Change of plan…

Ok – so here’s the day’s events so far…

Jack didn’t wake up until about 07:45 and was in a really good mood as a result. I was thinking that maybe he’d be a bit grumpy or something for sleeping so much, but no.

We got up, washed and dressed and then the plan *was* that we went to Rhyme Time – basically, lots of mums and the occasional dad with their babies and small kids sitting around going through nursery rhymes. It’s a free thing, so they tend be packed, and held in the library in town.

I know Claire quite liked going to Rhyme Time before she went back to work on Thursdays, as it’s an opportunity to get out of the house and meet other mums in the same boat, etc. And, it’s all quite safe to let them roam around a bit. The worst they can do, is pull a few books off the shelves.

But anyway, we didn’t quite make it there this morning, as I we got to town a bit early and decided to go straight to the Church Rooms, where they hold the sessions to have the babies weighed frequently. As we were pretty much the only ones there, we had the 1:1 treatment, and she was telling me what he can and can’t have, now that he’s a year old.

By the time we left there, time was getting on, and so I decided that rather than going to the library and being 20 minutes late for a 30 minute session, I’d take him to see his Grandma (at work)and Great-Grandma (at home)instead. On the way around to seeing his Great-Grandma, we saw that Granddad's car was at home too, so we called into see him too!

So, busy day, so far.

We’ve just got back, warmed his milk and he soon fell asleep in my arms after it. Peace and quiet for a little while.

The start to a good birthday?

I don’t know if someone told Jack it was his birthday today, but he’s certainly making the most of it, having a really long lie-in!

As I write this (at 07:37) he’s still asleep in bed! I’ve been awake since Claire left for work this morning, just before 07:00, and have been expecting M’ Lord up there to have woken by now and demand attention.

But no.

The first birthday!!

Oh my word.

…

…

It’s finally here.

Jack is one year old tomorrow. A whole year old, 365 days and all that.

I wanted to write something here about the fact that it’s his birthday, not because it’s his birthday, but the fact that it’s here, upon us.

He’s grown so much in the past few months, its unreal. He now stands up taller than the side of his cot in the mornings when we go to get him up. He can even reach the drawers on the unit beside the cot and bang it shut when he’s bored! Little monster.

Some of his clothes seem to have shrunk too. The older stuff I mean. The clothes that he had several months ago, seem to be a bit tight, especially the baby-grow/jumpsuit type of clothes that go over his head and get his feet in too, stitching together between his legs. However, the alternative is the newer clothes that are still too big for him that make him look like Maggie from The Simpsons, where her blue clothing drags behind her and trips her up every other minute – Jack’s just the same, as it’s his ‘feet’ in his new baby-grow/jumpsuit thing that are too long and drag behind him.

Claire and I were just talking about this being a weird year, and that it feels like a really long year in one respect, as we’ve had almost zero sleep, but then on the other hand, it seems like the days/weeks/months this year have literally flown by – once we’ve got home from work, had food, sorted out Jack and got him to bed, there’s a bit of time left to clean up, or in some cases, make his food, and then it’s midnight. Kapow.

But, as I might have mentioned earlier, tomorrow is indeed Jack’s birthday. I have the day off work and we’re off to Rhyme Time in the morning and then off to see how much the little fattie weighs.

We’ve noticed that there’s a few photos missing from the SkyDrive photo collection and we’re in the process of uploading them. Same, too, for the video clips on Jack’s website: my mum constantly has her digital camera set to video mode, and has helped in almost doubling the video clips that we have of him to process, and upload to YouTube, and then linking to the website. I have days occasionally where by it’s great to do something like that, but at the moment, finding the several hours to sit there and vet them isn’t possible!

Oh, one other really important fact for me to record here, is that we have officially taken… 4806 photos of Jack in his first year, which averages out at about 13 photos per day!! That’s quite worrying really..!! But we’d rather have them and look at the occasionally, than to have not taken them at all and wish that we had.

So – tomorrow, Jack stops begin none-years old! Wahey!

“He’s like… a giant!”

I’ve just been upstairs in Jack’s bedroom helping Claire put him into a baby sleep-suit for the night after she had fed him his nightly milk, when Claire pointed out the size of our child, saying “Oh my God, he’s like a giant!”, claiming that “he must have grown… today!”.

Well, there’s a good chance that he has, I suppose, but whether he’s grown the inch or two that Claire’s making out since last night is a little doubtful! And thankful really, as he’s getting through clothes a bit quicker now that he’s growing!

Admittedly though, tonight he did seem to be a fair size, laying face down in his cot, with his arms to his sides and legs straight-ish, compared to the size he was when we first started using that cot with him; back then, he was all small, tiny and scrunched-up anyway, but then he’d sleep in a sort-of vertical foetal position, laying on his front with his bum up in the air, with his arms and knees tucked in. He still does that occasionally when we first put him to bed, but in the mornings, it’s quite random as to the position he’s laying in, let alone the orientation of the bed that he’s wriggled into overnight!

Aside from his height, he’s starting to get heavy too – picking him up and carrying him around the house, we’re starting to notice it a bit more very recently!

Little fattie!!

Nose-job, anyone?

He’s getting more and more entertaining to be around recently. He’s always been a bit of an attention-magnet, but he’s starting to do things, as well as trying to say things, that really make us smile!

Like today for example:

I’ve had a bit of a pants day at work, staying late to get some stuff done, which means getting stuck in lots of traffic on the way home. When I got there, Claire and Jack turned up just minutes after I did, as they had been at a swimming lesson. From what Claire’s said, he should have been absolutely knackered tonight, as he hadn’t slept a great deal and had been splashing around in the pool.

I went out to the car to help bring him in and he’s smiling away and jabbering away as is becoming normal, except he had no trousers on, as once Claire had dressed him, he crawled through a puddle in the changing room and got soaked! When I opened the car door, it was absolutely baking in there, as Claire was trying to make sure he didn’t get cold! She had put a dry pair of backup-socks on him, and wrapped a blanket over him, but he’s a dab-hand at getting socks off, and does so with a devilish look about him too, so he’s sitting there in just a jumper, coat and his nappy!

I brought him in and took him straight upstairs to get some trousers and socks on him and, standing him on the changing unit, he’s raised both hands and landed them on both of my ears, and then comes at me with his mouth wide open, trying to bite my nose off!

Luckily, I survived this time, but he’s getting quicker and quicker each time. Apart from dribbling right down the front of my t-shirt, he didn’t cause any damage, but I don’t think he’s doing it to hurt, but think maybe this is some sort of baby-affection? Who knows.

Or maybe:

At the dinner table, he’ll be chewing away on some strange-looking carrot-based crispy thing, and he’ll offer it to you as innocently as anything and allow you to take hold of it, and then not let go as though he’s changed his mind, again with the devilish look.

It’s not necessarily that because he’s ours that I find some of the little things he does funny, but for a baby, he’s not half bad.

Some random Dad-like thoughts

A year ago, things were starting to seem a little more… ‘real’, with regards to this whole baby-lark.

Claire was, by then, heavily pregnant and carrying the warning label that she could plop-out a baby anytime.

As daft as it sounds now, for someone like me that has had absolutely nothing to do with babies (ever), this was a shock waiting to happen.

Blissfully unaware of what would be happening from one day to the next, little did I know how things worked, when they would happen and the consequences of them happening.

I know that we had been to the antenatal classes and all that, but that was the driving *theory* lesson that I took before I started to learn to drive. Knowledge? Out. Learn by experience? Most definitely, in.

Everything turned out well though. A year on, Jack’s doing great. He’s keeping us on our toes and although he does like a routine, nothing ever seems to be set in stone with him. Some mornings he wakes up early, around 5:30-6:00am, and then some mornings, like the other morning, he was still fast asleep at 7am, and had to wake him up so that we could take him to his Grandparents house whilst we went to work!

It’s good fun being a dad though. I can’t speak for Claire being his mum, obviously, but I enjoy it. Poo-y bums, I don’t. Playing with the toys and teaching him things, yep.

My folks still have our Scalextric set from when we were 7 or 8 years old (blimey, 22/23 years ago!!) but I’m not allowed to have it until our Jack (and any others we may have) are old enough to play with it. Same for the train-set, but I wasn’t as keen on that as I was Scalextric. (I had a red Ferrari, similar to the one in Jack’s photo flashcard – coincidence? no.)

I remember when we were kids, my dad was always playing with our toys too. I’d build the Lego Forklift Truck that I had for Christmas or my Birthday, to wake up the following morning to find that my dad had “did an A-Team job” on it, making it an armoured forklift truck that was then 4x wheel steered instead of 2x. I didn’t mind too much afterwards, but seeing the thing you’d spend hours building be ‘pimped’ like that wasn’t funny. But it is now, and I' can’t guarantee that I won’t do the same to Jack’s Lego-equivalent!

It’s true what they say, though, in terms of your body gets used to a change in sleep patterns, and surprisingly, you can function on 4 to 5 hours sleep if you need to. That’s not to say that you’re not useless at work the next day, but hey.

Car! Ca! Ka! Kar! Kah! – Part 2

In the first post about this, I said how we’d got the various photos from Google Images of a car, a motorbike, etc and printed them out on 7”x5” photo-cards, laminated them and stuck them around the playroom as flashcards.

Well, actually, he’s not half bad! And, that’s not me or Claire making it up.

Here’s my proof that he knows what things are called, but not necessarily know how to pronounce their names.

If I carry Jack into the middle of the room and hold him whilst I kneel down on the floor, I can ask him where the car is, namely the bright red Ferrari which is in the centre under the window. Easy, really, as he knows these things that drive around outside are called cars, and that’s the one that most resembles a car.

But then, if I ask him where the van is, he’ll look around, seeing the motorbike and the double-decker bus that are to the left of the car, ignore them, swing his head around to the right of the car, sometimes looking around me, to see a white Ford Transit van on the wall perpendicular to the window-wall. Then, you can see his eyes lock onto it, like a bird of prey seeing a mouse, and whilst his smile forms on his face, his hand is already up with his finger extending the best he can, pointing to the van.

Ok, I could have trained him to do that. So, he knows where the car and the van are, but then if you ask where the motorbike is, you can see his expression on his face change, as if to say, “ooh, I know that one… where is it?” and then scan the images again, looking for the Orange County Chopper motorbike photo.

Between the car and the van is the photo of the Land Rover Defender, which I’m calling a Truck, and he can find that too. To the left of the motorbike, is the double-decker bus and he can do that one too.

The others, namely the helicopter, aeroplane, tractor and Eddie Stobart artic lorry, haven’t had much attention from us yet. But in terms of early progress, I think he’s doing great! Claire still gets confused sometimes as to what they’re called! (Joke!)

Admittedly, if you were to ask him what any of them are called, they’re all cars, but I’m working on that!