BayDad

The next exciting post in my traveling series!

Thanksgiving in Maryland

This time, its travelling with a 6-month old.

By 6 months, Mr. B was on 100% formula, and on just a little bit of solid baby foods.  Pretty much the same traveling rules applied this time as with 3 months.  By 6 months, we had the baby changing, eating, sleeping, feeding, pooping routine down, and everything was going really smoothly.

Mr. B was fairly easy going at this point (not much crying, not much fussing) and we could actually feel like we were on a bit of a vacation, and not just going through the motions in a different part of the country.

So, I’ve not got a lot more to say other than:  At 6 months, I still wouldn’t buy a seat.  He was a bit heavier than at 3 months, but still not that bad.

Thanksgiving & Grandpa

Red Eye or Daytime flight?  This is sort of your choice.  If your kid is sleeping through the night at 6 months, then you might consider a red-eye, because hopefully he’ll sleep through the whole thing even if you don’t, and that will be a win for the parents.  A daytime flight has the opposite benefit:  You don’t miss much of your own sleep, and thats good, and if your kid is doing his normal routine, it may be easier for him to just settle in to his new routine when he arrives.  I’d say I could go either way.

At 6 months, Mr. B still wasn’t crawling, and thats nice for visiting the relatives, because you don’t have to worry too much about how babyproof their house is.  It also means he’ll stay roughly where you put him, which sort of makes for nicer photos.

Sleeping at the airport...

We took Mr. B on his first round of family visiting trips when he was just about 3 months old.  His first trip was to Florida to visit his Great Grandma Shirley, and it was our first time traveling with him.

Young babies are surprisingly portable, and relatively easy to travel with.  The only dilemma that we had was whether or not we should get him a seat.  So, in our strive to be the best parents ever we got him a seat, thinking that he could sleep for most of the way there on a red-eye.  It turned out that it actually worked out pretty well, but we still spent a pretty good amount of time holding him and rocking him and generally comforting him.

With the other Great Grandma

In retrospect (this was nearly a year ago) there’s really not all that much you can do with a 3 month old. I mean, they kind of like to look at toys or move their arms, but its not like you’re needing to entertain them like you need to do for a 15-month old!

So, a month or so later, we took him on his second trip in the opposite direction to visit his other Great Grandma in Hawaii.  We did nearly the same thing that time, and it worked out great.

One of the biggest problems with traveling at this young age was the matter of feeding.  My wife was still breastfeeding at the time, and the combination of that and the trips and unfamiliar locations, made the feeding a bit difficult.  There never seemed to be enough time or the right place to really give him a good feeding, and all the new locations and new people meant that he was pretty distracted (and not focused on food!) for much of the time.  So, these 2 trips were the times when we started to feed him more and more formula, and when we really polished our routine around feeding formula.  A month or so later is when we switched to 100% formula, which was somewhat a relief for me, as a father, since it meant that I could participate a lot more in his feeding, which was actually quite enjoyable.

On the plane with Mom

In Florida, Mr. B got to sleep on the couch, in a somewhat make-shift crib arrangement.  Anyone who’s more SIDS paranoid that us would have probably flipped their lid, but we were pretty okay with the situation, and were sleeping just inches away from him, so I thought it worked out well.  In Hawaii, he slept in a Pack-N-Play, which also worked out great, although it was totally necessary to have a chair sitting next to it for the night time feedings and calming down.  Mr. B had somewhat trained us to put our hands on his back or chest or cheek when he wanted to fall asleep, so we always had a chair next to the crib at home so it was easier on us.  This is a bit harder with a Pack-N-Play, but I don’t think that anyone else will end up doing what we did. 

In the end, I think that getting a seat for a kid this young is kind of a waste.Its very easy to hold them and let them sleep in a Baby Bjorn or some other child carrier, and you can fairly easily trade off between the parents.  Having the Pack-N-Play was great.  Having your guests buy diapers and formula and wipes before you arrive is great. If you are breastfeeding and you decide to travel at this age, make sure you’re prepared for all the new locations, new people, time zone changes, and the rest of that.

One thing that I didn’t really think of when I thought about fatherhood was product envy.

I’m used to the moderately consumerist bay area, and I’m used to seeing people with iPhones, Blackberries, Projection TVs, Xbox 360′s, and all other manner of electronic junk.  What I’m not used to is seeing someone walking down the street with a stroller, and thinking “man, thats a really nice stroller!  I wonder if I should get one of those?!”

So, before Mr. B. was born, we went out and bought a modest “Baby Trend” branded stroller & carseat combo.  It served us well for the first 9 months or so of his life, and in fact, he still uses the stroller part of it on a daily basis.

But, the stroller has gotten kind of wobbly and dirty, and the car seat was okay, but the buckles were a pain in the butt to use, and the mounting in the car didn’t seem to be as good as it could have been.

We started thinking that there could be something better, and we would see Bugaboo’s and Bob’s and Orbit’s on a daily basis at the park and around town.  But, if you look at that stuff, you have to ask yourself:  Do you really want to spend $1000 on a stroller?  Seriously?  People do that?!!

When the time came to get a newer, bigger stroller, what did we do?  Well, we mostly focused on getting something that would fit in the trunk of the car, but that was still sturdy and light and let Mr. B lie down and take a nap.  We ended up getting a MacLaren (not quite as expensive…) but still up there in the upper tier of stroller-dom.

In the end, I don’t really regret it, and I don’t really feel like I’ve compromised my drive to raise a “regular” kid using “regular” stuff, and there are things about the MacLaren that aren’t the best they could be.  It still has its annoyances, and I guess thats what keeps me still grounded.  It wasn’t the super-luxury purchase that it could have turned out to be.

Now, I’m finding that I envy all kinds of other baby goods.  My current pointless obsession is on the Thermos Foogo Straw Bottle.  Does anyone out there have one of these?  Do you like it?  I know its like a $7 purchase (not a big deal) but I can’t bring myself to buy another baby bottle when we have probably 2 dozen different ones around the house already…

Swimming at Abilities United, Palo Alto

We wanted to expose Mr. Busy Body to water and swimming before he got too old and too afraid of the swimming pool.  So, at about 3 months old, we started to take him to the infant/toddler swimming classes at Abilities United in Palo Alto.

Its a good place, and they have a nice therapy pool thats very warm (probably 90F or higher) and they have a nice gentle walk-in entry, so getting in and out of the pool with him was easy.

They also have a set of changing areas where you can set your baby and not worry about getting the bench or pad all wet, since its designed for this use.  All in all, I thought the facilities were really nice.

Swimming!

The “class” is 30 minutes long, costs $11 (right?) and consists of alternating between signing songs with the kids, and some general free play time where the instructor might come by and see how you’re doing.  The songs were fine, and were mostly a way to get the parents together and organized and doing the same thing.  None of the kids were really old enough to “do the hokey pokey” or sing “tick tock”.

Classes are from 10am-12pm on Saturdays, and you just pay as you go, and there are no signups necessary, which is really nice.

Although, as Mr. Busy got older, we found that we didn’t have as much time to take him to the classes, which is sort of unfortunate.  Getting out of the hous e at 10am on a weekend with a toddler, and then going swimming, means that you’ve just spent your entire morning (say, 9am-noon) doing one single half hour event.

But, I really enjoyed going there, and I do think we’ll go back every once in a while, just to get him some nice fun time in a non-threatening pool.

In the mean time, we’ve taken him to the Rinconada Pool in Palo Alto, and that also seems like a great place, although its much bigger, and a much different, social experience!

We took Busy Boy camping for his first time this weekend!  A’s coworker had reserved an extra campsite that was going to go unused, so we hustled around on Saturday preparing for our first camping trip as parents. One of the most urgent errands was to get Mr. B his own sleeping bag…  More on that later…

Mr. Busy did really well on the car drive out (he’s getting a bit fussy about rides these days), I think mostly because he enjoyed watching the scenery go by.  Its surely a lot more interesting than our regular trips up and down El Camino.

Once we got to the site, we set up the tent, and went for a short hike.  Busy Bear actually was walking down the path on his very own, and making good progress!  He seemed super happy to be outside with us, in the woods, and traveling.

Hiking!

We hiked for about an hour, of which Mr. B lasted about 15 or 20 minutes before getting a ride in the backpack.  When we got back to the campsite, a fire was built, and the cooking started.  We dined on boil-in-a-bag Tasty Bite Indian food.  Mr. B likes Palak Paneer, but not so much Chole.  Anyway, after cleaning up, it was getting dark, and we started to think about going to bed.

This is where the fun began…  On a typical night, we put Mr. B down in his crib, with his pacifier, and he snuggles in to his blankets and goes quietly to sleep, usually for the entire night. (9pm-7am is typical these days).  So, all 3 of us climbed into our 2-person tent, we all got on our PJ’s, and started to “sleep”.

Yeah, looking back on it, its even hard to describe what was going on in there.  Imagine a 15-month old, who’s never been in a tent before, and in fact, never been in any structure that doesn’t have solid walls, and who’s used to clibing around in bed with us in the morning.  I guess it most closely resembled some kind of human jungle gym, where us parents were fun stuff to climb on, and everything was super-interesting because you’ve never seen it before.  Let’s just say that the pacifier was lost in the dark for quite some time, there was a lot of crying, and we realized that the thought of him snuggling down inside his sleeping bag was completely crazy.  The even crazier part started when he woke up in the middle of the night and really needed to talk to us.  (By ‘talk’ I mean ‘babble’ because he has about a 10 word vocab at this point).  So, he laid on my chest for probably an hour just babbling away quietly in the dark in the middle of the night, until he finally went to sleep.  He did end up sleeping well (past 9am!) and we weren’t too tired the next day…

Sleeping on the trail...

So, we went for another hike, and Mr. Busy decided to take a break and nap for the big climb up.  We had a great hike up to Sempervirens Falls, took about 3 hours round trip, and had a great time.

In retrospect, here’s what we learned:

• Camping with a toddler is actually pretty fun!
• Sleeping is something that we need to work on.  I think a large set of Sleep Sacks would have helped a bit.  The sleeping bag will have to wait until he’s older.
• Bring extra pacifiers! (Or wean him before our next trip!)
• Its impossible to keep a 15-month old clean!
• Don’t forget the can opener and proper type of camp fuel!

Funny, how many dads there are out there taking care of their kids on weekends.  Even funnier is the looks that a lot of them have.  They sort of look like kids who are being forced to do their chores.  Its as if its their duty to take the kids out on Saturday morning, and that means going to the coffee shop, and the off to some park or kid-friendly event where they’ll do their kid thing, and bring the offspring back home to mommy.

Thats all really sad, and I can see it almost every weekend at our local coffee shop, Dana St. Roasting Company (DSRC).  Just sit at a table on any given Saturday or Sunday morning (say, at 9am) and watch who’s coming through the door.  You’ll see more “dads with kids” than you’ve seen anywhere else in town.  The coffee shop becomes dad central!

But, we’re one of the few families that come there together, and we’re one of the few families that actually sit and enjoy the coffee (or milk, in Mr. Busy Bear’s case) and bagels & muffins, as a family.  Its chaos, for sure, with crumbs everywhere, kids running behind the counter, and lots of “Hi!”‘s coming from Mr. Busy, waving to everyone who’s waiting in line.  Everyone, including the staff smile and really seem to enjoy having him around, and I think it kind of lightens up the place.

But, I wonder about the other dads:  Are they just “doing their duty” for the weekend?  Where do they go after the coffee house?  And, most importantly, why do they seem so stayed and mildly anti-social?  Is it so uncool to be out with the kids having fun on the weekend?