Monthly Archives: April 2005

You Know Your Kid is in Daycare When….

…you can count on one hand the number of days they haven’t had a runny nose/cough/sneeze/wheeze in the past month.

Even though Maggie is only in daycare a couple days a week, it seems like she has been nothing but sick since she began. My RN brother-in-law says that’s a good thing as she is building up her immune system.

It may be a good thing, but it is still doesn’t make dealing with a sick kid anymore fun. And it looks like we can expect a few more, as the average kid has around 8 -10 colds before their 2nd birthday.

Fortuantly, there are only around 200 strains of the common cold and so far this year Maggie has managed to catch 196 of them. Four more to go and we are home free!

No Ozzy Needed

Is it normal for a 15 month old to bang their head against the wall when they seem happy? I know occasionally some parents may feel like doing it, but I had been a bit worried by Maggie’s tendancy to tap her forhead against the wall. She also likes to slap her head with her hands. Apparently, it’s okay. I was reading The Mother of All Toddler books by Ann Douglas last night and came across a note about head banging that said one in five toddlers will do it, either to relieve the pain of teething, relieve stress or when they are mad.

Babywise is nasty

Earlier this evening my wife was reading a post on the Babycenter forums that made us both mad. After reading the nasty Babywise book, seems like this poor Mom couldn’t quite “train” her child to sleep through the night, as Babywise has lead her to believe can be done. So she was letting her child cry until they vomited. Let’s read that again – until they vomitted.

To make the post even worse, one of the replies advocated letting the baby sleep in their own vomit, or else risk having the baby associate vomitting with Mom and Dad rescuing them from sleep.

Unbelievable.

How could anyone in their right mind think that letting a baby cry until they vomit is a good thing? I don’t blame this Mom. Mind you, when she says in a post later on that she suspects her child was hungry that night because she was so busy cleaning the kitchen she forgot to feed them, I have second thoughts about blame. I mean, what’s more important: feeding your kid dinner or having sparkling cutlery? Instead, I blame Babywise.

If you are a new parent and reading this, take my advice and get rid of this book if it should ever darken your household. But, if you don’t want to take my word about the evils of Babywise, check out Ezzo.info, a very good clearinghouse for articles about the author Gary Ezzo and the Babywise method. Or just Google Babywise and read for yourself.

Adventures of a (partial) at home Dad

If you are reading this, chances are you may be an at-home Dad, like me. Welcome to the club. Let me tell you a bit about us. I am a Dad to one kid, Maggie. She is 15 months old and a hoot. I’m home with her 4 days a week – 2 with Mom and 2 with just Maggie and me. The other 3 days a week she goes to daycare and I go to my day job. So, I am not a fulltime stay at home Dad….just part time. We’ve been doing this for about 2 months now and so far we haven’t had a single trip to the hospital :).

Being at home with Maggie is a blast. One, however, that isn’t without challanges. Nothing major, but a couple things hang over my head. For one, I think she gets bored during the day, and I find I have a tough time keeping her stimulated and interested. As the weather gets nicer I am looking forward to spending more time outside with her. That is my biggest worry right now – how to keep her occupied and engaged. She is curious, as I suspect most toddlers are at this age, and wants to touch, smell, taste and experience everything. So, my biggest challange is finding things to keep her interested.

On the career front, I have just recently begun to feel a bit out of touch with what is going on in my workplace. I think this is a challenge for any career parent that goes from working full time, focused on their career – to working part time and changing their focus to raising a good person. I have to work hard at staying in touch with what is happening back at the office, and I find that a challenge.

Other than those 2 issues, my life is great – I’ve got a fantastic daughter, a great partner in my wife and am happy to be a Dad. Hope you are, too, and you’ll share some of your experiences and comments with your own adventures as a stay at home Dad! Cheers.

Vomitus Maximus

In the 1989 movie Parenthood, Steve Martin plays a Dad to a girl who, one day while quite ill, throws up all over him. When his wife comes into the room, she finds Steve staring dumbfounded at the little girl, clothes streaked with vomit. She says, “Aren’t you going to do something?” To which he responds “I’m waiting for her head to spin around.” Today, that man was me.

The Girl puked on me for the first time. Not a little baby spit up after an over the shoulder burp – but a full-on, gut emptying, projectile spewing geyser. At one point, I swear I saw her kidney come up.

I knew the moment would eventually come and I had been dreading it. Smell is a powerful sense for me, and I don’t do well with foul scent. My wife discovered this about me when we walked into our house once after spending a month traveling in Turkey only to find our freezer had crapped out sometime between Gallipoli and Istanbul. She quickly realized I wouldn’t be much help digging the previously frozen blackberries and chicken out from the bottom of the dearly departed freezer.

Mom was at work today, so it was just The Girl and me – poor girl. She has been sick in the past, but never quite this sick. So I carried her off to the bathroom and stripped us both down. I toyed with giving her a bath, but she was looking quite stunned, and I couldn’t quite bare the thought of inflicting a bath on her when it looked like the only thing she wanted to do was crash. So I wiped her off as best I could, dressed her and gave her some water. Ten minutes later she was fast asleep on my chest. A chest, I must admit, that was a bit bigger knowing that I had handled my first major vomit situation with my breakfast intact.