correlation to causality

Sorry it's been a little while since the last post, but it feels like a little like cheating to be posting at a Dad blog when my kid is nowhere to be found. So what's a Dad-blogger to do? Some might say, "start by going to find your kid," but I do know where he is (really). Start-Up Mom and Kaden have been down in North Carolina since last Thursday. I had to stay in Boston a few extra days to attend some meetings (there's that whole starting a company and starting children conflicting again) but will join them today.

I could talk about how things are going here, but it is just much more interesting to contemplate the causality of certain behaviors of a newborn than it is to gab about Battlestar Gallactica and Chinese food.

So, let me present on ongoing conundrum for a curiously analytical parent.. so much is constantly changing it's incredibly difficult to pin down whether A behavior caused B effect. To put in economic terms, it's easy to find correlation and near impossible to prove causality.

Case in point: Kaden has previously been a very good sleeper, and up until recently woke only once a night. But he has now become nighttime Cujo (or perhaps the Sleep Nazi would be more appropriate). What started as a low "drip, drip" of slight wakings turned into a gush of "no sleep for you!" over the course of a week.

Simultaneously, Kaden has recently figured out how to nap during the day (finally) which is great. So it's logical to think that his longer day naps were enough to mess up his night sleep patterns. Except, we don't know if it was the napping. While true that he started to nap longer at the same time his night sleep screwed up, there are plenty of other possible causes.

• He has started drooling like crazy. Seriously, we could use a mouth diaper.
• We installed an air conditioner the same week
• He started sucking his pacifier a lot more, which could mean waking up a lot and wanting it
• Kaden is stronger and getting out of his swaddling
• He has just learned to roll on his side, which is cute. Unfortunately previous to this the only times he was on his side is to breastfeed.. which means his life experience has tied the two together. So now he rolls on his side in the middle of the night and then assumes that because he is there, a nipple should be presented soon.

While I try and hammer away at what the cause is, it's pretty clear that the solution is just to help teach Kaden to be able to soothe himself back to sleep. If he can take care of himself then the problem goes away (well, technically he still wakes up so I guess it just becomes his problem and not ours). While in DC they apparently have Brazilian families to help with this sort of thing, we're on our own. So I have begun putting him in the crib after his eyes are closed, but just before he's really asleep.

It's interesting, before I had Kaden I thought of parenting in very distinct stages. The first 15-18 years was about looking out for your child, showing up at soccer practice, and so on. Next you'd start trying to teach them how to live on their own and be self-reliant, somewhere around late high-school/early college. But it would seem that from the very first day of trying to get him to put himself back to sleep, it's all just a continuum of teaching how to be independent.

a present for dad

There's not a lot a three month old can give his dad for Father's Day. Kaden can grasp things, sure, but he doesn't yet have the motor control to "offer" them to someone. He doesn't really own much anyway. But today Kaden did indeed find a way to give me somethin.

Kaden was born with the instinct to get one thing, milk, and he very quickly developed the instinct to give it back again. So Kaden is hanging above my head playing airplane when he realizes this is his time to strike. He's smiling and shaking. And I'm smiling as I lock into his bright eyes (just as he planned). We're just having a grand old time and POW - spit-up and gravity did their thing right into start-up dad's mouth. His timing was perfect, like a mother bird feeding her kids.

I won't even bother explaining the taste, you can imagine. I must admit being slightly curious about the taste of breast milk, but not quite this way. Happy dad's day everyone, may your child give you something better than regurgitated breast milk.

and now for something completely different

This medium makes for an excellent place to vent, but that may lead to a skewed view of how things are going. Ranting just comes off better (not to mention more naturally for me) in writing. It just does. So to be clear, things are going fine. There is no need to call the cops (or social services, or nanny 911 or whoever you call in these situations).

So to try and tip the scales a little back to normal, I present:

Kaden likes...

• trying to roll over (that's new as of today!)
• holding things, like plastic rings
  
• immediately thrusting those things in his mouth
• drooling (seriously, it's raining drool, I wish the NBA would send over some of those floor wipers 'cause we've got pooling over here)
• air conditioning
• bright lights
• white noise
• ceiling fans (like a husband watching football while his scantily clad wife tries to get him to pay attention, I can not for the life of me get Kaden to play if there is a fan nearby)
• standing, and standing and standing
• smiling in his sleep (everybody now.. awww)
• smiling in the morning
• smiling at new people who talk to him
• standing
  
• napping in the Cradle Swing (the tackiest, most tricked out, hugest monstrosity of a battery-powered blessing you could ever get - great review here, 2)
• and of course, being sung to (especially high tones, and especially bad music).
  

many faces of kaden, pt 2 (now in motion)

i just couldn't help myself. but will try to keep such glistening perfect multimedia renditions of our child to a minimum (at least I included a frown)




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many faces of kaden

many faces of kaden

We love Kaden's frown. I've been trying to catch it for you guys since he started it in early april. This naturally means that just as kaden is getting sad I'm diving for the camera..I'm sure that's not what he intends, but it's just so hilariously overdone. But just look at this photo and I bet it'll make you smile. And we might as well laugh now because soon he's going to realize the unintended effect and then resort to screaming, then the "i hate you" tantrums, and eventually the storming out of the house to get married to his pet lizard in Reno.

But for now, it's just cute.

pacifier roulette

One of the primary ways we know that Kaden has actually fallen asleep, versus merely resting his eyes, is that his pacifier falls out of his mouth.

So, if the cause and effect relationship is: pacifier falling out of mouth = asleep then could you expect the reverse to also be corollary?

My natural affinity for judging things from empirical evidence means I needed to test this. Does removing a pacifier make him fall asleep? If I want the little cujo to hit the sack do I just yank the pacifier out of his mouth?

Before you scoff too loudly, it turns out that this does (carefully & sometimes) work. No, I have not found the magic baby OFF switch that allows me to plug him with a pacifier when he's wide awake and hungry, then by quickly yanking it out cause him to turn into a calmly snoring lump of jello.

But it does work. Turns out that if he has a pacifier in his mouth he gets into sucking it.. enough so that it keeps him awake longer than he would otherwise have. So (here is the tricky part) if you just catch him when he is close to asleep (eyes closed, sucking away calmly) and gently tug the pacifier out of his mouth then he puckers his lips for a second upon exit and then BAM he's asleep. We go on with our lives, he gets extra shut-eye, everyone is happy.

That is, unless you timed it wrong. Then he starts throttling back and forth because he was perfectly happy and you had to go yank something out of his mouth FOR NO GOOD REASON. You've added a good 15 minutes to his going to sleep time, all because of this ridiculous shortcut you read on the Internet.

Start-Up Mom doesn't have the stomach for it (risk isn't her thing). She starts to pull on it and he starts sucking back and she backs away in horror. Me, I just yank the sucker out and wait five seconds to see if I'm a champ or a chump. She gets consistency, I get volatility, it fits us both.

PS - we've solved the noise issue I ranted about in my last post by purchasing the loudest white noise machine we could buy, which also has this rather unique cooling feature (see more here).

a note for firemen

Kaden now regularly* takes a nap at 1pm. I understand there are fires, and that firemen are not content to simply slide down their poles and play with dalmations. Please, unless there are children inside, and unless they are napping and therefore cannot get themselves out, just let it burn until 2:30ish. If you must go squirt some water at it, please do so without resorting to those ridiculous sirens. Brookline isn't that big, you'll get there in time, meanwhile my kid is screaming awake and won't take another nap and therefore will be his own siren for the last two hours of the day.

This goes for you mr. fedex ring-buzzing delivery man - it's a package, just set it down (SLOWLY AND QUIETLY) and walk away. Same to you mr. ice machine, one more noise outa you and I'm pulling the plug.

* regularly = it's happen more than 50% of the time in the last 10 days. i admit this is not the "regular" you might refer to when expecting, say, your airplane to take off (although now that think of it...), but this is regular when your kid being one week older just added 7% to his accumulated lifespan.

Well if the post on Kaden leaning left led us to buy a Che onesie then maybe we should be out purchasing some Star Wars onesie's based on Megan's feeling of the "force" the other day.

What's that? Think Star Wars baby attire might be too cute and not hip enough? Thankfully, Modern Day Dad tracked down some so-trendy-it's-silly Star Wars baby stuff from the so-trendy-it's-silly store, Hot Topic. I think I'm leaning towards either the Darth Vadar-themed "who's your daddy?" or, based on how much he's been trying to stand and cycle his feet lately, perhaps the stormtrooper.

We could do a "revolutionaries" series with Che, Mao, and Luke Skywalker. Big board points to someone who can find a Mao onesie.

does that mean he's the chosen one?

An interesting phenomena is that Start-Up Mom's milk comes in on the same schedule as Kaden eats, so even if we are not near the little bugger we know when he's hungry because she feels it.

Yesterday we saw our first full length motion picture in the theatre, Star Wars Episode III (finally a good Star Wars, that would have been even better if they limited dialogue to the animated characters only - R2D2 carried the picture).

Anyway, watching the movie was a nice little miny escape from parenting, but we hightail it out of there afterwards to get back in time for Kaden to eat. As we're hoping in the car I mention that I forgot about the whole parenting thing for almost the entire movie. My baby-free escape was going great up until the last ten minutes of the film I was suddenly staring at 20 foot high newborn Jedi's cooing at me. So I'm telling Megan about the breaking of the baby-spell with mini-Jedi's and she concurs by saying, "yeah, they made my boobs hurt."

the largest vacuum cleaner in the world

Like many babies, Kaden takes well to vacuum cleaners, shower sounds, dryers, and just about any incredibly loud consistant sound. So I have no idea what I was nervous about putting him on a plane from Boston to DC to visit the folks. Sitting outside his window was his own personal massive noise machine. All went well, and he's even operated well in the uber-social environment of tons of relatives and friends the last couple days (photos here).

So, on the positive side - he's into people, he adapted after a day to his new sleeping environments, and the travelling was pretty simple. On the bad side, he just absolutely refused to take a bottle even after days of trying many things. So Megan needs to stick nearby and our non-baby time is limited to 2-4 hour streches. That's really not a big deal for us, but I'm sensing the grandparents wouldn't mind getting rid of us for longer so they can have him all to themselves.