Watch out, Master Chef at work!

Claire has been making Jack lots of different types of mushed-up food for the past few weeks or so now. She has been following the recipes from an ‘Annabel Karmel’ baby cook-book, and has been doing a fantastic job too!

• Broccoli and Potato
• Pea and Potato
• Carrot and Sweet corn
• Sweet Potato and Broccoli
• Apple and Oats
• Courgette and Sweet Potato
• Steak and Chips

Ok, maybe not the Steak and Chips, but I’m sure that’ll come soon!

Anyway – I (to be entirely honest) was quite surprised how she went about all this. Claire bought this fantastic little steamer/blender and it’s truly brilliant.

First of all, she cuts up the food into small blocks and then filled the holder inside the blender cup – this not only has a blade in, but also has an inlet hole at the top that the steam comes in through to cook the food.

Once the food has been steam-cooked, the holder inside the blender cup is removed, allowing the food to sit directly onto the blender-blade at the bottom and is mixed with water to soon turn it to mush.

Then, these tiny little pots (which have appeared from nowhere) get filled, date-stamped and sent to the freezer until needed, all done in a factory-line style.

When the pots are out of the freezer, Claire leaves them to defrost overnight in the fridge and then zaps them in the microwave for about 10 seconds to warm them up. Then, we have to wait 10 minutes for it to cool down again before we try to feed them to Jack, during which we mostly have to smile and laugh to him so that he thinks that the mushy, strange-tasting stuff in his mouth is ok, before repeating with the next spoonful.7

Taking time to get the drinks down

So – it turns out Jack has a few traits of mine in the drinking department.

He’s becoming a bit slow in getting his drinks down him and loses interest in the last 40mls or so. He almost needs a break in the drinking, so that he can have a burb or two – then, he eventually gets a second wind and then can sometimes carry on. He really is a chip off the ol’ block!!

As he’s sleeping lots more, and we’re not waking him up at ten-ish, he’s not having as many feed-stops in a given day and, therefore, he’s not having as many opportunities to have the same amount of milk. The idea is/was that he' makes up for the missing milk during the day and has more – but he’s had a few days where he’s dropped the amount of the milk he’s been having in the day. (We know this, as we’re still playing ‘milk-monitor’ at home, which is where recording the amounts that he has comes in useful, as we’re able to see a difference in quantities.)

I know this sounds strange, but if Claire was breastfeeding him directly instead of expressing into bottles, how would we even know if he’s had anything to drink at all? And how many times a day would he need to keep having a bit of milk, as from what I can understand, babies have a bit of milk here and there when breastfeeding (unless I am misinformed) – at the moment, Jack has a whole bottle of 200mls +/- 20mls each time; how do you tell the quantity of milk he would have had by the breast? Measurement of time?? Is that a reliable means of testing?

Feed times are going to have take a bit longer than normal from now on, in order to allow Jack his time to be awkward, and then giving him the time to return to finishing the last little bit off. Not massively longer, but I think beforehand, we’ve just assumed that he doesn’t want the rest of the milk and then we’ve been surprised that he’s not had much to drink!

Baby-Smash meets the laptop!

As the blurb on the right-hand side of the blog site says, I am a self-confessed IT geek and through my geek-world, I know of a chap called Scott Hanselman who works for the mighty Microsoft. Anyway, he made a free website/computer-application called ‘Baby-Smash’ for his kids and released it into the wild, and it is pretty much as it sounds…babies smash on computers for fun.

So, as I started saying, the program allows for babies to whack keys on the keyboard and symbol appears on the screen in bright, funky colours. Fantastic, if you don’t mind your keyboard taking a pounding.

Anyway, Claire had Jack on her lap, whilst checking her emails on her laptop in the lounge at the table. Jack was happily banging away at the table-top with the flats of his hands, when the Baby-Smash website popped into my head. The application soon installed (in no time at all) and within seconds, Jack had his slobbery mits all over the keyboard playing Baby-Smash, much to Claire’s delight.

Jack managed (somehow…!) to press the exact key combination (using both hands, I muse point out) that was needed to rotate the entire the screen on the laptop by 90° counter-clockwise!! By some sheer fluke of time, Jack’s milk was now warmed to perfection and I decided that he ‘needed’ his milk that second, so I took Jack and the milk to go feed him and left Claire with a 90°-neck, matching the screen’s appearance.

Of course, she asked like any other normal person, about how to rotate the screen back to normal. And, as I was in the middle of something, I only had time to stand up, and lift the laptop onto it’s side making the screen correct but the laptop now perpendicular to the table!!

Oh, how we laughed. No, seriously, we [all] laughed as though it was really funny, but of course it wasn’t really.

What goes in, must come out…!

Up until recently, Jack has been having his regular feed of breast milk, a.k.a. “Booby-Juice”. Nowadays, he has the milk as before, but with added foodstuffs on top, as I think I mentioned before.

Anyway. Luck has probably been on my side, along with working late and weekends at work for the project I was on, and so I haven’t really had to change many, if any, of Jack’s poo-nappies.

Before, Jack’s poo-nappies have been filled with a “whole-grain-mustard” type of poo (according to Ian at work!!), which is pretty much as it sounds, but I would add to that, that it is also a little watery. This is normal/ok/dandy, as Jack was having Booby-Juice.

Now, however, I have very recently found out that his poo is similar to before, only much thicker in consistency and there’s about five times the quantity in one go! Literally!

This isn’t really a problem, providing that he’s sat in a decent position when he does this ‘passing’ of the poo. Nappies do their job, and there’s nowt to worry about.

Unless, that is, if he happens to be sitting in his Bumbo chair-thing, which is a soft rubber/plastic type chair (looks a bit like a high-22sided potty) that allows babies to sit upright keeping their back straight, etc. If he’s sat in there, not only do you get a major echo going on, that reverberates around the base of the chair and through into the kitchen units and floor, but it also means that the poo gets squirted at high pressure up his back instead of downwards into the nappy.

So, the Bumbo needs cleaning, Jack needs a new version of whatever he’s wearing, which pretty much means everything, especially if he’s quick and gets a few fingers down to his bum or back area, as he helps as best he can to spread it around onto anything else in the vicinity that isn’t yet poo-coloured. When this happens, the job of holding his legs up in the air with one hand and using your other hand to clean him up, means that you need one more hand to hold his hand so that he doesn’t

1. spread even more poo about
2. stick his fingers in or near his mouth.

All good fun that most if not all parents have a t-shirt to show that they have been there. But it’s the sort of detail that they don’t seem to tell you about in antenatal classes. Nor when you’re in school learning about babies and sex and stuff. Maybe if they did, there might be a few more clued up parents, and hopefully a few less 12 years old mums and dads.

Yes, he does!

Jack managed to sleep ALL night last night – going from 6pm through until I woke him up at 6am!

If there was ever any doubt that Jack was Claire’s son, that proves it.

We’re chancing our arm once more tonight and have already put Jack in his sleeping bag ready, in the assumption that he’s there for the night!

If anything, it was ME that was waking up looking at the clock wondering if he’s woken up! Claire, as always, was fast asleep and didn’t notice anything until the morning…! Cheers m’dear.

Can he do a full night of 12hrs sleep?

Well, that’s the question.

Over the past week or two, Claire has been reducing the amount of milk that we give Jack for his 10:00pm feed.

To reiterate what we’re doing, he has a full bottle of around 200mls at 6:00pm and then we’re putting him to bed almost straight away, after changing his bum first of course!

Normally, we’re letting him sleep until 10:00pm and then getting him up but not trying to actively wake him up – what I mean, is that we’re not talking to him, or letting him play with toys, etc, but merely getting him up and out of bed enough to feed him a bottle. Then, once he’s had it, around half ten-ish, we’d put him straight back to bed where he’d sleep until around 5:45am-6:00am.

So, as I was saying at the very top of this blog-post… we’ve been reducing the amount that he is being given for his 10:00pm feed, right down to around 90mls last night. It has meant that he has been making up for it during the day, as his drinking quota has increased enough to cater for it. (Yes, we’re still writing down the amounts that he has! Yes, we’re sad. But yes, we know exactly what he’s had and whether he needs more, so are we really that daft? Maybe not.)

But tonight is going to be the first night that we’re going to let him sleep without having any milk at 10:00pm. I am expecting to have to get up in the night to feed him, but we’ll see…! He might be ok… Last night, when I tried to give him his 90ml bottle at 10:00pm, he only drank half of it and even turned the rest away, meaning that he did the whole of last night on about 45mls, so is it really too much to expect?

Either way, if it doesn’t happen tonight, maybe in a few nights time, or next week?

I’ll let you know tomorrow evening, if I can.

I think he’s growing…

I know that might sound like an obvious thing to say, but it’s true, as day-to-day, you don’t really notice him growing and changing so much.

The other night, I was looking back at some of the millions of photos of Jack and the countless video clips of him and he seemed all wrinkly and small when he was first born… all screwed up and tiny. His hands were a fraction of the size that they are now and they were a bit baggie with the skin. He had scratch marks on his face and even went a bit blotchy at times!

Now, his hands are bigger and fuller, making the skin on his still-tiny little hands tighter, but more normal-looking if that makes sense? His face seems like it has changed massively since he was born. His hair has changed colour from a dark brown/black to a fair/blonde. He weighs a lot more and fills the pram that he used to occupy just a corner of!

It feels strange to say and think all of this, as he has changed so very much in such a very short space of time, literally 157 days, but on the other hand it seems like he hasn’t changed at all! What I mean, is that it seems like he’s always been how he is now, but then looking back at photos even a couple of months ago, he looks like a different baby entirely. His head and face have changed shape totally.

It has it’s upsides though - He’s much more fun nowadays compared to when he was a new-born baby. Then, he used to just cry and poo all the time. Then he used to cry every night for a couple of hours solid. Then he didn’t really ‘do’ anything, apart from an occasionally gurgle.

Now, he’s different. Now, he giggles, laughs, looks longingly into your eyes with the sweetest of smiles… before gouging one out with sharp nails on the end of the hands that he’s getting good at aiming with.

He is eating semi-normal food too (pureed fruit), which makes a difference. In a way, it sort of separates him in my mind from when he was a ‘tiny’ baby to now being ‘just’ a baby.

He and I sort of ‘play-fight’ on our bed… He doesn’t mind being rolled over again and again as he makes his way across the length or width of the bed and back. He even manages to grab handfuls of my hair whilst I’m blowing raspberries on his neck making him giggle like a little girl. He seems to enjoy being lifted up in the air quickly and ‘caught’, even though he doesn’t actually leave my hands.

But he still saves his special smiles for his mum. Just fake smiles for me, real ones for his ma.

The Day After…

So, yesterday, we had a few friends and family over to my parent’s house for a little barbeque.

Quite surprisingly, two of our friends said that they had already read the blog post that I had written earlier yesterday morning whilst waiting for my dad to pick me up and not only that, but one had even signed up to Twitter to read my tweets throughout the day…! The only problem, was that my mobile phone gets absolutely no mobile phone reception at my parent's house (thanks Orange!), so it put an instant stop to that, so I couldn’t send any Twitter updates, or even send SMS (text) messages to Twitter that way either! Doh! (Sorry Phil!)

Anyway, the day itself went really well – It wasn’t long before people started to appear, the food cooking and the beers flowing. The weather had been a bit pants in the morning whilst we were setting tables and chairs out, but gradually throughout the day, the clouds turned from dark grey to white fluffy clouds and the sun shone through. There was a bit a bit of a wind throughout the day, which probably helped to mask the heat from the sun, as I did manage to get burnt!

We hired a bouncy castle for the day, for the kids of course, but Jack even made an appearance on there – one of the girls was holding him and bouncing on it and he really seemed to like it… and then threw his lunch up later! Maybe too much physical movement after having food! Doh! The kids of all ages seemed to enjoy themselves – I went on there a couple of times, and was attacked by a load of the kids and wrestled to the floor. Nightmare.

I managed to take about 250 photos on my camera throughout the day, and we’re going to go through them before uploading to Jack’s website (If you have any, however many or however good, send me an email and we’ll talk about how the best way to get the photos from you and onto the web too.)

Claire and I would like to thank everybody for coming, as well as say a big thank you for the gifts that we really weren’t expecting; so thank you very much indeed.

Jack has been a bit out of routine the last few days, as we’ve been over to my parents a bit in the last few days trying to get organised and everything, and he really did manage to get upset at times. It wasn’t necessarily anything that anyone was doing particularly at the time, he just didn’t sleep when he normally did, or didn’t have as much food, etc etc. So, if you were one of them, don’t take it personally!

BBQ vs. Rain? Who knows!!

So, today, we’re having a BBQ with a couple of friends and a few family members.

I was really worried about the weather, as last night and first thing this morning (around 7am), it looked really grim and wet – you know, the usual weather that appears when I bring out the charcoal!!

Anyway, at the moment, the weather is all sunny and bright. There’s a few clouds roaming around up there in the sky, but as long as they stay as clouds up there and not magically transform themselves as droplets, we’ll be ok.

BBC News this morning said that the day will be really warm over East Anglia by 4pm, which isn’t too bad. We shall have to wait and see.

Off to the butchers in a moment to pick up the meat and then on it goes! (I found this picture –attached - on t’internet and thought it was funny enough to embed in this post…)

Also, I’m debating with myself whether or not to try and use Twitter throughout the day – I don’t really see the point, but just for the craic really… providing I can get network coverage that is!!

Proper foods!

I forgot to mention that last week or so, Claire has been busy making up various small pots of food for Jack and freezing them for when he needs them. When needed, she’s getting one small portion out of the freezer, zapping it in the microwave and it’s nearly ready in seconds!

Claire has been really busy buying lots of fresh fruit and vegetables (more than normal when talking about the fruit!!) such as sweet potatoes, broccoli, parsnips, etc. and then blending them down into a mushy sauce.

Yesterday for example, Jack had a small amount of sweet potato and broccoli mixed together, which made for an interesting colour of orange-with-green-bitty-mush scattered all over his face, arms, bib and table area, let alone Claire and myself for trying to feed it to him.

He seems to like it too, which is great; either that or he’s smiling at us congratulating him for having such stuff in his mouth and making it look like he likes them. He’s not spitting it out, lets put it that way. When he does, we simply scoop it off his face, bib and/or ceiling and serve it right back to him as if it’s fresh… he doesn’t seem to mind!!

By the way, Jack is still on his regular booby-juice as normal – this is an addition to that milk.

Today (Friday), he has had apple, again mushed to pieces, zapped and then served cold.

We have tried to record it on the video camera, and I’ll see if I can get a link on here to it maybe. (If not, the video feeds are definitely on Jack website, if you have access.)

But this is all a big credit to Claire – she’s been reading books and stuff online and busy doing mum-stuff too. I have literally helped in serving the stuff, whatever colour and smell, to Jack, but she has thought about each recipe and bought the stuff she needed and just did it. She’s a star.

Been busy…

So – I haven’t blogged recently.

I have been having to work more for work to meet a project deadline, and so some nights I have either been staying late in the office, or working from home which isn’t as bad. Either way, I have managed to clock up lots of time-in-lieu, and so I am currently ‘spending’ some of that time accrued this week, which is the up-side to doing it.

Also, the last weekend or so, as I have been away on a Stag Do in Spain, no less. One of the lads on the stag do co-owns a place in Cazorla in Spain, and so it was the place to have the bash! The windy streets of the town of Cazorla kept us all on our toes, and probably helped to walk off most of the beer consumed over the weekend. (Cheers to Ian for that, by the way - much appreciated.)

In total, seven of us went (two dads, the groom, myself and three others) and all seven returned safely without prosecution or hospitalisation of any kind, as I think I was expecting before we went.

The weekend itself was great – totally non-touristy, and so we even had to explain in broken-pigeon-English to the locals why one of us, namely the groom, was dressed in a pink spandex legs and a matching tutu. (Isn’t ebay a wonderful place!)

Anyway, reason I mention this stag-do, is because it was the first time I have been away from Jack and Claire – we pretty much moved Claire and Jack out of our house and into her parent’s house for the long weekend, and the amount of baby-related fodder that needed taking was crazy. Everything that could be taken, was. Literally. The boot on our new car was put through it’s paces, as things were rammed in there.

I know her parents were there to help her out, but I did feel bad for abandoning her when Jack is still quite young and a handful at times. Claire even admitted that she now looks forward to me coming home at night after work, as it’s a time when she doesn’t have to sing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ to keep Jack entertained when he starts to flag. So me not being there obviously has an impact on her, but also that I haven’t seen my little baby for a few days. (I am reading into this and see the fact that prior to Jack not being here, Claire didn’t look forward to me coming home… thanks, wife!)

At my old job where I was the IT Manager for an international sports event management company, part of the job was to go away on the weekend projects and not only oversee the IT side of things, but I would also pitch in and help the work of setting up to be done, as well as helping to drink all the beers afterwards. Anyway, the least I’d be away was around 4/5 days at a time, and part of the reason to leave there and work where I do currently, is because of the time away from home and from Claire, which takes its toll after a while. Now with a baby in the frame, there’s another face in the back of my head.