Author: Family Friendly Daddy Blog

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Jack William Meets Evan Carlos

August 11, 2011 at 11:11 pm , by 

Eight months.

Though Jack has been attending day care for a couple of weeks now, I still have been wondering what it would be like when he would be exposed to another little boy about his age and size, in a different environment.  I had these preconceived  ideas that it might be difficult for them to get along, fighting over toys.  I envisioned myself cringing, just waiting for the moment when one of them would smack the other in the forehead with a wooden block or a Matchbox car.

I guess I forgot that infant boys don’t have that much testosterone, yet. Fortunately, Jack’s first encounter with a buddy wasn’t at all as I bleakly imagined it.  While in Sacramento last week, we visited Jill’s childhood friend, Paula; she and her husband had their first child just a few months before Jack was born.

It was funny to observe Jack and Evan (Paula’s son) playing next to each other from the same toy box. Several times they reached for the same toy, then they would both simultaneously back off from it, as if to say, “No, it’s cool.  You go ahead. You saw it first.”

If only we lived in a world with “baby subtitles,” where we adults could translate what our children are saying to us and each other.

For most of the visit, I imagined  in my head what their conversations were like as they were playmates:

“So, you’re Evan? Yeah, my mom has talked a lot about you.  Actually, I’ve seen a lot of your pictures on Facebook.  There’s this one where you’re wearing one of those taxi cab driver hats.  My mom got me one of those but I kept taking it off because I can’t stand having stuff on my head.  It makes me itch.”

“Yep, I’ve heard of you too.  I wonder why our moms are laughing at us right now.  I’m hungry.  Let’s eat.  Wahhhhh!!! Waahhhh! Ehhhhh…”.

“Okay, sounds good.  Bluhhh!!!  Mehm-mehm-mehm-mehm…”.

Being that Jill and Paula grew up together and remain friends despite the long distance and that they still see each other at least once a year when we fly out to California in the summer, I think it’s safe to say that Jack and Evan will grow up knowing each other too.  Even if that means just one actual play date a year and in the meantime their Mommies pointing to a Facebook picture, saying, “Look, here’s your buddy.”

Jack has made his first friend.

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Happy 30th Birthday to My Wife!

August 11, 2011 at 6:02 am , by 

Eight months.

There have been more than a few people who were surprised when they learned that I am not married to a girl in her early 20′s; instead I am only three months older than she is. Today, my wife Jill turns 30 years old.

We were both born in 1981, graduated high school in 1999, and had our first child in 2010. Not only is my wife my best friend, but we have experienced the same amount of living. In 2007 when we started dating, our timelines became one as we have shared our lives together ever since.

For our first dance at our wedding reception in 2008, we actually had two songs played back to back: “Everything” by Michael Buble was a more natural, understandable selection, which represented our “normal” sides.  But we felt the need to also include a song that represented our mutual quirkiness, too.  So we chose the weirdly beautiful, “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds.

In “The Luckiest,” Ben Folds explores the idea of the importance of a shared timeline, answering the idea of what life would be like had the love of his life not been born in the right year:

“What if I’d been born fifty years before you
In a house on a street where you lived?
Maybe I’d be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?”

I imagine the statistical chances of the two of us being born in the same basic era of time, as opposed to decades or centuries apart. Instead, we were born in the same year and did find each other.

Jill and I have this plan to die naturally in our sleep while holding hands when we are 80 years old.  Sure, we realize we have zero control over the previous sentence ever becoming true, but it’s how we’d like to think our shared love comes to an earthly end.

Speaking of, “The Luckiest” also addresses this issue:

“Next door there’s an old man who lived to his nineties
And one day passed away in his sleep.
And his wife; she stayed for a couple of days
And passed away.
I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.”

The two of us are normal enough to play Michael Buble at our wedding reception for our first dance, but we’re also off-beat enough to play a Ben Folds song that talks about the “luckiness” of being born in the same time era, as well as, dying near the same time in old age.

I’m aware of my natural ability to be weird and abstract.  But somehow that worked for me and my wife chose to spend her life with me.  To quote Ben Folds one last time:

“I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you… I am the luckiest.”

Happy Birthday Jill!

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In Flight Entertainment from Sacramento to Phoenix

August 9, 2011 at 11:51 pm , by 

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Getting My Infant to Sleep through the Night

August 8, 2011 at 9:29 pm , by 

Eight months.

“Crying it out” plus “cold turkey” equals “everybody’s happy!”

It was only pretty recently (the beginning of July) that I was able to master getting my infant son Jack to sleep.  After he learned to crawl at six months old, my wife nor I were no longer able to get him to sleep without him (and us) getting extremely upset.  So I tried my own version of the “cry it out” method and it has worked great.  I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, we soon realized that the getting to sleep was only the first half of the problem.  Even though we could get him to fall asleep, he was not able to remain asleep for more than a couple of hours.  That meant that none of the three of us were ever getting enough sleep (especially my wife and my son).  Additionally, it meant our son was drinking at least three bottles of formula during the night and therefore needing three additional diaper changes.

After a decent amount of research, and obviously acknowledging the immediate effectiveness of the “cry it out” method, my wife gave me the green light to apply the “cold turkey” method to get him to sleep through the night without needing to eat.  So I did.  And it is so awesome.  Life is beautiful, now.

Here’s what I did the first night of applying the “cold turkey” method: When I put him to sleep for the night (around 7:00 PM), I closed his bedroom door most of the way, then I didn’t come back until the morning when he cried after 6:00 AM.

On the first night of going “cold turkey,” he woke up after an hour and cried for 30 minutes straight, but then fell asleep for two solid hours.  Then he woke up and cried for 10 minutes and fell asleep for three hours.  Next he woke up and cried for 5 minutes, then another couple of hours.  As the night progressed, he continued to sleep longer and cry less.

We heard him cry at 5:40 AM, but knew not to go get him yet since it was still before 6:00 AM.  So we waited, and the next time he cried it was an hour later, and we went to go get him.

I can honestly say that the three of us were never happier to see each other in the morning.  Jack had survived his first night without eating since his dinner meal; plus, his diaper was dry.  And we, the parents, both were able to sleep more solidly than any other night while being in the same house with him.

More than a month has passed since that first night; this system has been so good for all of us.  Now when he does wake up in the middle of the night it only takes a couple of minutes for him to get back to sleep- on his own.

We had been hindering his sleep by continuing to feed him through the night; preventing him from progressing deeper into his sleep cycle because we would comfort him not only with food, but with additional soothing. Therefore we fed him too often and he never learned to fall asleep without parental help. We had been enabling him to overeat and under-sleep.

Have you half-way considered this technique, in your desperation to get your infant to sleep, but just felt that A) it was too cruel, B) it would mess up your kid psychologically, and/or C) you never knew any nice, normal parents to ever do this method?

Well, I am indeed a nice, normal parent who believes in the importance of raising my son in the most positively reinforced ways possible. I came to the conclusion I was hurting him more by not teaching him to fall asleep on his own.  And I can obviously see that, so far, I have not messed him up psychologically and he still treats me the same.

But if you should have any doubts, continue reading The Dadabase every day.  That way, you can still check in on my son to make sure that both the “cry it out” and the “cold turkey” methods are not only effective, but for my son at least, they are also a good and necessary thing.

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These are the Days We Will Remember Forever

August 7, 2011 at 12:15 pm , by 

Eight months.

In April 2007 after dating two months and having already gone to meet my parents, I flew to Sacramento to meet my wife’s family- all of them. That meant not only her parents, but also her two sisters and most of her seven brothers along with all their kids.

I was the new boyfriend.  There was no guarantee that any of the family members would ever see me again.  I could have simply been a single-serving special friend that ultimately disappeared from most peoples’ memories.  At best, I could have been, “Hey Jill, whatever happen to that guy from Alabama with dark hair?”

Instead of becoming a blurry memory, I proposed the following January and we were married seven months later.

Over the past four years, I have really grown closer to my wife’s family.  But during my most recent visit, there was a new closeness I felt to them all because now that my wife and I have our son, it has never been more official that I am grafted into the family tree; though our family branch is labeled “Shell” instead of “Tuttle.”  Though I obviously am not kin to them by blood, I am part of their family and have helped it grow.

The gathering place for all my wife’s family in Sacramento is her mom’s house.  Today I took a few pictures of some of the signs hanging on the walls there.  I have written before about how people show what they value through the art they create.  In my mother-in-law’s case, the decorations she hangs on the walls help serve as art.

My favorite sign at the house reads “These are the days we will remember forever.”  That motto is so much more clever than it may appear to be.  With me being such a desperately nostalgic guy, constantly yearning for the best of my life’s warmest memories, that sign reminds me that when I go out to California with my wife, and now my son, that I don’t have to wish for a moment in the past.  Instead, I get to enjoy warm fuzzy memories as they occur in real time.

Even though I do my darndest to capture all these stories and conversations with my wife’s side of the family, who I typically only see once a year, it must be my obsession with nostalgia that causes me to be one of the official photographers of the family.  Because even though these are the days we will remember forever, my memory is only so good.  Digital cameras definitely help.