Smithology

I haven’t been one to push Sol’s development deliberately, I prefer to let him learn at his own pace and discover the world in a natural and fun way. That’s why it sometimes comes as a surprise to me when he does something new. Some things come gradually, I notice new words and his ability to piece together sentences evolving slowly, his memory or attention span growing (like how he now holds me to task on things I promise him rather than forgetting as soon as I find a good distraction) but then there are the sudden leaps of cognition that take you by surprise.

Counting has been one of those things. We’ve been counting for a long time mind you, a lot of books have counting in them as do TV shows but Sol has usually just gone along with the rhythm of it “one, two, seven, eight” in time to the music. Last night we were reading “A Wiggly Zoo Adventure” when we got to the page where Greg sees four lions and Sol pointed to each lion and counted “one, two, three, four”. I just about fell off the side of the bed (where I was sitting)! The next page is where Dorothy sees two cute baby bears. He counted these “one, two … three” and I realised that he felt that the rhythm was wrong just counting to two so I corrected him saying that sometimes you just count “one, two” and he got it. The next page was Wags with two seals and he counted them correctly “one, two”, then we did Henry the Octopus’ Zebras “one, two, three” (“and they are stripy”). Wow! I was really excited by then so I was happy to read the book a second time with him. Then he counted everything on the pages of “Robot Dog” and “Trees”.

So that’s how it happens. It is so rewarding to be witness to the development of this small child and to be with him when he comes to those moments in life where his mind opens to the the universe just a little more.

[tags]children, counting, early development, fatherhood, learning[/tags]

fatherhood

Sol and I have started a TV show on YouTube called Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things. It will be a reviews kind of show and just something fun so that we can have lots of footage of Sol to use at his twenty first.

Episode 1 of Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things

[tags]matt, sol, youtube[/tags]

fatherhood matt and sols favourite things

Last night Sol woke us up crying about a bad dream. For the first time, I was actually able to get him to tell me what the bad dream was about. So what do you think a 3 year old’s worst nightmare is?

“Daddy, I dreamt that my DVDs weren’t working. They were broken.”

[tags]sol, nightmare, dream, funny[/tags]

fatherhood

An interesting habit developed with the toddler tonight. It started at dinner time:

Me: What would you like to drink, juice?
Him: (hands me the soda water) beer!
Me: ok I’ll make you a “beer” (mixes the juice and soda water)

Later on he’s in the bath with his “beer”. As he gets out he slips over and has a bit of a teary. When he’s calmed down he sees his cup on the floor: “My beer!” he exclaims tragically.

So as I’m reading him his books (including one with pictures of utes given to him by a friend) I ask him if he’d like some milk to help him get to sleep and of course he says: “No I’d like a beer”.

Disclaimer: he only sees me drinking maybe once a week which consists of one light beer so all I can surmise is that he’s tapped into some kind of Jungian Aussie bogan consciousness.

[tags]beer, bogans, humour, toddlers, utes[/tags]

fatherhood

As I mentioned previously, we’ve been preparing for a new baby. The day came last week and it all went relatively smoothly and we now have a beautiful baby girl.

My role during the day consisted of saying reassuring things, sitting in the corner, some hand-holding, getting towels and glasses of water, SMSing, calling the midwife, reading the output from all the machines and commenting on what I thought they did, running the music and taking photos.

On the music front, I’ve gained a few tips on selecting tracks. Basically you want music that is happy but not demanding attention so I had it all on low volume most of the time.

Approved:
Badly Drawn Boy – About a Boy Soundtrack (also approved by obstetrician)
Morcheeba – Parts of the Process
Mutton Birds – Envy of Angels
Darren Hanlon – Hello Stranger

Not that great (and comments from the customer):
Ryan Adams – Gold : A bit too rocky in parts
My Friend the Chocolate Cake – self titled : too brooding (but actually starts quite happy)
Daft Punk – Discovery : too bleepy. Has a good part in the middle that works ok
Midnight Juggernaughts – Dystopia : too harsh

The new Pentax K100D “Super” DSLR (recently obtained as part of an insurance claim) performed ok but I was expecting better. The point and click cameras may not be outstanding in every way but they often make the most of a bad situation: bad light and inexperienced photographers. Right at the end of the birth I was asked to cut the cord and a midwife took a few photos. She was not used to a SLR and so I think she either shook the camera or the light was just such that we couldn’t get a good exposure. I had the flash turned off because I have a problem with flashing lights in everyone’s faces and I think flashes make everything look harsh.

My advice on cameras is to have a point and click one as well as a good one. The DSL is excellent when you know how to hold it and can put it onto the right settings. The sales guy told me that the DSLR would do all of the auto things that a point and shot camera does so wouldn’t be a problem for inexperienced users. I have found that you do have to know a bit more what you’re doing even if it’s just knowing how to hold it.

I also had a chance to actually play with the camera while we were waiting for things to happen and mostly discovered the different white-balance settings and the auto ISO sensitivity settings. My camera can go up to 3600 ISO but will only go to 800 in auto mode to save you from taking grainy photos. I prefer grainy to blurred but had to manually go to 1600 or 3600 for the low light stuff. Also the camera can be set to compensate from different types of fluros and incandescent lights. The LCD display can be a bit misleading here: on my laptop, the photos were more yellow than I thought and the white ones that I didn’t like on the LCD came out more natural looking.

If you’re choosing a hospital to have a baby in in Brisbane, my experience of the Mater three years ago was pretty negative, the midwives just seemed negative and I can’t really explain it. The Wesley this time around was warmer and the midwives seemed to have a buzz and were enjoying their work. We felt a lot more informed as the day progressed. Just those small things made the difference.

[tags]baby, birth, brisbane, cameras, hospital, music, photography[/tags]

fatherhood

I haven’t had much to say on here for a good while but for anyone “out there” who’s doing the baby thing, here are my thoughts on it.

Tomorrow we have an induction scheduled for baby #2 so we’re kind of pacing about trying to make sure we’ve thought of everything and to fill in the hours. I’m sure in all the little details we’re addressing, there are big things we’ve forgotten but we’ll deal with that as it comes.

• overnight bag
• phones
• cameras
• MacBook and speakers (for playing “Eye of the Tiger” and other motivational music)
• books (for reading whilst waiting for the drugs to do their work and so that Matt has a chance of finishing his assignment this week (wishful thinking?))

I’ve tried to explain to the 3yo what’s happening but he wasn’t very interested. He knows mummy has his “sister” in her tummy (he’s convinced it’s a girl) but I wasn’t able to get it through to him that grandma would be looking after him tomorrow and that mummy was having the baby.

He fell asleep tonight while I was reading “The Tiger Who Came for Tea” (after the mandatory “Magic Hat”). I felt very sad to realise that this is the end of our time with just him. After tomorrow we’ll have “kids” instead of just him and he won’t be the center of our lives.

Steph and I spent the day together without Mr I’m-wearing-buzz-lightyear-undies to try and remember what it’s like to be just good mates who are probably a little bit too into each other instead of responsible parents living in the suburbs with a home loan. It’s not like we did that much that you can’t do with kids: the difference is we could do it in our time and talk without being interrupted and not having to mop up spilt milkshakes or apologise to other customers on our child’s behalf.

The Mother-in-law arrived on scene this afternoon which should keep me on my toes but she has filled our freezer with pre-made meals which is much appreciated. So everything seems like it’s ready to go and all we need to do now is sleep (yeah right).

P.S. The Photo is Sol when he was 1 day old. I resized the image with Acorn image editor. The first attempt was with Pixemlator but they stuck a big watermark on it. I will probably buy Acorn: it’s just a simple no-frills image editor: great for bloggers.

[tags]babies, children, kids, sentiment, fatherhood, induction[/tags]

fatherhood

I intend to blog.
Somehow I will make the time.
I have some ideas floating around my head.
Stories I’d like to tell.
In the meantime, send me good wishes because I will be a dad x2 any day now.

Uncategorized, fatherhood

I have a swearing problem. Not really too much of a problem publicly, at work or whatever but just in my own private space, which now includes a child, I swear often and regularly.

My father taught me to swear and my mother taught me swear even worse. As a child I knew Dad had stuffed something up when he said Bloody Hell! (accompanied by a crash or the sound of breakage). I knew he was annoyed at something when I heard CRAP!. And I knew something was very wrong with the world when I heard SHIT. Before he became a Christian I would occasionally hear Jesus Christ! thrown into the mix.

Mum on the other hand never let a crass or indecent word cross her lips as far as I can remember. I might have heard her occasionally saying things like oh bummer. My grandparents on that side were very strict about swearing too. I wasn’t allowed to say things like gosh or heck when grandpa was around.

So when I reached those unruly teenage years, I chose swearing as a place where I could safely rebel from my parents and impress my friends with my imaginative vocabulary and use of the ‘F’ word in innovative ways. If Mum had not really cared (or given a shit) about swearing then I may not have gone so hard on the swearing front as a teenager. I remember riding through the suburbs on my pushbike with a friend just yelling out all variations of f-ing and combinations of crass words for genitalia and women as we went past the neatly manicured lawns and freshly painted fences.

While I grew out of that, I’ve never really given up swearing as a therapeutic expression of a great many emotions that would otherwise remain repressed.

When I worked as an embedded engineer, it was fairly routine to swear at work. Electronics can be pretty frustrating and when you’re debugging software and electronics at the same time, you need to be able to talk to the system in a language it understands.

When I got my new job, I happily sat at my desk swearing at any javascript errors I saw and happily declaiming the sexual performance of miscreant php code. Until I realised that hardly anyone here swears.

Since becoming a father, I’ve had to try and curb my potty mouth. Steph has only occasionally complained of my swearing (usually when driving) but I don’t want Sol’s first word to be Fuck! – he already knows Duck (at least I think that’s what he’s saying).

I have tried a few different methods of fixing my language. The solution I’ve found most effective is to try and raise my swearing threshold. A lot of swearing creats a kind of background swearing radiation so you need to swear more intensely to get what you need. So if you can lower the swearing background radiation, then when you really need to swear, you don’t need to swear as brightly – a twinkling star instead of a super nova. Part of lowering the swearing background noise is the substitution method: Fracking, freaking, shedload of shite etc… It seems to be working ok for me but sometimes I still just want to fill my lungs, put my head back and yell FUCKING BULLSHIT!.

[tags]swearing,fatherhood,childhood,parenting[/tags]

fatherhood