Swimtime!

The unfrozen-watersports contingent of my family will be happy to hear that Quinn loved his first "swim lesson". Of course, he was more galvanized by the ceiling fans than the actual water, but we're taking the ho-hum reaction to the water as a good sign. The lesson part is more to teach parents how to introduce infants to the water, and that part was definitely valuable. There were singsongs and bouncing games, which are things he just loves, and I think the whole water part was completely irrelevant to him.

It's good that it appears to feel like such a natural thing to him though. Hopefully he inherits his mother's aptitude and attitude towards the water - in spite of being on it or in it all my life, I've never been completely comfortable in it. I can swim, but Rebecca's a complete natural in the water.

I'm hoping that after a few lessons he'll actually get past the ceiling fans and notice the water. Lessons are Saturday mornings for I dunno how long (his mother looks after that part...). Watch this space for further reports.

Bedtimes

Since we've gotten back from NS, we've established a pretty consistent bedtime routine, and it seems to be quite effective. Bec changes him, I read to him, then sing to him softly, and then Bec takes him to bed and nurses him to sleep. That last step has taken awhile on a couple of nights, but it's gone quite quickly some nights too. Last night was about 10 minutes, although Bec hung around a few minutes to ensure he was good and out. Tonight he started looking tired before the proscribed bedtime so we started early, thereby hopefully averting any overtired owliness.

Teaching Quinn to sleep has offered some valuable insights into my own sleep. None of it is rocket science, but it seems easy to lose sight of it amid all the rush to get things done. Particularly, avoiding mental or physical stimulation before bedtime, establishing a wind-down routine, creating an atmosphere conducive to sleep, and just plain old going to bed when one is tired, are all valuable sleep promoters I'd overlooked in my own life. I'm having the best sleep of my life and I have a 5 month old son. Go figure.

We have the crib beside our bed now. We're hoping to soon be able to make the transition 3 feet to the right to get him from our bed into his own crib. It doesn't seem like a major leap to me. We'll see how it goes.

He seems sensitive to overheating in the heat & humidity we're going through currently. It makes sense I guess - all that insulating brown baby fat makes it more difficult for him to regulate his temperature. At least the fact that he gets all gross & sweaty is a good thing - it means his little body is doing what it can to shed heat.

We have rollover!

Quinn rolled over by himself for the first time today! We have been putting him on a blanket on the floor periodically and helping him roll over to get him used to the concept. Today Bec put him down and he rolled over with almost no help. So she teed him up again (he can only go front-to-back) and he did it again, this time with clearly no help whatsoever! He still needs a little push to get from back-to-front but I don't think that one will be long. He looked surprised the first time he did it, but then looked pleased as punch. Once we started cheering him on he got really into it, hardly waiting at all to flip once put on his stomach.

All the exertion wore him out though. He was a bear the rest of the day. He was a complete zombie tonight before bedtime. When I think about it though it's not much wonder. When I first started working full time and I was learning so much every single day, I was completely exhausted too. And the occasions where I've been immersed in speaking French (or trying to) I felt like my head was going to explode by the time the end of the day rolled around. So we'll cut the little guy some slack, put up with a little understandable crankiness, and start a whole new day tomorrow.

We aborted our camping plans in order to preserve our newfound and hard-won sleep progress. Now is just not a good time to take him to a new setting in a new sleeping environment, especially trying to get him to go to sleep in a tent at 730pm on the longest day of the year. We'll try camping in September maybe. It's important to get the right mix of exposure to new things and constancy, and we're just now establishing what that constancy *is*. I think there's a Life Lesson in that - and fortunately we didn't have to endure a wailing baby in a campground to learn it. Either that or we just chickened out :)

Routine adjustment

We're finding bathtime perks Quinn up, making him more difficult to get to sleep at night. Thus we're moving bathtime up so he can have some more playtime before bedtime routine. We'll see how that goes.

He's changing so much these days. He babbles away to himself much more. He's gotten much more dexterity. He has a plastic giraffe that he's quite adept at getting into his mouth. It's funny to watch - he sees the giraffe and immediately opens his mouth and starts sweeping his hand towards it, and if he doesn't get it into his mouth first try he gets quite agitated. He's much stronger now, able to sit up for a little while, and enough neck strength that you can hold him one-handed. You have to watch out for him launching himself though, arching his back suddenly and stretching out.

He's been particularly happy these past few days, smiling and giggling a lot. We think that if we hadn't been so attentive to him that he might have wailed enough to be called colicky (although it seems to me that most of those cases are inconsolable so maybe not). Whatever the case, he's definitely high needs. Colicky babies usually rectify themselves about 4 or 5 months of age, and I wonder whether non-colicky babies also go through a similar positive swing in disposition (are brain inter-hemisphere connections forming maybe?). Whatever the case, he's definitely fascinating to watch grow and develop. My paternity time off is definitely being a most enjoyable time.

Rubber duckies in a row

Quinn's nana and grampy recently rectified the fact that he was lacking any rubber duckies. He seems to really like them - we've used them for the last few baths and he studied them quite intently tonight. Of course, his parents singing the rubber ducky song completes the experience :)

Speaking of ducks in a row, he checked out just fine at his recent 4-month checkup (that took place just short of him being 5-months old, for various reasons). He's 95th percentile for height, weight and head circumference. Because he's clearly not lacking for calories, the doctor suggested we could continue to wait to introduce the solid food that he seems so interested in when adults are eating around him. While he's a big boy (19 lbs, 10oz, 70cm = 28") I wouldn't call him fat by any means. If he were average height but 95th percentile in weight I might be concerned. He got through his first illness while we were in NS - a cold - but currently he's healthy as a horse (how healthy is a horse anyway? I never got that one...don't they shoot horses when they're sick?).

We're quiet little parents...

We've realized in the last week or so that we are very quiet people. Quinn is easily startled by noisy people because he's not used to it. He was startled by his cousin Emily during an animated soliloquy while we were in Nova Scotia, and he gets a little overwhelmed sometimes by his animated Aunt Caitlin. It's good though, for him to be exposed to it from family, people he knows and trusts. He'll get used to it. Vehicle and ambient noise (like appliances) don't bother him because he's always been exposed to them. We just never really thought about it until now, but we really don't speak loudly at all around the house. It's part of the whole house-as-sanctuary thing I guess. He's startled by other kids' shrieking and rattles (of all things) at playgroups, which made me think that perhaps we need to take steps to get him used to the noise of the real world.

A sleep turning point?

For the third time in the last 5 months, Rebecca has had to choose to go to bed tonight. All other nights she's been held captive by Quinn. He's learning to sleep on his own. The last couple times it took a couple interventions to get him through a couple hours but tonight he just went to sleep and that was it. Bec is so used to just doing stuff until he stirs that she almost forgot to decide to go to bed.

She has changed tack the last week or so to nurse him to sleep when he's already in bed, rather than carrying him until he falls asleep. That, combined with finally abandoning the co-sleeper, I think has led us to this turning point. I now wish we'd tried this approach earlier, but oh well, better late than never. I haven't been able to get him to sleep at nighttime for a long time now and it's been difficult on Bec. I take part in the nighttime routine though, and the Plan is for me to get involved with the getting-him-to-sleep-in-bed process.

Does this perhaps mean we'll be able to get him to sleep on his own without having to cry it out? I'm not counting any sheep before they're over the fence but I'm certainly a lot more hopeful at this point. Tune in next year for the exciting conclusion.

Cosleeping risk, an engineering analysis

Provincial coroners are going on about the risks of cosleeping with one's baby. It's difficult to separate the hysteria from the facts, as "one kid died somewhere" gets widely reported but the tens of thousands of kids that safely benefit from it does not. I don't want to raise a kid leashed to the clothesline in the backyard with a helmet on, but I don't want to expose my son to unnecessary risk either. If the risk is remote, and/or able to be mitigated, there are advantages to be had.

I don't understand the bias of the medical community against cosleeping. I'm not militantly for it - we ended up there because it was the only way anyone would sleep at all in the early going, and we're on a track to get him into his own bed - but the rank bias of the coroner's report, the hysteria of the reporting, and the lack of hard facts really gets my back up. But pride and principle don't mean a damned thing if our kid dies, so we tried to establish the facts to determine if we had an imminent problem.

• In 2003 there were 130,927 live births to Canadian residents in Ontario (from Statscan). Numbers were similar in 2002. I am assuming numbers would be similar for more recent years. The Wikipedia entry for Ontario demographics indicates 671,250 children under age 5, which roughly correlates.

• The percentage of families that cosleep "always" or "almost always" was 25% between 1991 and 1999 according to a National Center For Health Statistics survey cited in the Dr. Sears book "The Baby Sleep Book". A further 42% slept with their baby "sometimes". Dr Sears is a major proponent of cosleeping so it's possible there is bias there but the number looks solid to me. At 25%, this would be 32,732 cosleeping babies in any given year.

• The 2008 Ontario Coroner's Report includes a section on infant deaths. They are mandated to investigate all deaths of children under the age of 5 (not all are full blown inquests but evidence from all are examined). They investigated 186 cases over two years; 77 involved "unsafe sleeping", of which 41 were "bedsharing" (their term for babies sleeping in an adult bed). Of the 41, 37 involved bedsharing with the baby and one or two adults; the other 4 also involved siblings (a recognized cosleeping problem due to various unpredictabilities of sleeping children). They did not break it down per year. It should be safe to assume half in each year - round up and say 19 bedsharing deaths in one year.
  

So that means 19 deaths per 32732 cosleeping children, or 1 in 1722, or 0.06%. I'd be more comfortable with another order of magnitude but that's less than one's lifetime odds of dying in a car accident (1 in 100!), by fire or smoke, or even by "falling down" according to one list.

But even that's not the whole story. The coroner's report states that of the 77 unsafe sleeping deaths, the sleeping positions were: 31 on stomach; 10 on back; 9 on side; 27 unknown. How those numbers map to the 41 bedsharing deaths is not stated. However, stomach sleeping is a known SIDS risk factor. Stomach sleeping deaths were 31/77 or 40% of the 77 unsafe sleeping deaths. If you exclude a similar ratio of deaths from the 19, we're down to 12 (rounded up). That would be 12 in 32732, or 1 in 2728, or 0.04%.

Furthermore, the coroner's report states a couple of other nebulous statistics: that 23 of the 77 unsafe sleeping deaths had been Children's Aid Society cases within the 12 months prior to their deaths. Also, drugs/alcohol were somehow involved in 14 cases. It's not clear how these map to the 41 cosleeping deaths, or the degree to which drugs/alcohol were involved. However, there is a definite implication there.

So if we put him to sleep on his back, keep neighbourhood kids out of the bed, don't drink or do drugs, and don't beat him (CAS), the odds of a problem look long to me. I'm open to the possibility that there is a problem with my numbers or assumptions, but from what I can tell, I'm comfortable that cosleeping with my kid is just fine. We're on a trajectory to get him out of our bed anyway.

I'm going to bed with my wife and kid.

To NS and back

Not quite "to infinity and beyond" but Buzz Lightyear has a better marketing department.

We just got back last night from two glorious weeks in Nova Scotia. It was Quinn's first major road trip and he did pretty well with the car travel part. He had minor meltdowns through Montreal in both directions, but then again so do I so you can't really blame him. Maybe he picks up on the tenseness in the car. We did the trip in two days in both directions and stopped a lot, sometimes for an hour or more. It all made it very manageable. We tried to time it so that we were in motion whenever he was about to go to sleep. Then when he awoke we would usually have about 15 minutes before he needed to stop, which Bec could manage to extend to half an hour with a full-time distraction effort. By the end of the trip back he was having some quiet happy time on his own in the car seat which gained us some more miles, but he was also sleeping less which offset that advantage. Day1 of the trip back he slept in some large chunks - likely due to the full-court-press of family stimulation of the preceding two days - and before we knew it we had achieved two thirds of our distance objective with one minor stop. It took a couple of major stops to get the rest of the way, but the time pressure was off by that point.

Traveling with a 4-month old really changed my outlook on travel. Instead of being focused on the destination and going like mad, I was focused on Quinn and the needs of our family. It made the trip a lot more pleasant instead of the grueling haul I used to make it. We were open to making it three days of travel in both directions this time if it needed to be, which further took pressure off each day. Of course this particular time we have the luxury of time since I don't need to be back to work until July.

I'll write more about our time in NS as I have time. For now it's time to take our little Buzz Lightyear off to the doctor for a routine checkup.

What a week

I'm now officially on 4 weeks' paternity leave. I'm sure looking forward to it. The run-up to it was brutal though - I was trying to squeeze in a large-ish work task before I left, and ran into a couple unexpected wrinkles. With some stellar help from others, I got them sorted out in record time though, especially for a defence firm. Hardware bugs just usually don't get sorted out in 4 hours there.

On top of all that, I had a job interview for another position within the company on Monday. On Thursday that became an offer. That is also record time for a defence firm, but I think the knowledge that I was away for 4 weeks probably accelerated things (plus the interviewers are ex-telecom...). Ostensibly it was an offer good for 3-business days, but as I was leaving it was effectively 24 hours. There weren't a lot of specifics cited which added to the stress. I talked to Rebecca, I talked to my brother, I talked to one of my interviewers again, and I decided to go for it. It's a leap - both a leap of faith given the unknowns, and a technological leap as it's an architecture position. I'll be over my head for awhile, but it seems like good people and a great opportunity to learn something new. I need a challenge. The timing's not great given the aggressive schedule of my current project but if one waits for the perfect opportunity at the perfect time it'll never happen.

Anyway, the upshot was two really long and stressful work days to finish the week. I saw Quinn briefly in the morning and I saw a very tired Quinn last thing before his bedtime. He mustered the faintest of grins through his overwhelming overtiredness. I missed him, and I think he missed me too. I missed two whole days of his life and he's only had about 120 of them so far. I don't want to do that again. It was a valuable lesson in the face of looming work pressures involved in my new position - that I need to enforce that my work is not going to take over my life. Historically I have immersed myself in my work when required but now I have to find the proper mix. It will be a challenge, both at work and at home, but there are ways to do it.

We're off to Nova Scotia tomorrow for two weeks. I am approaching the 12 hours of car travel with a 4-month old with a significant amount of trepidation. He's been an able adventurer so far but this is a lot to ask of a kid that young. We're aiming for 2 days' travel time, but if it takes three that's OK too. We figure we have about 9 usable hours in his day and if we can travel 6 of those 9 we can make it in two days. We'll see how it goes.

Life is just one great big challenging adventure isn't it? Let's see what tomorrow brings...