Preddy | Blog

You might remember Jordan’s wonderful bacon cheeseburger cupcakes, which we posted here last year.

Now, one of our favorite blogs, Cake Wrecks, documents how this great idea can go sadly, horribly wrong. Here’s but an example of the horrors you’ll find when you click the link.

Patrick turned three-quarters of a year this week, so we figured it was time for an update. First, I’ll share some stats: Patrick is officially 31.5” long, which is really tall. Both Jordan and our doctor suspect he’s actually a little shorter than that. Either way, he’s north of the 95% range for height. He’s not getting huge, though. He’s 21.2 lbs, which places him squarely in the 50-75% range. Still very healthy, but his growth has slowed a bit. We’ve received instructions to fatten him up a bit.

Second, we’re proud to note that Patrick is now walking! He still can’t stand up without using a wall or a chair or a dog, but once he’s up he can walk all over the place. Here are a few videos that show of his skills. We took these a week or so ago. He’s improved even more since then.

Yes, this is quite on the early side. But we know better than to get too excited about our little genius.

A new article from Slate persuasively argues that developmental milestones for children—when they learn to walk, when they start speaking—are meaningless.

Babies take different routes to the same destination. There’s no right way to learn to walk, for example, and there’s scarcely even a right time: The accurate range for when babies should start extends from 8 months to almost 20 months—an amazingly, almost meaninglessly broad stretch of time. The most interesting research on motor development in recent years treats it as the product of many different systems: the infant’s environment, personality, nervous system, and personal physical limitations. When all these variables interact, you get a lot of different results, as countless studies have made clear. You don’t get a chart that looks like something out of The Ascent of Man.

But the idea of the typical child is ever with us, never mind the volumes of research disproving it. As several prominent developmental psychologists have written, somewhat despairingly, "Ages and stages so thoroughly pervade our conception of motor development that every pediatrician’s office and developmental textbook sports a requisite table of developmental norms." These charts and tables make us anxious and shrink our sense of the possibilities of infancy. There’s no chart that can make sense of this photo of an 11-month-old Efe infant, in a rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, carefully cutting a fruit in a half with a machete.

Of course, parents want some sense of what their children should be doing, and knowing that their baby girls technically might be able to use a machete won’t help much. But false milestones and misleading developmental narratives aren’t helping, either. It’s a sorry state of affairs: Even as developmental psychologists have discarded the idea of universal developmental milestones, those milestones are the only things many parents know about developmental psychology.

In the Preddy house, we’ve sorta figured that was the case. I learned to walk when I was 11 months old. Jordan learned when she was 9 months. I have a coworker whose twins started walking at 14 months. All within a “normal” timeframe.

But understanding the essential meaninglessness of these milestones doesn’t mean we aren’t excited and proud to see Patrick a few weeks away from taking his first steps when he’s barely 8 months old. For the proud parent, that’s the nature of the beast. You get excited about the big changes.

Here’s video evidence of Patrick’s new skills.

In case you were wondering, this is perfectly normal.

We’ve just uploaded a few videos to our YouTube.com channel, both of which document Patrick’s newfound mobility. In the last two weeks, he’s started crawling and pulling himself up. Not bad for just having turned 7 months. As he starts to get better with his feet, we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that he’s probably going to be an early walker. That’s not to say we aren’t proud of his progress. We were just hoping we’d get to enjoy that golden period where he can sit up and entertain himself, but not yet be a moving target. No such luck, as you can see.

An administrative note:  If you are interested in keeping up with photos and videos of Patrick, you really should bookmark or subscribe to our respective Flickr and Youtube accounts. We tend to upload stuff way more than we post to this blog.

Obviously, we could just upload stuff to Facebook, but many of our family members aren’t on the Facebook. Also, Flickr and Youtube both work super well with the iPhone, which is popular amongst our otherwise tech-challenged parents / grandparents / siblings.

Got home from work today, and this amazing bread pudding was waiting for me. You may remember, I have earlier blogged about Jordan’s bread pudding and it’s awesomeness. But this will be bittersweet. It is a goodbye gift As Jordan and Patrick have left to visit Florida to see his abuelito and abuelita (Patrick has a bit of Mexican heritage, too).  They will be gone until Friday.

Jordan and Patrick will be flying tomorrow, along with Jordan’s sister, Jessica, and her son, Gage. I already pity the poor people on this flight.

I will digress a moment to explain a point of order. If you read this blog at www.preddys.com, you’ve probably noticed the posts don’t feature a lot of comments. That’s because most of the comments we get are on Facebook (the social-networking site allows you to import your blog).

When I posted a humorous ad a few days ago, a couple of friends of mine posted to Facebook some helpful travel hints for flying with small children. I thought I’d share with you non-Facebookers—and future Googlers—a bit of this advice.

First, my pal Tanuj:

We’ve flown a ton with our girls – Zinnia’s first flight was at 3 weeks old, and we just got back from India with two of ‘em! We’ve mostly gotten compliments, but a couple times out of the couple dozen trips we’ve flown ours have been “those kids.”

Tips:

1. Snacks – for an infant, the key is nursing (bring a light blanket/jacket for b-feeders, or a couple of bottles.) Helps a ton for the pressure change, and tends to make ‘em sleepy

For a toddler, bring a couple favorite snacks, along with milk. Airlines are inconsistent about having milk available, so you can’t really count on it. You can actually carry on sippy cups full of milk through domestic security now (they just pass it by an explosives tester.) For the pressure change, lollipops are great.

2. Toys – I bring two ziploc bags full of little wind-up toys and light up toys, metering out the goodies as the flight goes to keep ‘em distracted.
Now we also bring story books and washable crayons/markers, which brings me to:

3. Changes of clothes – most lavatories have changing tables, so you are OK there. We find that our kids somehow manage to go through more clothes that we expected, and we got our connection in Newark to Denver on our India trip I thought the gate agent was going to call CPS on us as our girls were flithy. When the girls were infants, they seemed to only have diaper failure when we travelled – we ended up starting the flight in clothes we were ready to pitch. Don’t forget to get toddlers to pee before boarding and before approach. Also, consider a change for YOURSELF – I’ve been vomited and pooped on several times (both ways to India – fun fun fun for 15 hours in a plane.) Finally, don’t forget the grocey bags for dirty diapers / clothes / etc.

4. Other thoughts:

- the airline supplied earbud don’t work for toddlers. Bring your own from home.

- try to schedule around naps so the are getting sleepy right at takeoff. We’ve used benadryl to help with time change / nap time changes (yes, we are bad, bad parents.)

- gate agents are inconsistent about special pre-boarding for families.

- you can get check strollers and car seats for free. take advantage of that

- don’t forget that you need to take proof of age for some airlines if you don’t buy the child a seat. Southwest are sticklers for this – we got spoiled by Continental never asking, and then had to buy a one-way ticket for Sage at the check in counter

- plan to get to the airport about 90 to 120 minutes before the flight, as you often have to get a special lap child boarding pass from the ticket counter (can’t get it always with online check in.) and you’ll some airlines have the “slow lane” in security for families with kids.

- if one parent is flying with multiple kids, you can get a helper to get through security and one to meet you at the gate. Call the airline ahead about that.

Now here’s Jeremy, whose advice is less concrete but much funnier:

You need pockets, man. Lots and lots of pockets, all filled with various toys with which to keep the little guy entertained.

When they’re little, you can try to request the bulkhead seat — the plane’s got these cool little crib things that attach to the bulkhead and strap the kid down, which is *very* cool if you need a break from holding a baby on a long flight.

Of course, the best option is to make sure there’s another kid on the plane who’s even louder/sicker/angrier than yours. On Abbie’s first flight, she had some major crying spells (pressure change baaaaad), but there was a newborn further back who cried THE WHOLE TIME, so everybody around us kept telling us how great *our* kid was. Win!

I am happy to say this advice will be of no use to me this week, as I am safe at home and at work. Jordan and Jess are on their own flying with two kids under 2. But these are certainly wise words from two dads/pals who have braved the unfriendly skies before; this advice will aid me in the future. Perhaps it will aid you as well.

At my insistence, and with only gentle reluctance from Jordan, we took Patrick to my regular barber on Saturday for his first haircut. The resulting experience was part comedy, part tragedy. I think Jordan and I both agreed it wasn’t the scene we had imagined and hoped for, but the result might actually be more funny. This was due to the old guy who cut Patrick’s hair.

We should say up front that Patrick at 6 months old was a handful. He was pretty good at first, but once the hair started getting in his eyes, he wouldn’t stop squirming and crying. Still, 80-something dude cutting Patrick’s hair was definitely part of the problem.

His hands were steady enough. But Jordan had been clear in her instructions. We were here to deal with Patrick’s mullet. Trimming the back and sides were our top priority.

But Old Dude Barber (or, if you like, ODB) started with the top and didn’t really stop. He just. kept. cutting. the. top.

“Hey, his mom wants you to get the back of his hair,” said the lady barber next to us. She was trying to be helpful. But this dude just kept cutting the top.

“Tell you what I did with my boy when he was young,” said ODB.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Just put his head between my knees. Held him there until he stopped squirming, and then buzzed him until he was red.”

“Ah,” I said.

Jordan asked again. “The hair is getting in his eyes. Can you start on the back?” He started cutting elsewhere, but it was not the back. Poor Patrick’s cries are getting louder.

“His mom wants you to cut the back,” lady barber said again.

“You know what I did first time I cut my boy’s hair?” ODB asked again. “Put his head between my knees and gave him a burr. His momma didn’t like that. ‘It’ll grow back,’ I told her.”

At this point Jordan shoots me a look of utter frustration. Patrick continues to squirm and cry. And ODB continues to cut everywhere but where we’ve asked him to cut.

“Can we just stop?” Jordan asks, half protesting to me, but definitely loud enough for ODB to hear. Finally, he starts moving his scissors to the back.

“You know how I cut my boy’s hair when he was little? Just put his head between…”

Oh, no. He was back to cutting the top of Patrick’s head. Patrick is crying quite loudly. Everyone is looking. Patrick’s mom is upset.

“Okay,” Jordan said. “We’re done. We’re done. Can you stop? We’re done.”

Jordan got up from the chair and looked at me. She was very upset. ODB had ignored her the whole time, and had been fixated on one part of Patrick’s head. Which was the part we basically told him to ignore. “I don’t know who is more upset,” she said. “Me or Patrick.”

At least Patrick had stopped crying. Jordan finally went out to the car, and the manager told her the next cut was on the house (uh, probably not). Evidently, all the other barbers were well aware of how bad ODB was, and how loud Patrick was. Lot of tension in the room

As Jordan left, I sat down to get my hair cut. That’s right, I put my own hair in the hands of ODB. He started cutting my hair, and I noticed he wasn’t that awful. He was a bit slow, though. About a minute in, I realized just how slow he was.

“You know what I did first time I cut my boy’s hair? Put his head between my knees and gave him a burr. His momma didn’t like that. ‘It’ll grow back,’ I told her.”

He told me this story 3 more times in the 25 minutes he took to cut my hair. He was slow because he kept returning to parts of my hair he had already cut. He skipped around a lot, too.  I finally decided that ODB has Alzheimer’s or perhaps another form of dementia. If true, it would explain a lot.

But he gave me a great haircut.

Sure, with Patrick he missed a few spots.

But after Jordan cut off a few stray bits, it ended up looking pretty good.

And really, with Patrick screaming and crying his eyes out, we probably overreacted. On the way home Jordan talked with her mom and sister, and she tried to explain how bad it was. But she ended up convincing herself it was kind of funny. It wasn’t as awful as it had felt in the moment. It just wasn’t the way we imagined Patrick’s first haircut.

I think parenthood will frequently be like that. A whole lot of looking forward to things that don’t turn out liked you’d planned or hoped. But then things still end up being pretty good. Or maybe even better.

Full set available on Flickr.