Tales of a Newbie Dad

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.
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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!

Now, I am not fully prepared to lay the entire blame at the feet of this innocuous looking crib mobile. However, we figured out pretty early on that Aiden was a bit spooked by the animals during the night. He was completely mesmerized by them during the day, but what was a cool colorful display during the daylight hours became weird shadow figures hanging above his head at night.

So the animals came down weeks ago, but we thought nothing of leaving the ark itself up. It is a wind up music player, and he seemed to like the music alright. But a couple of nights ago I caught Aiden staring wide eyed up at the boat, and I thought perhaps we needed to try life without the mobile at all for a bit.

Now I won't say that Aiden's sleep has greatly improved over the past two nights, but he has definitely gotten us up fewer times than previously. This could be due to taking down the mobile, or it could just be the effect of the change in his rice cereal patterns finally kicking in.

At the end of the day, we may never know what works and what doesn't. But for now, it seems that this playful looking children's toy may have been a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Let's hope that with this villainous toy out of the way the baby will continue to sleep better uninfluenced by strange shadow figures above his head.

So it has taken three months, but mommy and I finally went out for a nice dinner by ourselves last night. We had been talking about going out, well just about every week since Aiden was born, it just never seemed to happen. Either something would come up, or we would be to tired or no one was available to take care of the baby for whatever reason.

It almost didn't happen again last night. A string of thunderstorms came into the Nashville area about 4:30 with severe thunderstorm warnings until 5:30. We had told Raquel's parents we were going to get the baby to them around 5:30, so we were a little hesitant.

Since the warning was to expire at 5:30 we figured we would push things back just a little bit and leave right after the warning expired. Then about 5:25 Raquel got an email about a tornado warning. Ooops... not so good. It was well south of us, and by this time most of the storms had passed our area by, so we decided, you know what, we're going to dinner!

Of course it was rainy and thunder all evening, and we just went to dinner, no movie or anything afterward so as not to be picking up Aiden too late from the grandparents, but it was nice to just get out. We went to one of our favorites "P.F. Chang", highly recommended for excellent chinese fair.

We came home and mommy was in bed by 9pm, I would have been in bed too, but Aiden was still up for a bit, so we watched Journeyman and by about 9:45 the baby was asleep. Daddy was in bed and asleep by 10:30. Not exactly a romantic date night out until all hours, but small steps right? We got out of the house and did something as just the two of us.

Next time we might even be able to go see a movie, go bowling, who knows, the sky is the limit. :-)

Saturday night was our very first experience with Daylight Savings Time with Aiden. I count myself pretty good at math, but sleep deprived and with half the clocks in the house already changed and half waiting to "auto-update" at 2am, it made for a very interesting night for our little one.

I think it might have been one of our longer nights as far as not getting any sleep. Not because Aiden didn't sleep, he did his normal routine of sleeping the first segment of the night then becoming our snooze alarm after 4am. But we essencially had no idea what time it really was or when he was supposed to be due to eat.

Aiden eats about every 4 hours, give or take. If he starts grumping before the 4 hours, we try to hold him off, but when he gets really grumpy we go ahead and feed him. Conversely, if he sleeps through the four hour mark, we don't wake him up to feed him.

Saturday night I think both mommy and I were just confused by the entire ordeal. Here is a night where typically all we do is set our clocks back before bed and enjoy the fact that we can stay in bed an hour longer before getting up for church. All the sudden every time the baby squeeked we were up comparing notes on when exactly the last feeding occurred.

fortunately, we did make it through no worse for wear, although we were awful tired Sunday. Aiden seems to have jhad no ill effects from his parents momentary lapse of reason, and all is well that ends well. Now we get to look to the next scheduled wierdness Springing forward.

Aiden is becoming a lot more vocal the past week or so.

It started with the "bvvvv" noise I mentioned in the three month update, and has moved to all sorts of wonderful coos and gaas and squeels. And once he gets going, he can have a solid 30 minute conversation with himself, or with one of us. We try to repeat back the sound he makes to us. One of the things I have read says that by mimicing the sounds the baby makes, it actually lets them see what their face looks like when they make that sound, so helps with language developement. I'm not sure how true that is, but I'm willing to look silly for Aiden's education, so we'll give it a try.

I try to read a story to Aiden just about every day. They say it doesn't matter what age range the book is for at this point, so long as it has big bold colors and lets the baby hear the inflections of your voice while you read. While we were out waiting for our portraits to be done we went over to a Books-A-Million in the same shopping center and found three new books that we hope Aiden will enjoy. Two of them are texture books, so we hold his hand up to the different fabrics so he can feel texture. Not sure what that is supposed to teach per se, but it is pretty cool, and he seems mystified by it (as long as the tv isn't on).

So I was looking back at some of the content I have put up on this site so far, and I came to a realization that a lot of the stuff from the monthly updates is focusing on the bad or negative parts of being a new dad. That's not the way I see it at all. Being a dad is a great thing. It is trying and frustrating at times, don't get me wrong, but for every sleepless night there is a huge grin that just lights up your whole world. For every crying session because his tummy aches there is a long conversation where he is just enjoying interacting with daddy.

No... The good far outweighs the bad. It is just sometimes the bad is easier to type about. I wouldn't trade the experience in for the world. Now when we talk about having a second child... Well that is going to have to wait awhile. I'd like to get caught up on sleep one of these day.

I was reminded tonight that I need to get out the video camera that was graciously bought for us as a baby gift and start putting together some clips of Aiden doing this wonderful chattering. Because in a couple of months the chattering will have changed and we will miss what he is doing now. So I resolve to take the video camera downstairs with me and work on capturing some of these moments, not just on the digital camera, but on video as well.

Who knows, tomorrow's update might just be a video update. But don't count on it. :-)

Tonight I signed up as an Associate with Amazon.com, meaning that if you click on either of the Amazon.com links in the sidebar and then purchase something during that visit to Amazon, Newbie Daddy will get a commission on that sale.

Most of you that I know out there purchase at least one item from Amazon for someone over the holiday season, so this is a great way to support the blog doing something you were going to do anyway. The prices are no different from what you would pay for just going straight to Amazon.com so it is a win/win.

You will also see some wierd new links in my content. Amazon goes through and finds what it considers to be "good product matches" in my blog and links those phrases to an item you can buy from them. Some of them make sense, Enfamil links to formula for instance, others none whatsoever Acid Reflux links to a book Acid Reflux for dummies or some such.

Anyway, have fun with it. Amazon states that the Associate can make up to 10% from everything sold through their link, so we'll see how that goes. As always, if you know anyone else who shops Amazon, encourage them to link through this site.

Thanks for all the support. We are slowly gaining viewers and hopefully my content will continue to get people coming back to see more.

I'll be back later with my Aiden update for Sunday. :-)

Aiden had his first "professional" photo shoot today. Somewhere along the line we were told that you have to have a professional photo done at 3 months of age.

This photo is just one of the 60 or so poses that we had to choose from. I have uploaded some of the better pictures to our PicasaWeb site, which is linked on the sidebar.

Aiden did really well the whole time we were in the store. He didn't cry, but he has a tendancy to stop smiling as soon as the camera is pointed at him. In the end I was able to get a little bit of some smiles out of him just as the photographer was bringing the shoot to a close.

We were able to get a pretty nice family shot in there as well, and that will likely be becoming my profile photo. I usually don't like pictures of me, but this turned out pretty good and I can't complain.

I want to give a quick shoutout to the fellas over at DaddyPlace. I have been looking for blogs and stuff where other men were sharing their experiences as fathers, and from the look around I had last night this site seems like a great place for the fellas. Women be warned, the site is exclusively for the guys, and the "No Girls Allowed" sign is hung outside the treehouse. :-)

So we have gotten through the updates taking us through the first three months of Aiden's life, bringing us to the here and now. Hope you enjoyed those extra long posts. From here on in it will be daily updates, and sometimes it might be as short as a sentence or two, who knows. Only Aiden can tell us what Aiden will do that is blog worthy.

We should have learned the lesson when we bought our first puppy four years ago, what people tell you is typical, never really works out in your own personal experience.

We bought Leetah as an eight week old puppy at Christmas Time. Neither of us had raised a dog before, and we really had no clue what to expect. She is a golden retriever, and that breed, apparently, is very hyper. People always told us, oh she will calm down, just give it a year. Then it was two, then three, and now people are saying she will calm down at age 5. Meanwhile we still have a hyperactive attention hound for a dog, despite going through several different obedience programs.

So why should we have expected it to be different with our first child? No, Aiden isn't hyper (yet) though he is a Mr. Squirmy. Aiden does not sleep. I mean, almost at all.

When we came home from the hospital we were under the impression that newborns slept about 16 hours a day. Now we knew they didn't sleep through the night or anything like that, but we anticipated a couple of decent 2-3 hour stretches somewhere in there to let us sleep a bit. Not so. Aiden was up at minimum every two hours. Eventually we got to the point where we could put him down around 10pm and he would sleep a solid 3 hours, and that was wonderful, except for the small problem of that when I work, I work nights and don't get home until 11. So already, even if I fall asleep right when I get home (an imposibility to be sure) I'm still only going to get 2 hours before he wakes up.

The 10-1 sleep shift was the only decent sleep Aiden would get all night. After he would eat at 1am (later moving to 4 hours between feedings it became 2am) he would be up for a solid 45 minutes to an hour before finally dozing off again. So now we are at 3am. Once 4am rolls around, our personal snooze alarm, as I labelled him to our doctor, begins going off every 15-20 minutes.

We called the doctor and were given the go ahead to start introducing Rice Cereal into Aiden's nighttime bottles. This is a solid month before most of what I had read suggested introducing a first solid. The nurse said to put in 1/4 teaspoon of rice cereal. I thought she meant per bottle... 4 ounces of formula and 1/4 teaspoon of cereal seemed awful low to me, but what the heck. We put the cereal in the bottle and... what do you know, no change.

I had called the doctor on a Friday, so we had to wait until Monday to call back, the weekend was the usual very little sleep at night, and Monday I was told, no it was supposed to be 1/4 teaspoon per ounce. Now don't I feel like a moron. 1 teaspoon per 4 ounce bottle sounds pretty good. Well, not so much.

Remember Aiden's Acid Reflux? Well, apparently immature tummies with reflux and Rice Cereal don't mix so well. So while the first sleeping session of the night got longer (one night we got a 5 hour sleep out of him!) after that he started really struggling to poop. Great, the fix for his sleep problems is causing constipation. Another call to the doctor's office. Well, try cutting to 1/2 teaspoon, give that a week and if there is no improvement you will need to schedule an appointment. Right.

The second night on the 1/2 teaspoon we thought we had this whole ordeal licked. It was a Thursday night and I had been at work. I got home a little before 11. At this point our feeding schedule was 6-10-2. I came upstairs and there was a bottle of water on the desk, my wife and the baby are both asleep. I have to assume the bottle was meant for 10pm and he has been asleep since before then and I need to feed him when he wakes up, which should be a matter of moments.

11:45 rolls around and I decide I need to find out what time he ate. Gently nudging my wife I ask her when he ate. Well it was almost 7pm, so while we are still past 4 hours, it isn't that big a deal. at midnight I lay down to try to get some sleep and see what he does. 12:51 the monitor wakes me up, it is time to eat.

That night we got 6 hours between bottles and thought everything was wonderful. Well then the constipation kicked in, and boy this child HURTS when he is constipated.

Saturday night Aiden slept maybe 3 hours TOTAL for the night. Monday night I don't know if I slept at all, so Tuesday we called the doctor and set up an appointment for thursday.

Of course what it boils down to is that every child is different and the doctor doesn't have any magic fixes for us. It is going to be a process of trial and error until we find the right combination that works for Aiden.

The Doctor changed us from the Zantac to prilosec for his reflux, jumped up his rice cereal per bottle to a plan to escalate it to eventually 2 teaspoons per bottle, and recommended apple prune juice to stave off constipation.

So now we have a specialized formula and medicine to combat reflux, rice cereal to thicken up this thin unfilling formula so he feels more full, and prune juice to combat the constipation caused by the rice cereal that is supposed to fix the sleeping problem. Anyone else confused yet?

This problem still isn't nipped. Each night brings a different experience for us. One night he actually went 5 hours between feedings for three straight feedings. The next night he was up from 3:30am on.

We know eventually he will sleep, and that will be a wonderful day in our household. Until then, I am going to need some concealer to hide the bags under my eyes when we take family portraits.

Other fun facts from the 3rd month:
-Mommy is back at work. This makes things a little strange for Aiden, as in order for Daddy to get in the hours he works he has to pack Aiden up into the car, drive to work, take Aiden up to Mommies office and drop him off. Mommy (is supposed to) immediately leave work and packs Aiden back up into her car to take him home. That's a lot of packing up. Fortunately it only happens a couple of times a week.

-Aiden is smiling regularly now, and even may be making a good giggle or two from time to time.
-Although he isn't sleeping much more than previously, Aiden is crying less overall.

-Aiden has moved from his Basinet in Mommy & Daddy's room into the crib in his own room. He made the transition very well, in part because he sleeps in a snuggle next that moved from the basinet to the crib, leaving him still in familiar surroundings.

-Vocalizations have officially started in force. In the past week Aiden has begun to make a "Bvvvv" sounds by blowing air between his lips. He can converse with himself for as much as a half hour at a time trying different variations of this one sound.

-At three months of Age Aiden wieghs roughly 14 pounds and is approximately 24 inches long

If you pay any attention to my sidebar, down at the bottom there is a square with a bunch of pictures in it labelled NaBloPoMo. That stands for Nathional Blog Posting Month. There are over 4000 members and each has made a commitment to make at least one post a day to their blog throughout the course of November.

Since the idea for me is that I would update my blog daily anyway, I thought this was a good motivation to keep it going and accomplish the 1 a day goal.

If you are a blogger and want to participate in NaBloPoMo just click the icon in the sidebar and join up, it is quick and easy. If you miss a day it isn't a big deal, it is the idea behind it and the intent to post every day that is important.

Rather than wasting time with all of the garbage reciprocal link generators out there...

While I am new to the world of blogging, I an not new to the internet. Links to and from your website are what drive SE results, and Blog rankings and in the end, traffic to your site. Since my blog is new I do not have that many quality links in or out of my site. So I am looking for some link swapping.

If you are a parent who blogs about parenting or anything related to parenting, shoot me a note by commenting to this post, or post a private message to my guestbook. I have links both on my main page as well as on a designated "Links" page. I will reciprocate whichever type of link you give me on your site. So if you put me on your main page, I will put you on my main page, if you put me on a links page, I'll do the same for you. May as well help each other out with this whole "driving traffic" idea right?

Also, if you are a member of a quality blog ring about parenting, shoot the link for that over to me as well.

Many thanks! And now, back to Aiden.

This is one of our favorite pictures of Aiden, it still serves as our background on our home computer and was taken the weekend of his 2 month birthday.

This post was going to be much shorter than the previous two "updates" as the second month was when I went back to work and Raquel stayed home with the baby. So I didn't really have a lot to say about it. There are a few updates from that month to share, but I will get to those later.

Tonight when Raquel read my entry from the first month she asked why I had not discussed breastfeeding at all. Well Raquel tried to breast feed and had a really tough time of it, and I sort of thought it was a bit of a sore subject with her, so I let it be. But she feels it is important for other new moms to understand that it is okay to switch to formula if breast feeding just isn't going very well.

Raquel had a rough start with the whole prospect of breastfeeding. The hospital where Aiden was born does have a Lactation consultant on staff, but apparently she only works a half day on Saturday (Aiden was born... you guessed it, Saturday) and she called in sick on Sunday. So Raquel's first opportunity to talk to the "specialist" was not until Monday. The nurses helped, and they did know what they were talking about, but we had gone to the breastfeeding class and were sort of under the impression that the Lactation consultant was going to be able to help more.

By Monday Raquel was cracked and bleeding and neither she or Aiden were having a very successful time of it. Aiden would go at the breast for a bit, but eventually we had to give him formula just about every feeding. Frankly, I don't think the lactation consultant, when Raquel did see her, helped all that much. So we came home with both mom and baby a little uncertain about this breastfeeding process.

After a couple of weeks of trial and error, several phone calls to the maternity ward nurses, and endless frustration, Raquel decided the best thing she could do at this point was to pump and feed Aiden from a bottle. At least he was still getting the breast milk everyone said he needed, and pumping was easier on both of them than trying to get a latch and get comfortable.

One of the things you have to do some solid research on to find anything solid about is the fact that a goodly percentage of women, especially those who deliver via c-section, don't produce enough milk. I think there is such an emphasis on the NEED to breastfeed that no one at the hospital wants you even thinking about the possibility that your milk just isn't going to be there. But, no matter how much she pumped, Raquel was only getting about an ounce of milk per session, so it would take her several pumping sessions just to get one decent bottle for Aiden. While Raquel spent a lot of time blaiming herself and calling herself a failure, I don't think there is anything she could have done to increase her milk production. It just wasn't going to happen.

After about 6 weeks Raquel decided it was time to switch over completely to formula. By this time Aiden had been diagnosed with the Acid Reflux and we figured it was best to keep him on strictly the nutramigen. The pediatric nurse said that as long as he got some breastmilk for the first six weeks he got the value out of it that is so important (mommies immunities and such).

This is such a hot topic, before Aiden came I had no idea. There are literally camps of people who fight over the value of breast feeding. I read one place where a new mom had called her doctor's office to ask about how much formula she should be giving her new baby and the nurse told her "I don't know, I breastfed all of my babies, and every woman in this office breastfed their babies so they won't know either" Now this might be an exageration, I certainly would not be going back to a doctor who allowed a member of their staff to answer a serious question like that, but the fact is, it is out there. Raquel did have a little bit of backlash from other moms who have had it grilled into them that formula is bad and only breastmilk will do, but fortunately, none of it lasted too long.

I was a formula fed baby, and while the jury may be out on if I turned out okay or not, I think I did alright. So if formula 30 years ago was good enough for me, I figure the formula today is good enough for my baby, if formula is what helps the mental state of my wife and my child then so be it.

Just a couple of things to share from Aiden's second month:
-Aiden had his baptism celebration at 8 weeks old.

-Aiden made his first significant Road trip right as he was turning 2 months old. We drove up to Santa Claus Indiana to see Grandma Mimi and Grandpa Danny. The trip takes approximately 3 hours each way and we were able to stay 2 nights. Aiden slept for the most part through the entire trip.

- Aiden's first smile occured at approximately 7 weeks.

-Aiden is getting used to routine trips to Grandma and Grandpa Perez' house. Since they are only 20 minutes away we make trips there pretty regularly, and occationally mommy and daddy leave Aiden with the grandparents while they take care of other things.

- At two months of age Aiden weighed 11 pounds 9.6 ounces and measured 23 1/2 inches long.

Yes, the two month and three month updates will have to wait a bit. But I have to get the picture of Aiden in his Halloween outfit up right away.

What you don't get to see here is the big black "BOO" that are on the bottom of his feet and his bottom. We didn't get a picture of that. Ah well.

Unfortunately, I did not get to spend Halloween with my little one. I was scheduled to work. Aiden and momma went over to grandparents house and, I assume, helped hand out candy to the neighborhood children. We can't give out candy at our house, our golden retriever is just too hyper to open and close the door that many times, and it is a wee bit too chilly to sit out on the front porch.

Enjoy the photo. More to come on Aiden's second and third months tomorrow time permitting.

Baby Growth Tracking

Friday, November 30, 2007

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Monday, November 26, 2007

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Monday, November 19, 2007

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Friday, November 16, 2007

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Monday, November 12, 2007

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Friday, November 9, 2007

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Monday, November 5, 2007

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Friday, November 2, 2007

Thursday, November 1, 2007

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