Studio711.com – Ben Martens

My son loves to play with water from hoses and tubes. While watching him splash around in the tub the other night, I got an idea for some PVC toys. A quick search revealed that lots of other people have had this revelation too. Here’s how to make your own set:

The project is simple. Grab an assortment of PVC elbows and T’s from your home improvement store. I chose 2” but go with whatever looks good to you. They’re a couple bucks each so you might want to start small and see if you like the idea before buying a bunch of them. While you’re there, pick up a some suction cups. I found them over by the picture hanging hardware. The little ones that hold 1 pound each work fine.

Drill two or three holes in each PVC piece that’s just big enough to hold the suction cup. I then used white Gorilla glue to hold them in place because that’s what I had on hand. So far it is holding up to tugs and pulls.

Once the glue has set, stick them to your tub wall and pour water in them. It’s not perfect but with a little practice you can get water to fall from piece to piece. I might also pick up some tubing to connect them, but this is plenty of fun for now.

There have been a lot of surprises and lessons learned from being a first-time parent. One of the biggest that I keep coming back to is how impossible it is to apply the scientific method to parenting. The scientific method basically says that you ask a question, do some research, construct a hypothesis, test it with experiments, analyze your data and then draw conclusions. Surely solving a parenting challenge could be approached the same way?

In theory, yes, it would work, but when you’re only dealing with even just one kid, the problems come at you so fast that it’s impossible to isolate one problem at a time and experiment with solutions. Your child isn’t sleeping well? Try making the room warmer or colder, putting him to bed sooner or later, feeding him more or less during the day or at night, sleeping with white noise or without noise, and the list goes on and on. The first night you pick one experiment and try it. Ok that didn’t work. But before you can try the next experiment on your list, you have a new set of problems like your kid missed a nap or your kid is teething, etc. The experiments start compounding until it feels like you’re just struggling to keep up, much less making any progress on the problems. And even if something you try does work one day, it doesn’t mean it will ever work again. Or just because it didn’t work today, it doesn’t mean it won’t work tomorrow. Instead of driving the boat, it’s easy to feel like you’re getting dragged behind it.

So far the only “solution” I’ve found is to just go with the flow as much as you can. Pick your battles and let the rest slide. Ignore the mountains of “advice” that come from every book, website, and Facebook post and do what you need to do to survive and raise a healthy, well-behaved child. If you succeed then you did it right.

It’s been nine months since I wrote the last “Elijah Update” post! I’m not even going to attempt to recap what has happened since that last post, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s going on in his life recently.

Tyla and Elijah keep pretty busy throughout the week. The main scheduled activities are Parent/Baby group, Stroller Strides, and Little Gym. They’ve also started swimming a little bit and will be starting swim classes later this year.

He’s gaining new motor skills every week and on Sunday he took his first steps! Tyla’s family happened to be at our house when Elijah let go of his little push toy and took about 5 tiny steps toward the grill. That’s my boy! You can see him thinking really hard about each movement to take a step and he still needs to build up his confidence, but I bet he’ll make rapid progress in the coming days and weeks. Lots of people says “Keep him as a crawler as long as you can” and stuff like that but I’m excited to have my little man walking! Yes, it’s more work, but by now I’ve figured out that being a parent isn’t something you do because it’s easy.

Elijah was really quiet for his first few months but now he’s always making some kind of noise. There was a period of shrieking which (I hope) is passed, at least for now. He loves to babble and make seemingly random noises and will sometimes even imitate our coughs and achoos. When he’s really excited, he kind of turns his tongue sideways and makes a sucking sound.

Milk is still the main food of the day but he’s experimenting with other foods that Tyla and I eat. He sits in his high chair for most of our meals and does some combination of smearing it on his face, dropping it down his bib, and putting it in his mouth. I don’t think he’s quite made the connection that this type of eating will also solve his hunger pains.

Night times are still a battle though we’ve kind of settled into a workable truce for now. We’re going on 11 months of not sleeping more than 3-4 hours in a row except for a couple somewhat random stretches when he was very young. This is probably the single most painful part of parenting for me (and I’m not even the one who has to stay awake to feed him!) and I’m praying that we get to a better spot soon.

We’re very blessed to have such a wonderful child in our home!

What do you do when your wonderful wife is having her first Mother’s Day? Celebrate! The party started on Friday night with New York Strip steak from the butcher. It’s the fanciest piece of meat that we’ve purchased from them yet and wow it was good! Saturday morning Tyla got to sleep in for a couple hours and then she took Elijah to a craft fair. We spent the afternoon walking around our neighborhood’s garage sales and found some great purchases. Dinner on Saturday night was one of Tyla’s favorite foods: sushi! On Sunday morning Tyla ran the 5k that she’s been doing for the past years (though she skipped it last year when she was pregnant.) After a long nap from Elijah, during which I washed Tyla’s car, we had her family over for lunch (grilled beef dogs and brats from the butcher). While we were grilling, Elijah took his first steps! Dessert was a giant cookie cake from Mrs. Fields.

I hope you had a special weekend! Elijah and I love you!

Tyla is good at entertaining Elijah and making him smile. Here is some video of her at the work party on Saturday.

On Saturday, we headed down to one of the cruise terminals in Seattle for a party thrown by my organization at work. (There are about 4000 people in this org.) They rented out the building and had it set up like a carnival. Elijah loved watching all the people and seeing the decorations. There was a play area for kids which kept him occupied while we chatted with some of my co-workers. Tyla and I both enjoyed sampling all the foods they had, and I’ll never pass up free Mac And Jacks. Elijah’s favorite part might have been the shuttle ride from the parking lot to the party. He loves watching big buses and this was his first time to ride in one.

Tim called us last week and asked if we wanted some free tickets to the game on Sunday. Yes please! Elijah suited up in a variety of Mariners gear that he has acquired and we headed off to the game. We wondered how he would do but he did excellent! Our seats were in the 300 level so we wimped out and took the elevator. On the way up the elevator operator gave Elijah his first baseball card and on the way down a policeman gave him a Junior Policeman sticker. Unfortunately we underestimated how cold it would be with the strong wind blowing and seats in the shade so we didn’t stay for the whole game. We left in the top half of the 7th with the Mariners down 5-2 and they ended up coming back to win it 6-5. It would have been fun to see that, but we came home with a happy baby so I’d say the trip was a success.

Having a child has made me realize that I have way too many hobbies. Or rather, I have too many hobbies to sustain. When we transfer to new groups at work, the tradition is to send out mail introducing yourself and talking about your hobbies and interests. I included skiing, hiking, motorcycling, target shooting, phone and Win8 development, wood-working and RC airplanes. Even then I felt like I left some out! If there are 52 weekends in the year and a big chunk of them are taken up with family plans, there’s not nearly enough time left to devote to all of those.

I’ve been re-evaluating the time I spend with hobbies. Things like skiing or motorcycle riding are hard to justify because they pull me away from my family for a big chunk of the day. In addition to normal hobbies, my TV and movie watching has dropped to probably about 10-20% of what it used to be. I’ve barely touched video games since Elijah was born, but that had already started to taper off when I got married.

This is one reason that I decided to get into RC airplanes. In theory, we can all go to a park, spend time together, and I can fly a plane for a few minutes while we’re there. I’ve also heard that it’s an excellent parent-child hobby so if I’m still doing it when Elijah is old enough, it’s something he might really enjoy too. That would be a great launching point for learning about engineering, physics, technology etc.

It’s kind of a relief to admit that it’s ok if I don’t go skiing 10 times a year, go on a big multi-day motorcycle ride, or watch every episode of a TV show. And while I believe it’s still important to be involved in a hobby or two, I’m happy to have more time to spend with Tyla and Elijah!