Daddy Day Care: A Spoiler?

As I sit here with the world’s cutest and happiest baby cooing in my lap, I can’t help but think that we’ve been blessed with a spoiler. What’s a spoiler you ask? Quite a few parents we’ve talked to (even before we had Kayla) have made comments such as, “Oh yeah, we thought we had parenting all figured out with Bobby and Sue, but then we had Billy…”

Now that I’m getting used to living on less sleep, I’m beginning to think that Kayla is our spoiler, given us to cut our parenting teeth, and encourage us to have another. Let’s be realistic here, who wouldn’t want another precious little easy to care for baby? Before we had our first we had all sorts of doubts. Oh sure every parent tells, “You’ll know how to tell which cry is which.” I can take such statements on faith, but there’s a difference between expecting something, and accomplishing it.

We were given quite a few excellent books on parenting. Thanks to Jen’s friend Christina, our baby actually DID come with the baby owner’s manual. Jen and Eric gave us Babywise, which is also excellent. The What to Expect… books are also good. We read them all and referred to them often during them first weeks. They helped set our expectations realistically and provided us with an arsenal of tools to help us manage our new baby and integrate her into our life.

Now, 7 weeks into this gig, it’s easy to determine what her needs are. We know that each evening she’ll have her fussy time. To get her ready to eat, just uncover her for 15 minutes while warming up her milk. She’ll cool off and wake up ready to eat. Keep her awake for a half hour of “happy play time” and then warm her up and she goes to sleep. Now we’re listening to The Rolling Stones and I’m about to get a little work done during her nap. In short, life involving a baby is becoming predictable.

I mean sure, we did have to learn some new skills, but we expected that. Just as we had to learn new skills to thrive as a cohabitating couple, so too did we need to make changes and grow with this new addition. It almost seems to have been too easy. Is this the calm before the storm?

Chronicles of Day Care Daddy

She looks beautiful doesn’t she?

Perfectly innocent, and safe. Not a care in the world, and nothing at all to be concerned about. Well, there are things we’ve learned that are simply too precious not to share, especially since they weren’t mentioned in our Baby Owner’s Manual.

There are certain things about changing a diaper that are intuitively obvious. Chief among these is that leaving certain parts of baby uncovered is hazardous to everything near babies discharge ports. Discharge is normally on the bottom end, but you can’t count on that. Again, this is obvious. However, what isn’t obvious is Day Care Daddy’s first corollary:

Never remove babies diaper within 5 minutes of any activity near the babies bottom.

There have been numerous “events” that have led us to draw this conclusion, but I’ll share one of my favorites. While Ricardo (grandpa) and Paulette were here, we left Kayla in Paulette’s loving care while the rest of us went shopping. This might be something peculiar to Kayla but we failed to warn Paulette that if Kayla does a “download”, immediately going to change her is a bad idea. No sooner than Paulette got one diaper off, Kayla was letting go and discharging more. Several diapers and fresh clothes later, things got back under control. This leads us to Day Care Daddy’s second corollary.

Never change baby on anything that isn’t easily cleaned (or disposed of).

All the evidence we’ve seen indicates that exposing a babies excretion ports significantly increases the likelihood of discharge. Because of this, we’ve adopted a method whereby we leave the old diaper under her until the new one is ready to be slid into place. Thus, excepting a two or three second transfer period, there is always a diaper under her. This has prevented many an incident, and I can’t say exactly how many times I’ve had her discharge into the new diaper before it was installed. However, this practice alone is insufficient to insure against catastrophe. Today I disregarded the first corollary. I did not forget the second, and therein lied my salvation.

Daddy got careless and unlatched her diaper within 5 minutes of a discharge. Two wipes later, her nasty little tail was cleaned up and ready to go into a fresh diaper. In the few seconds after the first diaper was removed, a precious little stream emitted that didn’t stop until the entire disposable changing pad was soaked. These are wonderful little things. They’re just like a painting drop cloth, plastic lined paper that absorbs fluid but won’t let it through.

I wrapped up my freshly soiled bundle (in the disposable pad) and took her directly to the sink with the new diaper still in hand. Ever mindful of the events necessitating the unscheduled bathing, I wasted no time getting her back into a diaper. This brush with disaster was a major accomplishment of the day. Yawn. So concludes today’s issue of “Day Care Daddy”. Stay tuned for more exciting adventures to come.

Hallelujah, we’ve scored!

Buying a house can be a daunting task, but Dallas has treated us well. We have three days invested in selecting our new home. I spent a day looking at houses on my last trip down here to get a feel for the market. On this trip, our intent was to buy a house. Yesterday we looked at over a dozen houses. That’s far too many to keep all the details straight, but just enough that a real estate agent can get a really good feel for exactly what you’re looking for.

Yesterday we dialed in the compass and today we marched. We looked at only five houses. Two were houses we returned to for a second (and a third) look and honed in on two houses, both of which we really liked. We deliberated a bit, visited both houses again, and finally settled on the slightly more expensive (159 vs 155) of the homes.

We placed an offer of $150k and they countered with $153 which we gratefully accepted. We are extremely pleased. Even though both houses are terrific, we know we made The Right Choice. There have been a considerable number of “coincidences” that have confirmed it. It’s as if someone is in control and we’ve been able to see Him working behind the scenes to make everything fall into place.

Our Texas address is 313 Crooked Creek, Garland, TX. Our closing date is July 25th, and we’ll be able to move in any time thereafter. It’s time to start packing!

Greetings from Dallas

What a day. We looked at over a dozen houses today, ranging in price from $134,000 to $189k. We’ve been fretting over how to make the $134k house work because it’s such a great deal but it just doesn’t have enough space. It’s adequate, but cramped and we’ll be here for 4 years.

We’ve found several very nice houses that suit our needs wonderfully and range from $160 to $172k. Although that will seem high to our friends in Cadillac, it’s terribly reasonable compared to housing in Seattle, Atlanta, and many other metro areas. That’s about as good as can be expected for a nice home within 20 minutes of downtown.

Greetings from Oklahoma City, OK

In the spirit of being footloose and fancy free, on Sunday evening we decided to pack up and drive to Texas to buy a house. Yesterday we left home around 1PM and spent the night in St. Louis, MO. Today we once again got up bright and early (9:45, just in time to catch breakfast) and got onto the road by 12:30. This traveling with a baby takes a wee bit longer than we’re used to. If all goes according to plan, we’ll arrive in Dallas at 9:45PM this evening.

Tomorrow we meet with Jack, our realtor. We’ll spend a day or two house shopping and then return home. Unfortunately, I did forget my Compact Flash adapter for the laptop, so there won’t be any photo uploads on this trip. Kayla is a good traveler. The motion lulls her right to sleep. We wake her to feed and then let her go back to sleep.

Evidence found.

After my water broke on Friday night, we had a couple of hours before heading to the hospital. We packed our bags and Matt finished baking the cookies. Today evidence was found that yes Matt is susceptible to impending birth jitters. I found the unused cookie dough in the pantry next to the chocolate chips instead of in the refrigerator. Oooops. Obviously a few more important things were on his mind. 🙂

Is a name important?

Apparently so, because everyone wants to know our little daughters name. I was of the opinion that I wanted to meet her before giving her a name. If she came out screaming and insufferable, a name like “peace” obviously wouldn’t be a great fit. No, that name wasn’t a consideration, but you get the point.

For months now Jen has wanted to have a name picked out for each gender, just in case. She had a list of boys and girl names all ready to go. I have maintained that I’d rather not name our baby until after meeting him/her. Today, the lady from records came and visited us to fill out the birth certificate. We still hadn’t settled on a name. We had also verfied that you don’t need to pick out a name and have an “unnamed” birth certificate issued. You simply file a $40 form to change the name at any later date. The only catch is that we’d have to apply for her social security number after choosing her name. No big deal.

Ironically, after knowing how easy it would be to not name her, Jen had really warmed up to the idea of taking some more time to consider a name that was “most” fitting for her. However, there is absolutely no harm (and no extra cost) to give her a name for the birth certificate, and then simply change it later. We had “almost” decided on Kayla and unable to settle on a full name, minutes before our official discharge, I made an executive decision.

Our 6lb bundle of cuddles and snuggles is named Kayla Marie Simerson. If mommy decides that there another name she’d prefer more, we’ll just change it later. However, we are both growing quite fond of the name.