Monkey House

People visiting with Cole will quickly notice bumps and bruises. His shins in particular seem to take a beating; though, now that he’s walking I’m not entirely sure where from. It used to be my suspicion that the bruises were from crawling over our long gate (there’s a metal bar along the bottom, not just bare floor), but now I’m not so sure.

He is a head-clanging fool. Gave himself a good little goose-egg when he unexpectedly threw his head forward into Alex’s earlier this morning.

Most of the time, you don’t feel guilty about these things. As a parent, you know that you can’t protect them from everything, and you know that a few bumps and bruises aren’t a bad learning tool. But sometimes, intellectualizing these things doesn’t take away from that horrid feeling when your child is crying (screaming!) from physical pain.
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Today is Cole’s first birthday.

It’s 2:37 so I’m sure I’m not going to do justice to how great that fact makes me feel.

A bit of self reflection before I start yammering about the Monkey: I think I wanted to be a dad every since I was in my teens. Not that I wanted to be a teen father. My parents taught me to be smarter than that. And I certainly didn’t mind spending my early-to-mid twenties not having become one yet. But for many years I knew the day would eventually come. And I knew I’d be pretty good at it. I feel I was right, though of course there are good days and there are bad. But for this past year, the good days have been really really good. And since I get to spend the bad days with my beautiful wife and our son, they’re ultimately ‘good’ days, too. I tell people this all the time: Yeah, it’s hard… yeah, it’s mainly work (repetitive, frustrating work sometimes!)… but there isn’t a day—not a SINGLE day—that I don’t laugh, smile, and feel enormously lucky. So it’s really been a year that despite requiring much sacrifice, has really resulted in me becoming the dad I always wanted to be, and becoming more “myself” every day with the more I give to my family.

But enough about me… this is a day for the little guy, after all! Here are some of the things I keep coming back to:
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Alex and I were going to take the monkey to the beach, but I was worried that we were cutting into naptime, so we headed home instead. Not long after, we realized that he wasn’t going to sleep, so Mama Monkey came up with the great idea of going to one of the local parks, which has a water feature thingy. It was his first time getting his hands in the sand (which he then proceeded to try and eat, of course), and was the first time I had been with him when he was enjoying slides, tunnels, swings, and other good fun activities!

I have to say, it was awesome. I love seeing him learning new things, having new fun, and trying his best to be so independent while he’s at it. What a cool little dude we have. I think in this case, the pictures say it all…. enjoy!   Read the rest of this entry »

This video was taken only a few days after Cole started walking. At first he was only walking a few steps at a time, but as you can see in this video, he began “catching” himself and adjusting his balance. And then there’s the push-truck-thingy. It’s not the same fun as fully-independent walking, but it’s good fun nonetheless. Particularly because his Nana taught him to say “vroom vroom” and he’s all over that. He says “vroom vroom” when he plays with his toy firetruck, too, so I think he’s making the linguistic connections. Neat!

Here’s the video, which is completely unedited ’cause I just don’t have the time to make it short and sweet. Maybe a bit long for some of y’all but there ya go.

It hasn’t happened yet, but Alex figures it’ll be coming sooner rather than later.

Cole is fighting his afternoon nap. He doesn’t want it, doesn’t think he needs it (and in fairness, for parts of this afternoon, he had energy and wakefulness to spare), and isn’t going to let his parents make him have one.

Well, that last part isn’t entirely true. After one false start and some time spent back on the main floor puttering around, he eventually went down for a nap. And he was SOME GRUMPY when he woke up from it. Which implied to me that he would have been better off staying down, but Alex and I knew without question that a 4:00pm bedtime was NOT going to work. So we just let him slowly un-grumpify over the period of the next 30 mins.

It’s going to be a rough transition, though. After he wakes up in the morning, he’s only good for 1.5 or 2 hours before he’s rubbing his eyes. So when does the 1 nap happen? If he starts to slowly extend that morning gap until lunchtime, then it might happen. But if he doesn’t start ramping it up a bit, we’re goners. He can’t go from a 10:00 wake-up all the way until a 7:00pm bedtime, or even a 6:00pm bedtime. Which means that we’ll have to deal with Scrodgy McGrumblebutt for a significant chunk of his day (worse, the daycare provider and Grammy will), or we’ll have to continue with 2 naps and an increasingly later bedtime. Which is no good either.

Not sure how we’ll approach it yet. Obviously, trying to “force” him to stay awake until a lunchtime nap will help him stretch out that morning gap, but it’s not going to be pretty.