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ladyjenna13
member
Update on Jacob
ladyjenna13
member
So, I used to frequent this site quite a bit. Now, my life is just crazy hectic. Not complaining, it is what it is, and I love being that dad!! I am going to have to start back up with my posting here again, now that summer is long past, and winter will keep me under wraps for the next 6-7 monhs.
Jacob is growing so fast! He is walking all over the place, and he is strong like bull! 6 teeth in now, and he loves hot dogs and mac and cheese (yes, only kraft). He can throw now with the best of them, and he is learning to kick as well.
He wakes up every night between 12 midnight and 2 am, and he ends up in our bed with us. We don't have the energy to have the sleep fight, so we jsut bring him in with us.
Went to the Milwaukee Zoo for trick or treat. Jake went as a giraffe, and ended the night with a merry go round ride. I am amazed that on a night when college football was in full effect, I was at the zoo with my family, loving life. This parenting thing is pretty cool, actually!
So, I will keep trying to post here on a regular basis once again. Good to see all of you again!
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Re: Update on Jacob
Whenever I see "these parts" in a sentence I am reminded of a Jared Allen quote during the Vikings's Favre push.
“I don’t know where this came from. Like I said, I don’t think anybody on this team knows what schism is, let alone could use it in a sentence. I thought it was an STD when I first heard it. And I was like whoa, we preach abstinence around these parts."
Sounds like he is doing great! Hope to see more of you around.
Either way, happy to see you back on the board. It is pretty amazing how the concept of what makes a good day can change so radically once you become a dad.
So here is a typical night in my house:
Between 6:30 - 7:00 start running bath for Jake.
Throw dirty boy in bath for @ 15 minutes.
Try to dry off and get pj's on pissed off little boy because bath time is over. Little boys are strong and have no fear at all, so that is a fun 5-10 minutes for the two of us. Mommy has trouble with him alone most nights now.
Bottle of milk in hand by 7:30 at the latest. Followed by teeth brushing and storytime.
7:45. Lights out and in the crib.
Last night the wife and I powered through and actually got some sex in. We are starting to be more aware that we need to get through being tired and force fooling around to happen. Massages are great for leading to sex!
We were in bed at 10:00.
1:00 am Jake wakes up. I go get him and bring him into our bed.
4:00 am Jake wakes up for the day, regardless of mom and dad's feelings about this!
So we probably got about 3 hours of REM, which has been our average over the last two months. For the first time in my life I am taking a 5 hour energy shot today, because yesterday I had to catch myself dozing off at the office.
Told my wife that this is going to end soon....real soon. As parents we have to be able to function. Lack of sleep helps no one!!
My wife goes to bed when the kids do. I tend to stay up an extra hour, but our kids go down at 9 and get up anywhere between 6:30 to 8, depending on how tired they were.
By the time we finish up the cleaning that we cannot do while he is awake it is already going on 9:00. Plus, last night I got laid, so......
We are keeping him up later tonite. The thing is, when he crashes, he crashes hard, so it is a very thin line we walk at that point. I am thinking we will still give him his bath right after dinner, and instead of going right for the bedtime bottle, let him stay up and play a little bit before the bottle.
Tonight I will go to bed right after Always Sunny in Philadelphia is over. Unless my wife wants to fool around....that trumps all. I think she is starting to think more and more about starting to work on the next one now that Jake is getting so big.
We are up at 5:30 M-F to get the three of us ready to leave for the day. So keeping him up too long really will cut into his sleep time. I have him in the car seat by 6:45 every morning. At that age they are supposed to get 9-10 hours of sleep a night, so 8 is the latest we can get him down without worrying that he is not getting enough sleep.
Cleaning is what it is. We are both neat freaks, so it is very hard for us to let things go. I can always find something that needs to be cleaned or fixed. And Jake is at the age where one of us has to always be on him, and after a day of work, we just want to spend time as a family each night for a couple of hours at least. I did the math, and during the week we spend 1 1/2 hours "together" in the morning, and 3 hours each night. The rest of the day we are apart, with the two of us at work and Jake at school. So when the three of us are together, we try to take advantage of that time the best we can, so we don't clean until he is down.
We are learning to get some of our cleaning crazies under control....
Sleep training was a disaster last night. We put him down at 8:00. Went down fine, like he always does, and we were in our bed by 9:30. And once again, the boy wakes up @ 1:00am. We let him cry for about 20 minutes, and that is when we started making mistakes.
I got up and brought him into our room. My thought process is that at this point I just want to get back to sleep asap...5:30 comes pretty quick. He refused to fall back out, and instead started to fuss and escalate to full crying mode. This lasted about 1/2 hour before I got up, put some orajel on his gums, and hit him up with some pedicare, thinking maybe his teething has him all worked up. I had noticed some red on his toothbrush earlier, so I was thinking maybe a tooth or two was cutting. After that, put him back in his crib.
For the next 45 minutes he threw a fit in his crib, standing most of the time, screaming at us. We ignored it as best we could, but the little guy can work it. Finally, my wife gets up, and boom, back in bed with us. This time he knocked out.
So basically, from 1-3 it was full battle mode in the house. All three of us woke up miserable this morning. I am at the point where he can no longre come into the bed with us. But after 45 minutes of tantrum, it is hard as a parent to not get up and bring him in with us. And that is his expectation in the first place.
So now I am back in planning mode.
We never really did the full on co-sleeping thing, so we didn't really have to break J of it and A has co slept a couple of times, but not often enough to set up expectations for him, so I don't really have any first hand experience to help you out in your situation. I've heard having a parent simply in the room when he's in the crib can help, but I could see the flip side on that too.
Started crawling at around ten months. It wasn't even a month after his birthday that he was walking a few feet, falling, getting back up QUICK, walking a few feet, falling.....
Now, at 15 months, he walks and runs to whatever trouble he can find. Once they start to crawl, it really is a very fast transition to walking.
Real quick. I get a half hour between work and home to relax before I walk into the circus that my son has turned our house into.
He is quick like mercury, and he can trash our house in no time flat, running from room to room, in full sprint!