AC Capehart capehart

When I was growing up, I didn’t have to worry about what my parents wrote about me. Neither of them wrote much. OK, my mom’s great about letters and cards, and my dad’s pretty good about postcards from key locations, or travel events. And I know my mom journals. But that kind of communication is, I think, fundamentally different from the public forum of blogging. As I continue to be a daddy blogger, I pay attention to others of the same ilk. While some, like dadblog have continued through the ever growing and changing process of childhood development, a number of others like Being Daddy and Trixie Update have hung up the towel, generally on the “privacy of my daughter” front.

I have just finished my first WordPress plugin. If you’ve noticed Sam’s age popping up at the bottom of posts in the Childhood & Fatherhood category, that’s my plugin at work. If you’ve noticed pages not acting quite right, well, that’s my plugin when it wasn’t working. 🙂

I think I’ve gotten it all fixed up now, and am releasing it to the relatively small community of people who read my blog. Of my readers, I think that only one other (non-family) reader blogs with wordpress (Hi Luke), so this is a fairly small release. Once I’ve had it in play a little longer, and maybe tested it on the 2.0.x version of WordPress, I’ll see about announcing it to a larger audience.

I write a fair amount about my new daughter. Becoming a dad has shifted my life around quite a bit. As I write things about when she first smiled, or first rolled over, it was keeping the date of when those things happened, but the I’d have to do date-math in my head to figure out how old she was. I don’t like doing date-math in my head. So, I wrote a wordpress plugin to do it for me. This plugin adds text to the bottom of each post about my daughter saying how old she was when that post was written. It is made general enough, however, to be about the duration to or from any particular event you care to track.

This is the parent page for wordpress plugins that I write. It may end up being a fairly small list, but I’ve been impressed with how easy it is to throw together a plugin for wordpress, so as other wordpress-thorns appear in my side, I may soothe the itch here. In the meanwhile, there’s just “Duration” — A plugin to include how long it has been since some event (or until some event) calculated between the time the post was written, and an arbitrary event set by the blogger.

I realized today as I was feeding Sam that there were worries that I’d had when she was younger that I no longer have.

I took a moment to revel in them.

• Breathing — OK, we aren’t out of the woods entirely for SIDS at this age, but we’re past most of the serious danger area. When Sam was a few weeks old, I remember waking up in the night, and not being able to hear her breathe. It took great force of will not to get out of bed and go check just to be sure — force of will I didn’t always have.
• Latch — I remember really worrying about how Sam attached to the bottle, and how that meant she would or would not attach to the breast later. She now eats well from both, and doesn’t seem to mind switching back and forth. I’ve been reasonably happy with the Avent bottles/nipples we’ve used with the minor exception that it’s easy to put the nipple on too tight, cutting off the airflow in, and it’s easy to put the nipple on too lose, causing formula/breast milk leak all over pajamas.
• head position — I remember worrying a great deal about the fact that she preferred to look to the right. She still seems to have a mild preference for looking that way, at least during sleep, but it’s mild, and she seems plenty capable of looking all over the place.

Some worries are still with me — her growth still causes me some willies despite the pediatrician giving her an “excellent velocity” report. Her sleep is of some concern. We’ve got 3 books and one video on it, I’m sure we’ll figure something out. Still, even if I can’t get her to bed, at least I’ve put a few worries to bed.

We did it. And it was at least a moderate success. Sam had her first non-milk, non-formula food today! We mixed up some rice cereal with formula, and fed it to her with a spoon. A real (baby) spoon! It’s hard to tell how much she actually took, as a great deal of it landed on her bib, her clothes, her parents, her chair, her floor, etc. (Not really all that bad.) She seemed interested in it. She watched the spoon, she grabbed at it, she chewed it. I have some pictures, and a small video I’ll add when I get a chance.

Sam had her 4-month checkup at the pediatrician last Thursday, and in addition to shots, got a clean bill of health. Her percentiles are generally up as well, and she has a good weight “velocity.” This means that a lot of changes are starting now.

• We’ll be able to start giving her solids as soon as we like.
• We need to start setting good bedtime habits and establish a bedtime routine.
• We can start letting her sleep for longer periods of time.

When put in bullet-form like that, it doesn’t seem like much. But it feels like it’s really shaken our world. Thursday night, Carolyn got more than 4 hours continuous sleep. In the past, we’d been having to wake Sam to nurse, letting her go no more than 5 hours between sessions — and even that no more than once per day. I’ll report more when we actually give our first go at solids.

When Mom was away at work, Dad declared that it was time for a fashion shoot. Unfortunately, Dad was so lazy, he didn’t even go upstairs to get a white sheet as a backdrop, making do, instead, with a few gauzy cloth diapers. It didn’t come too well, but it’ll just have to do. So, here you go. Altoona’s youngest calendar girl is now also a fashion model — showing off all (well, some) of the 0-3 month styles before she outgrows them.

I don’t want to do a blog category on marketing genius, but I’m afraid it’s come up again here.

Partly because we have a good friend who’s a P&G baby, partly because P&G supports Upromise, but mostly (and I really do mean mostly) because it’s cheap, we buy “Joy“dishwashing liquid.

First off, I think “Joy” is an odd name for dishwashing liquid. Expecting a chuckle of support and a comment like “Yeah, why don’t they call it ‘kleenzgud’?” from Carolyn, I mentioned this to her. Instead, she said, “I think it’s a perfectly fine name! What would you have them call it? Drudgery?”

Well, Sam, I’m off to a late start again, but I’ve not forgotten your newsletter. As in previous months, a lot has changed this month. Highlighting these changes has been your basic physical shape. I’ve been facinated by reviewing pictures from previous months. Dr. Karp (The Happiest Baby on the Block) talks about the first three months as the “fourth trimester” and it was certainly a reasonable description for you. Your early months were in many ways that of a fetus that happens to be out in the world. Your body this month, while still very baby, has been starting to seem more… “person-like” for lack of a better description.