Author: Family Friendly Daddy Blog

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Spirituality

Surviving a God-Nudged Leap of Faith

August 18, 2011 at 8:46 pm , by 

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

There’s a Certain Comfort in Routine

August 16, 2011 at 11:11 pm , by 

Nine months.

As a parent, I learn to find calmness by embracing the chaos; mellowness through the madness.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog postquestioning why statistically one out of every five people on Earth, both locally and worldwide, smoke tobacco; despite an often negative social stigma; despite addiction; despite the smell a smoker becomes accustomed to yet non-smokers find offensive; despite the fact that cigarettes are the leading cause of house fires and fire related deaths; and despite the fact it’s an expensive habit.  I was simply curious and uneducated on what I was missing out on.

One of my former college roommates at Liberty University, James Nasman, explained it in a way that actually made the most sense, through a very short and simple comment: “There’s a certain comfort in routine.”

It took me nearly two weeks to finally let that soak in to where I can understand it and now apply it to my life. I started thinking about my own daily routines that I subconsciously rely on as forms of comforting structure.  Like the way my wife and I say a quick prayer each morning before we leave for work.  And how I ride my mountain bike to the nearest Starbucks during my lunch break to read whatever the newest book is that I will be giving away next here on The Dadabase.

Simply going to work everyday, despite it being work, is a comfortable routine. So is driving back and forth to work everyday.  So is that sub-par cup of coffee at work to start the day.  They are all part of my routine, and in some basic ways, I rely on them.

We are wired in a way that we enjoy positive, unexpected rewards in life.  I think that’s part of the thrill of checking our Facebook and Twitter accounts.  Of course, when it comes to life’s negative surprises in life, we actually need some sort of vice to be able to handle them.  For me, one of my most reliable devices isdepending on the routine itself as a way to have control over it.

Parenting is stressful.  If not, you’re in denial as you are attempting perfection and are nearing a nervous breakdown but just don’t know it yet.

I openly admit and confess my parenting stress.  But I remember just how normal the craziness of parenting has been- for thousands of years and for billions of people throughout the course of time.

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

Bedtime Routines for Rocking My Baby to Sleep

August 16, 2011 at 10:43 pm , by 

Nine months.

Now that I’ve been a parent for nine months (as long as my wife was pregnant with our son), I have gained some confidence in finding some consistency with this whole thing. Through some quick Internet research, I taught myself how to get Jack to sleep through the night. Granted, he almost always puts up a fight when it’s bedtime, but even he recognizes the comfort of routine.

The last bit of fun that happens for him before his bedtime routine is that he gets a bath, along with plenty of attention from my wife and I.  But once I walk into the bedroom with him for bedtime, it’s all business: I don’t look at him, smile at him, touch his skin, talk to him, or feed him.  This may seem a bit harsh, but the key is to not engage him or emotionally comfort him in any way.

Comfort is only obtained by him falling asleep. Granted, I make sure he’s physically comfortable as I’m holding him and rocking him.  The room, the blanket, the tone I set; it’s all exclusive to his daily bedtime routine and naps.  It’s the only time he experiences that version of me.

Note: In the following pictures you will see me demonstrating with a Sleep Sheep, not my actual son.  The flash on the camera while he’s trying to fall asleep would have been pretty counterproductive!

My son knows that when I sit him down on his bedroom floor and he watches me unfold his blanket on the extra twin bed, I am about to pick him up to wrap him in a “baby burrito.” Or maybe it’s more like a “baby corn husk” because he likes to have his arms hanging out.

The moment I put my hands under his arms to lift him, he stands up, then leans back Matrix style facing the blanket, hysterically crying as he turns towards the bed.  I call it his “wailing wall” routine.

But sure enough, the moment I lay him down on that blanket and begin to wrap him up, he gets quiet and calms down. He lets me rock him for a minute with his head resting on my bicep (my left arm) and my right hand supporting his lower back; then he starts trying to sit up as to escape my embrace.

So I challenge him: I slightly tilt him backwards to make it harder to sit up. After he has completed three or four of what I call his “impossible sit-ups,” he’s ready to give in to my comforting strength.  Usually by that point he is officially ready to fall asleep.

To hypnotize him into a “sleep trance,” I “shoosh” him to the rhythm of the first line of “This Old Man.”  Then when his eyes close and he starts a slower breathing pattern, I switch to a “Darth Vader snoring” noise to match him. He is asleep at this point.

After a minute or so, when I can see he is in a decently deep sleep, I quickly set him down in his Graco Travel Lite crib and start rocking it back and forth like he’s in a boat at sea.  A minute later, I sneak out of the room, still making my “Darth Vader snoring” white noise until I shut the door.

If he wakes up later during the night, I wait ten minutes before going in to help him back to sleep.  The reason is that almost every time, he falls back asleep on his own.  Usually he’s just transitioning into different sleep cycles when I hear him cry for a minute or so.

It’s weird, but it’s the routine that he and I share every evening at 7 o’clock.  It used to take 90 minutes to get him to sleep and he would continue waking up every few hours to be fed again.  Now, it only takes around 10 minutes or less and he usually sleeps through the night undisturbed until 6:20 AM the next morning. That’s the power and comfort of routine.

I have to put some perimeters on the sometimes overwhelming open-endedness of life. I can’t imagine things any other way.

This has been a sequel to “Getting My Infant to Sleep through the Night,” which itself was a sequel to “Is It Wrong to Let Your Baby Cry It Out?“.

Additionally, it is also a spin-off of “There’s a Certain Comfort in Routine.”

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

Baby on Board: Jack’s Taxi Service

August 15, 2011 at 9:40 pm , by 

Eight months.

For nearly a month now, Jack has been going to day care as my wife and I have returned to our jobs here in Nashville.  I work only a block away from where he is all day, so I’m the one to chauffeur him an hour round trip five days a week.

Those “Baby on Board” suction cup signs on cars always crack me up.  I’m only pretty sure that a careless driver isn’t going to have the gumption to read one of those signs, then stop and think, “Oh! That car has a baby inside. Man, I need to slow down and focus.”  Or maybe there’s some secret society of people playing bumper cars with their cars out on the highway and they only break for vehicles with the “Baby on Board” signs.

Needless to say, there is no little plastic yellow sign stuck on a window of my Honda Element, but I do indeed drive a vehicle containing precious cargo.  With my baby on board, I feel like his bodyguard.  The Pope has the Popemobile; Jack has his Toaster on Wheels, his Big Green Lunch Box, his Wind-Up Toy Car- your choice.

I know there are cities with crazier drivers in America, but for those 60 minutes a day I drive him around in Nashville, I have to assume that every other person is a maniac who is drinking their fifth 5-Hour Energy drink and Tweeting on their phone while I drive alongside them.  I have to assume that at any given moment, a startled deer will jump out in front of the car.  I have to assume that Wile E. Coyote poured a bucket of Acme grease on the road in front of me in attempt to catch the Roadrunner.

In the meantime, Jack is asleep half the time as I jam out to any given Weezer album.  As for the time he’s awake, I assume he’s like me: in deep thoughts about A) the unfortunate impossibilities of time travel, B) whether or not God likes the music of Dave Matthews Band; if so, what is His favorite song, and C) who would win in a fight- A.C. Slater from Saved By the Bell or Uncle Jesse from Full House?

For now, Jack’s vocabulary doesn’t extend past “dada,” “mehm-mehm-mehm-mehm,” and “ba-ba-ba-ba.”.  But eventually, he and I will be able to have some normal conversations during the morning and afternoon car rides.  I can ask him what he learned in pre-school that day.

Until then, we’re both just sort of in our shared solitude, looking in opposite directions.  Every so often though, I turn around real quick to make sure he hasn’t somehow escaped his car seat and wandered off.  Then I see those happy little feet and know that my baby is still on board.

Look how cool Honda Elements are! The back seats can fold up and into the side of the car or all the way back (as seen in the picture of this one).

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Spirituality

The Half Abortion: Only Keeping One Twin

August 14, 2011 at 8:31 pm , by 

Eight months.

In today’s publication of the New York Times, there is an article entitled The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy. It tells of the growing number of women who are pregnant with twins and choose to abort only one of the fetuses, and allowing the other to survive.  In other words, these women are having a “half abortion.”

According to the article, New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center performed 101 abortions last year; 38 of those pregnancy terminations involved a mother pregnant with twins who decided to only abort one unborn child.  And that’s just one medical center in the entire country.

One mother who used fertility drugs to get pregnant, then aborted only one fetus, gives her reasoning for the decision:

“If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

What is it about the idea of a half abortion that somehow seems more difficult to grasp than a “normal” abortion?  The immediate thing that comes to mind is that it is an ultimate case of “playing God.” As if a “normal” abortion wasn’t already giving one person the authority to choose another human being’s ability to live, a half abortion gives a person the ability to decide which unborn child deserves to live and which one deserves to die. That’s playing God, times two.

Is there any justification for a half abortion? The article in the New York Times gives several examples of why women made their decision:

1. The mother was 45 years old and already had children.  She felt financially insecure, as well as, too old to have twins.

2. The mother was known as a “good parent,” highly devoted to her children.  Pregnant with twins, she decided she couldn’t be equally devoted to two more; just one.

3. The mother already had a son. Then she got pregnant with twins; a boy and a girl.  She chose to keep the girl.

4. Many of these mothers were in their 2nd marriage and already have kids from their previous marriages.  Twins would have been too complicated, compared to only one more addition to the family.

5.  Some were single mothers.

6. Some mothers did not want to jeopardize their education.

7. Some did not want to jeopardize their careers.

8. One woman’s husband was an officer in the Army, fighting in Iraq. They already had a few kids.  Twins were too much a risk if something happened to her husband.

For those of us unfamiliar with the idea of a half abortion until today, we now make a decision in our own minds of whether it is ethically justifiable or wrong. The fact that The New York Times is doing a story about it says something in and of itself: This is not your typical “gray area” moral dilemma.

This isn’t a discussion about whether abortion is right or wrong, in general.  Honestly, “pro-choice vs. pro-life” debates bore me. Polls show that our nation is split 50/50 on abortion.  Most of us have already made up our minds on the issue and the truth is, we are not going to convince each other otherwise via comments on a blog post; especially if we ourselves play God by judging other people’s character and life decisions.

I hope it is clear that I am not asking anyone to cast stones, but instead to think with an open mind about a tough issue that has some undeniable ethical questions surrounding it. I enjoy mature, mutually respectable, deep conversations. Therefore, I’m curious to know how other people feel about the “two minus one pregnancy.”  What ethical issues does the half abortion raise?