The Salmons

New Blog Location

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:53:11 -0600

It's sort of cute that this blog is still at "http://scotandanita.org/Baby", from back before Grant had a name. But for Year 2 we're moving to "http://scotandanita.org/Grant". Head over there for new posts and to get the updated RSS feed.
-Scot

Anita's Reflections on Grant, Year 1

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:52:59 -0600

It's hard to separate out a lot of my memories from the first year, but overall I'd say I remember a few distinct phases.
The first few weeks are hard. They involve intense sleep deprivation, spending 8 hours a day nursing, lots of frustration and pain associated with the nursing, another 8 hours a day trying to get the baby to fall asleep, and more time changing diapers. Then, of course, there is scavenging for food for yourself, countless loads of laundry and the task of decoding what's going on inside of the black box of a child you've been given. During this time, having my mom's home-cooked meals in the freezer was great, and Dr. Karp's 5 S's kept us mostly sane.
We took Grant with us everywhere for the first four months. It was a great idea. He would usually fall right asleep when we got in the car and was generally peaceful whenever we were out. If he did get fussy, a newborn cry is generally considered sweet (by people who don't live with him that is). It was good for us to go out in public at least once or twice a week to avoid becoming captives in our own home.
Then came the "schedule". After a few months, you want your baby to start sleeping through the night so you create a predictable routine for your baby's day. Suddenly, no more trips to get together with friends at night! Once Grant started sleeping through the night, though, he started really engaging with the world. Now he plays and show how much he loves us. It's so much fun!
The heart of this entry, though, is the change Grant has brought to my life in the past year.
Time moves very differently now. In some ways I feel like Grant's birth and newborn period was a recent event. More often, though, I feel like my life before Grant is some kind of distant past. I ask, "Was that even me?," quickly followed up by, "What did I do with all that free time?"
For the past month or so I've been struggling with how to see myself and my life now that I have "settled in" with Grant. The development process has been kind of strange. For the first two months after Grant's birth I was just scraping by, trying to meet Grant's (and my own!) basic needs. For the next four months (until Grant had been reliably sleeping through the night for a few weeks) I felt like I was drinking from the firehose; I was a new mom through and through. From about six to ten months I started being able to feel that, with some extra help around the house and rearranged hours at work, I had a shot at pulling it all off. Somewhere around ten months, though, I started struggling again. Especially the past month has been tough.
Putting a finger on the source and the fix has been hard. Scot and I have talked a lot about it lately. I have felt it more acutely than he has. For a while, it was just a nagging sense of things being a little "off" - things with me, things with Scot and me, and things with Grant and me. As my project at work entered final stretch, I've been working more hours lately and my restructured work schedule is out the window. Some of what I'm feeling is certainly the replay of the factors that led to the decision to restructure my work hours, but something broader is going on, too.
Before having a child, it's easy to think that other things you've done in your life can prepare you to have a baby. People talk about being "ready" to have a baby. After all, humans have been parenting for generations, right?
From the vantage point of one year, I know now that I wasn't prepared. I'm also pretty convinced that no one really is, at least not in American society today. Being a parent is such a different experience from any other. Sure, taking care of other people's kids might prepare you for a tiny fraction of parenting. Sure, growing up in a large family might give you an idea of the pandemonium to expect. Sure, you and your partner might think you've agreed on how you want to raise your kids. But these all only scratch the surface. In fact, if I've learned anything, it's that even what I've experienced in the first year is only the beginning. I'm sure that next year and in the years that follow I'll look back on the thoughts I have now as those of a naive parent of a one-year old who still has so much to learn!
So what were the surprises of the first year? They were plentiful, and I'll try to capture a few here.
Grant is amazing. When I used to think of babies, I mostly thought of the basic needs stuff - cry, feed, diaper, repeat. I was shocked by how quickly this wasn't all there was. Admittedly, I could have used that first smile a little earlier - say at week 3 when the sleeplessness peaked. But I still remember the joy at two months when he first watched his mobile go around above his head and when he swatted at the stuffed butterfly that dangled above him in his play gym. Now the advances are coming much faster and in bigger steps, but I'm still just as amazed.
Getting started with breastfeeding is unbelievably hard for a "natural" activity. In this regard, humankind was surely much better off prior to the development of formula. When the breastfeeding experience was nearly universal among the female population I imagine there were lots of people around to instruct, coach and correct breastfeeding problems. In our society we try to pay a lactation consultant for a 60 minute session to transfer all this information. I suppose that learning to breastfeed today is like what learning to ride a bike would be like if an entire generation didn't learn to ride bikes and then their kids wanted to pick up the tradition again. Wow. Hard. Everyone who wants to breastfeed should take a class before giving birth.
After the first two months, breastfeeding was wonderful. Beyond the medical benefits for both him and me, it offered a special closeness with my little boy who is already little no more.
Before my pregnancy I didn't have much weight to spare. You can imagine my shock that in the past year I lost not only lost the 38 pounds I gained while pregnant, but also another 10 pounds. I just couldn't eat enough to keep up with Grant's nursing. Unfortunately, I don't think this was a healthy change for me. I hope to gradually regain some weight as I wean him.
In our pre-Grant days, occasionally there would be times when Scot & I found agreement elusive. This didn't happen often, but like most couples, I suspect, Scot and I found that sometimes just agreeing to disagree was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Enter Baby. When it comes to a decision about Grant, agreeing to disagree isn't usually an acceptable solution to either of us. The stakes are too high. This is our baby!
Fortunately, Scot and I have parenting philosophies that are fundamentally similar - we generally agree on what we're trying to accomplish. The things we disagree about tend to be whether, at 3:30 am, to give a bottle to our baby who has been crying for 2 hours. The books and the pediatrician say that feeding him reinforces that waking up and crying for attention in the middle of night is okay. But 3-frigging-thirty anything that can get you back to sleep has great appeal. (This always happens on nights that you went to bed late, by the way.) These situations make for difficult arguments. They require resolution right at that moment, the situation is tense and emotions are high. You can't turn to Grant and say, "Sweetie, will you just quiet down while Mommy and Daddy sort this out?"
These small yet somehow monumental decisions come up all the time in parent-land. With more decisions to be made, we argue more than in pre-Grant times. We were never particularly good at arguing pre-Grant, but we didn't spend a lot of time doing it, either. The occasional nuisance level of frustration that used to come with arguing now accumulates into a bigger burden.
One really fun change in our relationship is watching each other interact with Grant. We both have our own styles with him, and I'm so happy that Grant gets to experience multiple ways of playing and interacting. Seeing your spouse playing with your child is a very fun experience, indeed.
Calling each other Mommy and Daddy all the time for the first couple months is really fun, but the tendency to keep doing it can make it easy to forget that there is more to your relationship than just your relationships with your child.
I get butterflies all the time now - at least once a day when I peek in on him before going to bed.
It took a bit, but I figured out that you don't have to do everything fully by the book. It's okay to adapt some things to better suit you. Of course, it's good to try to understand the rationale behind the recommendations first. In a lot of cases, you'll probably be making some kind of tradeoff, but sometimes it's just better that way.
Teaching Grant and watching things click is awe-inspiring. How does the brain work? I don't know, but I have quite the laboratory now!
I was somehow caught off guard by how relentless an infant is in his demands. Day in, day out, multiple times per day you must address the wail of a hungry, tired, new-diaper-needing and/or anxious child. Logically, I knew this going in. But there is a degree of "near-inescapableness" about it that can weigh on you after a time. A co-worker of mine commented that people who say their wife is a ball and chain have it all wrong. The wife is fun and enjoyable; you can sometimes be together and sometimes apart. The kids are the ball and chain. The full sentiment was lost on me at the time, but I get it now. With other adults, you can do some things together, but still each stake out some time to yourself. Someone always has to be watching a child. If there are two of you sharing the watching, it will be your turn a lot of the time, even if you just watched the child yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before...
I have a whole new perspective on single moms and families where parents work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Among other things, I now have a hard time faulting them if they haven't done all the proactive, warm-fuzzy parenting things that supposedly really make kids thrive. Just addressing the basic needs is hard work! While I suppose that from an outside perspective it might look like I have it together, I've felt run down a lot of the time. I sometimes get frustrated (and even angry on occasion!) when Grant is still crying for no good reason I can discern. And I have a great partner to share the load!
In fact, so much energy goes into just basic needs that it's easy to not allocate enough time for other things. In the past couple months, Scot and I have been talking about the reduced deposits in the "happy bank" of late. This is a pretty common concept in relationship theory. We originally heard about it in a parenting class at church. The idea is that in a relationship, when you share happy times together, do things for each other, etc. you are making a deposit that is there to draw on in later tough times. Over a period of time, successful relationships typically make several times as many deposits as withdrawals. Then there is lots of goodwill built up to make it through the stressful times. It's an interesting concept, and I can see where it's coming from. When I think about our relationship's happy bank I wonder if "me" and "us" getting lost in all the Grant hubbub. We've talked about some ideas to make sure that doesn't happen.
And the last one for tonight - having your child light up when you want into the room is one of the best feelings in the world.
- Anita

Scot's Reflections on Grant, Year 1

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:52:31 -0600

I'm not naturally a particularly reflective person, but the first year of being a parent is definitely an opportunity to make an exception.
The main thing I think about when I think about being a parent is the way time has passed, expanded or compressed by the magic of memory. It rarely seems like Grant has been in our life for a year -- he's been with us either far longer, or far shorter, than a year's worth of time. And it rarely seems like Grant is now 5% the way to adulthood. He's either racing towards it and will be "all grow'd up" before we know it, or he's still a baby and far, far, far from voting, college, and all that.
I've had this conversation a couple of times recently with friends -- fellow parents and otherwise -- and we realized that life is always this way. For my high school buddies and I, a few magically expanded months in 1989 apprenticed to Jason, Alan, and Mr. B. took us from wide-eyed and vaguely seasick middle-school landlubbers to self-assured pirates of the high school, though we were only freshmen. Six magically expanded weeks at St. Paul's ASP dominates my memory in a way that most normal-time years can only envy. The four-plus years it took me to convince Anita that she should marry me are magically compressed in my mind; our courtship but a brief prelude to our marriage, though the calendar says the marriage has only just now outlived her evaluation period.
Good times. Maybe I'm more reflective than I thought when I, you know, try to reflect.
Anyway, this same magic time thing happens when you have a baby. If I just say how I feel about the time, it's too silly to believe. I feel like I've been a parent most of my life. I have only the vaguest of memories of that distant past when Grant had his first solid food, or when he slept on his back. I sort of doubt I could reliably swaddle him anymore, I'd have to relearn the technique. Talking about this with friends, I had to be reminded of the big (and, I would have thought, memorable) party we threw for our joint birthdays (his 2-month and our 30th and 32nd).
On the other hand I can give you a minute-by-minute report of the day he was born, as if it were yesterday. The first weeks and months are completely compressed in my mind; I know I was home with Anita and Grant for a while, then Grant had lots of checkups with the doctor, then I went back to work, then Grant started taking a bottle, then Anita started working again, then Grant had a plane flight, then we had a bunch of play dates, then Grant started sleeping through the night, and so on in some order...but really that might all have happened in a few days as far as my memory could tell you. He was a newborn, and then sometime later he wasn't, and life got interesting and time expanded. A lot.
Not, I should note, that he wasn't interesting as a newborn. Contrary to all my expectations of oxymoronically stressful boredom, I loved being the parent of a newborn. I recall finding him utterly fascinating. I distinctly remember taking great pleasure in what are clearly uninteresting events such as "almost rolling halfway over". But I admit that period suffers from magical memory compression.
By comparison the time since, roughly, sleeping through the night, or eating solid food, or sitting up...which in my memory (and I think in real life, too) happened one after another...since then, wow, the time in my memory just can't expand enough. So many more things pile up each day, new food, new looks, new sounds, new actions. I feel like the Grant I know has always been able to cruise, has always been able to carry toys around, has always pushed the laundry basket wherever he wants, has always been a threat to eat paper, has always had lots of hair (though for some reason the teeth still seem new), has for sure always been able to say "dada". These things are big enough, I guess, that I can't just compress them yet. Maybe next year.
-Scot

1-year Birthday

Fri, 7 Dec 2007 21:31:42 -0600

Grant had a busy day today. He was greeted by a chorus of, "Happy birthday!" when he woke up this morning. We then carted him off to his one year well baby check with Dr. Nichols. He is now 30 1/4 " tall (75th percentile), 20 pounds, 9 ounces in weight (25th percentile), and has a head circumference of 47.7 cm (75th - 90th percentile). The doctor asked Mommy and Daddy lots of questions about what Grant's up to. She said it's a little unusual for him not to say one or two words by now (to connect Mama and Dada with us, for example) and that he doesn't point to things he wants. He knows his name and "no", but she usually expects more communication by now. She said it might just be that because he's so physical he's just not focusing his energy in that way right now. It's just something to keep an eye on. So our homework for our next visit is to start naming lots of things around him and asking him to choose between different items.
Then it was Mommy and Daddy's turn to ask the doctor some questions while Grant played with the otoscope. Then came time for the shots. He got four today. He is now interested in crying about them a lot more than he has been in the past. Even so, by the time we left the office we were down to sniffles. By the time we were at the car, he was pretty well calmed down. From there it was off to see Ms. Leticia and Ms. Liz who had their own happy birthdays ready for when we talked in the door.

Grant had a good day at day care and then helped Mommy make sweet potatoes after work. Then we all loaded up for an evening of fun with our couples' group.
Grant got to open one present from Aunt Sho today. He got a rattle and bib. He'll get to open the others at his mini-party tomorrow.
Yesterday was no less fun. Grant tried Amy's Just Vanilla ice cream for the first time on our "one year ago today on Grant's due date we went to Amy's for labor-inducing ice cream" anniversary trip to Amy's. He made a horrible grimace for the first bite. He tried a little more, but still wasn't enthused. Who knew ice cream was an acquired taste?
These days Grant:
• Regularly walks across the room successfully and can stand without holding onto anything. He often carries his push rattle as he walks across the room, and is surprisingly sturdy on his feet for someone just getting started.
• Takes only one nap a day. It's typically around 1:30 for two hours.
• Eats some of our meals, some as finger food and others spooned. He rejects a lot of food, though. He won't eat chopped or whole veggies or ground beef. He reluctantly might have a little pasta or cheddar cheese. He'll eat fruit, baby cereal, and pureed infant foods. His favorite foods are Mommy's milk, bread-like foods, cheerios, meat sticks and yogurt.
• Likes to feed his pasta, bread and cheese to Mommy and Daddy.
• Drinks four 6.5-ounce bottles per day.
• Has figured out how to turn the knobs on the stove and has nearly pulled the oven door open.
• Can reach higher shelves.
• Understands "no". He obeys sometimes.
• Remains calm during some diaper changes and doesn't thrash around as much as he did a couple months ago. He frequently gets himself to his knees or standing partway through a change, though.
• Has figured out how to operate a toy train that Kelly gave him. He pushes on the head of the conductor, and it goes.
• Likes his new car seat, but wants to play with the tethers.
• Has had some trouble reliably sleeping through the night lately. Ever since our first cold snap about a month ago, he has tended to stir around 1:30 am for about half the nights. On a few nights (ones where we went to bed late, of course) he has fully woken up and thrown a fit. One of those nights we were up with him for two hours before we eventually gave him a bottle. After that he finally went back to bed. That made for a really bad day at work for me the next day.
• Moves less in his crib at night (i.e. isn't in a new position absolutely every time we check on him).
• Likes feeding himself.
• Opens his mouth for the toothbrush... at least for a bit.
• Loves to give and take items. We'll hand a toy back and forth at least 10 times before he tires of this.
• Throws temper tantrums. He'll cry for 15 to 20 minutes at a time until we find a way to change the situation somewhat (hopefully without reinforcing that screaming gets you what you want).
• Still has six teeth.
• Goes to bed at 8 and gets up shortly after 7am.
• Enjoys holding his swaddling blankets. They are good for peek-a-boo and make a great chew-rag.
• Has been saying "ma-ma" and "da-da", but still doesn't seem to connect them with us.
• His favorite toy this month is his "G-R-A-N-T" puzzle from Rootin Ridge. He's always carrying one of the pieces around the house. He likes taking them out, but hasn't started putting them back into the puzzle. He does sometimes successfully put shapes into his shape sorter toy, which is pretty impressive to watch.
• Cried when we dropped him off at daycare two days this week. Until this week, he hadn't done it again since the first time he did so a few weeks ago.
Anita
P.S. We will probably archive this year's blog and start a new one for next year, since the iWeb file is getting pretty unwieldy. If any changes to URLs or RSS feeds are needed we will let you know.

Car Seat Pickin'

Wed, 5 Dec 2007 23:01:52 -0600

You know those personality tests you can take? Special today at scotandanita.org: "one moment in the life of a person with the Strategic signature theme: Car Seat Selection". For more on "signature themes", you can read Now, Discover Your Strengths or the newer version Strengths Finder 2.0. Anyway, as you read on: yes, I think this way all the time. But most of you already knew that.
A couple of weeks ago we happened to do a rough weigh-and-measure of Grant at home, just to see how he was doing. About 22 lbs and 30" tall. Hey, waitaminute, those are the height and weight limits on his infant car seat (shown above 1 year ago)! We need a new seat, pronto!
So let’s start with the law. Each state has its own child car seat rules. Texas law requires a child to be in a safety seat or booster seat until 5 years old and 36" tall. Other states require to various combinations of 8 years old, 80 pounds and 4'9". Since the law rarely reflects the latest research, we can also go to the American Academy of Pediatrics. They recommend a child be in a safety seat or booster seat until 8-12 years old and 4'9" (57") tall. Wow. Longer than I thought.
It surprised me how long it took to sort out the different classes of car seats:
Infant car seats are designed only for rear-facing use. They start at newborn and go to about 20-22 pounds. Grant’s current seat is an infant seat. We liked it because it has a handle and fittings for carrying it and putting it into a stroller, features only offered on infant seats.
Regular convertible seats are designed to be used rear facing for a while and later forward facing. But most of them don’t fit properly in one or both orientations in our Mazda 626. They start at newborn and go to about 65 pounds or 49".
Compact convertible seats are like regular convertible seats, but they are physically smaller and can't support as large of a child. They start at newborn and go to about 40 pounds or 40".
Harnessed booster seats are designed to be forward facing only. The seat belt attaches the booster to the car. A harness in the booster restrains the child. They start at about 22 pounds (roughly a year) and go to 65-80 pounds or 49"-53". While Grant could technically use one of these now, it is generally recommended that a child remain rear-facing as long as possible. The crash forces are distributed across the child's entire back side when they are rear-facing. When forward facing, the pressure is applied only over the areas in contact with the harness.
High back booster seats are designed to be forward facing only. The child is restrained by the seatbelt that passes through the booster, not any additional harness. These are designed to start at "roughly" age 4 (30 pounds and 38"). The recommendation, though, is that a child remain in a 5-point harness until 4 years and 40 pounds.
Low back booster seats are designed to be forward facing only. They are used when a child is too tall to continue to use a high back booster safely. A low back booster requires the car to have a head restraint in the seat. The child should be 4 to about 10 years old, 40-100 pounds and 40-57".
The analysis:
Despite our initial desire to put Grant forward facing to let him see the world, we decided to keep him rear facing until it became a real problem. Once we decided that, we knew we would be looking at either a regular or compact convertible.
I took a look at the growth charts to try to predict how long we could use various car seats. Assuming Grant stays in roughly the same percentiles he's been in, it looks like the height will probably be the limiting factor for Grant. I compared three car seats by estimating how old Grant would be when he hit their maximum size limits.
Height:
Britax Companion infant seat (current seat): 30"
Britax Diplomat Compact Convertible Seat: 40"
Britax Boulevard Convertible Seat: 49"
Some boosters: 57"
30" 40" 49" 57"
Assume 75% 11 mo 3.5y 6.75y 10.25y
Assume 50% 12.5mo 3.75y 7.5y 11.25y

Weight:
Britax Companion infant seat: 22 lbs
Britax Diplomat Compact Convertible Seat: 40 lbs
Britax Boulevard Convertible Seat: 65 lbs
Some boosters: 80+ lbs
22 40 65 80 lbs
Assume 50% 11mo 4.75y 9.25y 11y
Assume 25% 13.5mo 5.5y 10.25y 12y
So if we went with a compact convertible with a 40 pound and 40" limit, Grant would probably be able to use it until he was 3 1/2 or 3 3/4 years old (2 1/2 years from now). At that point, he would be too light (31-35 pounds) for a low back booster to really be appropriate. We would to switch to either a harnessed booster or a high back booster. If we chose a harnessed booster with a higher limit range (80 pounds or 53"), Grant would be able to use it until he was 7 3/4 to 9 1/4 years old. At that point we would switch to a low back booster.
If we went with a regular convertible with a 65 pound and 49" limit, Grant would probably be able to use it until he was 6 3/4 to 7 1/2 years old. At that point he’ll weigh about 50 pounds and we would switch directly to a low back booster.
So after all that work, it appeared that the decision boils down to 1) whether a regular convertible fits in our cars which would allow us to go straight to a low back booster after that seat vs. having to buy an harnessed or high back booster seat to bridge a gap,and 2) the features of each seat. So we started trying out seats. For some, we didn’t like their buckle system. Others were really hard to adjust. One seemed way too roomy side to side. The big thing that rules out a lot of car seats for us was that the maximum height on the harness clearly wasn't going to last Grant very long. Remember that when the car seat is rear-facing the straps should be below the child's shoulders, but when it’s forward facing (when you're child is taller), they should be above. When we put Grant in some car seats even now, we could tell that he would outstrip the maximum height slot of the seat much sooner than he should. So we wound up focusing our search on seats that have a continuously adjustable harness height that goes up higher than some of the slotted seats. But the real eye-opener didn't come until we took sample units out to our cars to try installing them. The regular convertibles just don’t fit properly in Scot's car in a rear facing orientation. Different seats have different fit problems, but the end result is that if we bought a regular convertible and used it in Scot's car, we'd have to use it forward facing. Since we don't use his car to transport Grant very often we decided that would be okay, but if we regularly used his car, that would have ruled out regular convertibles.
We also looked at Consumer Reports rankings of car seats. By the time that we eliminated the ones that didn't have tall harness adjustments, that had annoying features or that wouldn't fit properly in our cars, we were pretty much left with an empty list. None of the seats we were considering were even evaluated. The NHTSA also does ease of use ratings that we considered.
In the end, we chose the regular convertible Britax Boulevard.
- Anita