First Father’s Day as a Dad

Just one short week ago I experienced my first father’s day as a Dad.  It was a wonderful day.  It started off with Alyssa cooking me a wonderful breakfast of Huevos Rancheros.  This is my favorite breakfast and I am always disappointed when I order it because it was never as good as the first one I had.  But the dish Alyssa made was even better.

As you can see Julia tried to help me eat it but just couldn’t quite figure out how to use the fork.

Alyssa also gave me a wonderful gift of 5 framed pictures of the three of us.  We plan to hang it right in that spot behind me.  It was a truly wonderful gift and while I didn’t quite cry I may have had a tear or two in my eye.  :)

After breakfast, Julia, Alyssa and I headed to the National Aquarium and US Botanical Gardens in Washington DC.  It was a beautiful day and the three of us had a wonderful time walking around.  Julia tried to escape into the plants at the Gardens but thankfully her legs aren’t long enough to get too far away.

Finally, on the way home we had to end the day with a mint chocolate chip milkshake from Baskin Robbins.  It was a wonderful first Father’s Day and I look forward to many more.

A New Ride

So as June 17th rapidly approached and the lease on my Lexus came to an end I needed to find a new car.  I was pretty sure I wanted a larger car and the Subaru Forester was the front runner.  But the more I looked at it the less I like it.  So I had to go back to the drawing board.  I started with who was having a good sale and it turns out Nissan was.  So one day after work I headed over there to drive the Altima.  Oh and also the Quest just to see what it drove like.  So Paul, the sales guy, and I headed out on a test drive of the Altima.  It was alright but nothing that blew me away.   We then drove the Quest, it was better than I expected and had a lot more room.  We even drove it to the house to show it to Alyssa.  As I pondered my decision Paul showed me a brand new dark red Altima that had just arrived.  It had every feature I could want it in a car.  So that made my decision much tougher.  After much debate though and a night where I took home the van to sleep on it.  I took another step in my journey as a parent and bought the Quest.  It was a great choice, the first weekend after I bought it Alyssa, Julia, and I packed it up and headed to Charlottesville.  I was amazing how much I could get packed into it and how comfortable it was to drive.

So now I truly feel like a parent driving around in a minivan.

And I know Julia and Alyssa will love it when we drive up to RI over the summer.

Freedom!!!

As many of you know Julia has been swaddled when she sleeps basically since Day 1.  She had a very strong startle reflex that caused her to flail her arms and basically slap herself awake whenever she tried to sleep.  So we swaddled.  At first we swaddled tightly with a regular muslin blanket and I have to say that Andrew was much better at this than I was.  I would cringe as he cinched the blankets around her but inevitably she would stop crying and calmly (relatively speaking) go to sleep.  Then as Julia became more active and stronger we had to up the ante in order to keep her swaddled.  Who knew what a market exists for different swaddle blankets promising to keep your little one wrapped tight?!?

We began using a SwaddleMe blanket which uses velcro to keep the flaps secure and tight.  Then, as Julia learned to wiggle her hands out of that, we used the SwaddleMe and a regular muslin swaddle blanket on top of it.  We drew the line at using a blanket that is basically a straight jacket for babies; especially since the one time we did use it, we picked up Julia to discover that her attempts to escape had ended in her arms at very strange angles that would have caused permanent damage if babies weren’t made of elastic. 

Well, our swaddling essentially ended last Friday night when Julia expertly escaped every attempt we made to keep her wrapped.  We would wrap her and within 30 seconds there would be a hand peeking out the top of the blanket, her little fingers making a beeline for her mouth and her eyes looking at us with an expression that clearly said, “I win.”  We tried again on Saturday and Sunday to get her swaddled believing that there was no way she would be able to sleep soundly without it.  Especially as we had both done a lot of reading of others’ horrifying experiences of trying to unswaddle their babies and ending up with many, many sleepless nights until success was achieved. 

But on Monday we decided to bite the bullet and attempt “free sleep” that night.  We reasoned that we were just putting off the inevitable and at least, if we had a week of not sleeping, we are going to Charlottesville to visit Andrew’s parents this weekend and could at least get a few hours of napping in while Julia visits with her grandparents.  So we began.  Monday morning the nap was a complete failure.  I tried for 2 hours to get her to sleep and it resulted in a total of five minutes of nap time.  Monday afternoon I had more success, it took a half hour to get her to sleep but she slept with all her limbs free for 45 minutes (a long nap for her!).  Then came Monday night; the initial getting to sleep process took about an hour and a half and then…. silence.  She slept.  We heard her wake up a couple of times and were on eggshells waiting for the crying to start.  Instead we heard slurping – she found those fingers!  She nursed at midnight, had a brief period of wakefulness at 2am when she was flailing around and couldn’t get her fingers into her mouth and needed to be soothed and then slept again until 5:30.  Last night was similar, two nursing session and a little bit of settling required but that’s not different, and in the case of many nights, better than her previous sleeping. 

So we are cautiously calling this a success!  And all the grandparents should be delighted that all of Julia’s fingers and toes will be on open display for all sleeping periods going forward!