15 thoughts from my 15th month as a parent

This month of parenthood has involved sheep, streamers and shoes…

1. We seem to always forget to bring our son’s bucket and spade with us when we go on an outing to the beach. As if to make a point about this, he has spent a lot of one day recently wandering around our front room with his plastic spade.

2. Our son enjoys helping out in the garden. We have had to teach him that he’s supposed to water the plants and not the chickens.

3, Laundry pile jenga is our son’s new favourite game. It involves walking up to a pile of laundry on a chair, tugging at it and seeing if he can knock it all over before mummy or daddy notice what he’s doing.

4. Another one of his favourite games is playing ‘peek-a-boo’ with daddy’s t-shirts.

5. We were really impressed when our son recently started responding to the question ‘where’s your nose?’ by touching his nose. However, he recently also responded to the question ‘where’s dad?’ by touching his nose.

6. Rather than staying inside and watching the World Cup on television, we have been taking our son out and about to exciting local events. Here is a sheep shearing competition at Sioe Dyffryn Ogwen, a local agricultural show. We didn’t see the conclusion of the event as we needed to change his nappy (what us UK folk call diapers!). The same thing happened in the last few minutes of the World Cup match between Argentina and Brazil, meaning that I missed Lionel Messi’s winning goal.

7. We recently bought our son a box full of blocks with letters on them at a jumble sale. I’m currently wondering if there are enough to spell the name of the famous local village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

8. Here’s the answer…

9. Our son’s still not sleeping through the night on a regular basis yet but he was kind enough not to get up early on either Saturday or Sunday of a recent weekend. He woke up at 9.30am on the Saturday and 10am on the Sunday.

10. I bought some streamers that I was going to use to decorate our house for our son’s birthday a few months back. I forgot to actually put the streamers up but our son demonstrated his dexterity by managing to find one of the packets a few weeks ago before opening it and having lots of fun!

11. Animals and food have been two things that we’ve tried to teach our son about. One weekend, we had to stop our sun trying to eat cat biscuits and then an hour or two later try to prevent our son from having part his flapjack eaten by chickens.

12. Baby led weaning can get messy, especially when a 14 month old insists that he wants to hold the spoon himself while having porridge. Indeed, things can get even messier when he decides to grab a clean baby grow and rubs porridge onto it as well…

13. Our son has recently added the words ‘bath’ and ‘splash’ to his vocabulary. I still have ‘dad’ noted down as his first word though.

14. Our son enjoyed getting his first ever pair of shoes recently, mainly because he was able to pull lots of pairs of the shelves. In fact, he had more fun that the last time he went to a soft play centre.

15. My wife and I have finally got our son’s hint about trying not to forget his bucket and spade when we go to the beach. We got him a new bucket and spade at the beach recently so as he has one set to keep in the car and another to keep in his sandpit in our back garden.

 

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a bit as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups, check them out to see a range of posts by fellow parent bloggers:

10 thoughts from my 10th month as a parent

Our son expresses surprise at seeing himself described as a somewhat messy eater on my blog

With our son now entering his 10th month, he has now been out of the womb for longer than he was inside the womb. Apparently babies can hear from inside the womb and I believe that one once wrote a book about what they could see from inside the womb, and that their novel was later made into a film. Anyone remember ‘Womb with a View’? 

I’ve learned a lot about parenting over the last few months, and this post is the latest in a series of monthly posts that I’ve been writing about memorable little moments, anecdotes and reflections. I’ve included links to previous posts in this series at the end. Anyway, here are ten thoughts from my 10th month as a parent:

1. Our son used to chew a plastic duck in the bath, which caused us a few worries as vegetarian parents. We were re-assured when he started chewing a face cloth in the bath rather than the duck, but recently he’s been using a raw carrot as a toy and throwing it round the front room. Vegetables = something to eat, plastic duck = something to play with. Obviously, we need to keep working on this one.

2. I explained the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ to our baby son when ‘less’ was misused by the presenter of BBC’s television rural affairs series Countryfile. Our son looked back and smiled. I must point out to him that some of his baby grows feature missing or misplaced apostrophes.

3. I recently parked in parent & baby space for 1st time since becoming a dad. Wasn’t much closer to the shop than normal but felt like a big moment. I parked in another parent & baby space last weekend and feel like I am really a proper parent now.

4. Our baby son has discovered that he get all his toys out of his toy box more quickly if he just tips the box upside down. He still needs to work on his tidying up technique though.

5. I have started to use Twitter a bit more since staring this dad blog. When my wife was singing The Wheels on the Bus to our son, she including the line ‘the daddies on the  bus go “tweet, tweet, tweet”‘. I hope that our son will grow up to realise that birds also go ‘tweet, tweet, tweet’.

It’s a triple whammy! Bowl on the floor, food on the floor, spoon on the floor…

6. In a previous post, I mentioned that our son sometimes shows off his raspberry blowing skills at 4am. It’s getting worse – he’s now demonstrating these abilities during mealtimes when his mouth is full. We’ll have to start wearing overalls when we feed him before long as it can sometimes feel like we’re being paintballed at close range.

7. Whenever our son drops a cream cheese rice cake, it seems to always end up cream cheese side down on the floor.  When cats fall, they’re supposed to always land on their feet. I wonder if this would still happen if a cat was covered with cream cheese. Please note that I have not carried out any empirical research into this matter and have no intention of doing so.

8. Our son’s getting closer and closer to managing to crawl at the moment but still doing quite a bit of wobbling and falling over like a little drunk person.

Mmmm… Yummy haggis!

9. I had a proud Scottish Dad moment on Burns Night this year. Our, 9 month old son had his first taste of vegetarian haggis and really liked it! I’m particularly proud of this as I made the vegetarian haggis from from scratch for the first time ever this year. Have a look at this post if you want to hear more about this.

10. Dear son, as you’re into your tenth month you’ll have to remember that from now on you need to do a double figure number of funny, cute or thought-provoking things per month. If you don’t, writing this monthly post is going to get really difficult. Please try to remember this. Thanks

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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8 thoughts from my 8th month as a parent

An aerial shot of feeding time at the zoo as another rice cake with homous ends up face down on the floor…

First there was 6 things I’ve learnt in 6 months as a parent. Then, hot on the heels of Being a dad: celebrating the little things, there was its light-hearted sequel 7 thoughts from my 7th month as a parent. Now it’s time for 8 thoughts from my 8th month as a parent. Once again, I am sharing some of my reflections on life as a parent and the little things that our son does as he develops and tries to gradually make sense of the world around him. Here goes…

1. There are quite a few pictures of our baby son that have led people to say that he looks like me. One of them is a photo of him having a bath in which my wife says his facial expression makes him look a bit like an alien. I’m not sure how to take this combination of comparisons.

2. Our son is trying to crawl but often ends up moving backwards. When he sees something he wants, we’re having to lift him up, turn him around and hope that he’s able to move backwards towards it. 

3. Our baby son is developing advanced motor skills. Yesterday he changed our car’s oil, today he fixed the windscreen wipers and tomorrow he’s changing a tyre.

4. Must control reactions when watching live sport on TV with our son, made him cry after my football team went 7-0 up recently. I should have remembered about this sort of thing. After all, he did start to whimper and then howl after myself and some friends got a bit excited about seeing Andy Murray win Wimbledon.

5. Dear 7 and a half month old son, it’s cool that you can blow raspberries. That said, 4am isn’t best time to repeatedly show off this skill.

6. Had a few of our baby son’s apple rings again today. Well he did leave the bag lying around open in the kitchen. This happens quite often so I hope that he’s going to learn his lesson about leaving an open bag of apple rings lying around.

7. Watching baby son eating is even more fun than seeing feeding time at Edinburgh Zoo after the penguin parade. He currently has a really cute penguin suit that he likes to wear. The fact we’re vegetarian has meant that we haven’t tried to create the penguin parade by making him follow me while I carry a bucket of fish and then thrown the fish at him and watch him catch them in his mouth.

8. Two months ago, I wrote about 6 things that I’ve learned in six months as a parent. Last month I talked about 7 thoughts from my 7th month as a parent. This month, I’ve given you 8 thoughts from my 8th month as a parent. Next month I’ll have to have nine thoughts. This whole parenting thing is sooooooooooo demanding sometimes… 🙂

Do any of these comments remind you of things that your kids do or used to do? If so, feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/428827195740294197/) if you’ve enjoyed reading it 

 

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7 thoughts from my 7th month as a parent

Parenting isn’t just about big milestones, it’s also about the little things that bring a smile to your face or make you think. This is something that I touched upon last month in a post entitled Being a Dad: Celebrating the Little Things and it’s something that I’m going to make a regular feature on the blog (…as long as our son keeps doing funny little things, which we’re sure he will do!). Anyway, here are seven thoughts from my seventh month as a parent:

07/11/13 We’re raising our six month old son as a vegetarian but he’s been chewing a bright yellow duck during bath time quite a lot recently.

10/11/13 Baby son was in team baby grow for his 1st football match yesterday but pooped. We had to change baby grow and then team lost. Coincidence? After it was suggested that our son should be given a football banning order as our team lost the game that I mentioned above, I came up with an idea. Alternatively, we could just get him to put on a baby grow with the opposition team’s crest on it and feed him prunes.

11/11/13 We went out for lunch yesterday and our son spent more time playing with a beer mat than the plastic toy that we brought him. Moral of the story – kids’ toy shops need to sell fewer plastic toys and more beer mats.

12/11/13 After I blew out the candles on my birthday cake recently, our six month old son started crying. I hope this doesn’t happen every time someone in the family has a birthday. Does anyone else have kids who do this?

15/11/13 Must try to stop eating our baby son’s apple rings, but they’re so tasty! Mike Crider of Twin Dad Talks suggested that this was only right as kids often grow up to want to eat off their parents’ plates. As as our son was just under seven months old when I posted this, perhaps it’s a case of me getting the retaliation in first! 

16/11/13 Our son and I had fun playing with stacking cups today. When he was in his little chair, I kept trying to see if I could put one on each of his feet and one on each of his hands before he could knock any of them off. It was a bit like Buckaroo! 🙂

22/11/13 Might get tablet soon but worried it won’t be as good as my laptop for playing peek-a-boo with son on days when I work from home.

Do any of these comments remind you of things that your kids do or used to do? If so, feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it http://www.pinterest.com/pin/428827195740240421/.

 

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Being a dad: celebrating the little things

This post is a light-hearted look at my first six months of being a parent. I’ve been reflecting about all sorts of things since our son recently turned six months old, and this inspired my recent post 6 things that I’ve learned in 6 months as a parent. This time, I’m looking back at some of the lighter moments.

Some of these are reflections that I have already mentioned on my Twitter feed or on the Dad’s The Way I Like It Facebook page. A fellow parent blogger, Ute Limacher Riebold (who blogs at Expat Since Birth), suggested a while ago that it’d be a good idea to record these experiences so as my wife and I could share it with our son when he’s older. I guess that’s the sort of thing this blog is going to provide (as long as I back it up!).

All of the thoughts below come from between when our son was three months old and when he recently turned six months old, and I’ve arranged them in chronological order starting from the things that date from when he was three or four months old. I hope that you enjoy reading them. Let me know if they remind you of any similar experiences that you’ve had!

1. Making silly noises to get our three month old son to smile is now one of my favourite hobbies, especially when it also stops him from crying.

2. Have cold and our 4 month old son has cried twice due to noise of my sneezes. Now trying to go to another room when I feel a sneeze coming.

3. I’ve used becoming a dad as an excuse for buying several Muppets DVDs. We’re currently watching The Muppets Take Manhattan and really enjoying it!

4. I’m glad that our car’s central locking is now fixed. The alarm started going off a few months ago when I was getting into our car outside outside a hospital maternity ward at 5am. Our son was about five months old by the time I got round to getting this sorted!

5. Thank goodness for YouTube and campsites with WiFi. So helpful when you’re struggling to put up a travel cot on your first family holiday! Here’s a link to the blog post where I talked about this holiday.

6. Got slightly excited about buying our five month old son his first ever toothbrush yesterday – is this normal parent behaviour?

7. Two highlights of today so far: brushing 5 month old son’s teeth for first time and watching our chicken jump in the air to catch flies.

8. When my wife and son were coming home from hospital three days after he was born, I put up some balloons in the front room along with some streamers and a home made welcome home banner. Just over five months on, they’re all still there! He reached the six and a half month mark before we took them down. I thought that we should have waited until we moved house but was unfortunately over-ruled.

9. Last night mistook the noise of a sheep going baa on a television nature programme for the sound of our five month old son crying. He’s was still fast asleep, phew!

10. Just fed my son some food for the first time. Not sure my wife was impressed when I looked at the sachet of apricot and banana porridge and asked ‘so do I just squirt it into his mouth then?’.

11. Our son, who is almost six months old, has discovered a new game. It involves picking up a toy or piece of paper, waving it about, dropping it on the floor and waiting for mummy or daddy to pick it up.

12. Our six month old son is definitely getting cheeky. He blew a raspberry last night when we asked him if it was time to go to bed.

13. May soon have to start wearing full waterproof clothing while bathing our six month old son in his little bath. He’s the one who does all the splashing, not me, before anyone asks.

14. Saw this picture (see above) in one of our son’s books. Thought it was quite a good likeness really.

15. Our son has started weaning recently. We’re still trying to persuade him that bits of carrot are something to eat and not something to just throw on the floor.

16. I’ve been enjoying watching our 6 month old son starting to eat solids. It’s mainly baby rice at the moment, hope we’ll soon be able to give him baby curry. Within minutes of tweeting the comment above, a Welsh vegan group replied with a link to a vegetarian curry recipe suitable for babies. I love it when this sort of thing happens on Twitter or Facebook!

17. Our son’s definitely improving two key skills at the moment: giving high fives and blowing raspberries. I’ve told him to make sure that he puts this on his CV.

18. Dear son, I know you’re only six months old but please remember clocks go back tonight & let us have extra hour in bed tomorrow. Thanks, Dad.

19. Six month old son ignored advice about clocks going back and having extra hour in bed, glad I didn’t stay up for Match of the Day last night.

20, I used the word moron several times when talking to our 6 month old son yesterday. Don’t worry folks, I talk to him in Welsh and moron means carrot!

After he grabbed the remote control recently, we’ve been trying extra hard to make sure we get out and about with our six month old son recently 🙂

21. Looks like I’m not getting a say in what we’re going to watch on television tonight!  (see picture above)

22. Stroller we got for our son has a brake but no clutch or accelerator. I think that we might have to take it back to the shop.

What do you think of this post? Have you had any similar thoughts about being a parent? If so, feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it!

 

Similar posts

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I’ve linked this post up with the ‘Something for the Weekend’ parent bloggers link-up hosted by Diary of the Dad and The Voice of Sarah Miles.

What parenting and game shows have in common

Our son hasn’t really displayed an interest in game shows yet, but is already trying to keep up with the latest football scores.

Parenting and game shows have more in common that you might think. This declaration might give the impression that I’ve appeared on a television game show. Actually, I haven’t and that my quiz career peaked at the age of ten and a half when I was a member of Newport Primary School’s prizewinning Scotquiz team. Anyway, here are the five examples that I feel show what game shows can teach us about parenting…

1. Deal or no deal. On this game show that the UK copied from a French version, contestants keep opening boxes with differing amounts of money in them until there are fewer and fewer left. At various stages the banker (who is never visible or audible but supposedly phones the host) offers the contestant various sums of money in return for the contestant deciding to surrender whatever their box has in it.

Believe it or not, this game show is like our baby son’s bath time routine. The deal is that one of us fills the bath (a clear plastic bucket-like thing) with water and also gets out his pyjamas and toothbrush. The other one has to take off his day clothes and then his nappy in preparation for bath time. When I’m the one who’s about to remove the nappy (=diaper) before putting him in the bath, I feel like a contestant on deal or no deal as I speculate about whether or not there’ll be any nappy contents that will require a clean up operation before bath time can begin.

2. Going for Gold. This was a general knowledge quiz shown on BBC television during the 1980s and early 1990s presented by the ever amiable Irish broadcaster Henry Kelly. Contestants from all over Europe competed against each other, although I did sometimes wonder if they were really all people who now lived in the UK but had been born and brought up somewhere else. We’re trying to bring up our son bilingually using Welsh and English and hope that he’ll be able to do different fun things in both languages.

As it happens, I remember joking a few years ago that I’d like to learn Welsh to a standard that would enable me to compete on Welsh language channel S4C’s quiz show Dim ond Un (Only one!). In this show, contestants living in Wales competed to make it through to the final round where they would have a chance to win a foreign holiday if they could outscore an ex-pat who was seeking to win a trip back to Wales. I haven’t made it onto the show (and think that it may have actually stopped running anyway), but I did appear in an S4C comedy sketch show two years ago where I had to speak French to a chain-smoking plastic pigeon.

3. Autumnwatch or Springwatch. Actually, these are really nature programmes rather than game shows. However, I see them as a  mixture of television reality shows such as Big Brother and traditional television nature programmes. Basically, there are nightly or weekly episodes about what wildlife that it has been possible to observe in certain areas using little cameras. It kind of feels like a reality show for birdwatchers and the BBC could make more of it by getting viewers to phone or text in about which birds and creatures they wanted to be kept on the show for the next episode.

This may sound like a bit of a tangent, and that’s mainly because it is. However, these sorts of nature programmes are a bit like being a parent to a small child as there’s something both fascinating and kind of cute about seeing them do the smallest things as they gradually get older and start to engage with the world around them. When our son was only a few days old and still in hospital, I used to love watching him do really big yawns and try to film or video it on my phone.

4. Catchphrase. In this UK gameshow that was for many years presenting by the friendly Northern Irish comedian Roy Walker, contestants had to guess what well know phrases or sayings were being represented on an animated screen that often featured a little robot-like figure called Mr. Chips. I always liked the way Roy Walker was an encouraging host and became associated with phrases like ‘that’s good but it’s not right’ and ‘keep pressing and guessing’ when a contestant gave a wrong answer. A correct answer would often result in him saying ‘riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!’ in an enthusiastic manner.

In some ways, I guess that this sort of patience and encouragement is something that it’s good to demonstrate with kids. At the same time, being a first time parent can involve quite a bit of ‘pressing and guessing’ (…well perhaps not literally) when it comes to finding out what does and doesn’t work. As I said in a recent post, I feel that I’m still learning all the time about so many things to do with parenting.

5. Takeshi’s Castle. When a housemate of mine subscribed to a satellite television package when I was a graduate student, I ended up watching this Japanese gameshow even more than the live football that was the thing to which I was looking forward more than anything else. There was something really amusing about watching the crazy challenges as contestants sought to do things like run through a maze full of doors without falling into a mudpit or being pushed in by a series of loudly dressed villians wearing wigs. There were also games where contestants had to slide along a runway on a tray and try to stop at a specific point. If they went too far, they’d end up slipping into a swamp-like pool. If they stopped too soon, an angry swamp-dweller would leap up and push them in.

Thankfully we haven’t had too deal with too many wild and somewhat deranged characters since becoming parents. However, there are all sorts of bizarre challenges to get used to along the way. Getting used to changing the nappy of a wailing newborn at 3am, brushing our son’s two teeth for the first time, bathing him and starting to feed him solid foods can at times be every bit as messy as some of the crazy challenges on Takeshi’s Castle.

Are there any other gameshows where contestants have to do things that have some sort of parallel with being a parent? Are there any other television programmes that have unexpected links to what it’s like to being a parent? If so, feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well.

I’ve linked this post up with the Best4Future Wednesday Link Party.

I’ve also linked this post up with the Something For The Weekend link-up organised by The Voice of Sarah Miles and Diary of the Dad.