More firsts!

It appears that my post about 'firsts' this week has missed out a few more 'firsts'...

Swimming

Claire took Jack for his first swimming lesson at Spring Common School on Wednesday. I was in trouble before they started, as I had Claire's car that day which meant I also had her sat-nav too! So, she got lost... on the Oxmoor..! Doh!

Claire was hoping that swimming would go as well as the baths that we've been giving Jack recently, as we've been bathing him in the proper 'grown-up' bath in the bathroom at home. From what I have been told, the pool is very warm, so it should be ideal for babies. Incidentally, when we bath Jack here, we have a floating thermometer that tells us that it needs to be near to body temperature... how does that work in a baby pool?

Claire suggested I take Jack next week as it is my 'work-life balance' day from work until she mentioned that there were 3 Jacks in the group! How did she know this? They has to 'sing' hello to each other..!!

How do you teach a baby a baby to swim when, blatantly, they don't have proper control of their arms, legs or even heads yet! Well, good question, especially as all 5 babies are under a year old! Well, they blew bubbles and learnt to float, as well as going around the pool to see the steps, the drains (different noises), pouring water near the baby, splashing them, etc.

So - what did Jack think? Claire said he loved it. Apparently, he only cried once (and for about 10 seconds) when the teacher got too close!

Luckily though, Jack decided to leave poo-ing in the pool for another day, which is a shame, as the nappies haven't had a full and thorough testing as yet!! Maybe next week.

When Jack and Claire got home just after me that day, he was well tired. Claire and I were trying to get food ready and Jack just cried as his routine had been upset AND it was after 6pm, so he cries anyway.

Which leads me onto our next 'first'...

Jack's first DVD box set!

A few weeks ago, Claire had been on the internet armed with a credit card (again) but this time bought Jack a DVD box set from Disney's Baby Einstein range. The DVDs are marked as being 3 months onwards, but we thought we'd jump the gun and try the youngest age DVD of 3 months, expecting that the older age DVDs were into quantum computing or something. So we put Jack in the bouncy-chair-thing in front of the TV in the lounge, during the biggest screaming session ever and, within seconds, not only had he stopped crying but he was watching the DVD and paying attention too! He loved it!

It's a bit weird though if normal 'grown-up' people watch it, as there's toys on the screen for about 10 seconds (to music) and then it changes to another toy, in bright colours and captivating movements. Some are executive toy-style objects, but some are bubbles , etc. It's really random, but it worked in keeping Jack's tantrums at bay. Might use them more often!

Jack and his dad... home alone?

So - how did we do? Well, to be fair, I thought it was actually really good!

Before doing this today, I have been coming home from work and seeing Claire and Jack for just a few hours before bed and, normally, Jack seems to go into this routine of crying for about two hours solid. For no reason. He really goes for it too, and makes you think you're not doing something that you should! Anyway, Claire passes full control of the baby to me in the evening, as I haven't seen him much all day - fair enough. Except for this crying.

Well, onto today.

If I'm honest, I was fully braced for a day of non-stop screaming and crying as, recently, this is mostly as I've seen him. But he didn't really cry that much at all. As a result, the day seems to have flown by. I haven't had much time to do anything else, so I can see why Claire says that sometimes she has no time to do anything when she's at home with him all day, everyday.

So, what did we do? Can't remember right now... I did have the best intentions of trying to write down what Jack and I got up to, for the purpose of the blog... it just didn't work out like that!

Claire and I had a chat the night before about what I needed to do and when. I think that for some absolutely bizarre reason that I would forget to feed him, or forget that he's crying because he's tired, etc etc. Well, I probably would have, if I'm honest, and I'm glad that she drew up a timetable of what we needed to do. Here's what she left us with.

• 13:00 Feed Jack
• 13:30 Get Jack to sleep
• 16:00 Feed Jack
• 16:30/17:00 Walk
• 19:00 Feed Jack

And throw in about a million nappy-changes, and you're done.

Claire left around twelve-ish, leaving Jack foolishly in my capable hands.

13:00 came around fairly quickly and I had to feed Jack. Claire has been expressing milk, aka booby-juice, and so the milk is stocked up in the fridge as needed. Except now, Jack has a taste for having warm milk, as we have been giving him milk fresh from the... Claire. And of course, it's warm, whereas he's been having milk straight from the fridge before - the midwife in the hospital told us that if he'd have it cold, give it to him like that....so, we did. So, now, I had to warm the milk using a little single-bottle warmer, that takes 5 minutes or so to heat up.

The milk went down no problem, and by the time he had finished it all, it was pretty much near 13:30 and he's already getting sleepy.

He had about 45 mins asleep upstairs in his bedroom (where he spent his first night last night) before he's awake again. He doesn't seem to wake up and scream, like I think I would have expected (not knowing much about babies as a whole), but instead he lays there and looks at his cot mobile, that hangs over his bed and gurgles at it. I heard that he was awake and so I nipped up there and switched on the mobile, so that it spins round whilst playing Bach, or Mozart, or someone.

Here, he sort of reminded me about myself when I was little, as I would wake up in the morning and play with my toys by myself and keep myself occupied. Incidentally, I would also do this when Russell, Emma and I would all be fighting or bickering with each other as we would, and we'd all get sent to our rooms; but this didn't really bother me, as I would then spend the next couple of hours playing Lego or something by myself, to the point whereby my parents thought I was actually enjoying my punishment and would chuck me out of my room!!

Jack and I then spent most of the afternoon playing with his toys a little and generally messing around a bit. Jack had an unscheduled nap at about 15:20, which sort of threw me a little, as I was looking at the notes that Claire had left, and not expecting him to drop off in my arms whilst half-way upstairs!

So, now my 16:00 food was slightly put back a bit, as Jack was just waking up again. Lazy ol' boot. He ended up having food and we played around with his toys a bit more.

At 17:00, I was determined to get out of the house and go for a walk with Jack and Alfie, the dog. I put Jack in his harness, and he hung in front of my chest, as per the photos in a previous post. Whilst dangling away, I got Alfie hooked up onto his lead and we started going for a walk, but Jack wasn't comfortable and there's something in the field that scared Alfie a few weeks ago and so you really have to drag him sideways across the field. So, the baby is upset, Alfie plainly doesn't want to be there and I am trying to fight them both off, determined to at least reach the first gate in the field...! So, I turned around to come back, which now means that Jack is still waving his arms and legs about, but now Alfie is pulling really hard on the lead, trying to rush to get home! Nightmare. So much for a quiet walk!

Jack and I dotted around the house a bit more until Claire got back around six o'clock-ish. So now, it was Claire's turn to walk in on Jack during his routine crying hours.

So... all in all, I think it went well. But went you sit down and think about what else I have done today, 'not much' springs to mind. I had some stuff I was trying to do on the computer throughout the day, but it was really fragmented, as I would just sit down to start doing something, and then Jack would wake up or the dog started barking at someone who dared to walk past our house, or something. So, it was five minutes here and there throughout the day, which wasn't a problem as I had nothing urgent to do, per se, but trying to get it done in a day would be nice!

What else did I learn? I want to mention here something about Claire doing this all day, everyday. I think it's re-confirmed what I already knew about her, in that she does have a lot of time and patience for Jack (more patience than she does for me, for sure!), and I don't mean that just because she's with him all day. What I mean, is that I know that when Claire is at home all day with Jack, she's with him as much as she can be, and when they're doing 'stuff', it's doing things that he's learning - she's always trying to read to him, or keep his mind entertained by focusing on different toys around the house so that he doesn't get bored. So,despite Claire saying in the past that she doesn't have that much of a creative imagination, I beg to differ, as today I found it tough to keep changing my battle-plan with Jack to keep him amused and entertained, and I would have said I have a good imagination for things like that.

So, my hat is off to my wife Claire - Jack really is a little diamond (when he's not screaming the house down in the evenings!!) - it seems like he's learning something new all the time and sometimes he just smiles at you when you're not expecting it, and you can't help but smile back and be involved with him. He's great and she has obviously been a significant catalyst in the learning process.

I might have mentioned about Claire's internet shopping habit, namely the spending part, but pretty much everything that we have for Jack is here because Claire has looked into things and thought hard about things for him and has bought stuff as we went along and might need them. He's not even old enough to know what a book is, yet he already sits on Claire's lap and listens to her intently reading to him - maybe when he's old enough to understand what it actually is that she's reading to him, maybe he will already understand the concept of reading a book and will hopefully enjoy it a lot more and not put up a fight about it. Who knows, but she amazes me more and more. She does all this and still has time to wash my socks and keep me in-line. Thanks, wife.

First, first and another first.

First of all, my apologies for not blogging for week or so. I'll try not to do it again, but the problem is that time literally just disappears!

Anyway, good news!! Jack slept in his own room last night for the first time! Claire had mentioned about when we do put him in there overnight, but I think we both just fobbed it off, as though he wasn't ready for such a commitment, but I got home from work yesterday and Claire mentioned it again, and so after his 10pm feed of good ol' booby-juice, we put him in his sleeping bag and put him in the nursery. And that was it!

He only stirred twice in the night; the first time he had a bit of a cough around 04:45, so I tiptoed in there to see if he was ok, half expecting him to be wide awake and grinning like a Cheshire cat as normal, but he was asleep. Later, he must have been dreaming or something as he made a bit of a noise and so Claire went in, again to find him sparko again.

He didn't even wake up until around 07:00 either, so he's definitely got Claire's knack for sleeping sorted at such a young age.

In other news, whilst I was at work yesterday, I received a text message from Claire to say that Jack had managed to roll himself onto his side for the first time too! This means that we're going to have to be a bit more careful where we put him now, especially as the baby-changing mat in his nursery is on the top of the chest of drawers!!

Not for this week to be a week of 'firsts' or anything, but today is the first day that I am solely responsible for the well-being of our son and heir...! Claire has gone to a hen-do for one of her friends, and has [foolishly] left me in control. I'll let you know how this all goes, but right now, it's 12:15 and Jack is asleep...!

Claire’s been on iTunes again!

Claire wanted to get some music to play for Jack, to help soothe him and calm him down and all that. So, the obvious place to look was the internet, namely iTunes, as she can then buy and download any music to her iPod.

She has managed to download a heap of nursery rhymes and singable children’s songs, including several from Disney’s albums.

These are then played on a loop through the speaker set for her iPod, to the point that I probably know all of the words myself!! But Jack doesn’t seem to have any obvious objections to them. We keep looking for patterns in his crying, such as if a particular song is playing at the time, but nothing.

To be fair, the tracks that she has bought (yes, legally!) are a little random but they are very child-like and will probably get played lots more over the coming years, so on one hand, we’ll get our money’s worth from them, but on the other hand, I’m going to hear these things forever... Argh!!

Digital Cameras are great!

It’s fair to say that we have taken a number of photos of Jack already. If anyone has been around to visit since he’s been born, we have tried to get a few snaps of them with him, as there’s no cost to the photographs themselves, and they’re an instant memory for many many years down the line, providing that the photo files are still around!

I have recently got a Digital SLR camera and have been taking some fantastic photos of Jack, whilst at the same time feeling a member of the paparazzi, which is good fun for me, not-so-good-fun the person in front of the camera! Either way, the quality of the photos are immense, as it’s a 10.2 megapixel camera, compared to the 3.2 megapixel point-and-click camera that we’ve been using for the past couple of years. When we had that, the photos that it was creating was fantastic, so it shows that when you think things can’t get much better, they do!

We still use the point-and-click camera, as the size of it means that it is pocket size and much easier to carry around.

The photos from either camera are constantly uploaded for family and friends to my Skydrive account, mentioned a while ago here.

I have just checked our photos folder, and we have currently 869 photos of Jack and he's only 9 weeks old! Blimey!

The wonders of Sky+

We signed up for Sky+ during Claire’s pregnancy. This wasn’t a plan to help her through the long days of being at home whilst pregnant, or for after the birth, but it has certainly turned into the best thing in the world for Claire.

Prior to having Sky or any of its variations, we have had FreeView for years and liked the extra channels that it brought with it. We had been thinking about getting Sky for a long time, but was put off by the price and the associated set-up fees, etc. When we have been away on holiday particularly in the States or in Canada, we had Sky access and was able to watch channels like Discovery Channel, which had shows on like American Chopper, Myth Busters and many more. My sister and her boyfriend have been watching all these for years, but I was a Discovery-newbie, so to speak.

We bit the bullet when our friends Phil and Lucy mentioned that both them and us would get £50’s worth of vouchers if they ‘recommended’ us to get a Sky package. We had a chat about it and decided to get it, thinking that we might be wasting our money if only to watch the occasional Sky-based channel. How wrong we were!

When I signed up, I signed up for Sky+, which means that we got a fancier box, which is able to record TV programmes even easier than an old skool video recorder... and it can record a series of a programme using its Series Link feature. (Instead of getting the £50 vouchers, I opted to swap these for a free box and free fitting, which was great!)

Anyway, why all this is important, is because the Series Link feature has meant that Claire has been able to record her favourite TV programmes and watch them at very random times of the day, fitting in around Jack’s sleeping times. This means that when I look down our 'planner' of programmes we have recorded, I am slightly embarrassed/ashamed to admit that there has been recording after recording of naff programmes like Holyoaks, Eastenders, Doctors... basically, if its rubbish, we have it. These would all build up, especially when Claire was in hospital having Jack, and then Claire would watch them all back-to-back, and have like 4 or 5 hours straight of Eastenders. Me, on the other hand, I’d be in the kitchen sticking sharp implements into my eyes.

Jack's recent sleeping patterns

Not that I am trying to tempt fate or anything like that, but Jack's sleeping appears to be getting better and better by the week.

Originally, he was waking at least once a night but recently, he's been surprising us by sleeping through the night without waking for his nightly-feed..! Claire has had to rock the crib to keep him asleep, but he seems to have a bit of a dream, murmur a little and then he's off again.

This morning, I even had to wake Jack up so that we could get us all ready before I left the house to go to work this morning, as ol' sleepy bones was fast asleep, despite Claire's banging about the house in the morning!

Jack isn't doing this regularly enough to call it normal as yet, but it looks promising.

“We need a new car...”

Claire and I both have our own cars, and Jack’s seat has been fitted to Claire’s car, a 2002 Volkswagen Golf, as hers happens to have Iso-Fix fittings behind the rear seats ready for fitting child-seats to.

Iso-Fix fittings are basically u-shape fittings hidden on the metal-work behind the rear seats, where the seat belts emerge from. Iso-Fix car seats are car seats which have special locking hooks that clamp onto these u-shape fittings. Once clamped on, the car seat is held fast to the car, meaning that if there was an accident, the car seat shouldn’t move away from the seat. My 2004 Ford Focus doesn’t happen to have these, but I have heard that all cars as of 2007 should be fitted with Iso-Fix fittings, but don’t quote me on that!

The Quinny Travel System (the pram/buggy we have) that we have fits snuggly in the boot of Claire’s Golf, with little room to spare. This means that if you take Jack shopping at Tesco, then the only space in the car for the shopping is on the rear seat, where Jack isn’t sitting of course!

Anyway, Claire has decided that the car is too small and that we needed a bigger one and so went out for a day’s worth of car-gazing. We looked at different types of cars:

• Kia Sedona
• Ford C-Max
• Ford S-Max
• Vauxhall Zafira
• Vauxhall Meriva
• And even looked at a Mercedes B150 although the prices of those are a tad higher than we had budgeted.

We did question whether or not we actually needed a massive A-Team van to move the family around with, and whether we could do with a bigger car, or even an estate. We looked at several estate cars on our journeys, but none that we liked particularly. During this period of pondering, we stumbled upon the Volkswagen garage in Peterborough where we found a VW Golf Plus, which is basically a Golf but with more head-room, etc. (Ford does this with the Focus, making the C-Max and with the Mondeo, making the S-Max.) The Golf Plus was in the newer shape Golf to ours, which is good too.

After the salesman started working his magic on selling us the car, we put the seemingly hugh bootspace in the Golf Plus to test and tried to flat-pack the Quinny buggy into the back... but it didn’t fit! The salesman tried to move the seats in the back of the car around to make the buggy fit, but the truth was that the newer shape Golf Plus actually has a smaller boot than the Golf that we had!! This is a shame, as for a few years Claire had mentioned that when we had kids, she’d like a Golf Plus, as she really likes the one that she has, and that it looked quite cool and funky too. (Probably the colour more than anything, but either way, she liked it.)

Just as we were about to leave, we were talked into looking at a VW Touran, which looks like a small, fun-packed mini MPV-type thing. It looked good inside, felt comfortable to drive, but didn’t feel as big and intimidating as the S-Max did. We had to leave sharpish, as Jack needed to get back home for more booby-juice, but came away thinking that the Touran was certainly an interesting choice...

Nappy Brands

In one of the free sample packs Claire received whilst still pregnant, there was a free packet of Huggies nappies inside. As we were hoping to use the Bambino Mio nappies mentioned earlier, we didn’t worry about getting too many more, but we did decide take them to the hospital as Nicki, the NCT teacher, advised we do so for the first round of poo to come out of our new-born baby boy, as the first poo is usually black, potent and sticks to the nappy like ____ to a blanket, so to speak.

We started using the Huggies nappies and continued to do so, assuming that nappies were nappies and were all the same, more or less. Or so we thought until we had another free sample of nappies, but this time they were Pampers. Not knowing anything about nappies, we assumed they were the same, until we used them and found them to be a bit useless and seemed a little flimsy. So, we quickly ruled out the Pampers brand and went back to buying Huggies nappies. That was, until my sister called around after seeing my parents and brought back with her a pack of Pampers nappies that my mum had bought for storing at her house, in case we needed to use them. She realised that the nappies are made according to the size and weight of the baby and so the nappies were nearing there ‘expiry-date’, as Jack is getting bigger each week and is already outgrowing some of his clothes.

So, we decided to try the Pampers nappies once more, giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Although the two brands differ slightly in the type and quality of sticky-fixers used to keep the nappies together on the child, the Pampers did appear to have redeemed themselves, if not appearing to be the superior of the two. The fixers on the Pampers don’t appear to be as good as those on the Huggies nappies, but despite this, they seem to be really good.

As I said earlier, both nappies are sold according to the size and weight of the baby – we’re still on the newborn range, but each brand number the nappies, starting with ‘1’ for absolute smallest nappies and going up accordingly. I just thought I’d mention this, as the stacks of nappies in supermarkets can make a purchase for a new mum or new dad a bit daunting. And heaven forbid that a certain new dad should go into a supermarket alone and emerge with the wrong size, or wrong brand!!