Night time milk feeds

I seem to remember with Jack there being this almost invisible cut-off date at which we stopped feeding him milk by a bottle in his bedroom before putting him down to sleep each night. I don't, however, remember thinking twice about it, nor feeling any sort of loss about not doing it anymore.

This evening, it crossed my mind, whilst feeding a now-one-year old, Oliver.

As much of a chore as it is to make bottles of what I call 'plastic milk', (that is, powdered milk) and everything that goes with it, such as washing/sterilising/etc, it's actually... relaxing.

Here's what I mean to clarify that; Assuming that you can calm a screaming hungry toddler down in the dead of night which is the whole reason that you're there in the lion's den, the actual act of feeding a small, innocent and, to be fair, helpless/feeble child and to then lay them softly back into their cot ideally fast asleep, is quite gratifying.

Tonight, and no different from most nights that I feed him, Oliver was laying on my chest, face upwards, drinking from his bottle of plastic milk, eyes closed and arms open wide. His head rested on my shoulder, almost ear-to-ear, and occasionally stopping the sucking of milk, but otherwise, chomping though as though this was his first feed in weeks. Basically, his complete and utter trust/faith/love in me, as a parent, is personified right there.

And that's when I thought about it.

"Will I miss this moment?"

"Will I forget how peaceful he sounds or how relaxed he and I both are (aside from listening to the noise of moving liquid just millimetres away from my ear or constantly smelling the foulness of the previously-powder-now-stinky formula milk)?"

"Should I make more of a mental note to remember these details, for when he's older and pestering me for money for something?"

Hmm. Maybe.

Oli, The Daywalker

My boy, Oliver, is hereby unofficially declared a ‘Daywalker’ - if you’ve never seen the movie trilogy ‘Blade’, then this might not mean much to you.

In the movie, there are people. You know, regular people that sleep at night and do stuff during the day.

There are, of course, also vampires in this particular movie. Those are the people that sleep during the day and do stuff, namely bite/kill people for blood, during the night like any good vampire should.

Oliver, however, is a daywalker like Blade, the star of the movie;  Blade is a ‘special’ individual, as he does all the nocturnal stuff that vampires do, but also works well in sunlight.  Here’s why they’re similar:

The past couple of days, young Master Rigby has been going almost all day without need for a sleep. (Bearing in mind he’s not a year old, this is a problem!!) Then, at night time, he is *still* waking multiple times throughout the night, despite being 9 or so months old. So, without need for fangs and vampire-like gory stuff, he’s slowly killing his folks off, as we’re outright knackered come the morning. This makes work a bit… different, as I don’t think that the wife and I have ever had so little sleep when Jack was this age.

So, in my eyes… daywalker.

He’s 100% bubbly, playful fun during the day though, don’t get me wrong. And he’s always got a smile for his big-bro, Jack, which is certainly helpful, as Jack does like to show-off in front of Oliver to get a giggly-based reaction from the dribbly tot.

In all honesty, it could be that he’s teething or something.  He’s had an ear infection or two of late, so that probably hasn’t helped things, but he is getting to the age of sprouting a tooth or two. I just hope that all this noise and effort means that ten are coming through at the same time, and they’re fully grown adult teeth, as I’m sure I’d be disappointed if there was just one tiny little baby tooth coming through causing all of this upset, as the problem is that when he wakes up, he kicks off big-time and gets himself in a right little state, which takes a while to calm him down.

But Claire and I do consider a night that he wakes just once as a good night. Even better if he goes straight back to sleep immediately after having a drop of milk.

Hey ho. Kids, eh? Just goes to show that you simply can’t use the first child as a benchmark for the second.

Jack-Joke

After seeing a joke on TV/online about the recent possible discovery of the Higgs Boson particles, I told Claire, Jack and Oliver it over evening tea.

A Higgs Boson walks into a church and the vicar shouts “Out! We don’t allow Higgs Bosons in here!”. To which the Higgs Boson replies “But, without me, how do you have MASS??”

Anyway, I thought it was funny; they didn’t.

Days later, and totally out of the blue, Jack has interpreted the joke into:

A Higg Boson walks into the church and the vicar says “GET OOOUUUUTTTTTTT! You’re not allowed in here!!”

Made us wet ourselves. Literally.

7 Months and Chicken Pox!

Unbelievably so, it’s been AGES since I’ve written anything about the boys, Jack and Oli. I think blogging managed to be something that I’ve let run away from me, in the midst of now having two of the little blighters in the house.

I’ll try to make a more conscious effort in future, as I really want to have a record of their goings-on, but to be fair, there’s not a massive amount of time left in the month!

So, right now, Jack is 3.5 yrs old (ish) and Oliver is about 7 months old.

Oliver is a real bundled of smiles and dribble wrapped up in baby clothes – since he was very small, the drool has simply POURED out of his mouth, but not that he’s teething or anything, but just got the setting on maximum for it.  As such, he’s always wearing a bib, and goes through easily ten in a day, as they become soaked to the point of when you try to wipe the next bit dribble away, you’re actually making more of face wet!

He’s still not sleeping through the night, which is a real kicker for his mum and I. We were sort of thinking that we were making some real progress in convincing ol’ blondy that he could survive longer sleeping patterns, but just as he’s getting there, he’s gone and caught Chicken Pox. Not a massive surprise, as Claire’s been making them both share time/air with other infected nippers, to try and get it before school starts again, and before Claire has to return to work after maternity leave.  Jack seems immune to it, which is totally odd, but Oli is absolutely plastered in spots, to the point that his head is a Braille horror story. In the past day or so, he’s grown some pox-spots in or near his ears, which have made them so sensitive that Superman would worry.  So much so, he gets really upset if we accidentally breathe upon it from a distance. Tears. Screams. Not good. Especially at 5 am, which he’s taken to waking up at, permanently. 

He’s waking around midnight/1am and crying and screaming himself into a state – Claire’s taken the brunt of these Oli-poundings, but the truth is, he’s awake and thrashing around for about an hour before he can be tempted into having some milk and going back to sleep.

As you can imagine, with Oli waking at midnight and then again at five, it’s not leaving any of us any real time to get some proper sleep, but although you get used to it as a new parent, 7 months is really starting too drag on a bit, young Master Rigby!! (hint hint!)

Oli’s on the tipping point, too, of crawling which is so funny to watch. He’s been able to rolly-polly around the floor by himself and sit up-right for a while now, and he can wiggle himself into the baby-crawling position, and then he rocks himself forwards and backwards as though he’s teasing us. Then he decks-it on to his front and then slams his out-stretched arms down in front of him, and pulls the world towards him on his tummy, whilst kicking his legs like he’s in the swimming pool behind him.  This is a bit different from Jack, as he used to do the the full-on army/commando crawl, and then converted this straight into walking; so we were robbed of the crawling-baby back then. Maybe Oli will be the one to enlighten us as to this elusive art?

Jack – When he’s in the company of Oliver, he’s usually either all over him, by cuddling, kissing or pulling at arms/legs/etc (affectionately – mostly!) or he’s dancing or waving his arms whilst talking Whale-speak to him. Either way, Oli has nothing but smiles and ‘coo’s for Jack, his constant entertainer.

Occasionally, Jack does get a taste of the green-eyed monster though, although this tends to be when Jack is a bit tired and aware that he’s not the centre of attention at that particular moment.  But to be fair, it’s not an easy thing to judge, as to when to show Jack the attention that he’s craving, and when not to, as to try to teach him that our little family has grown by 133% since Oli’s arrived in town.

Jack is growing and learning new things all the time. He’s recently been into historical events such as The Titanic and Cook’s HMS Endeavour, as well as dinosaurs, Range Rovers, Land Cruisers and the like.  His vocabulary is expanding massively, and sometimes, this totally catches me off-guard when he says something using a word that I didn’t know he knew. Or, even funnier, is when he re-uses something that we’ve said but in the wrong context, as he’s just relaying words.  Little star.

In September, Jack moves onto the next part of his pre-school stuff, and will be attending the local school for three hours in the mornings, five days a week.  Up until the 6 weeks (!!) holidays, he’s been going to pre-school for three hours in the afternoon.

Aladdin / Jafar Stickers

If you’ve been to our house recently, you’ll have noticed in the kitchen that there’s a pretty-rough looking Reward Chart blu-tac’d to the wall, along with a page of heavy-Aladdin-themed Avery labels that are beside it, also blu-tac’d up.

These are my take on Reward Charts for Jack, and are pretty much my top-quality (read: so-so) handy-work in Microsoft Word.

The Reward Chart itself is pretty much a grid, with the days of a week labelled down the left hand side, with about five or six boxes along for each day.  The basic premise is, that when he’s been good, he gets an ‘Aladdin’ sticker, and if (read: when!!) he’s been naughty, he gets a Jafar sticker.

I’ve made variation of the good/bad sticker, with some of the other characters too, as otherwise it could look a little odd on the chart.

Why Aladdin? Well, at the time of ‘production’ of the chart, Jack really liked watching the Aladdin movie and wouldn’t stop talking about it and asking questions about it.  So, I thought that I’d work on the good/bad theme in the film and see how this would work in practise.

To much of my surprise, and Claire’s too for that matter, Jack has been very receptive to it - We try to make a big thing about getting him an Aladdin (or Genie, Abu, Jasmine, Magic Carpet) sticker when he’s been good, and getting him to help stick it onto the chart, which usually results in a full-on palm-smack to ensure firm adhesion of the small Avery labels to the paper surface.  He also REALLY DOES NOT WANT a Jafar sticker (of three varieties – Jafar & Iago as above, ‘Old-man’ Jafar, or ‘Snake’ Jafar), to the point of when he’s being naughty or unruly, simply the mention of getting a Jafar sticker is enough to bring him around to our way of thinking. Sometimes even without a paddy first!!

In all, I had spent a hour or two on Google Images and found images that met my needs, whacked them into Paint.Net to crop and down-scale them to size and then used Microsoft Word to drum-up a labels document to match the sheets of A4 labels I had in the drawer and, hey presto!, instant stickers and Reward Chart!

It’s still early days with these stickers and the whole Reward Chart thing, as it’s more of a grown-up experiment on mind-controlling a three year old, but it’s fun when it works in either direction!!

School-boy Jack

Well, ‘school’ is a probably a little over-used in that title. ‘Pre-school’ may be more appropriate, but nonetheless, my boy has spent his first week at school!

He’s on a breaking-in session, whereby he attends the local primary school from 12:00 until 15:00 and gets to play, read, paint, cut-out stuff and basically do anything he likes, really! Much like home but without the mess. And the noise!!

The teacher at the school said Jack was ‘adorable’, to which Claire had to make sure that they were talking about the same child. This was confirmed by Jack physically being there, but I’m thinking it’s a common one-liner to new school kids’ parents to put them at ease. But, to be fair, they seem like good teachers there and look like they’ll keep him in line, as he does tend to get a little boisterous at times. Especially if another child has taken a train or truck off of him!

We’ve noticed that, over the past week, he’s been shattered at night times. To the point of falling asleep almost at tea times, which is really funny in one sense, but worrying in another, as we’re sure that he’ll be roaming about the house at 04:30 as a result of sleeping earlier.  We try to keep him awake, but he’s pretty much flaked out for the evening.

But he does seem to really like it there. Why wouldn’t he? The school was fantastic when they showed us around – filled with things to play with or to do, which really surprised Claire and I, as we didn’t get that impression from the nursery that he’s been going to, that we’ve been paying for!

I’m sure there’ll be more on this school topic for later – might have to add a ‘school’ category on the blog, methinks.

Oliver–3 months old!

Yes, it’s true – the little man is three months old, there or there-about.

He’s past the stage of crying all the time because of wind (or colic) and is a really smiley, happy little boy. (honest!)

He smiles a lot now, which really is a nice thing to see. 

Claire also found out a little while ago that he’s ticklish and laughs with a big wide-open mouth and the occasional chuckle! I tickle him now and then, as you do, and he’s getting easier to ‘get’ each time.  Tonight, for instance, I was blowing raspberries on his tummy and tickling him and he loved it, which is great as I’m seeing a totally different side to him; Claire has been saying for weeks that he’s a happy, bubbly little boy, but when I get home from work, around 1800ish, he’s been grumpy and crying lots.  Coming home to that each night makes it more difficult to imagine the happy child, but, as I said – finally – I’m seeing what she means,

He’s getting to be a big, strong boy too – he’s able to hold his neck up and look around, which is good. He’s starting to understand about rolling over, but still needs big brother Jack to yank on his leg to make the centre of gravity change position. After that, he’s find.

I’ve been playing on the bed with him, and rolling him sideways onto his tummy and then over again onto his back, which he seems to enjoy. I used to do this with Jack, too, which I guess was about the same sort of age.  I’d imagine that it’s a whole new world at that age, as he’s been either face up or face down in bed and that it! Now, he’s finding out that there’s a series of steps in between those poses.

He’s still not sleeping through the night entirely as yet though, much to mummy and daddy’s disappointment! In the past couple of nights (literally) he’s slept for four or five hours straight, which is the most he’s managed. Previously, it’s been as long as three hours and as little as thirty minutes, which sort of makes for a very long night.

But, we’ll see how it pans out. In terms of the holy-grail at the moment, it would be getting Oliver to sleep the entire night through. In his own bed. And not waking up until a decent hour!