Tales of a Newbie Dad

Hard to believe it, but Christmas is upon us. For some reason this year I just haven't really felt the holiday spirit. Just all of the sudden, here it is, Christmas. I'm not sure if I haven't gotten into the spirit of things because so much time and attention goes to taking care of Aiden that I lose track of the calender, or if it is work (although work is just like last year) or maybe it is the fact that I have not done much holiday shopping at all. I kind of think that last option is the one that does it for me. The holiday's have always provided me a bit of an interesting challenge in trying to make sure I buy something useful and creative for everyone on my list. I hate giving gift cards (although I love getting them.... odd that). Gift cards take no thought. They are quick and easy, which is what most people like about them I suppose, but I guess one of my thought processes is that the gift is as much the thought that went into it as the item itself. I've always had trouble returning gifts I receive for that very same reason. So not shopping this year takes away from the Holiday feelings I suppose.

But I am off work for the first time in something like 9 years on Christmas day, and that will be a nice change for me. It will be Aiden's first Christmas, and although he is not anywhere near old enough to have a clue what is going on, it will be fun to sit in front of the tree with him and open gifts and see how he reacts.

You may have to wait for the Christmas update though... Busy time of the year and all, not sure if I will be able to make the time tomorrow night to upload photos or not. Be patient though, I will get them online for you. :-)

So Merry Christmas everyone! I hope your holiday season brings you everything you desire. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you soon!

Alright. Since I have been remiss with the photos of late, here is a small collection of photos for your viewing pleasure. :-)

So the sleepover last night was a success by all accounts. There was no majr seperation anxiety on either Aiden's or our parts. Although we did not get home till late, so we didn't get a ton more sleep than usual, but it was uninterrupted sleep. So that is a good thing. Aiden did pretty well for the grandparents. So all is well.

Apparently it went so well that mommy thinks it would be a good idea if Aiden spends the night with his grandparents once every week or two. So we'll see how that works out. The grandparents seem willing to oblige in taking care of him, so sleep sounds pretty good to me.

Today Aiden went and got his very first photo taken with Santa. It is just about the cutest Santa photo ever taken.... Of course I am a little biased. Unfortunately, showing you that picture will have to wait for tomorrow, because I am losing the argument with my scanner at the moment.

So tonight Aiden has his very first sleepover and his grandparents house without mommy or daddy. Shocking I know.

Momma's work Christmas party was tonight, and the original plan was to take Aiden over to their house before the party, and then pick him up afterwards. It would mean a late night for her parents, but they would be getting up to give him a bottle anyway. But this afternoon mommy calls me and asks if I am alright with Aiden staying with his grandparents, I'm okay with it... Is she?

So we'll see how it goes, for us and for him. We had a good time at the party, mommy only checked her phone a couple of times for messages. Hopefully he settles down and sleeps alright for them so they don't end up with sleepless nights.

We'll go pick him up at 8am tomorrow, and I will tell you in tomorrow's update how it went... for all parties involved. Until then, we're going to try to get about 6 solid hours of uninterrupted sleep. :-)

Kim asked in a comment on Belated Update for me to talk a little bit about dealing with the baby’s grandparents. Fortunately for us, all of Aiden’s grandparents have been great (and he has 6 of them.) I think a big part of that is that we kind of all know, they are welcome to give advice, but we reserve the right to not take the advice if we want to do something else. Do we have instances where the grandparents advise us of something that we don’t do and they are a little upset by it? Yeah occasionally. But for the most part we do pretty well.

Lets face it, having grandparents close by can be a great help. They can help with babysitting, getting chores done that just can't be handled with the baby in tow. They add another layer of love and affection to the baby's life that they just wouldn't get from daycare or a sitter.

Now I know that not all new parents are in the same position as we are. Some people just don't like their in-laws. Fortunately for us, we both love our in-laws and that makes things a whole lot easier, because you don't have that barrier of dealing with someone you aren't very fond of.

As for the advice... One of the things that we always need to keep in mind is that a lot has changed in the last 30 years in how doctor’s recommend bringing up your baby. 30 years ago parents were told to let their babies sleep on their stomachs, now sleeping on the stomach is a big no-no. 30 years ago babies didn’t get acid reflux, they just had colic and you dealt with the crying. Does that mean what worked for our parents then won’t work for us now? Not at all. But we have to take into consideration the changes in the medical research on what is best for our babies and then make the best, most educated decision that we can.

Since Kim put out the example of the Christmas party and the whole family being around, I will use that example. I don't exactly disagree with Kim’s decision to keep the baby in the bedroom and allow only the occasional visitors with lots of washed hands, but we made a different decision. Yes, hand washing is important, and we try to make sure everyone cleans up before they handle Aiden. But from our reading, the first 2 months or so aren’t really an issue for sicknesses picked up from being around other people. The baby has just spent 10 months being exposed to everything that momma has been exposed to and their immunity is at one of the strongest points it will be at for a long time. Of course this rule does not hold true for preemies and in other instances. But for us, Aiden was just about 8 weeks old when he was Baptized and he was in a room with about 25 other people all holding him and playing with him, and he did not suffer any ill effects. But that was our choice with our child, based on the information we had. Kim's decision is just as valid.

Now new parents should never be ridiculed for any decision they make. The only time they should be chastised is if their decision could directly cause harm to their children. Let’s face it, raising a child is an effort in trial and error, and is different for every set of parents. What was true 30 years ago certainly is not true today, but what is true for me and my baby doesn’t necessarily hold true for you and yours either. If there were one sure way to bring up your baby, there would be one definitive rule book and we would all have perfect children.

So take the advice for what it is, the concerned words of wisdom from someone who has been there before. But then make your own decision and stand behind that decision. If someone gives you grief for the decision you make, stand up and let them know you appreciate their input but you are going to raise your child the way you see fit. And you would appreciate if they would respect your choices and stand behind you rather than giving you a hard time for trying to be a good parent. Because, at the end of the day, that is the new main focus of our lives, to be the best parents we can. The grandparents advice can be useful, sometimes it can counter everything your doctor says, sometimes it might be downright comic, but take it as their good intentions, then decide what YOU are going to do. They will have to respect your decisions in the long run.

To Sleep or not to sleep. Mommy and I got a little freaked out this weekend. Aiden actually slept. He took several naps through the day Sunday, and then he slept from about 10:30p-4am. Wow. We’re thankful to get the break. Maybe he is finally turning the corner and ready to sleep a bit more through the night? Then he slept a lot Monday throughout the day, and we start wondering… Why is he sleeping so much? He never sleeps like this. We got ourselves busy with asking what was going on, when, hopefully, he was finally doing what a baby is supposed to be doing at his age.

Well flip the page to Monday night. Not so much luck there. He got his schedule pretty funky and only took about half a bottle between 10-11. He did settle down for a bit, but then he was up at 2. Full bottle at 2, and then he was sleeping but grumpy from about 3:30 on. Oops. It seems we get a lot of these, a good night followed by a really bad one. Not sure why we get these little spurts, but that is sort of the trend we are following.

Aiden’s still smiling and having a good time when he is awake. The hydro cortisone does not seem to be helping the itch on his head a whole lot, and particularly last night I think that was the issue with his sleep, as long as I was rubbing his head he was fine, but as soon as I stopped and tried to go to sleep he would start fussing and itching at his head again. So We’re supposed to try a couple of different shampoos on him and see if that helps. Trial and Error… Trial and Error.

Seems like 3 months ago I was writing about how we couldn’t continue doing this with the sleep issues and needed some definitive answers. 3 months have gone by, and still no solid answers. But we keep trying, and we keep plugging along.

So, I’ve been a little busy for updates of late, and those of you who come daily looking for news, I apologize. Tis the season you know. Although we are not doing much for Christmas, I am hard at work making sure everyone on my list gets a little something from us, and that is taking a lot of my time right now. Of course with it being the Holidays at work, I am also pulling a few more hours than I had been when I started the blog. But after the start of the year we should return to business as usual, and I will try to get more updates in as well as get the newbiedaddy.com website up and running.

LAst night Aiden went to his first Christmas Party. Our Sunday School group got together at one of the member's houses and had dinner together. The host's baby went to bed at about 7pm, so that left Aiden to be the life of the party the rest of the evening. He didn't disappoint. He was playing and thrashing around, looking at everyone he could get eyes on. He had a pretty good time.

It takes about an hour each night for me to get Aiden settled down to sleep, and I wish I knew exactly what works in the end to settle him down. We rock in the glider for awhile, I put his lotion on his head, give him prune juice, rock some more. In the end, he just konks out somewhere along the line. It isn't that I mind spending quality time with my infant, but I would really like to get to sleep myself. And in fact a few times I have found myself dozing in the glider while I try to rock him to sleep. Maybe eventually we'll figure out what the key ingredient is to going to sleep, but until then, the trial of errors continues.

Right now we are busy blowing raspberries at each other, which he thinks is the funniest thing in the world. I have to admit, I find it pretty entertaining myself. :-)

Well.. last night we had another rough night... no known reason for it, Aiden just was really grumpy all night long, didn't want to sleep for more than about 20 minutes at a stretch.

But we're not going to dwell on that because we are going to share a couple of videos today! We finally caught Aiden rolling from his stomach to his back. The first one is about 40 seconds of him being cute trying unsuccessfully to roll over. The second is a short 13 second clip taken moments later when he does manage to roll over. :-)

So it is officially two weeks to Christmas. Seems like the year has flown by. We have not done any shopping for the few presents we are going to be buying this year, and that includes buying anything for Aiden. Not that he will need much with all the aunts, uncles, and grandparents spoiling the little guy. But still you want to go back and say "This is what e got him for his first Christmas". We've got less than 2 weeks to figure it out now.

Aiden continues to frustrate me with the rolling over thing. He rolled over twice today, but when the camera was there, nothing. Think the kid is camera shy or something.

The nights have been better with the Oatmeal Cereal. Last night he did get active between 5-6am, but when I moved him from his crib to our room in his bouncer he settled back down just fine. In fact he was sleeping peacefully when I woke up about 7:05 and realized mommy hadn't gotten up yet either. Her alarm failed to go off this morning, so she was a little rushed getting to work this morning. Oops.

Took awhile to get him to settle in to sleep tonight. In the end I left him awake in his bouncer with his little musical aquarium playing and by the time the 5 minutes of music had played out he was asleep, so that was good.

Alrighty then.

So Aiden has now been on the Oatmeal Cereal instead of Rice Cereal for 3 days. He seems to be taking to it very well. No constipation so far. Rice Cereal we would have some hard painful bowel movements every couple of days regardless of how much prune juice we gave him. With the Oatmeal Cereal we have not given him any prune juice at all and he seems much more comfortable. His sleep has not been terrific, but it has been okay. No sleepless nights since we made the change. Saturday night was probably a downright GOOD night for him. Last night was okay, but mommy said she was up with him several times between 4am-7. I never heard him.

We have him sleeping in his bouncer so that he is upright a little bit and that seems to be helping his tummy out quite a bit. Last night we put the bouncer inside his crib (prior to that he had been set up right next to our bed) he did okay in the bouncer in the crib from 11:30-3:45. At some point between 4 – 7 mommy brought him out of the crib back to our room.

He does make some noises in his sleep… not fussy noises, just kind of little baby sleeping noises. I don’t know if momma is so keyed up to the sounds he makes that these noises woke her up, or if he was actually fussy. She wasn’t really sure if he was fussy or not, just that she was up several times.

I need to reiterate that Aiden is a very happy baby. It has been awhile since I talked about much other than the sleeping problems and the tummy problems and the skin irritants. But during the day, when he is awake, he is a very happy, active baby. We get lots of smiles and giggles. He thinks Daddy and mommy are the funniest things on the planet. I think if momma and I were getting decent amounts of sleep we would have no complaints at all.

We watch Extreme Makeover Home Edition every Sunday, and watching that program and others like it, just make us realize exactly how lucky we are that Aiden is as healthy as he is. There is so much more that could have gone wrong. So many families out there who have such stories of struggle and hardship, just keeping their little ones alive. In the meantime, Aiden is thriving and we complain about lack of sleep. Every night I thank God that Aiden is as healthy as he is. I also ask that he take away the skin irritation and let the Acid reflux fade out so that Aiden will sleep, but primarily I am thankful that we have a healthy happy little boy.

A couple of pictures I can share with you this evening… and I am going to try to link in a video from my mother’s picasaweb site that she took while here over the weekend. We took more pictures over the last couple of days, but I am not allowed to share because they are for the Christmas Card. I guess after Christmas I can share that one.

That’s gonna about do it for tonight. I’m working on a little fun entry for somewhere in the next few days. 10 rules to live by for new dads. Just a fun little list of things to expect. That should be fun!

Tomorrow I will try to make some time for a full fledged update for you, as well as bring in some photos that were taken over the weekend.

My mom and Danny came in for the night Saturday, and we had a good visit. Aiden has had a couple of decent nights. Not great nights, but acceptable. At least he is sleeping.

We've had a few more instances of him rolling over, but have still failed to capture it on film. He gets shy around the camera I guess.

I am still fighting with the computer to one degree or another. I will get it all sorted, but Vista seems to have a lot of compatibility problems with already in existence software. Almost makes one consider buying a mac.

As I said, I will give a longer update tomorrow, but I told myself I couldn't go to bed tonight without at least posting something, so there you go!

It has been a busy couple of days around the house here. Aiden had a grumpy day today. I tried him on solids again, and he did better, since I mixed the rice in with his apple juice it probably tasted better, but about 5pm he got really grumpy, and grumped all the way until momma put him to bed a little after 11. He is now sleeping soundly, which may be a result of all the energy he exerted grumping for 6 hours.

This update is a little late in coming as my computer has continued to act up on me since we had the little issue with the firewall a month ago. Windows Live Messenger along with several other programs boot up and then stop working. It tells me it is looking for a solution, but no solution is ever available. So tonight I decided to try reinstalling Vista to see if that takes care of the problem. Well it takes about 4 hours to reinstall Vista, and once that process was completed, the same problem still occurs. I find it slightly amusing that the main program I need that fails to work is a Microsoft product. But anyway.... I don't think this would be a really big issue, except that it crashes Windows Explorer whenever I try to launch the Control Panel. That is a problem.

So I think tomorrow, or sometime over the weekend when I have some time, I will be downgrading back to Windows XP. That should be a load of fun. Hopefully not too much of a nightmare.

So I may miss a day or two of updates if the computer is busy loading files and getting right with Microsoft. But I will be back soon!

Okay all you bright people out there. Or people with more time to explore than I have. Aiden is doing something for which I cannot find any sort of reasoning. I am going with it being a part of the teething process, but go out there and show me something to back it up...

Aiden has started to roll his tongue around his gums. Basically massaging his gums with his tongue. I have tried to look this up as baby licking gums to no avail. If you can find something on this, it would be welcome.

After our first night of Aiden rolling over from his tummy to his back 3 times, he has not done it since. I don't know what the magic was that cause him to roll over so easily on Saturday night. Maybe it was all the football on TV, but no successes since then.

We'll keep on trying. And trying to catch it on video!

One of the new things I have been trying the last few nights is giving Aiden a little extra formula in between his 7 and 11pm bottles. He seems to get fussy right around the 9 o'clock hour, so I gave him an extra 3 ounces the other night and that settled him right down, so I have continued to do it.

Last night, after finishing his extra bottle and his 11pm bottle, Aiden slept until 2:45, when he started grumping. I got up, gave him his pacifier and went and got his bottle ready. I sat down at the computer to wait for him to grump again. He didn't until almost 3:30. I got him up and tried to feed him, but he was not even remotely interested. Over the next 45 minutes, every time he fussed a little I offered the bottle, he would take a couple of sips and then go back to sleep. Between 3:30 and 4:15 he drank 2 ounces. Then I decided to put him back down. He got back up a little after 5 and Raquel gave him a little more. But he did not have a full fledged bottle between 11pm and 9am. Is this progress? We'll have to wait and see... But tonight when he fusses I am going to try the pacifier and go back to bed instead of assuming he is hungry and getting ready to feed him.

We'll see how that works out for us. :-)

So it has been awhile since we had any pictures of Aiden posted. So tonight instead of posting much of an update, I am going to post a few pictures from the last couple of days for your enjoyment.

It was an eventful day for Aiden today. We had another very rough night last night, just hoping tonight will be better. I'm not entirely convinced the problem isn't that he is still hungry. By the 2.5-3 ounces per pound he should be getting anywhere between 38-45 ounces of formula a day. We are giving him a little over 30 ounces a day. Now the Rice Cereal should make up some of that difference, but how much? Who knows.

I gave him a little extra formula between his 6 and 10 o'clock bottles tonight and (for now) he is sleeping. We'll see how it goes.

Grandad and Nana came to town today to visit. This is the first time they have been able to make it down since Aiden left the hospital. It was nice to spend the late afternoon and evening with them, and grandad and I spent the evening cheering on Pitt and Oklahoma as they took on the #1 and #2 ranked teams in the land. Can you say welcome to the Championship Game Ohio State?!?!

And then.... after grandad left, I decided just to give Aiden a little tummy time, since he was pretty awake and active. Well what should I see, but he flips over from his belly to his back. I put him back on his belly and he does it again! I had to wake up momma and have her come downstairs and see, and he did flip again for her, but we didn't catch it on video. We'll be trying tomorrow to get that one.

We did take several pictures today that I will get posted tomorrow, the camera isn't convenient for me to grab right now, so it will just have to wait. hehe.

Here's hoping we get some sleep tonight!

Well. While we are not sleeping a ton, we are finally back to our routine of getting about 3, 3 hour stretches a night out of Aiden. Last night Mommy decided we should try getting out his snuggle nest again and just put that back in his crib. Apparently that did the trick. While it took a long time to get Aiden to settle in and go to sleep, once he was asleep he gave us 3 hours until it was time to eat. Ate, went back to sleep without too much hassle, and slept again.

Mommy said she did get up several times between 4-6 to give him his pacifier back, but I never heard him. Mommy has hypersensitive hearing between the hours of 4-6 I think. Possibly because that is when we swapped shifts back in the first two months before she went back to work.

Speaking of work, I get the only Saturday off I will have for the rest of the year tomorrow. My dad is coming into town, so I put this one on the books awhile ago. It will be nice to spend time with family rather than with 2500 hotel guests who are having a terrible time trying to enjoy the holiday season.

I promise to take some pictures this weekend. I've been overly lax in getting that done. Three mostly sleepless nights will do that to you.

On a side note. November ends today and I officially made it through NaBloPoMo. I posted for every single day of November, many days with multiple posts. I am not sure if I will keep up the EVERY day, as there were some days I just wanted to go to bed, but I promised to update every day. But I am going to try to keep it up. I may miss a day here and there if there is nothing overly remarkable to report, and depending on what my time available looks like. But I am really enjoying the blog as a writing outlet. And I will have to put some extra effort into getting newbiedaddy.com off the ground and add more features. The Forums are up, see the post below for a link to those, and I plan on adding a chat room, and maybe a place where parents can start a blog within the newbiedaddy framework. Suggestions for what should be on the site always welcome!

Thanks for reading. See you in December!

While I still have a ways to go before I am ready to turn on the newbiedaddy.com website, I do have the forums up and running on the backside. So since one of my readers yesterday asked for forums to be put in, I figured I would go ahead and let you all head over to the forums and get registered and start talking.

And just because it is NewbieDaddy doesn't mean the ladies are not welcome at the forums. Everyone can come and talk. Parents can share experiences and all of us can learn.

Don't bother going to newbiedaddy.com as it will just take you to an error page.

But if you use the following link, you can enjoy the forums. Just the first of many interesting things to come from NewbieDaddy.com

Come Check out the Forums!

I'm not sure how much conscious thought Aiden has put into it, but he is beginning to discover that if he moves his arms and legs around, his body moves.

Since I came home tonight he was about as squirmy as I have ever seen him, and his squirms seem to have a purpose. Mommy said that she left him on the bed while she went to get something and when she came back he had scooted himself up against his baby bathtub. Not sure exactly how far that was, but he is moving.

Of course, since he hates tummy time, he is scooting on his back, but hey, it's progress. Hopefully soon he will get those arms going and won't mind tummy time so much because he is holding himself up real well.

It was another rough night last night. Three in a row now. Usually we get two really rough nights and then a "crash" night. That didn't happen last night. He was pretty restless just about the entire night.

We're back in the crib in his snuggle nest tonight, and so far so good. He has been down for about a half hour and seems to be doing okay. We'll see.

In the sidebar there is a new little box called Rateit. You can submit a star rating and brief review of my blog to Rateit. I'd appreciate any reviews that I can get. :-)

Check it out. And if you are a blogger - check out all the other cool stuff at RateIt!

So remember yesterday I mentioned trying to get Aiden started on solids with some rice cereal. Yeah.. well all told he probably had at least two and possibly three times as much rice cereal yesterday as a typical day. That's a BAD thing for little tummies that aren't used to that much solid in them. We had a pretty rough go of things last night with Aiden just really uncomfortable trying to pass all that rice. We gave him lots of Apple-Prune juice and lots of attention, and he just continued to grump. Not much sleep for any of us.

He slept quite a bit today once he had had some good dirty diapers this morning. We just hope that doesn't mean he won't sleep tonight. As a precaution we did not give him any rice cereal at all today. We'll see how that goes over.

While I did not try solids with him again today, I did give him one of his spoons to play with. He stuck it in his mouth pretty good, so eventually I think he will do fine with solids. Just gotta get him used to the idea of taking stuff off the spoon and swallowing it.

I've been a bit lax on picture taking the last couple of days, so I will have to get some taken soon to post more. Need some 4 month old pics. hehe.

Hopefully we'll all get some sleep tonight as both mommy and I have to work tomorrow. We're going with bouncer in our room one more time so that we can take care of him without actually getting up. We'll see how it goes!

So yeah, it was a pretty rough night last night. Not that Aiden was up all night, but he was up frequently just grumping. His poor legs hurt from the 4 needles he got stuck with yesterday morning.

So many people told us "Oh when they get shots it is great, they sleep for like 11 hours!" Well not our little one. Yeah, he slept quite a bit yesterday afternoon, but despite our giving him his Tylenol every 4-6 hours and trying to keep his poor legs comfortable, he just wasn't very pleased.

Hopefully tonight will go better, but we are still going to keep him in our room with us, just in case. If he does alright tonight, tomorrow we may introduce sleeping in the bouncer in his crib and see how that goes.

We tried "solids" officially today. I mixed up some rice cereal in a slightly thicker than liquid consistency, broke out the baby spoon and had a go. I was prepared with two bibs and two burp cloths. The first spoonful actually went pretty well. I gave him just the spoon at first to see what he thought of that. He didn't have the tongue thrust reaction that people say to watch out for, so I thought we had a good chance of success. I got two or three spoonfuls in his mouth before it all started trailing down his chin and onto his bib. Then he wasn't interested in the spoon anymore. Despite trying to get him interested it just wasn't happening. So I added some more water and thinned it out enough for him to take it out of his bottle, which he proceeded to do.

So he ended up getting a pretty decent helping of rice cereal today, he just didn't eat it out of a spoon. We'll keep trying and see if we can find a good trick to getting him to work on the solid foods.

So we all got up this morning and packed ourselves down to the Dr.'s office for Aiden's 4 month visit. We came loaded down with all of our questions on different things. Aiden came in at 15 pounds 4 ounces and 25 1/2 inches long.

Before we got to our questions, before the Doc even said anything else other than Hi, she took one look at his poor dry scaly head and said "Alright, who else other than Aiden has the sensitive skin here?" So, it's eczema, no question about it. She said he has the most prevalent form of baby eczema and yes, it does cause them to be very itchy. At his age there is no allergy test to run, you just kind of have to wait for them to grow out of it for awhile. She did get us on two different dosages of Hydrocortizone creme to help with the itch, and while he still seems a little itchy, it does seem like he has made some improvement.

We mentioned last night having put him in the crib and he immediately started fussing but then putting him in the bouncer and his being okay. She said that 4 months is kind of the height of the reflux problems. By 6 months all should be well. In the meantime, she thinks we still need to have him inclined as much as possible for sleep. One of the suggestions was even to put his bouncer in the crib and let him sleep in his bouncer, but he is still in the crib so it is a familiar surrounding once his stomach is better and he is solely in the crib.

Another round of shots and the oral medication. Of course he screamed when they pricked his little legs, but he did pretty good afterward. Hasn't been too terribly fussy today, and has been sleeping off and on throughout the day.

Possibly the best thing was they gave us some Nutramigen. Yeah, we're still on it. I had hoped to get the word that we could swap him down to something a little less expensive, but they gave us about two weeks worth of samples so that should help a lot. Every little bit does help!

We'll see how he does inclined and with anti-itch medicines. More to come!

Tonight's topic. Aiden's poor itchy head. I was at work again this evening but mommy said that Aiden spent a good 45 minutes wailing and going at his head trying to scratch. Poor fella just can't seem to find relief. Momma finally was able to calm him down some by applying a cold cloth to his forehead, but that didn't last too long.

I am starting to wonder if it is something specific to his crib that is bothering him. I had him fast asleep in my arms twice tonight and as soon as I put him in that crib he started grumping. I brought him back into our room, got him to sleep and put him in his bouncer and voila, he's sleeping soundly now.

I don't know if it is the fact that he is sitting more upright and that is good for his belly, or if it has something to do with something in that crib making him itch.

We go to the doctor at 10am tomorrow, and I am just praying that she will have some good answers for us. For a kid who is essentially "healthy" Aiden sure does have a lot of problems. Poor kid.

Sorry for the brief updates the last few days. With Mimi here and me working the nights I haven't had a whole lot of computer time. I promise to try to sit down and do a more thorough posting (With Pictures) tomorrow, depending on what time Mimi leaves for home.

Today was the day we revisit Daddy's UK Wildcats (Since the Buckeye's didn't play) and watch them come ------ close to beating Tennessee for the first time in 22 tries. 4 overtimes, several chances to win the game outright, and the bad luck of the Wildcats just continues.

Aiden is really enjoying his Exersaucer. I think at the beginning he was a little scared of all of the stuff, but he has grown used to it. He still doesn't really understand what he is doing and half the time he is trying to play with one of the leg supports. But he is having fun and that is what counts.

See ya tomorrow.

This is going to be about the shortest update thus far.

Mimi (my mom) came to visit for today and tomorrow. During this time she has stripped us of our baby monitor and vowed that mommy and I will get good nights sleep for tonight and tomorrow night. I plan on sleeping like the dead, I rather doubt R will sleep that well, but who knows, she may surprise me.

So for this evening, it is me, the wife, and the dog all shut in our room with no baby monitor and (hopefully) a peaceful night sleep.

Good night!

Aiden's Mimi sent me these links and I just had to throw them up on the blog. Up at the top of the screen there are two new banners to check out for "Letters From Santa". Now there are all kinds of places where you can get letters for the kids "from Santa" but how many of those places send them with a stamp certifying that they are from "Santa's official Post Office" (in Santa Claus, Indiana).

This is a neat little opportunity, the letters look phenomenal and The letters can be personalized with your kid's name a list of 3 accomplishments from their year, and stuff specifically from their wish list.

Other items to check out include: phone calls from Santa. You can have Santa call your little one at a specified time and he will greet him or her by name and talk about wish lists.

Is your child getting to the point where they aren't sure they believe in Santa anymore? You can get a Santa "Evidence Kit" to help with that. When Santa accidentally leaves his glasses and a glove behind at your house Christmas morning who wouldn't believe??

There's so much more and it is all some pretty high quality stuff, so make sure you check it out.

Enjoy!

Yes, sadly it is true. Thanksgiving was the first major holiday for Aiden and Daddy had to go to work this evening. It was a compromise I had to make. Work Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve in order to get Christmas and New Years Day off. Worse things have happened, and we were only open until 7 tonight so I was able to head over to the grandparents house and get there about 8 while most everyone was still there.

Last night Aiden woke up for his 2am bottle, I went through the usual routine of putting his pacifier back in his mouth while I get his bottle ready. Well every once in awhile Aiden actually goes back to sleep while I am prepping his bottle. Last night was such a night. So I started wandering the internet, as ya do. I ran out of my usual places I look at during the night and thought I would start checking out some of the daddy blogs I have bookmarked here and there through my journey. While I was doing this a trend hit me. Most of the dad's out there are not using their little ones' names. They have cute nicknames like "Princess" or "Little Buddy" or "Munchkin" but they never use a proper name.

I understand in this day and age the more information you have out there the more risk you put yourself at, and for a second I wondered if I should go back into my blog and replace all of our names with cute little nicknames to be on the safe side. But then realization hit. If someone really wants to track me down, there are umpteen different ways to find out who we are without having any sort of name, heck, they have our pictures and that in itself would probably do the trick. So while I won't be posting our exact address on these blogs, I don't think I am prepared to resort to nicknames to maintain a veil of secrecy just yet. There's only about 5 people reading this anyway. :-)

Well today was a day of landmarks it looks like.

Aiden turned 4 months old today. So hard to believe it has already been so long. But then he is soo much bigger than he was when we brought him home. 4 months. One of the things we are looking for this month is for Aiden's stomach problems to level off. Our Doctor told us at the 2 month visit that he should "level off around 4 months and be off all of the medicine and special formulas by 6 months." REALLY hoping that holds true.

Raquel got started on putting up the Christmas Tree tonight. Not really sure why she decided it needed to be done today, although we both work the day after Thanksgiving which is the traditional tree day, so maybe that was it. Didn't get very far with it, strands of lights all over the place and none of them work right. Ungh. But bringing out the Christmas tree brought some revelations with it. We have kind of known that it was going to be a small Christmas this year, but looking things over and realizing that we spend $200 a month on formula alone, it looks like this year is going to be a year of very little giving for us. That is hard for me to swallow, as I like to be able to give some gifts that have some thought to them and that usually costs a bit more than maybe I ought to spend. This year I am going to have to figure out how to be thoughtful without spending much at all. *Sigh*

A couple of other landmarks today reached by the website. According to Google's stats we went over 1000 pageviews today, and according to the counter at the bottom we are over 500 visitors. Not bad for a lightly publicized little page about daddyhood huh? We're turning the corner on one month of being online. I haven't missed a day of posting yet, and still lots to talk about. I wasn't able to get tot he activity center comparison today so that is definitely still on my plate, and I will have to sit down and do an article about the trials of trying to find a decent work from home opportunity that fits in with my schedule requirements. Patience is the keyword there.

So thank you all for making the first month of NewbieDaddy a success. Aiden's enjoying it, I am enjoying it, and there is no place to go but up. I still have to put together a template for the newbiedaddy.com page that I registered, so hopefully I will get that started soon as well. So much to do, so much to do!

We received a request for specific content in a comment posted last night. An anonymous reader has asked for some information on the different activity centers that we have for Aiden and some of the research we did when picking out the different toys he has. This is a great idea and is going to be a MAJOR project over the next couple of days. I might be able to knock it out tomorrow since mommy and I are both home and she can watch Aiden for awhile while I put something together, but I am going to want to pull a lot of information into this article, and it may wind up being 3-4 different articles.

In the meantime, you can find a new survey over in the sidebar under our family picture. As the holiday season approaches, which brand of baby toy are you most likely to buy? If there is an answer you think needs to be added let me know and I will get it up there!

As promised, here is the picture of Aiden figuring out his toes. Unfortunately for daddy, this happened while I was at work, so I cannot report for how long or how excited Aiden was by this adventure. I do know that today he reached down and grabbed his foot a couple of times, but his body suit had feet in it so he couldn't exactly grab the skin of his foot.

In other developments.... we MAY have a new culprit for why Aiden is not sleeping well. It seems some forms of Cradle Cap can be itchy to infants and cause discomfort. We know Aiden tries to scratch his forehead during the night. We just never really thought that was anything other than some sort of reflex action. But MAYBE he is actually trying to scratch an itch. The last week or so we have been making sure Aiden has mittens on so he cannot gouge himself with his fingernails, which also makes his hands less effective scratchers.

So is this the problem we need to solve in order to find a decent night sleep? The world may never know. But I'll be looking into infant safe anti-itch medications to see if it causes an improvement.

At some point I suppose I will need to do a bit of solid research on Cradle Cap and Eczema to share with you all. But for right now, the baby is asleep, so yours truly is off to bed himself.

Well... We've hit a bit of a rough patch in the road for Aiden. While we never got to a point where we would consider Aiden a "good" sleeper, the last few nights have gone back to being extremely rough. So much so that it seems like we might be going back to the point where he will only sleep comfortably if one of us is holding him. While we did not sleep holding him in the chair last night like we did the first few weeks home with him, we didn't get much sleep either. Aiden slept for about 3 hours last night, and neither mommy or I got much more than that.

Fortunately for yours truly, Raquel has a hard time sleeping after about 7:30, so once she was up I went to bed and was able to get 5 hours of good solid sleep. That doesn't do Raquel much good unfortunately, but I felt a whole lot better.

Tomorrow we will have some fresh pictures to share. Raquel tells me Aiden "discovered his toes" tonight and was having a blast grabbing them, she took a couple of pictures which I will download at some point tomorrow.

We go to the doctor for Aiden's 4 month check a week from tomorrow, so hopefully she will have some new suggestions on the sleeping front. We'll just have to wait and see how that goes. For now, we just have to do the best we can.

Aiden is still a happy baby during the day, so we can't complain. And if some sleeping problems in the beginning is the worst we deal with, well we can count ourselves lucky. So many other parents are so much worse off than we are and we DO consider ourselves blessed that Aiden is as healthy as he is.

On a side note. One of the funny things about this blog. There is a spell check on the Blogspot form, and it does not recognize Aiden's name as spelled correctly. So I get lots of spelling erros every time I hit the button because of the number of times his name is in here.

So it was a good day to be an Ohio State Fan.

Okay, so the picture is from last week... I didn't want to jinx the Bucks by putting Aiden in the same outfit he wore during last weeks humiliation. But while Aiden was not decked out in the scarlet and grey this week, we cheered on as Ohio State managed to pull out the win in a sloppy Big House to secure at worst a trip to the Rose Bowl.

I don't remember if I have told this story or not, so if it is repetition I apologize... But Aiden is going to be a third (correction, forth) generation Buckeyes Fan (if I can help it). My dad is an Ohio State alumn and I remember watching Eddie George rip through defenses with him on Saturdays. Even though I didn't even consider Ohio State when I was looking at colleges (frankly I think I decided without much thought at all to go to UK) I grew up watching Ohio State football, so I have always been a fan.

There was a period there when I didn't really follow the team, probably because I was working on Cruise ships and didn't get much football on Saturdays, but the 2002 national title season brough me back to cheering for the Buckeye's for good. It was the first season I was not working on a boat, and it turned out to be a 14-0 season... worked out pretty well for me.

I tell people jokingly that I have a football team and a basketball team to cheer for, since I have been a lifelong fan of the Buckeyes in football, but they (until last season) had almost zero basketball presence. In the meantime, My UK Wildcats never did much in football, but they usually field a pretty decent basketball team...

Well.. it is past 1am and Aiden has decided he is not willing to settle down and sleep, so I am going to have to attend to him. Another rough night it seems. Aiden has hit what is apparently his 4 month growth spurt and is grumping and hungry a lot more than usual. Hopefully this spurt will pass in a couple of days, as before it came on we were doing pretty acceptably with the sleep habbits.

We'll have to wait and see...

Aiden has discovered a new noise... He will sit there Hooting to himself for 5-10 minutes nonstop. Not really sure what he is doing other than exercising his vocal cords, he doesn't seem to be directing the noise at anything in particular. It either sounds like he is saying Who? over and over, or he is Hooting like a monkey. I told him over and over he isn't a monkey!

I have to go and check the charts to see if there is typically a 4 month growth spurt, he has started to get pretty grumpy about 30 minutes before feeding time again and we haven't changed anything about how we feed him, so it might be time for him to get some extra calories, who knows.

Aiden will be up and rooting for the Buckeyes tomorrow. The game against Michigan is a Noon Eastern kick, which seems early for that game, but it works out for me since I have to work tomorrow night. With Oregon losing last night it seems there is still a chance (an outside chance, but still a chance) for OSU to make the title game again this year. I have to admit, I think LSU would thump them, so I am not sure I even really want them to get the opportunity but we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma are all going to wallop on each other, so OSU in New Orleans is not out of the question. Assuming they can take care of business tomorrow......

Tonight is going to be kinda short since I just got home from work and it is getting late. We have officially started Christmas at work, so things get pretty hectic and all the weekends are going to be kind of tough.

We caught Aiden doing the lower lip sucking thing a couple of nights ago, I forgot to post the picture, as it was the same night we brought home his exersaucer. So here is that picture.

Aiden did alright with the bottle at 10:30 before bed last night. He went to bed around 11:15 and stayed in bed until 3:15 so almost 5 hours between bottles, of which I slept about 3. Not horrible, but not great either. We're still working on it. At this point his 4 month appointment is less than 2 weeks away, so we are just going to go with what we have for now until the doctor gives us some different direction. It is not too bad right now, although I would love a night of uninterrupted sleep, I know that isn't happening anytime soon.

So anyway, that's it for now, here's the picture. More to come soon!

So last night Aiden took a bottle around 7:30 and got a bath about ten. He fell asleep about 10:45 and was due for his next bottle at 11:30. And so, figuring he would wake up fairly soon I stayed up and worked on a fewthings till 11:30. Next thing I know it is 1:45am. I haven't slept, but Aiden has gone 6 hours without a bottle. Good news to be sure, I just wish I had slept instead of waiting for him to wake up.

So tonight we are trying something different. Instead of having him fall asleep at 10:45 and wake up at 1:45, we decided to see if he would take a "bedtime bottle" at 10:30, then maybe he would sleep till 4:30 or later.

We'll see how that goes. It is 11 now and he is still awake, so we'll see when he even decides to sleep. Here's hoping it will be soon.

On a side note, several people have been having trouble leaving comments. I am not sure what is up with that, but keep trying. I appreciate your input when it makes it on.
few

Aiden and I went to Babies R Us today looking for an activity center for him to enjoy. We found three that fit the bill quite well and it was a tough decision on which one to get. There was one from Baby Einstein that had about 8 activities, 1 of which was electronic, and it spoke both English and Spanish to help Aiden Learn both languages, which is our intent since mommy is Puerto Rican.

Then there was the Evenflow Exersaucer, gobs of activities and 4 different electrical gadgets to play music and teach colors and sounds. We just couldn't decide, although daddy was leaning toward the Evenflow. We called mommy and asked what she wanted to do. Well she went online to check them out. She looked both over, and then she found this other one where the activities were on a central table and there was a walker attached so the baby can walk around the table and play with the activities. She liked that one.

In the end she left it up to me since I was there and could see the items right in front of me. I was having a hard time with it because I wanted us all to be happy with the purchase. In the end, for me, the walk around one was too space consuming with too few activities to make the cut. I decided that quantity would be good for keeping Aiden entertained and went with the Exersaucer seen here. He seems to enjoy it already and mom isn't too disappointed.

Then there is the toy for Daddy. Tonight I registered the domain name newbiedaddy.com. For now I will probably just set it to forward directly to this blog. But I hope to have a lot of other stuff added in the near future. Forums for dads to discuss things (moms and extended family will be welcome too), articles pulled from other resources I have found, and one day newbiedaddy themes gear you can buy and show off the fact that you are a new dad.

Lots of fun to be had... lots of work ahead. I hope that the toy we bought for Aiden will help keep him entertained while daddy works on his toy website. :-)

Just a few brief thoughts tonight.

As was suggested in one of my comments, Aiden is really getting to know who Daddy is. He smiles for me, laughs and talks for me like he will for no one else. Raquel is jealous sometimes I think because I have so much time with our little boy and she only has a few hours in the evening. There is no doubt that Aiden knows his mommy too and enjoys his time with her, but just spending so much of the day with his daddy has an effect.

I got to thinking today about the future a little bit. I try not to think too much ahead, other than to hope for the best in Aiden's life. But I know a lot of people with kids growing up and I know one day this little child of mine is going to rebel against me, or decide I am worthless, or in some other way have a negative opinion of his dad. That's natural I suppose. Most everyone has to go through this stage. But I can hope and dream that this one will always smile for daddy. I hope that he will always know that Daddy loves him very much and will always do anything to make him happy.

I hope it is always smiles. I know it won't be, sometimes it will be tears, sometimes it will be painful, but it will always be love. I can promise that to my son, and hope that he will never feel otherwise.

Raquel managed to catch a couple of minutes of Aiden and I conversing with each other tonight on tape. After a couple of hours of trying to figure out how to reduce a 153MB MPG file down to the 100MB limit, turns out letting Windows Movie Creator turn it into a wmv file takes it down to 40 mb. Hope it still plays okay.

So without any further ado.. The long awaited Aiden Video Clip!!

So what is new in our world today? I guess the big thing for Aiden is his latest reactions to Grandma Perez. I am not sure at what age babies typically go through the "scared of strangers" routine, but two of the last three nights I have dropped Aiden off to stay with his grandma while I went to work until Raquel could go pick him up. Both times he cried and cried. Gonna give grandma a complex if he keeps it up. Good thing she has a lot of patience. Having raised three children I suppose she is wise to Aiden's tricks.

It was really funny tonight when I dropped him off His Aunt Ruth was there as well, Ruth was holding him and as soon as he saw his grandma he popped out his lower lip in that "I'm not happy and I am about to bust out a cry" look. It's interesting to see what kind of facial expressions come naturally to a baby versus what we learn from society. I woulda figured the thrust out lower lip was just something people picked up on from other people, but Aiden has taught me otherwise. Somehow that is a natural sign of displeasure.

Just a couple of pictures to share with you tonight. This first one was taken about 26 seconds after the start of the football game tonight.

The second one would be with 2 minutes left to play after Illinois got ANOTHER first down conversion on third down to keep the ball for the final 8:09, keeping Ohio State from even having a chance to tie the game.

Okay, so that isn't really the timeline of the pictures, but they fit huh. I think Ohio State forgot they had a game to play today. The practice squad could have beaten them the way they played. If they play that way again next week they will go from spending the first week of January in New Orleans for the National title game straight to spenidng New Years in Orlando with the glorious Capital One Bowl. Let's hope they right the ship and beat Michigan and at least get to go to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl.

I've spent so much time over the last couple of days talking about stuff other than Aiden, so it is time for a brief post that is Just Aiden.

I put this in my article earlier today, but it may have gotten lost in talking about other stuff. Today a couple of times when he was asleep Aiden had his lower lip sucked in, and was very cute. Unfortunately, he was in my lap at the time, so I couldn't get a picture, but I am going to keep the camera close by and hope to catch him at it again.

It was a pretty uneventful day for us. We officially got out of bed a little after 10 and went downstairs to try to catch up on some TV. Didn't get much done there I managed 3 shows and still have like 10 to catch up on since we have three new shows tape on Friday Nights. This afternoon after discovering our front page result from Google thanks to BlogCatalog I decided to put some more effort into getting listed on the various blog directories, so Aiden took a nap in my lap while I clicked away at adding the blog to probably 50-60 more directories.

I worked tonight, and Aiden's mommy worked today, so I had to pack him up and take him in to work. He spent a good chunk of the car ride in cooing and testing out his vocal abilities. On the walk into work he was just staring at me so intently from his stroller. I started making funny faces at him and got some pretty good smiles. He loves it when Daddy makes a fool of himself. Fortunately mommy was able to walk right out of work when Aiden got dropped off, so he didn't have to spend a bunch of time in her office.

Tomorrow I think we'll try to find some good pants for him to wear so he can wear his Ohio State t-shirt. I have to work tomorrow night, but hopefully we can at least watch the first half together before I have to take him to his Grandmas. We'll see how that goes.

Go Buckeyes!

This afternoon I received a comment on my article about my experience with Tech support the other night. The comment is from a Gentleman by the name of Spencer who works for the PR arm of Symantec. It was a very nice comment with offers for assistance and to upgrade my software. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge this comment and the good intentions behind it.

I have to assume Symantec employs people whose job it is to utilize a spider to crawl the internet looking for key phrases that send red flags that something needs to be addressed. I don't think Spencer was riveted to the rest of my blog and felt compelled to respond to it. What I expect Spencer got was something like this:

Source: http://newbiedaddy.com
Content: "Symantec" "Norton Internet Security" "Tech Support" "No Help" "Long wait" "frustrated" and so forth.

Spencer's job then is to come and comment on the blog an offer to make it right. Which is great. Love a company that is proactive and wants to help their clients!

Of course all of those target phrases were not directed at Symantec. Fact is, I never talked to anyone at Symantec, through no fault of theirs. I spoke to people with Comcast, Microsoft and HP, but never anyone from Symantec. And truth be told, the HP rep was very kind and helpful, the Microsoft rep was indifferent since I wasn't going to pay him. The only Tech support I really had any issue with was the gentleman from Comcast.

So Kudos to Symantec and Spencer for being proactive and going out and trying to make it right, we could all take a page out of that book.

That being said... I have found references to this same problem coming up for people as early as July of this year. In each instance the only way the problem was cleared was a complete uninstall of all Norton software. So there is something going on there which ought to be addressed. I am sure they will get to it, if they are proactive enough to find me and my little blog, they should see this coming up enough to put some people on it.

So there you go. Long story short: Thank you Spencer and Symantec for trying to do right by your customers! This blogger appreciates the effort you put in to seek out opportunities to make it right!

Sort of. If you go to Google or Dogpile (the only other engine I tried was Yahoo for nwo) and type in a search for newbie daddy you can find Tales of a Newbie Dad on the first page. Sort of. I say sort of because the actual search result is from Blog Catalog, which is one of the blog directories I submitted the site to. But people can find that link and link from there to the blog itself, so we still have a pretty good search engine presence for a site that has only been up for a week now.

Funny thing is, the very first result for newbie daddy is another gentleman's father site, his name is Michael and his child's name is Aiden. How random is that??

Still been dealing with more computer issues today trying to get everything ironed out and I have about 10 tv shows to catch up on so Raquel can delete them later, so not much of an update right now. Aiden is busy sleeping in my lap as I type this. He has started sucking in his bottom lip while he sleeps which is funny and I need to grab a picture of it the next time he does it.

So yesterday as I was having a nice instant message conversation with Aiden's Mimi suddenly my internet connection goes kabloie. I have cable internet and interruptions are uncommon but not unheard of. So I look down at my modem, Well 4 green lights and a flashing orange light. That typically means good signal.

I consider myself relatively tech savvy, so I tried a couple of things. Reboots, hardware resets, all the stuff the first level tech support person at Comcast is gonna tell me to do. Still nothing.

So I give in to fate and call tech support. Outage listings don't include me, that's good. I finally speak to a lady on the phone who has me go through all of the things I have already done. I tell these people I have already done it, but they always want you to do it again while they are on the phone. Futility at its finest. Eventually she has me look at the configuration settings on my LAN and we find that it has assigned itself an IP of 169.254.x.y She says that means the computer and the modem aren't talking. OK. The computer is new, the modem seems okay. She thinks it is the cable. Well that's easy enough to fix I've got cables out the wazoo. So I try another USB cable, no luck. Maybe the usb slot in my pc is bad? try a different slot, no joy. Switch to Ethernet? Sure, but still nothing doing. Houston, we DON'T have a cable problem.

Time to call back and see if we have a modem problem. I call Comcast once again and the next girl who answers listens to me run through everything that I did previously and she agrees that if changing connections on the PC is doing nothing, we probably have a bad modem. Off to Staples with you!

I go out and purchase a new modem at Staples, the only cable modem they carry, called a Zmodem. Never heard of it, but okay. Bring it home, set it up and make my third call to Comcast to register the new modem. We register the modem and still no joy. Okay... third call, new modem time to get escalated to the level 2 tech support, which is probably where I should have begun my day. Level 2 guy takes me into my command prompt and we run through a string of ipconfig commands trying to release this IP address which is caught in there. No joy. After about 8 tries of the same ipconfig /release ipconfig /renew he decides the problem isn't with the modem and Comcast can't help me, I need to cal Microsoft.

Lovely. I call Microsoft and speak to someone I can hardly understand named "John" (yes Microsoft is still outsourcing tech support to India). This gentleman explains to me that because my Windows was purchased with the computer he will gladly help me, if I pay a charge, or I can call HP who holds the warranty on my Windows software. Well I am not going to pay John, so I take the HP phone number from him and hang up.

HP and a lovely young lady named Jennifer tries to help me out. I explain were I have been over the past 4 hours and she very kindly only makes me go through a couple of the same fixes I have already tried. She says she can reset the IP but she will need my Comcast username and password. I have never logged in to a Comcast account so I have no idea what this is and tell her I will have to call Comcast. She puts me on hold while she sets up a trouble ticket for me. In the meantime I call Comcast on my cell phone to try to get the username real quick while I am on hold.

Well of course both Jennifer and the Comcast guy come on at about the same time. I am able to get my ticket number from Jennifer and she says she will hold while I get my username. That shouldn't take too long should it?

WRONG! Mr. Comcast Tech support insists on taking me through all of the same steps I have already gone through, and then he puts me in this cycle of restarting and try the internet. After about 4 cycles of this I say "I appreciate the effort, but I have HP on hold on the other line and really just need my username and password". At this point he tells me his computer has been acting up this evening and he is still trying to get to my username. Okay... Jennifer is still on hold, and we go back into the cycle of him clattering on his Keyboard then telling me to restart windows and try the internet.

About 3-4 cycles later I hear the cut off beep from the other phone that means Jennifer has finally given up on me, I don't blame her, she has other customers to attend to. I let this guy take me through a couple more cycles without anything happening and then I just decide we aren't getting anywhere. "No offense, but we don't seem to be making any progress and this cycle of restart and try again is getting really frustrating, is there anyone else there who can give me my username?" A resounding No, I ask if I am better off to wait until morning. "yeah". Okay... say that in the first place and be done with it. I'm done.. Click.

Raquel has a Blackberry from work and so I get on tiny internet to try to explore what the heck is going on, because I am no good at "wait till morning". I find a couple of possible fixes that take me to disabling the IPAutoconfig feature in the registry. No luck there. Turns out my computer is not finding a DNS or Gateway, which is why it is defaulting to the local network, i.e. the 169.254.x.y until I fix the DNS there is no point telling the computer not to assign the local IP.

I finally find an article that talks about this problem in relation to Norton Internet Security 2008. Seems that one of the updates is the cause of this problem for some folks and the only recommended solution is complete removal of the software. But hey, Windows Add/Remove program function won't completely uninstall Norton, you have to download a utility from Symantec for complete removal. But I can't get on the internet to download the removal tool. Does anyone else see a problem here?

At this point it is 2am, Aiden just finished his middle of the night bottle and I am exhausted. In the morning I would have to try to figure out how to get this silly removal tool onto the computer that cannot access the internet.

6am and Aiden is up for his next feeding. Raquel is starting to stir awake to get ready for work, so Aiden doesn't settle right back to sleep after the 6am feeding. So I may as well take the time to work on the computer. I try finding ANY dial up trial software I may have to install and try to dial in to get the software I need. There is an OLD copy of AOL on one of my installation disks we are talking 4.5 or something. I try to install that... Oops, it's in German and only has access numbers for Germany. No luck there.

I decide maybe once upon a time I actually bought a box retail copy of Norton instead of just downloading it and go to explore the attic looking for the box. Nope.... but there is something else I can try. My old computer is in the attic, and it has a good hard drive in it with Windows XP and has been used on this modem. Out comes the old PC and the old hard drive gets installed in the new computer. Yay! I am online. Wait! I can only access the Comcast configuration page. It wants to know if I am adding a new cable modem or replacing an old one. Well Neither, but that isn't an option. And I can't navigate away from this page.

Call #4 to Comcast. They have the wrong numbers for my modem in their system. That is understandable since I tried a new one from the store last night and am now back on the old one. She tries to get it to come up but while I show four solid lights and blinking activity, she shows the modem as offline. She asks if she can send this to her Supervisor and call me back in a few minutes. Sure, no problem. The house is quiet now so I will lay down and wait. 20 minutes later no call has come in and of course I haven't fallen asleep, so I go to check on the computer. Load Yahoo... It Works!!

Okay, so I am on the internet, but I still have a problem to solve. Go to the Symantec website and try Tech support. They should know if their update is screwy and tell me how to fix it without losing my Firewall right? Norton Internet Security help chat... okay sure. You are in Queue as #45. uhmmm.. no thanks. Aiden fell asleep and I need to try to do the same. This will have to wait for later. I sleep for about an hour and come back, put myself in Queue again, this time as #47. Give Aiden his bottle, after which I am up to #18. Then my Internet Explorer decides to crash and takes out the chat client with it. Reload... You are in queue as #51. Aww forget this.

Download the uninstall utility. Connect both hard drives and boot long enough to transfer the utility from the old HD to the new. Disconnect old HD. Run Utility. Reboot Computer. Try Internet. There it is. Yup. I am back online after about 18 hours of trying and 6 hours on phones with tech support. I had to download ZoneAlarm to have a firewall for the time being, but at least ZoneAlarm is letting me get ON THE INTERNET.

I know this story had very little to do with Aiden, and guess what, every now and then you will see those. :-) I just needed to get that lovely story out there and let you all enjoy my tech support nightmare!

Baby Growth Tracking

Monday, December 24, 2007

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Friday, December 21, 2007

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Monday, December 10, 2007

Friday, December 7, 2007

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

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