Archives for posts with tag: Stay-at-home dad
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I’ve Done Something Only a Mother Would Do…

February 2, 2012 //
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I entered Gavin in a cutest baby contest.  I’m a little sheepish about this.  (SHAMELESS PLUG:  If you read Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine, you can vote for the Worm.) I never thought I would ever do such a thing.  I’m a man, for crying out loud!  (Which is something men don’t do, by the way.) So, why would I even think to do this?

I know every mother thinks their kid is the most beautiful thing in the universe, but that’s hormones playing with a woman’s mind!  I’m not a woman and I don’t even have hormones!  (At times, Steph thinks that I barely even have a heart!)  What’s gotten into me?  Does spending too much time with a baby generate estrogens in a man?  (Why is my underwear suddenly more baggy in the front?)

Is my sanity in fatherhood spiraling out of control?  Is SAHD life making me soft?  (Am I growing man boobs?)

I feel like a different man.  Not quite a wo-man, but a more sensitive man…I guess I would say a Wham!-man.  I’m no longer a Bad Boy.  For certain, Last Christmas, I was a manly man.  (How many Wham! song references can I make?) Now, I’m a sopping, photo-taking, face-wiping, diaper-changing shadow of my former self.

Is this going to lead to professional photo shoots in Gavin’s future?  Yes.  Will I be his driver for his future road-trip beauty pageants all over America? Yes!

The ultimate question is….Will I teach him how to toss a baton?  Yes!

We’ll be kicking ass and taking names, my Little Miss Sunshine.  Toddlers and Tiaras?  Hell no, Toddlers and Testicles.

Look out for us on the baby beauty pageant circuit.  We’ll be in the old Land Cruiser.

Photolicious!

 

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Categories Random Thoughts

How To Dad

February 1, 2012 //
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Cover of "How to Dad"

How To Dad By John Boswell and Ron Barrett

I received How To Dad By John Boswell and Ron Barrett as a gift.  It’s a fun book that I’m not ready for yet.  I mean Gavin isn’t ready for yet.  He’s almost 10 months old, and even though he’s big for his age, I don’t think he’s ready to catch a baseball at this moment.  (But, it won’t stop me from trying to toss one at him…)

Steph and I received a ton of books from our family before Gavin came.  (Maybe our parents agreed that she and I needed some serious guidance on parenthood.)  One day, about a year ago, I was sitting beside myself waiting for my clone baby to be born.  So, I read How To Dad from cover to cover.  It’s a short read and is 80 pages.  (I read slowly, so it was 3 weeks of reading for me.)  After going through the book, I could say that I was pretty excited for Gavin and I to start doing these fun things together.  Almost excited enough to start pulling the baby out of Steph’s body myself.

Boswell and Barrett know how to strike a chord with fathers in this book.  I kept flashing back through my own memories of my dad doing lots of these things with me.  I love my dad for spending this time with me and I hope that one day I will get to do this with my son.  With this book, I’m sure I won’t miss any of the finer father-son teaching moments.

The book is written well enough for both parents and children to read.  It’s a fun book and has cute illustrations on every page.  It touches on how to perform various life tasks (like whistling and snapping your fingers) and just as important, how not to perform them.

I enjoyed reading How To Dad before Gavin was born and I will be sure to dust it off and review it once Gavin is old enough to start doing cool stuff with his old man.  This book makes a great gift for Father’s day too!

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Overall Rating:  8 Worms

Readability:  9 Worms

Usefulness:  8 Worms  (This rating depends on how much you already know.)

Manliness:  10 Worms  (Nothing makes you more of a man than spending time with your kids.)

Retail Price:  $9.95

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Pros:

Lots of cool things that you can (learn for yourself as well as) teach your kids.  Teach them how to: throw a football, bait a hook, ride a bike, build a campfire, and lots more.  It’s geared towards kids that are a little older.  I would say this book is great for ages 4 and up.  This book gives some pretty nice techniques on HOW to teach your kids to do something.  It is an excellent guide for you to review if you tend to have difficulty explaining things to your children in a way they can understand.  In fact, you can even let your kids read it!

Cons:

Nothing.

Things I would modify:

Nothing.

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Categories Product Reviews

I’m Creeped Out Already About My Blog

January 30, 2012 //
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WordPress is a great platform for me to blog from.  On top of being laid out nicely, there’s a page that provides statistics on how many views I get, how many people clicked my pictures, where people are visiting my site from.  This last statistic is interesting for me.  Facebook seems to be where viewers notice my MVG blurbs and click through.  That’s great!  And thank you from the bottom of my heart.  There are also Google (I can’t believe that I’m getting a spelling error for ‘google’.  The google came way before the Google!  Get it right WordPress spellcheck!  Sorry, I digress.)  search terms that people use to find my webpage.  It even lets me know what people are searching for when they click to my website.  For instance, if I do a Google search for funniest dad blog in the universe, the results don’t even show mevsgavin.com.  But, let’s imagine that my blog shows up on the first page and I click through to get to mevsgavin.com.  That is a statistic that I can see.

Well, last night I was looking at the stats for MevsGavin.com and I saw that someone came through Google search engine.  The search terms were ‘child pornography’.  Yep.  If that creeps you out, then you’re probably not a pedophile.  But if it doesn’t creep you out, then maybe you should seek out some counseling.  Ok, you should seriously seek out counseling.  (In case you were wondering, on one of my other posts, I typed out those two words.  Google spiders find everything, huh?)

Anyhow, it got me thinking about what Steph told me when I started to blog about our life.  (She’s a savvy blog reader and has about 100 of them in her Google reader thing…so I defer to her opinion on all things blog-related.)  She said that I would be attracting some disturbed as well as normal people, especially as more readers get interested.  I just didn’t realize how soon the crazies would start knocking on my blog.

This is one of those things that you know happens on the internet, but you don’t really think about it until it affects you.  And it slapped me in the face last night.  After doing a double take at the WordPress statistics screen, I looked a third time.  Yep, there it was under Google search terms, correctly spelled.  I got the weird butterflies in the stomach feeling.  And then I wondered about my blog and whether or not I should keep doing this.

But, then I started thinking even without the involvement of rum.  I’m not going to stop writing this blog because some wacko wants to see naked pics of my kid.  I’m going to keep writing this blog so that my friends and family can share in watching my son grow into a lovely human being.  I’m going to keep writing this blog so I can share my family’s struggles and victories with child rearing.  I’m going to keep writing this blog so other parents can see Gavin doing the same zany stuff their kids do.  I’m going to keep writing this blog so that people can see that raising kids is a wonderful experience.

So, if you have a desire to look at fatherhood from a stay-at-home dad (SAHD), you are always welcome here.  If you have a desire for lewd behavior with children, you’d better knuckle up.  Someone may want to sit you down and have a “come to Tebow” talk.

You Want Somma Dis!?!

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Categories Random Thoughts

Missing the Milestones

January 30, 2012 //
3

When people describe other people’s inadequacies, they may say to you…”So and so has a great personality!”  which translates into “So and so is ugly as sin.”  Or…”So and so is an incredible athlete”  which means “So and so can’t think his way out of a paper bag.”  Well, we think Gavin may be the athletic type.  (Which is disappointing for now, unless we can later exploit his athletic prowess for millions of dollars.)

Pediatricians have developed a way to measure mental growth in children.  There are milestones for you (and them) to observe and chart your child’s progress.  It is based upon the average age at which babies learn to do things such as giggle, wave, make eye contact, turn when called, etc.  This milestone checklist is partly so doctors can catch abnormalities early in baby brain development.  More importantly though, milestones are used for parents to quietly rank their own child against their friends’ kids.

In the beginning, Gavin was smarter than average.  Smiling, laughing, rolling over, fetching  (or was that Duncan?).  Gavin was passing the milestones early by weeks, if not an entire month.  We would visit with the pediatrician and made sure she knew how advanced our prodigy was.  She would check off the milestone boxes on the Worm’s medical chart and we would make sure she documented the additional parlor tricks of our young Einstein.  Oh, how we enjoyed weekends at the park, jeering and throwing yogurt drops at all of the ‘normal’ kids falling off swings and tripping over themselves in the grass.  Our child was so much smarter than THAT!

Durp.

Well that’s changed, and not for the better.  Gavin’s almost 10 months old and has missed a few milestones already.  He doesn’t mimic any sounds we make (except for burping and farting).  He doesn’t say mama or dada.  He uses his forehead as an extra limb.  There’s no baby sign language coming off his hands even though I’ve been teaching him how to sign “eat” for 6 months now.  (At least, I’m learning sign language…)

Let’s just say that if licking the sliding glass door, dragging your face over the carpet, and chewing power cords comprised the milestone checklist, the Worm is in the 99th percentile.  But alas, he is doomed to be either an athlete, or worse, a reality TV actor.

 

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Categories Education

KidCo Anti-Tip TV Strap

January 29, 2012 //
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We’ve got a TV in the house.  (Yes I said house, not living room.)  It’s not big by today’s standards, just a 40″ LCD.  It probably weighs 45 lbs.  As with most LCD’s or flat screens, there’s a svelte base supporting the TV.  Barring earthquakes (we get them here in SoCal), the chances of our TV falling or toppling over had been less than 1%.  But with a baby that is crawling and pulling himself up on things, that chance has increased 10-fold.

Since we don’t want to see Gavin trying to muscle himself up onto the TV and then have it topple over and injure him (or even worse, kill him), we have installed a child proof TV anti-tip strap.  (After I became a parent, I started hearing these stories about TV’s crushing kids and furniture falling over on babies, etc.  It seemed like every day I read about a freshly pressed baby.  Not good.  So, naturally I freaked out about  all the evil house furnishings that could injure him. Duh, that’s what parents do!)

Our TV is perched on a stand on top of an entertainment center.  Our TV has mounting holes (in the back) to mount said TV onto a wall or other vertical surface.  It is these screw holes that will be used with the KidCo anti-tip TV strap.  The KidCo kit comes with a few different sized machine screws to fit the mounting holes on your TV.  This may be a problem if your TV mounting holes are recessed or odd-sized.

KidCo Anti-Tip TV Strap Kit

Check that your TV has holes in the back before purchasing this KidCo anti-tip TV strap.  Otherwise, it will be difficult to install this kit properly.  Also, you must be willing to drill holes into your entertainment center or into your wall.  Drilling into an antique entertainment center could be a deal breaker for some.  NOTE:  The KidCo kit does not have drywall anchors, so you’d have to purchase these separately to secure the anti-tip straps to a wall.

For our television setup, the KidCo Anti-Tip TV Strap mounted fairly easily.  The package says that it’s a 2-pack.  This is BS because you need both straps from the box to secure one TV.  I also had problems with the quality of screws in the bag.  Since I know more about nuts and bolts than I should, this was disappointing.  Especially if you ruin your TV mounting holes trying to force some cheap screws into your $10000 TV.  The nylon straps in the kit are well, nylon.  They seem ok for general use, so I can’t comment on the strength of them.  But, the thing that still worries me are the plastic mounting brackets.  The nylon strap has loops that sit over a hook portion of the plastic mounting bracket.  When you pull on the nylon strap, the plastic hook tends to deform.  This means that there is a chance that the anti-tip TV strap could break a plastic bracket and still fail.

Hook mounts

Even after mounting my KidCo anti-tip strap, I still worry about those plastic mounts.  I don’t feel like I should have to do that with any child safety item.  It should give you some peace of mind, right?

Bottom line:  This product provides some protection from TV tipping, but not enough for me.  Would I buy this product again?  Probably not.  I’ll be looking for another child proof TV anti-tip strap.

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Overall Rating:  3 Worms   

Ease of Use:  7 Worms  (But others can have problems with mounting to back of TV.) 

Performance:  1 Worm 

Features:  7 Worms 

Durability:  1 Worms 

Manliness:  10 Worms (We know how guys like to put things together with tools!)

Retail Price:  $10

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Pros:

Provides a little peace of mind.

Cons:

Cheap screws, no drywall anchors, flimsy plastic mounts.

Things I would modify:

Closed loop plastic fasteners. Different sized screws.  Add drywall anchors.

Where to find:

http://www.amazon.com/Kidco-Anti-Tip-TV-Strap-Pack/dp/B002SZT35S

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Categories Product Reviews

The White Women Home Birth Extravaganza!

January 28, 2012 //
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You heard me right, there’s a white woman home birth extravaganza and you’re invited!  Actually, no matter what color you are, you’re invited!  All you need for the extravaganza is a live pregnant woman, a house and a desire to deliver a baby in it!

Home-birth setup

Home Birth Setup!

Statistics show a growing concern about the hospital birthing procedures, and rightfully so.  In the great United States of America, we rank 50th in the entire world for maternal mortality.  Yep, that’s right.  Mothers dying while giving birth.  It’s not widely known, but the data speaks for itself.  (Maternal Mortality reference.)  The infant mortality rate in the U.S. is 46th in the world.  (C.I.A. reference.)  It’s pretty appalling, don’t you think?

I love my wife and I want to keep her around for a few more years.  We also plan on having a few more Gavins.  So, this article (see bottom of page) interests me, because it pertains to my wife and future children.

I despise some hospital birthing practices as I witnessed firsthand both the good and the bad sides of a hospital birth.  My own childbirth experience was beginning to turn into a science experiment before I had a “come to Tebow” talk with the staff. There were way too many interventions “being offered” to Steph in labor.  (But, that’s another story soon to be told.)  So, naturally I understand the desire of a home birth, especially if the mother and fetus are in good health.  (I would also be heavily in favor of a home birth for our next child.)  Apparently, white women are leading the charge toward more home births in the U.S.  There’s been an increase in out-of-hospital births by 29% between 2004 and 2009.  The major party working the non-traditional (I hate how the unconventional birthing practice in America has become the “traditional” method) birthing angle are, as the article title states, non-Hispanic white women.  They’ve accounted for 36% of the total increase in home births in that 6 year span.

Seeing as how I married a white woman, the chance for me getting our second baby home-birthed is better than average.  So, I feel pretty good about my odds.  (Obviously, this only makes sense from a statistical perspective…and in my own mind.)

There are good reasons for wanting a home birth.  Control of the experience, no one forcing their agenda on you, privacy, intimacy, makes for good story, etc.  Having a home birth can be safer than a hospital birth, but make sure the mother-to-be is a low-risk pregnancy before you grab that leather strap and bottle of whiskey to hunker down in the trenches with your old lady.  And do your homework.  Guys need to understand the tools, tricks, and risks of the L&D trade before they have their own home birth extravaganza.  You can’t just toss back a beer and cheer from the couch.  You’ve got to be involved.  (You can be the hero that Enrique Iglesias sings about in that song…)

Anyhow, if you’ve made it this far into my article, you’ve either got a high tolerance for number crunching, or you’re serious about making sure your ball and chain gets the best that healthcare has to offer.  If you’re looking for the latter, you may want to move to Singapore.  Just kidding, you may want to man up and learn about what you can do to increase the odds of your family’s next successful birth.  Get informed.

Article I was reading:

CDC Home Births on the Rise

There’s tons of information out there on natural birthing methods.  Google it!

 

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Categories News

Measuring Autism in Babies. Is it Possible?

January 27, 2012 //
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Major brain structures implicated in autism.

Image via Wikipedia

The article linked below is about the possibility of measuring brain patterns in babies to check for autism.  It’s an interesting idea.  What the scientists are saying is that there is a difference in the brain patterns of a normal baby making eye contact with you and an autistic baby making eye contact with you.  It goes along with one of the clinical signs of autism, which is lack of eye contact (and the non-verbal mannerisms or behavior that are associated).

Well, the study took 104 kids (6-10 month old) and measured their brain patterns.  The same study measured the same kids’ brain patterns at 3 years old.  Some of the autistic children were found to have different brain patterns than those of a normal, or undiagnosed child.

The good news is that doctors are looking for ways to diagnose autism earlier in children so that these cases can get special attention from an early age.  The bad news is that this study is small and that there was some unexplained brain behavior even in undiagnosed children.  Therefore, the study needs to be held on a larger scale and the data needs more accurate markers for interpretation to become definitive.

Anyhow, parents should be aware of how their children behave and note anything that seems unusual.  Consult a doctor or physician if anything seems out of the ordinary.  Please note that most cases of autism is diagnosed after the age of 2.

The link to the article I read:

http://news.yahoo.com/study-finds-early-signs-autism-baby-brains-170455953.html

I also remember reading a few daddy blogs with autistic kids.  Here are some links for the curious.  Here they are:

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Categories News
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