Back to "Normal"

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!

Introducing the Newbie Daddy Forums!

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!

Discovering Motion

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.

RateIt Widget

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!

too much of a good thing

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!

Here's Mr. Grumpus!

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.

4 month Doctor's Visit

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!

And the Itch just keeps on coming

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.