Category Archives: Dadding

Lately it’s been difficult to get out of the house with R, and by lately I mean basically since she started eating solid food. It was worst in the beginning. Meal time would take an hour to an hour-and-a-half, so that accounted for much of her awake time. It was made even worse when she would wake up from her nap and be contently playing in her crib. I want to promote independent play, so I leave her in her room when she does that. Sometimes that lasts for nearly an hour, so between that and mealtime it meant she was only awake and able to do something fun for 30-60 minutes. Very hard.

Here time spent awake while not eating or playing in her crib post-nap is increasing. Meal time has decreased to 30-45 minutes, leaving more like 1-2 hours to get out. Somehow, though, that always seems to disappear. Either I need to keep getting things done that I couldn’t finish while she naps, or she gets fussy or needs a bottle.

My goal this week is to get out at least once during the day, even if it’s in the afternoon. Ideally it would be mid-day to break up the time spent inside the house a bit more, so I plan to start at least taking a 30 minute bike ride. She loves being on the bike, I love being on the bike, and it generally makes both of us feel good.

I would also like to start getting together with some of the stay-at-home dads on the Facebook and Meetup groups I’m part of. It seems like every time someone posts an event, though, it’s right at or very near naptime. It’s a little frustrating. I need to start planning outings myself and invite people and hopefully that will fix this problem. I’m really craving interaction with other adults who are not my wife, so this would be great.

Hopefully this week sees R and me out of the house a little more. We do have swim lessons one evening a week, so at least there is that, but that’s mostly just playing in the water with the kiddos. Fun, but not really interactive in an adult way.

We are moving R into her own room this week. We’re starting out slowly, just playing in the room to begin. Her crib isn’t even in it yet, it’s still down attached to our bed. We’re hoping to start making the transition this weekend when Lurline doesn’t have to get up for work in the morning. That way if it’s rough she’s not sleep deprived at work.

What we’ve read is that first you want to get the child used to the new room. Like what we are doing playing in here this week. We’ll spend time in here each day to begin the acclimation process. By the weekend we’ll move her crib up here and start the process. We’re hoping that she’ll start sleeping better when she’s in a, darker room without us making any noise next to her.

Originally we thought we’d move her to the office adjoining our bedroom. The problem with that, though, is that it’s not really its own proper room. The wall of bookshelves dividing it from us does not reach the top of the ceiling, so there’s no real noise barrier. Plus, we’d have to walk through it to get to bed. Not really an ideal place for noise.

So, we decided on converting the guest room into her bedroom. It’s on the north side of the house facing our neighbors, so much less light gets through than our bedroom. It’s upstairs from our room, so no noise will get through from us when we are getting ready for bed. It will mean we can’t really hang out in the living room when she’s sleeping, but we have another room that will let us stay up without bothering her.

The down side to putting her upstairs is that it will mean walking upstairs to check on her when she starts making noise. It will make for a rough start for us of her transitioning, but hopefully that won’t last too long. If our suspicion is right and it is our noise and the light keeping her from sleeping through the night, things will be much better for us. I’m looking forward to when she does.

We’re currently a gluten free household after discovering that R has a wheat allergy. It’s a challenge, but we’ve done it before when I was concerned I had a problem with gluten. I determined it wasn’t an issue for me, so it’s been quite awhile since then.

Thankfully, gluten free eating is easier and easier these days. I found gluten free cheerios with no problem, and regular oatmeal doesn’t seem to bother her despite the chance of cross-contact. I was excited, then, to discover the GF bakery near our house makes really excellent bread. Like sandwich quality bread. Not the crumbly stuff we ate when I was with a girlfriend that couldn’t eat gluten. I was really excited.

I decided to give the bread a try with R, thinking it was great. The ingredients looked fine so i went ahead. What I didn’t expect was that cross-contact with nuts could be enough to trigger a reaction. I feel awful right now because her face has a nasty rash on it and there’s always a risk of serious allergic reactions. I’m thankful one didn’t occur, and from now on I’ll be really cautious when that is a possibility. I also know now to be really careful at home and restaurants, just in case.

Food allergies are the pits and I really hope she grows out of hers.

R is a pretty happy eater. She took to solid foods quite readily and eats just about anything we give her, including Thai curry (at least until the spice built up and she started screaming). She loves ramen noodles, steamed carrots, peach, beef, chicken – the list just gets longer every day.

For about the first three months she was content to be fed by spoon. She’d bob up and down happily before diving in like a bird to a worm to snatch the food from the end of the spoon. It is an adordable sight, though one that is getting rarer.

You see, for the last week she has been insisting more and more on feeding herself. While this is wonderful for a lot of reasons it can also be frustrating. Her manual dexterity has not developed enough for her to consistently get food from tray to mouth, so most of it ends up on the floor. The result of this is that it takes an interminably long time for her to eat enough to be satisfied. Yesterday we spent an hour and a half on lunch, which included almost fifteen minutes to drink two ounces of milk. I was so over it. Then, of course, when my wife was feeding her dinner she just ate from the spoon and was finished in half an hour.

On the advice of anther stay at home dad I decided to take a different tact today – I let her feed herself entirely independently for breakfast. I put a big bowl of oatmeal in front of her and let her have at it. Our dining room and living room are one big room so I was able to leave her at it and go practice the piano while keeping an eye on her from there. It was wonderful. Lunch was similar, although I sat with her the whole time since the food was more solid than oatmeal. However, I did just put portions on her plate and let her have at it. I ate my lunch and did some work on my iPad and we were both happy. She still didn’t get enough to be satisfied on just solids, so I ended with a bottle. Thankfully it didn’t take fifteen minutes to finish this time.

I’m sure over the next few days we’ll find a rhythm that works for both of us, she’ll get better at holding onto her food until she gets it to her mouth, and mealtime will shorten. Until, I’m told, the throwing starts. Not particularly looking forward to that but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.