Braden's Activities

Braden is growing up so fast that it makes my head spin. We have seemingly in days went from tiny fragile baby, to sleepless nights in the living room, to semi sleepless nights in his room, to rolling over, to crawling, to crawling everywhere, to present day where Braden tries to pull up on things. Actually he successfully pulled himself to his feet all by himself for the first time yesterday. We were all pretty excited. Of course he proceeded to topple over right after that.

Braden is going on 8 months now and the world is his playground. He crawls everywhere. If we need some rest, then the cow gate goes up and he stays in the living room. While in there he constantly crawls to every corner of the room. He is always heading for my PS3 which requires us to go over and get him. Then he crawls to the other corner where there is a picture frame on the floor. We haven't decided what to do with it for months so it sits there. Apparently now its purpose is to attract Braden's attention. After that we take him back to the middle of the room again.

Next he crawls over to the gate. He shakes it back in forth and screams Attica! Attica!

Then, tired of all the nonsense, he crawls over to where his mommy is sitting, and grabs her legs. He tries to pull up until he is rescued by his best friend.

This is how it goes if the gate is closed. If you open the gate then the whole house is fair game. Many times he crawls out of the gate and heads straight for his room. He knows that there are plenty of toys in there so off he goes down the long hallway to his own bedroom carnival. Apparently the 100 toys scattered around the other parts of the house are not enough for him.

He doesn't like to be left alone though. If we leave the room he will crawl after us. If we are in the kitchen cooking he is in the Kitchen playing with the magnets on the fridge. If we are in the bathroom he is at least trying to get in there with us. If we go to the bedroom he is in there inspecting our shoes. That boy is everywhere.

I am glad that he is developing at a good rate. I am glad he is learning everything he should be learning. I am glad that he loves us and wants to be with us. I only wish we didn't have to constantly rescue him from danger whether to himself or to highly priced electronics.

What we need is a white padded room for Braden.

Times They Are a Changing

Learning to be a Dad is an ever changing journey. You start out with a shiny new baby that is an eating and pooping machine. That pooping machine sleeps a lot but not for long periods of time. That leads to your first great challenge in parenthood. I have written ad nauseam about that topic here, here, and here. Eventually you get a routine worked out that helps you sustain life.

Then you are on to new problems. The kid needs more clothes because he is growing like crazy. He needs new diapers because he is overfilling them. Those things are super absorbent, but at some point they are just full. Of course then the next closest absorbent material is clothing. This is not desirable so you get bigger diapers.

There are always changes. Just about the time you get one thing figured out you move on to another. I wrote Tuesday about our newest challenge of teething. We are managing that like anything else. You just jump right in and do your best.

Recently Arica and I have started sleeping in the same bed again. It is a welcome development. For the past several months one of us had slept on an air mattress in Braden's room every night. We still spend some time on the mattress most nights, but at least we are getting a partial nights rest in our own bed.

So our lives are being changed by the additions of teething and sleeping in our own bed. These are balancing forces of good and evil. There is another storm of change brewing on the horizon. We can see it coming ,but are not sure when it will arrive. That storm is crawling Braden. He is currently scooting around his blanket on his belly. He constantly turns over on his stomach to survey his surroundings. He then sets his sights on something and heads that direction. Braden is not overly mobile right now, but it is only a matter of time.

He has all the proper crawling motions. He already knows how to spot things that belong to Mommy and Daddy. Of course those are the things that interest him most. He loves water bottles. Any time we drink from a water bottle he is dead set on getting that bottle. To a lesser degree he likes any thing we use to take a drink.

From what I can imagine our lives in the crawling era will be very different. I fully suspect that one day I will leave the room for something only to return and find Braden gone. He will be off on a wild adventure. We will have to box him in and out of certain places. I will have to crawl around the house looking for things that might by perilous to a crawling baby. The pack and play might be used as a cage rather than just a changing table. I definitely expect it to be insane.

With that I want to say goodbye to stationary Braden. We had some fun but it will soon be over. Please don't forget your Daddy when you are out cruising the hallways.

There is an Inch Worm in My House

I last posted on Friday about my lifelong involvement with raising, shooting, and eating animals. Since that posting I have found myself the care taker of another interesting member of the animal kingdom. This animal is of course the inch worm.

The inch worm moves by inching up the back half of his body toward the front making a big hump in the middle. Then he inches the front forward to even out his body horizontally. By doing this the worm can travel forward half a body length per effort.

The inch worm at my house doesn't move nearly that much, but he is trying. For those of you still wondering, yes the inch worm is my son Braden. We were sitting in the floor playing last night when he decided to show Mom and Dad his new skill. Braden has never liked being on his stomach. He gets upset easily when placed there. Sometimes he just rolls back onto his backside immediately. We place him on his stomach fairly often so he can work on his baby fundamentals. His fundamentals are more advanced than the last time I posted about them. Now he can easily raise his head so all of his work is toward the ever freeing skill of crawling.

Until last night Braden moved about his blanket on the floor by rolling or rotating around on his rear end. He could reach the 4 corners of his colorful blanket world by doing those things. Last night he added a new move to his repertoire. Without provocation he rolled onto his stomach and started inching around. He put forth maximum effort to move very little, but of course I was still proud.

I have no idea what the normal development pattern is for a baby. Before Braden I had exactly zero experience with that sort of thing. Now I consider myself well versed on baby development and parenting up to 5 months of age. Anything beyond that can be filed under "wait and see." I am pretty certain that imitating that ever so interesting inch worm is a step in the right direction towards crawling. Maybe I should say it is a step in the direction of a having a wild baby roaming the house at all times. That in turn is a step towards adding border control agent and bounty hunter to the list of jobs Arica and I perform every day.