Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

We’ve gone through lots of books and Amazon reviews trying to find the right products for our home. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Baby Bargains – This book was the key to a lot of our planning before our baby arrived. It has great advice about what you need and what you can skip as well as detailed guidance about what to look for in each item. Each section finishes up with specific recommendations for every budget. If you only get one thing off this list, this is probably the one to get.
• LeapFrog Learn & Groove Musical Table – No other toy has gotten as much use as this one. When he was very little, we propped this up on two of it’s legs for him to play with. Now that he’s standing up, we have all four legs on it and he’ll spend a lot of time walking around and around playing with all the different sides. As a bonus, it has an English/Spanish switch so I’ve been learning some Spanish. “Cuadrado… ROJO!”
• Philips AVENT Baby Monitor – I recommend that you don’t get a video baby monitor. You’ll end up staring at it all night long and they’re generally not very secure. We went with this monitor from Philips. It has built-in encryption so you’re not going to get someone listening in or talking over your channel. We also opted for this fancy model that shows the room temperature and humidity right on the remote. It will also alert you if either of those fall outside of a range of values that you set. The temperature in particular was really useful on hot summer days and really cold winter nights. You can save a few bucks by skipping those features though and it would still be a great monitor.
• Value Village – Ok this isn’t really a specific thing, but I’m so thankful that Tyla loves Value Village. I think we’ve only paid full price for a couple baby outfits. Everything else is either a hand-me-down or secondhand from Value Village or a consignment shop. Tyla finds great toys there too. You don’t have to pay full price for something your kid is only going to wear four times before they grow out of it.
• Portable Speakers with SD Card player – Instead of buying a dedicated white noise machine, we bought this very simple radio/SD Card/USB portable speaker gizmo. It has a built-in rechargeable battery. We paid less than $20 for it and then downloaded a 1 hour long white noise soundtrack for $1. It works awesome and we can easily move it from room to room as needed. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s available from Amazon anymore but there are many other products like it.
• Baby Carriers – We have a couple of these and they are fantastic. Please do your research as there are popular carriers out there which can have a pretty negative effect on your baby’s development (or even a good carrier can be worn incorrectly.) We loved both the Moby Wrap and the Pikkolo with the Babywearing Belt. The Moby is great because it’s cheap, easy to wash, and fits both Tyla and I easily. We’ve started using the Pikkolo as he has gotten bigger because we think it handles the additional weight a bit easier.
• Miracle Blanket – We don’t swaddle him anymore, but when we did this worked a lot nicer than a standard blanket. Buy at least two of them because you’ll always have one in the wash.
• Oxi Clean Baby – We keep a five gallon bucket in the garage filled with about 3 gallons of water and a scoop of this. Any poopy clothes soak in there for a few hours before getting washed and we don’t have many problems with stains.
• Glider Rocker – These rockers are available at lots of places but we went to a nice furniture store and got a high quality one. It seemed a bit extravagant to me at the time, but I’m so glad we got it along with the rocking ottoman. This chair is almost always occupied! It’s so comfortable and is stain resistant. (The specific rocker we got is listed as “bestc-C8107GP Glider Rocker” on this page.)

We haven’t really regretted too many of our purchases. That’s good because there’s plenty of money to be spent on a new baby. Choosing incorrectly gets expensive!

Our little man turned eight months old a couple weeks ago. It’s fun to look back at the photos from just a couple months ago and see the tremendous amount of changes. He’s still a very happy kid with lots of smiles no matter what’s going on. When he’s happy he loves to talk and roar, and if he’s really excited he lets out an ear piercing squeal. He learned to crawl recently and then almost immediately started pulling himself up onto whatever he could find. He’ll grab onto your fingers and happily walk around the house. I wonder how long it will be before he’s doing that on his own?

Meal times are getting more interesting as he is beginning to eat lots of different solids like ham, chicken, avocado, carrots, and applesauce. Nights are still very long as he gets up pretty regularly every two hours all night long. We’ve received lots of advice about how to solve that, but we’re content with the situation as it is and we’re sticking to our plan. (We’re content… but we’d love to get 6 straight hours of sleep!)

It’s hard to imagine a happier baby. He’s got such a wonderful personality and I’m so proud to be his dad!

I love you Tyla! This Valentine’s Day will be quite a bit different than our previous ones, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Elijah, you’re almost five and a half months old now! On the one hand, it seems like you just came into our lives, but on the other hand, I’m amazed at how much you’ve grown up and changed since we brought you home from the hospital.

Every week you’re picking up new tricks and skills. These days you always want to be sitting up and you smile all the time. When you’re really happy you give big open-mouth smiles and you’ll stick out your tongue and chew on it. If you get near anything, your right hand shoots out and you start scratching it and feeling it’s texture. If it’s mobile, it quickly finds it’s way to your mouth so you can chew on it.

You’re coming off the tail end of being pretty sick for about three weeks and that wasn’t fun for any of us, but it’s so nice to have our happy little boy back again. You’re so good-natured that it’s hard to ever get frustrated for too long, but if you slept a bit better at night, Mom and I wouldn’t complain. We haven’t slept three hours in a row for a month. But it’s ok. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you grow up happy and healthy.

Mom has been busy taking you to lots of activities like a parent/baby group, a mother/child workout program, and Little Gym. The other day Mom said you hung from a bar all by yourself! You’ve mastered rolling over from your back to your stomach and I’m just waiting for you to figure out crawling. I bet it’s not too much longer!

I could go on and on, but the reason I started writing is that I want you to know that on this Thanksgiving Day, I want you to know that I’m thankful for you and our wonderful little family!

Elijah got hammered by some kind of bug about a week and a half ago and a few days later, I got what appeared to be the same thing. Thankfully Tyla has somehow managed to stay healthy throughout this and she’s been an enormous help. Our nights have been long (Tyla’s have been longer than mine!) trying to keep our coughing, sneezing, snotting boy asleep and content. Throw in a time change and it really has made for some interesting nights.

So that’s why you haven’t seen as many pictures of Elijah lately if you’re friends with him on Facebook. While we do post lots of photos of him, we are trying to make some judgment calls about what we post since it will all still be alive on the Interwebz when he’s older. We’ve decided no bath photos, no sick photos, and no status messages about major diagnoses.

Every parent should draw their own line, but it’s an important decision to make. This is the first generation of kids that is going to grow up with every day of their lives documented. It’s hard to predict how that will play out, but we’ll make our best guesses. I just try to picture 15 year old Elijah standing in a group of friends when they find the mother lode of pictures, or an employer who has the ability to datamine old status messages and find out if there are any major mental or physical weaknesses in this employee he is about to hire. It’s impossible to predict perfectly because everyone grows up with their own ideas of humor, but hopefully we’re making good choices.

Enough of all that, let’s see a picture already! Here’s Elijah wearing his first Halloween costume!

Mom is scanning in the slides from our childhood years so I now have access to a lot of my childhood photos. Want to see my first Halloween costume?

It’s October 1, and that means I’m heading back to work. The last time I walked in the door there or even checked my email was August 31. My month of parental leave is over.

When I filled out the application for parental leave, I had to select a reason for the leave. The one that dads pick is called “bonding.” I thought it was odd at the time, but I totally get it now. This past month has been an incredible time to bond as a family. He grew up so much in that one month and I was there every day to watch the changes happen instead of just hearing about it when I got home from work.

Co-workers said that after 4 weeks at home with a baby, I’d be itching to go back to work. Umm… nope. I’m thankful to have such a wonderful job, but if I could afford to stay home, that’s where I would be.

In addition to taking countless naps with Elijah, I did get quite a few house projects knocked off the list and also gave Tyla a break so she could shorten her todo list too. While I didn’t get nearly as much done as I thought I would, I will always look back on September 2013 fondly. Thank you to my company for giving me this opportunity!