about 9,000 photos on it in the last 15 months or so, and they’re all worth every cent of the cost of the camera.

What I ended up getting was an entry-level body, a Canon XTi, and paired that with a fixed-focus (non-zoom) 50mm lens.  The biggest advantage of the 50mm f1.4 lens is that its a very “fast” lens in photography terms, and that means that it collects a lot of light, and that means I can use it without flash at night at home with hardly any lights on.  It’s awesome.

Why is it so great?  We’ll let me count the ways:

Fast response time means you don't miss the action shots.

Narrow depth of field focuses the image on your subject, not the background.

Fast lens means very natural lighting -- no flash!

Long focal length means easy close-ups

Are these enough proof for you?

What’s your favorite photo accessory?

What do you use for home movies?  How do you store them?  How do you keep them backed up?  How do you show them to your family?

Inquiring BayDads want to know!

Asleep on the train

After having our first kid, I found that I had a new-found compassion for parents and the challenges that they go through in life.  I got this feeling that a crying baby was a beautiful and wonderful thing, a short point in time, and something that we all should savor.  I would get this feeling of shared experience every time I saw another dad giving his infant a bottle of milk.

When we traveled to Switzerland, I would look for other parents who were going to be on the flight, and reach out to them to let them know that we’re here too, to sort of give them that little wink that says “we’re all in this together.”

So, on the last leg of our flight back to California, we were in the Pittsburgh airport, and I saw another family with a little boy a little older than Mr. B.  We were sitting there waiting for the delayed flight, and Mr. B was off exploring the water fountain, getting a drink, riding the moving sidewalk, pushing his stroller, and all manner of things that entertain little boys.  The other family’s little boy was sitting in his stroller drinking a bottle of milk, and I didn’t think much of it.

We were on a flight leaving at 7pm heading west, and we had planned this to exactly coincide with Mr. B’s bedtime.  We were tiring him out in the airport because we know that after a good session of crazy baby activities, he usually goes right to sleep.  They called us for boarding, and our two families both got on the plane.

Mr. B, with his binkie and favorite blanket, snuggled into his car seat that was strapped into his chair.

The other families’ little boy was strapped into his chair, directly behind Mr. Busy.

Soon after the flight lifted off, Mr. Busy closed his eyes and gently went to sleep.  It was going to be perfect.  He was going to sleep all the way back to California.  We were such perfectly equipped and prepared parents!

But, we had forgotten one last factor.  The little 20 month old behind us began screaming, crying, kicking, and fussing himself into a furor.  He was incessantly kicking the back of Mr. B’s chair, which inevitably woke him up, and like a lot of kids, Mr. B is pretty unhappy when he wakes up and is still tired.

Amazingly, the other family didn’t seem to be doing anything to calm down their little monster.  They weren’t reading him any bedtime stories.  He didn’t have his favorite blanket, and they weren’t talking to him softly about going to sleep.  What they were doing was offering him toys, letting him watch TV, and engaging him in conversation.

I was floored.  How could this family have a toddler on a plane at 8, 9, 10pm and not be putting him to sleep?  How can he not be tired?  Why aren’t they giving him a bottle of milk?  Why do they keep talking to him about the stewardess?  Why do they keep giving him that toy?  Why are they letting him kick Mr. B’s chair?  Don’t they hear me talking softly?  Don’t they see me comforting him?  Don’t they see how outrageous and annoying this is!?

My compassion was gone.  What I realized at that point was that I could have taken their kid hitting my chair.  I could have put in ear plugs, or just ignored it, or slept through the whole thing, or just not worried about it.  But, Mr. B is just a little kid!  He can’t wear earplugs, and doesn’t know how to ignore someone kicking his chair, and can’t look back and glare at them like I was trying to keep myself from doing.

Poor Mr. B was kept awake for an entire 5 hour long cross-country flight by a kid just barely older than he was.  I was furious at the other family.  How could they have let this happen!  How could they have let their little monster keep my little angel awake all night?  I’m still fuming just telling the story…

So, Mr. B survived, and I think I got some of my compassion back, but I realized something that day.  My compassion towards parents has a limit.  When their kids are doing something that makes my kid cry, and there’s no way out of the situation, then I get really protective and frustrated.

This is what I learned: When it comes to how others’ actions affect me, I can take it.  I can deal with crying and kicking and fussiness. But, when this stuff affects my own kid, I just went berzerk.  I think I did lose a little compassion that day, but I think everything’s going to be okay…

Bryan in his rocket ship

When my oldest, Ethan, was four, and Mom was on bed-rest, pregnant with twins, we started doing “Special Days with Dad.” Just me and him. Undivided attention. Breakfast out, maybe a trip to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk or Happy Hollow (sadly closed till Fall ’09). Whatever you want to do, kid, it’s your day.

When the twins got to be about four, we turned this into a nearly annual tradition for each kid, typically on a three-day weekend (which works out rather nicely with three kids). We rotate who goes first. The planning and anticipation of it as nearly as much fun as the day itself.

The rules are pretty simple:

• You get to do whatever you want.
• I’m buying. Toy shopping sprees are off-limits, but shopping for a craft that we will do together is encouraged.

We just had our Special Days this past Labor Day weekend. Ethan and I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and saw the new juvenile white shark. Katie wanted to see the flowers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, then have sushi in Japan Town (she’s my only kid that likes sushi), then walk around Chinatown and go to the Fortune Cookie Factory. Bryan loves to build stuff, so after breakfast at Peninsula Creamery (his favorite place for french toast), we went to the hardware store, bought PVC pipe, and made a rubber-band powered marshmallow shooter (which turned out to be more of a marshmallow squisher, but we’re still working on it…). Then he wanted to end the day with nine holes of golf.

A few years ago, Bryan wanted to build a rocket ship, so we found an old refrigerator cardboard box and cut and painted it. Another year, he wanted to sit in front of Jamba Juice and play with Pokémon cards (which, if you really spend time to learn the rules, is a surprisingly fun and involved game; we played for three hours…).

The thing I love most about Special Days with Dad is how well the kids respond to the undivided attention. We have sparkling, insightful conversations. They are polite and well-behaved, I think because they understand what “Special” really means. And most of all, it really lets them be who they want to be and do what they want to do, without having to compromise with their siblings’ desires. There are 364 other days for that…

Zurich

We took Mr. B to Switzerland when he was 13 months old.  By that time, he was a walking, talking, toddling little boy.  We got him a seat on the plane in both directions, because we booked several months in advance, and we didn’t know what to expect.

The flight out is about 12 hours from the Bay area, and it was a dream!  He slept for most of the time, and for the other times, he was happy and cooperative and a good little boy.

We stayed in a hotel in Zurich for about 2 weeks.  Despite being outrageously expensive, it was nice to have a slightly larger room while traveling, so that we had room for him to walk around, and had a reasonable place to put his port-a-crib, which was provided by the hotel.  All in all, it was a great experience.  I’d be a bit nervous about staying overseas in a 2 star or less hotel, just because you don’t really know what the facilities are going to be like, and this sort of matters more when you’re with a little munchkin.

One of the harder parts of the trip was the food.  If it were just us, we would have been eating out at nicer restaurants, and having a great time.  But, because Mr. Busy was always “in tow” we had to limit our selections to places that would be more amenable to kids.  And, in a foreign country, it’s sometimes hard to get a good feeling as to where it’s appropriate to have kids at the table, and where it’s not.  Thankfully, summer in Zurich is sunny and hot, and that means lots of outdoor eating, and that means kid-friendliness.

Another challenge was that at 13 months, Mr. Busy was just getting himself off jarred baby food, and just getting into real solids.  We were usually just feeding him bits of our entrees and seeing if he was doing okay.  He mostly did do okay, but there were times when I was a little nervous that he wasn’t getting enough solids, or enough milk, or enough water, or enough of a million other things that paranoid dads worry about.  But, I’ll attest that he’s alive and well, so it must have worked out okay!

A little Swiss house

We also took him on the train to a town outside of Interlaken called Lauterbrunnen, and stayed up there for a few days.  The hotel we were in was surprisingly kid-friendly, and Mr. B had wonderful breakfasts of Berrenmuseli, toast, and eggs.  They also provided a functional port-a-crib for us to use, but the room and surroundings were a bit less kid friendly.  The restaurants on the other hand, were a lot more kid friendly, with all of them having nice outdoor seating, and much friendlier and accommodating staff.

For a 13 month old, here are my recommendations:

Think about the food & milk situation ahead of time.  Sometimes you won’t have a fridge, or you won’t be able to give him what he wants or needs.  Think ahead!  Before you leave, think about what makes a good on-the-go meal (not just a snack!).  Think about what you could feed him on the train, or on a hike, or in a hotel room with no fridge.

Mr. B in the Alps at 3000m

Bring a baby backpack (as shown above) or borrow one from a friend.  Public transit isn’t really that baby-friendly, and in foreign counties, they don’t have the same handicapped-accessible laws that we have in the U.S., so getting a stroller on and off a train, subway, trolley, or in a cab is going to be hard.

Pack light!  Bring laundry detergent!  Bring everything you need to do laundry.  Finding the right soap in a foreign country is harder than you think.  Don’t rely on there being a laundromat.  There are no laundromats in Zurich!  None!  (There is wash-and-fold service, though, but expect to pay per item, and expect to pay more than they would cost to buy in the U.S.)

I’d recommend getting him a seat if he can walk.  The last thing you want to do is be holding a squirming and crying toddler who thinks they want to go for a quick jog around the airplane while you’re landing.  The ability to strap him in his seat during these times is important.   Hopefully he’ll sleep.

Take it slow!  Remember that your toddler needs time to get out and explore the world on his own time as well.  If you’re shuttling him from stroller to train to backpack and not giving him enough free time to play & explore, he’ll get really grumpy, and that will make you really grumpy, and that will make your wife really grumpy, and that will be a bad situation all around.

All in all, it was a lot easier to travel with a 12 month old than I had expected.  Having the baby backpack was a godsend, getting into a routine and knowing what Mr. B expects from his daily routines was very important.  Being observant of his needs and wants is also really important.  Travelling by train with luggage, stoller, backpack and baby in tow was harder than I thought it was going to be, but doesn’t really last that long.