Things I discovered about fatherhood (1month - 6 months)

Since Emry's baby cousin just turned a month old, I thought I list a few more things I learned about parenthood, babies, and caring for children from the time Emry was 1 month to 6 months old. 



1.  Babies who suck their fingers have horrible morning breathe!  It's compounded by the fact that the source of the stench comes from two places.  I'm working on producing a line of baby breath mints and scented hand lotions.    



2.  When adults interact with an infant, we look absolutely ridiculous.  Take the baby out of the picture and watch the adult's silly grin, super high pitch voice, exaggerated expressions...you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.

3.  In a related matter...when your baby is with you, you're no longer able to have conversations with adults.  All your conversations are routed through your child.  Example - You and your baby walk into random adult's house.  Random adult does not acknowledge you, but looks right at the baby, puts on the big silly grin and says in a super high pitched voice, "How are we this morning?"  Then you answer for the baby, "Well we've been a little fussy..." 

4.  Everyone wants to hold your baby when they are this age.  However, when the baby cries, spits up or poops it magically finds its way back into your arms.

5.  "I think someone needs a diaper change."  Learn this phrase, it has 2 important purposes:  If you are around a baby-hog, this is the best way to get your child back.  But more importantly, if your wife accidentally passes gas while in the company of others, this phrase will save you some embarrassment.

6.  Why is your baby crying right now? Assuming you didn't drop the child, odds are its a physical need, so change the diaper, feed and burp.  That seems to take care of most crying spells at this age. 

7.  If your baby is still crying, the plastic price-tag thingy on her clothes may be stabbing her repeatedly.  Check to make sure all the plastic tag thingies have been removed.  (It took the longest Saturday afternoon of my life to learn that one.)

8.  I wish I could fall asleep while sitting up at the dinner table.  

9.  Your baby's life is always one notch better than your life.  Example - One day Emry and I were sitting on the couch watching football and drinking from our bottles(one beer, one milk).  I couldn't think of a better way to spend the afternoon.  A short time later, Maren arrived home and put Emry on her boob.  I swear I saw Emry wink at me.  Tusche little one!

10.  Avoid using words like bumbo, boppy and baby bjorn around your friends who don't have children.  There's no context where you can use these words without sounding like an idiot.

11.  The first time you and your baby sleep through the night without waking up is actually a huge letdown.  You think you'd be excited to have a full night's rest, but you're too freaked out and worried about your malnourished child to enjoy it. 


12. I can kind of understand why lot of parents end up doing their child's 6th grade science projects...Watching your child try to roll over for the first time is the most frustrating thing in the world. Its hard to see them struggle, and you really have to fight the urge to just turn her over yourself. 


13.  When a dude is in a foul mood, sometimes his buddies will call him out on it by saying, "He has a little sand in his vagina.".....After taking Emry to the beach for the first time, I finally understand the origin of this expression.





That's all I've got right now.  If I think of anything else before 6 months, I'll let you know.  Hopefully this list will help save any of you first time parents some future headaches. If nothing esle, at least you'll know a couple of things to expect in the upcoming months!

Emry Board

I'm happy to let you know the Emry Board has a new home!  The page was getting too long and difficult to manage when adding new content, so Maren and I have made a separate blog for it.  It will be easier for us to do individual entries each month to keep you up to date with pictures and info about Emry's latest endeavors. 

I'll leave the Emry board tab on this site and link it to the new blog.  Or you can go directly to the new address marenandken.blogspot.com.

Running from the Cops

The day I turned 21, I knew I'd never have to worry about running from a police officer for the rest of my life.  A pretty safe assumption, considering I would never intentionally break the law.  Well, we all know what happens to people who ass-u-me.  We had a 'situation' at the Smith house recently which had me wondering if the police were going to be looking for me.  To tell this story, I'm going to borrow a Quentin Tarantino tactic and give you the ending first, then start back over to find out what happened to get us to that point.

Friday 12/9/11 7:22 PM, The Smith House

Maren: Do you think they are going to send a police car to the house?

Ken: Why do you ask?

Maren: Most of the time they'll send a cop to check!

Ken: I'm not sure, she didn't say what they were going to do.

Maren:  We need to get our story straight in case a cop shows up!

Ken: We know what happened, what do you mean "our story"?

Maren:  If a cop shows up, we need to make sure our stories match up.  On Law & Order they always talking about criminals having their story straight.  We don't want any differences in our stories that would make us sound suspicious..........

Friday 12/9/11 7:47am, A hospital in or around Raleigh, NC

A baby girl was born.  Not just any baby though, this was Emry's cousin, Maren's and my niece!  It was truly a joyous moment for the entire family...a healthy mother relieved to finally be able to hold her baby; a beautiful baby girl taking her first breaths of air all by herself; and a proud father letting the world know what had just taken place. 

Friday 12/9/11 8:21am, The High School  

Maren got a text message from the baby's father notifying her the baby arrived and mother was doing well.  Maren was so excited that she texted me right away to give me the details.  A few minutes later Maren began receiving an onslaught of texts and emails with congratulatory messages and pictures of her beautiful little niece.  The emails and texts would continue coming throughout the day.....

Friday 12/9/11 5:17pm, The Smith House

I arrived home from work to find Maren and Emry playing on the living room floor.  Maren asked if I'd seen pictures of our niece.  Since I had only seen one picture, we all went downstairs to check out the baby pictures on Maren's email. 

While Maren and I were ogling over the pictures, Emry decided she wanted to go upstairs.  Emry was about 3/4 of the way up and decided to turn around to come back down.  She got her legs tangled and started to fall backward down the stairs.  She fell one step down on her butt, which caused her to flip backward into the air.  I sprang from my chair faster than a NFL wide receiver and dove onto the stairs.  I caught Emry just before she crashed headfirst by scooping my hands under each of her shoulders and cradling her body against my chest. 

It was a perfect catch and everyone appeared to be okay.  However, the crying and screaming started instantly...and Emry was pretty upset too!  Maren and I really were pretty shaken up just thinking about how Emry could have seriously been injured.  At first we thought Emry was just upset because she got scared.  Upon further review, we noticed Emry had a red, puffy eye from where my knee bumped her head.  That must have happened when I was fighting for extra yardage after the catch.  Once everyone settled down, we decided to go out for Thai food.  Emry seemed cool with everything...or so we thought. 

Friday 12/9/11 6:37pm, Thai Papaya Cuisine

We ate a wonderful meal at our favorite Thai place.  Not much happened here, but we really like this place and I wanted to put a link to their website!  Maren ordered her favorite dish, Phad Thai.  I normally order the Green Curry but decided to try the Red Curry.  The green is better, but they are both delicious!  Emry had some steamed veggies, and was fascinated by the fish tanks.  Great service, friendly owner and great food!

Friday 12/9/11 7:19pm, The Smith House

We came back home and played with Emry on the living room floor.  Emry had a swollen bump by her eye and was still frazzled about the whole -Maren and I not paying attention to her and letting her fall down the stairs- situation.  Secretly, she had been formulating a plot to get back at us the whole time.  Emry stole my cell phone and went behind the living room chair.  I heard her angrily babbling into the phone, and I heard a confused voice coming from the other end.  I grabbed the phone and said "hello?"

Unknown Caller:  Hello, what is your emergency?!

Ken: Oh, sorry, er...my daughter was 'playing' with my phone and must have called you.

Unknown Caller: 911 emergency! Do you have an emergency?

Ken:  No...sorry again...not sure how she called you, but it was my mistake.

911 Operator:  Sometimes cell phones have a safety feature if you hold down the buttons it dials 911.  Give me your name so I can verify who and where this call is from....

The conversation lasted another minute and I hung up the phone.  Maren went into worrisome mom mode and said that 911 usually follows up on "accidental calls."  Maren had me convinced a police cruiser was going to pull up to our house any second.  We were in a bad position...I interrupted a 911 call from an injured child and our lame excuse was "she fell down the stairs." Anyone who's ever watched L&O SVU knows that's the #1 excuse bad parents give when they've abused their kids.  What should we do?   

Luckily, we never had to face that situation.  No detectives ever showed up to interrogate us.  We went to bed that night thanking the Lord for keeping Emry safe from serious injury and for blessing our family with a new baby niece.  We are truly grateful for the gifts our family has received and can't wait to meet our cute baby niece!

Things I Discovered about Fatherhood

Since we have a new baby niece in the family, I'm taking the opportunity to share some things I've learned about fatherhood, babies and other tactics I've picked up along the way.  I've limited myself to discussing things I discovered during the first 4 weeks of Emry's life, although I may add to the list in the future.  Hopefully this list will help the new baby-daddy adjust to life with a newborn...

1. Nipples and breasts - If your wife is nursing, these words will now appear in about of 95% of your daily conversations.  Its scary how quickly you'll become comfortable discussing your wife's nipple inflammation with your family, in-laws, friends, cashiers at Babies R Us, random strangers, etc.  If you can't get comfortable with this you can at least make it equally awkward for the other person by dropping "titty" or "jugs" into the convo. 
2. Piggybacking on that thought...even more shocking is how willing other people are to ask about these things. Some people think that your life is now an open book and anything is on the table for discussion such as your finances, parenting methods, your wife's other lady parts, and (later on)your sex life.
3. Also, everyone from your parents to friends to co-workers(even this blog) has advice for you.  "We did this...we did that...you should do this...why are you doing that?!"   They all have good intentions and really are trying to help you, but not all advice is good.  When someone starts to give you bad advice, challenge your parenting methods or goes as far as correcting something you are doing, this is the best way to avoid a lengthy sermon:  1) Use the smile and nod technique while they are talking.  2) Continue your current childcare activity using your regular method.  3) When they finish speaking, follow up by sounding interested and say "I've heard a lot of people are doing that nowadays."  4) Finish by commenting on the weather.
 4. On a related note...regardless of what people might say, the only mistake you can make is not being a part of your child's life.
5. "The baby has been really fussy today." This statement is a free pass to get you out of any social obligation you don't want to attend.  Also use "I think I hear the baby crying!" to abruptly end unwanted phone calls, ward off door-to-door salesmen or quickly end virtually any other situation. 
6. The most fun you can really have with a 4 week old is to sing them to sleep.  The great thing is that they don't care what you sing, they just like to hear your voice. This is an opportunity to entertain yourself at the same time.  My favorite song to sing to Emry at 1:30am(her normal nightly snack time) was "Bawitdaba" by Kid Rock.  My other go-to song was "The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers.  Except I wouldn't sing the actual lyrics to that song...I'd make up lyrics about what I did that day.  Its got a great tune and is slow paced, so you can easily ad-lib.  Well I woke up this morning...I made myself some breakfast...I ate it in the dining room...then went to work.....
7. Babies are like drunks(part 1) -  The only thing newborn infants seem to do is drink until they either pass out, get the hiccups or throw up.
8. Watching your sleeping baby and/or sleeping wife is the most satisfying thing in the world.
9. Being "on time" is a thing of the past.  You'll be at least 20 minutes late for everything no matter how early you start getting ready.
10. The first time you drive with the baby in the car you instantly become the safest driver in the world.  Consequently, every other driver seems like they're Mario Andretti.
11. If you go out for a run while your wife and newborn are asleep, you'd better be absolutely sure the baby won't wake up while you are gone - or you'll have hell to pay when you return.
12. When you first -- Darn, I think I hear Emry crying. I'll have to finish this later.
See how that works :)

Where's the Remote?

Where's the Remote?  Growing up in my house, this was a very common question for one Smith to ask another Smith. It was easy to get up off the couch for a snack and accidentally leave the remote in the kitchen.  Sometimes the remote would come back to the living room, and other times it wouldn't.  Often times the remote would find its way under the couch or between the cushions.  It became such a hot topic that my parents finally designated an end table in the living room as the "remote table."  The remote had to be placed on top of that table when you were finished watching TV.  Maren says in the Bray house(with 3 girls), the question always asked was "Where's the telephone?"

Given my background on this topic, you can see that I fully expected to ask this question in my own house one day, but not this soon.  Maren and I found ourselves searching high and low for the TV remote this weekend.  This was way too early for our family to have this problem for a couple of reasons...

First and foremost is because we don't watch much TV.  We don't even have cable, a fact that has been well documented by Maren's high school students.  Anytime I meet one of her students, the first question they ask is "Why don't you let Mrs. Smith get cable?"  Truth be told, Maren doesn't want it either.  TV is too much of a distraction and a time waster.  Maren and I have found so many other things to do to interact together that have helped us grow closer together as a couple.  There are way too many other things I'd rather do than sit on the couch as life goes by.  Plus I can't sit still long enough to watch a whole TV show anyway. 

Another reason we shouldn't have a remote issue yet is because our kid(s) are not old enough to watch TV.  Emry likes to press the buttons on the TV to make it go on and off, but she is like me and can't sit still for longer than 5 minutes at a time.  So its not like she would be watching TV and running around with the remote either.  She does like to play with the remote though.  Maren or I will give it to her while we are in the living room together, but we don't ever let her take it out of the living room. 

Lastly, we shouldn't be having this problem with the TV upstairs because we never use it.  The only time it ever gets used is when I turn on a football game and mute the TV while I'm playing with Emry.  The TV upstairs is an old box TV.  Its not even capable of receiving a digital signal, so we have one of those converter boxes hooked up to it.  The signal cuts in and out all the time, and is really annoying.  We also have a VCR hooked up to that TV in the living room.  It would be a pretty sweet set up...if we were living in 1984.

Yes, it says 4 Head with Hi-Fi Stereo. Not many people today know what this
inscription means.  The rough translation is "pure awesomeness."

So if we never use that TV and don't let Emry take the remote out of the living room, what happened? 

It was Thanksgiving Day.  We had a great day which started with our family going downtown for the Turkey Day 5k.  I had to walk the whole event because of an injury...I won't go into it now, but I'll probably rant about it in a future post.  Then we went home and cooked some food to take to my mom's family's Thanksgiving meal.  We had a great time visiting, seeing relatives, watching football and eating too much food.  Emry enjoyed eating the sweet potatoes and the peas the most!  She had a blast playing with her cousins all afternoon. 

Between the tryptophan and playing all afternoon, Emry was exhausted when we got home.  She went down for a nap and Maren started doing some work on the computer downstairs.

We posed for pictures next to our passed out
daughter.  However, we resisted the temptation
of drawing on her with a Sharpie.

To avoid distracting Maren from her work, I decided to watch some football on the TV upstairs(and fall asleep on the couch.)  I turned on the TV and converter box and sprawled out on the couch.  We only get 7 channels on that TV, of which we only watch about 3, so my odds were pretty good of having the right channel.  Unfortunately the TV was on the wrong channel.  We can only change the channel by using the remote control for the converter box, but I couldn't see it anywhere. 

Maren and I had just done a thorough cleaning of the house, so I knew it couldn't be hiding in the couch or under any furniture. I asked Maren if she had seen it, but she had no idea either.  We searched high and low, but couldn't find it.  Neither of us could remember giving it to Emry recently or seeing her play with it.  We searched through her toys anyway, but came up empty.  We gave up the search and figured it would show up later.  A couple days went by and we never found it. 

One evening the following week, Emry was playing in the living room.  She was doing her routine of turning the TV on and off and pressing buttons on the converter box and VCR.  I went up there and joined in the fun.  She likes to flip open the door to the VCR, so I flipped it open, and to my surprise I saw this...

The files are IN the computer? - Zoolander(And yes, I own it on VHS)

Emry,that little turkey, had stuck the remote in the VCR.  Maren and I had a good, long laugh about it.  Normally, I'd go all Doogie Howser right here and sum up the post by mentioning a great lesson I learned from this....but I've got a Ferris Bueller's Day Off" videotape calling my name right now, so peace out!

Raking Leaves

I'll start by letting you know that this post is not meant to instruct on the quickest or most efficient way to rake leaves.  The purpose of this post is simply to inform you how we do it at the Smith house.  Basically we try to have as much fun as possible, and eliminate as much unnecessary waste as possible.  If it were my choice, I wouldn't rake the yard or cut the grass at all...landscaping, shmandscaping.  But for the sake of our neighbors, we try to keep a pretty clean yard.

As you may know, I've kind of been on a all-natural kick this year and have been trying to eliminate as much waste as possible.  So I've been raking leaves this year instead of using the mower to mulch and/or bag the leaves.  In my mind, raking seems like a better option than burning gas and oil in my 20 year old mower for many reasons.  It makes the neighborhood a more pleasant place by cutting down on the noise and smoke from the lawn mower and leaf blower.  To eliminate using plastic bags that get thrown into a landfill, we are piling the leaves behind the hedge in our backyard.  Plus raking is good exercise for all of us!

Hang on a second while I step down off my soap box.......Ok, now back to the main point of the post - How we rake leaves at the Smith house. We started by spreading out a tarp on the yard.  I suggest using a good durable tarp for two reasons.  One reason is so it stays on the ground when the wind blows.  I'll wait until later to reveal the other reason.  

Emry has been interested in helping mom and dad lately, and she has been imitating a lot of things we do.  She did a great job helping us spread out the tarp and making sure it stayed flat.   

The next step was to rake the leaves into a big pile on top of the tarp. 

Learn from my mistakes #1...
While raking, make sure to keep an eye on your children.  They tend to fall off concrete patio steps if you don't pay attention to them.  I'm pretty sure there's like a 98% survival rate on falls from less than 10 inches high, but the screams your children will produce are still pretty terrifying.

 We also removed all the sticks from the pile as we were raking.  We didn't want to get poked by sticks while we played in the leaves!

Learn from my mistakes #2...

Don't encourage your children to help you break sticks and put them in your rusty metal fire pit.  I thought Emry would enjoy helping out her dad, so I showed her how I put the sticks into the fire pit.  Unfortunately, she could barely reach over the rusty metal side of the fire pit, and her poor little fingers scraped against the metal.  She got a pretty nice cut on the back of her thumb.  It bled a little, but she never cried!  We just rubbed a little dirt on it, and it was all good.

After we played in the pile for a few minutes, the next step was to fold the tarp over like a big taco.

 

Then we strung some rope through the holes on each corner of the tarp, and we set Emry on top of the big taco. 

The key was making sure she was placed directly in the center of the tarp so she couldn't fall over.  It kind of looked like she was sitting in an inner tube at the lake, getting ready to be pulled by a boat. 

This next step was the most fun for Emry.  We had to drag the tarp-taco around behind the hedge to dump the leaves.  The following video is pretty low quality, and sorry about the airplane buzzing overhead - didn't notice the airplane noise until I was editing it for the blog. 

You can't tell from this video, but Emry actually had a ton of fun riding on the tarp!  The ride in the video was pretty tame compared to the others. Unfortunately, I could not run as fast with one hand on the rope, one hand on the camera and one eye watching where I was going and the other eye on the camera.  Emry would laugh and clap her hands, but I just couldn't capture it here.  Earlier I mentioned there is a second reason to use a durable tarp...we obviously didn't want the tarp to rip with our child riding on top. 

The final step was to dump the leaves in the pile behind the hedge and take the tarp back around to start the entire process over.  It took us 5 tarp drags to do the entire backyard.

Learn from my mistakes #3...

Don't let your children play with your cell phone while you're raking leaves.  I let Emry play with my phone while I was raking, to keep her from falling off the patio steps again.  At one point, she set the phone on the tarp.  I made a mental note to pick it up before we folded the tarp over.  When I was done raking, I got so excited to give Emry another ride that I forgot about the phone.  Needless to say, I dumped that load of leaves and forgot about the phone until we were finished.  I finally remembered about 1/2 hour later, and Emry and I went back outside to search for it.  Maren had left the house and was running errands at this point.  If it wasn't for a perfectly timed text from Maren, we would have never found it.  Not more than two seconds after I walked around the hedge, Maren sent the glorious text.  The audio signal allowed us to drastically narrow our search, and after about 5 minutes, we found it!  Below is the long pile of leaves I would have had to search through had Maren not sent me that text.   

We had a bunch of fun.  It actually took me a lot less time than it normally does to bag the leaves with a lawn mower! The only thing I haven't figured out yet is what to do with the pile of leaves.  When I started, the idea was that I'd till them into the soil this spring, because we use this area to plant our vegetable garden.  However, the pile has gotten too large to till.  I would appreciate any ideas on what to do with these leaves.  Please give any suggestions in the comments below!

Camping is Intense

So we I thought it'd be a good idea to take our 16 month old camping.  After I'd convinced Maren that no one  would steal Emry from the tent in the middle of the night, the trip was set.  We left for Scales lake as soon as I got home from work on Thursday. 

The first evening really was intense(Julie, that pun was for you), but seriously, as we pulled in to the campsite, it was already starting to get dark. Plus, it was past time for Emry's dinner.  Maren started building a fire, and I set up the tent while Emry cried from hunger pains and explored the landscape.  I didn't realize this before the trip, but literally everything in nature can either choke a child, poke them in the eye, or get them dirty.  So Maren took over the duty of settling Emry down and keeping her out of the fire while I cooked dinner. 

Maren was growing more impatient because they were both hungry, Emry was upset, it was pitch dark, and our best source of light was the the most dangerous thing for Emry to go near.  Finally I got dinner cooked...hot dogs, green beans, mac 'n cheese and s'mores were enjoyed by all...

That night, Emry slept surprisingly well.  She laid between Maren and I in the tent. It should be noted that Emry constantly rolls, flips and flails her limbs when she sleeps.  Between that and the root digging into my left hip, I probably woke up about 10 times during the night.  The next morning Maren told the same tale of a restless night.

The rest of the weekend went really smooth, and we had a ton of fun playing on the playground, walking around the park, seeing the animals at the petting zoo, and exploring all the wonderful things in nature God has given us.  Emry had a blast being outside all weekend, and as Maren said,  "Emry is the dirtiest she's ever been(other than the day she was born)!"

It was so cute to watch Emry as she saw so many new things.  She loved the slides on the playground and was just adorable sitting in her little red lawn chair.
 

We took a bunch of photos and even tried a horsemanning picture for Halloween...

We had one bad experience on the last day of the trip.  We decided to take E in the stroller to walk the road around the entire lake, which is few miles long.  Unfortunately, the road doesn't make a complete loop around the lake, so when we got to the other side we had to make a decision - either take the road all the way back around the lake or take a shortcut on a trail.  Against Maren's will, we decided to take the trail.  Maren carried the stroller and I carried Emry.  The trail is made for mountain biking, so there were quite a few hills, roots and other obstacles which made it unsafe "not convenient" for carrying a baby and a stroller.  The final straw came when we were walking on a banked wooden platform that curved its way around some trees...All of a sudden, two mountain bikers came screaming around the banked curve and I jumped off the platform while still holding Emry.  Maren decided to walk back to the road and take the long way back to the campsite.  I told her I would run the trail and hopefully it would lead me back to the campground where I could get the Jeep and pick her and Emry up.

It turned out to be a very pleasant run through the woods.  I think my new passion is trail running.  Just being out in God's creation and enjoying everything He has given us was so much more fulfilling than my normal jogs on the roads and sidewalks.  As I was jogging the trail that morning, I thought about how lucky our family is to have the things we have and to be able to do the things we do.  Needless to say, taking the trail paid off in more ways than one because I quickly got back to the campsite and was able to drive the Jeep around the lake.  Luckily I picked up Maren and Emry before they got too "cranky hungry" and "cranky tired."  All in all it was a great trip!