Ready for lessons. UPF 50+? Yes, he’s that white.

Erin and I have been talking about it for a while, but she finally quit the talking and took the initiative and signed Isaac up for swim lessons at the YMCA. The kid loves water, loves taking baths (thankfully that phase didn’t last too long) and last summer LOVED going to the pool.

Since we have a membership at the YMCA and because our new house (oh, have I not mentioned that? we bought a house) is in a neighborhood with 2 pools, he’s likely to spend a lot of time around water this summer. So swim lessons seemed like a good idea. He starts in June and it’s on Tuesday and Thursdays at 4pm, which means his days are going to be pretty packed. He’ll go to My Day Out from 9-1, then home for a nap, then to swim lessons from 4-4:45. It could be a little crazy, but we’ll make it work. 

What’s freaking me out JUST a little is that it’s not a parent/child class. His first swim lessons will be him all by himself in the pool. Granted I’ll be there watching, but I have a feeling it might take him a few lessons to warm up to the whole thing. Having said that I’ll probably be wrong and he’ll go diving in head first from minute 1.

What about you out there? Have you put your kiddos in swim lessons? How did they go? How did YOU do?

Tomorrow I am going to have a guest post from someone discussing all the essentials you’ll need for your first day of swim lessons. It seemed fitting.

We’ve all had it happen to us in some form or fashion. Maybe you’ve been guilty of doing it or maybe someone’s been guilty of doing it to you, but at some point in your life you have called a baby by the wrong gender. I guarantee you that you have.

But there’s an easy solution that I will now present so that from now on we NEVER have to worry about calling a baby by the wrong gender. You can’t go by names anymore, as too many are gender neutral or just new to the lexicon and a crapshoot either way. You can’t go by hair length either, as many boys have flowing locks and if a girls’ hair hasn’t grown in she can look boyish. And clothes aren’t always the best either, as there are lots of gender neutral clothes out there (I’m sure if I had a girl she wouldn’t be that girly looking yet).

So Adam, you are asking, how can you guarantee that I will never call another baby the wrong gender? That seems pretty outlandish!

Well, the answer comes from my years working summers at a church camp and years spent volunteering at events with hundreds of kids. I am TERRIBLE at remembering names and faces, so I became a master of “buddy” and “pal” and all the vagueness that is needed to get through a conversation without letting on that you don’t know their name.

So here it is, in all its simplistic beauty.

Person 1 will be the one without child, Person 2 will be the parent with the child of unknown gender…

Person 1: “How old is yours?”

Note that the sentence just ends with the word “yours”. There’s no need to come out with a guess in this sentence of a boy or girl. You’re keeping it as simple as possible and nobody is going to register (or care) that you didn’t include the sex of their child. If they have multiple children you can simply say “How old is your youngest?“

Now comes the important part, played by Person 2.

Person 2 CANNOT simply answer with an age, that violates the agreement that I’m laying out here. Their reply must include the sex, and it too can be done subtly.

Person 2: “She is 7 months”

Boom, conversation over. One simple, generic question, one simple, generic answer, and you have avoided the whole awkward dance as you just called their child the wrong sex and you start tap dancing and showing shiny objects to get them to forget about your blunder. Nobody is showy about it, there’s just a slight drop off in the question and a very slight addition in the reply.

Keep this in your back pocket and you will never worry about this situation again. Unless you forget the next time you see the kid, in which case I recommend going with all the gender neutral vagueness of “little one” and “munchkin” or whatever else springs to mind. Got me through 4 years of volunteering.

Monday I had surgery to repair my deviated septum that I’ve had for…well a long time. My ENT swears that at some point in my life I broke my nose, but for the life of me I can’t think of when. That’s neither here nor there, however. What is important in this story is that Erin took Monday and Tuesday off to take care of the boys while I was recovering.

The two days went well, the recovery has been pretty easy, but the one thing that came out of it that really hit me was when Erin asked me last night “So, do you like staying home?” She asked because I’ve mentioned going back to work when the boys are in school a few times and that recently I just haven’t seemed all that into it.

And you know what I realized?

I’ve started taking it for granted. I get to spend my days with two people who I love more than anything in this world. I get to hang out with them, do pretty much whatever we want to do and watch them grow up. I don’t have to go to an office and spend time in pointless meetings or doing meaningless, time consuming tasks anymore. I get to raise my boys and do some freelance work while they’re sleeping.

And that’s a good life. I’d just lost sight of it a little.

In numerous ways, Elliot is nothing like his brother. One of them is how he goes to sleep. Back in his very young days, Isaac would crash out pretty much every time he nursed. It was practically a fail safe activity. It continued, though not as dramatically. It would be nap time, he would nurse and he would be out.

Then Elliot came along. This kid does NOT nurse to sleep. During the day he can be tired as all get out, but 9 times out of 10 he will not nurse to sleep. Not only that, but he won’t even let Erin put him DOWN for his nap. That job falls to me. Erin can nurse him and rock him and try, but eventually we switch and within a few minutes he’s done. Dada for the win!

Then the night time comes. The final sleep is about 50/50 in who he lets put him down, but after that it is GAME OVER for me. He could sleep for 1 hour or 6 hours, it doesn’t matter, when he wakes up he has no use for me. Mama is who he wants and Mama is all he will accept. Any attempt of mine to calm him only ticks him off.

But the sun (and son) rises and I am cool enough again. Because it is Dada by day and Mama by night.

By now most of you have surely seen the awesome, awesome video of the twins who have their own language and are having an animated discussion in the kitchen. If not (or if you want to see it again, for which I cannot blame you), you should watch it below.

We’re not at the point where Isaac and Elliot have their own secret language, but they are apparently developing an even greater connection. And it’s kind of creepy.

Saturday I had a rugby game and Erin brought the boys to it, pushing their naps back. We got home, had lunch and put the boys down for their naps around 3 (crazy late for our house). Isaac crashed out for about 2 hours, but Elliot just kept the party rolling (he’d also missed his morning nap). And rolling. And rolling.

Sometime around 7 Isaac and I were sitting at the table, eating some food and watching some baseball. The washing machine was also running in the utility room next to us. Elliot was not making a peep, nor had he for the previous 3.5-4 hours.

Suddenly Isaac turns around and says to Erin “my baby is awake”. Erin kind of chuckled, but I informed her that he is scarily good at telling me when Elliot is awake. His track record is not to be ignored. So Erin hiked upstairs and peeked her head into Elliot’s room.

Sure enough, he was just starting to rouse, rubbing his head on his mattress and starting to look around. It was, to put it nicely, awesome and disturbing at the same time. I guess they’re off to a good, strong relationship if they’re that connected.

Do your kids have anything like this that isn’t really definable?

Isaac is still a pee machine during naps and overnight. It’s without fail that he wakes up from either and his diaper or pullup weighs about 10 pounds. For the most part that’s not a problem, the diapers absorb and they have covers that keep everything dry, and the pullups are incredibly reliable in the absorption realm as well. Now, however, there is a new enemy, and it’s an unexpected one.

It’s Isaac.

This all started a month or two ago. Isaac had been sleeping really well through the night (even through Elliot’s cries) and it was all “WOO HOO!!! SMOOOOOOOOOOOTH SAILING!!!!!!!!!” in my head. Then we hit a run where Isaac woke up 3-4 times in the span of a week at various points during the night. Every time he woke up, however, it wasn’t because of a bad dream or that he was thirsty or anything like that, it was because he had peed in the bed.

Eventually we discovered the reason behind this phenomenon. He was shoving his hand in his pullup and pointing his penis either up or, in some cases, actually part of the way OUT of his pullup. For those of you with boys (or common sense for that matter), you know that this tends to lead to pee leaks.

So what can we do to stop this? He’s not doing it intentionally, I’ve seen him put his hands down his pants in his sleep. It’s really strange to watch.

Well, as of last night, I have executed Operation Zipper.

So say goodbye to this:

A way for the hand to get in? Not on my watch!

And say hello to one piece jammies.

I know that when Isaac was young I said that one piece jammies were…well I said they were something along the lines of the devil. But that was when he was waking up at night and needing his diaper changed. Now that he’s sleeping through the night (and wearing 12 hour pullups) they’re not such a big deal. Besides, if it keeps me from having to wash sheet after sheet after mattress pad after mattress pad, I’m willing to deal with a little annoyance if he wakes up during the night.

So our new plan is to leave him in zipper jammies for a while. After a few weeks, maybe a month, we’ll switch back over to regular jammies and see how that goes. If it flops miserably we’ll start the process over again. But somehow, someway, we’re going to find a way to beat this.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I flaked on writing this Tuesday, and Wednesday is a picture/video day, so you’re getting it today.

We are having issues with Isaac putting his hands down his pullup overnight, moving his penis and wetting the bed. We’re pretty sure it’s all done while he’s asleep and he has no control over it, but it’s still frustrating. In some ways it’s worse because us telling him not to do it can mean diddly.

So Tuesday morning around 5am I hear Isaac crying over the monitor saying he wants water. I waited to see if it would stop for a minute, but then decided to go in. When I went in he wasn’t asking for water anymore, but he really, really wanted to hug me and be rocked. When I hugged him, however, I felt that his pants were wet. And I knew. I felt the bed and, sure enough, it was wet. Since he’d had some other accidents recently, all his clean mattress covers (that are waterproof, thankfully, otherwise he’d need a new mattress by this point) were down in the laundry room. So I took him to the bathroom and had him go, then I put him in a diaper, got a pillow and blanket and had him lay on the floor and covered him. Then I went downstairs to grab the mattress cover, but by the time I got back upstairs he was already passed out. Not wanting to wake him, I decided to just let him sleep on the floor and I went back to bed.

At 7:59 I was greeted by Isaac saying he was “all done with nap”. He was diaperless. Then he started saying something else that neither of us could really make out. Finally we understood what he was saying and didn’t like it at all. He was telling us that he pooped on the floor. The alarm had been set for 8am, so I had already hit the snooze (I was getting up, Erin didn’t have to be at work until a little later so she was staying in bed for a bit). I went downstairs and YEP! Poop on the floor! Thankfully it was on the wood and not the carpet. It looked like he had been taking out his trains while squatting, and it just kind of happened. It had been a long time since he’d had a poop accident. I cleaned it up (he’d actually gotten a cloth diaper and tried to clean it up a little, which had just made it worse) and we started the morning.

While I was in the kitchen the alarm went off again. Isaac heard it and said “What’s that? Fire truck?” He was in the playroom close to the front door, and suddenly I heard the door be unlocked and opened. I yelled at him to stop, ran to the front door and sent him to time out (he is well aware of this rule, opening the door without Erin or me is a straight time out).

All of this got me thinking, and it was a little scary. What if he had been downstairs and hadn’t woken me up before the alarm went off at 8? Would he have walked out the front door and just gone looking for the “fire truck”? (in just a shirt mind you) That would have been way worse than just coming downstairs to poop on the floor. Do we need to “baby-proof” the front and back doors? It’s a really disturbing thought, but fortunately it didn’t turn out that way. I guess we’ll just have to reevaluate when we move Isaac out of his crib. But that’s a story for another day.

What has your kid done that’s scared the heck out of you?

The past few nights have been rougher than normal around here. Like Elliot won’t go to sleep until after midnight, then won’t sleep in his own crib and ends up crashing in our bed for 80% of the night rough.

Then, over the weekend, little guy turned 6 months old. What’s that you say? He’s already 6 months old? Well yes, yes he is. And apparently Elliot has decided to be like brother and do exactly what he did at 6 months old.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Elliot has cut his first tooth.

We also had his 6 month pedi appointment today and discovered that our “little” man is 28.25 inches (98%), 17lbs 2oz (45%) and his dome is in the 99%.

You know how there comes a time when you realize what things you say repeatedly because it turns out that instead of a child you are actually living with a parrot?

Well, we’ve been in that phase for a while now, and it’s starting to really come to the surface what kinds of things we say to Isaac, whether consciously or unconsciously. Fortunately, it turns out that we don’t say too many negative things (at least that he’s caught on to, but with 2 nephews we’ve had some training).

What he has picked up on, however, is hilarious.

Apparently we can be seemingly some of the most polite people on the planet. I realized it a few weeks ago when I asked Isaac to do something and he replied “Yes sir”. That kind of took me back a second. But it wasn’t a one time fluke thing too. He’ll tell us (on a not infrequent basis) yes or no, sir when we ask him to do things. Granted it doesn’t always go the way we want it to, but at least it’s put in a nice manner.

The other thing he’s picked up from us is the phrase “No thank you”. This one cracks me up because he says it with an absolutely formal tone. “Isaac, can you take this to the trash please?” “No thank you”. This one doesn’t really have a positive turn other than, perhaps when he says “Yeah, SURE!”, but it’s hilarious nonetheless.

I’m just glad he’s not dropping bombs at school or in front of other people, makes me think maybe I’m doing something right.

What phrases has your kid learned from you?