This is what we are reduced to?

The wife and I have been busy lately. You know, with kid stuff, putting our house on the market, working, etc. It happens. Life gets to be so full of urine and stuffed animals that you almost forget that the chick you sleep with every night isn't just a roommate, but someone who at some point you actually could talk to and bounce ideas off of.

Its not always this easy.

We get so caught up in our kids lives that we don't really take the time necessary to hang out with the person that you actually made babies with. It sucks and if you don't do anything about it, its a slippery slope to having a sucky go at things.

So as the wife and I saw that we were potentially headed down the tunnel of suckiness, we decided to have a date night. In most parts of the world date nights are usually held on Friday or Saturday nights. This way you can stay out later, hang out longer, and pay your babysitter more. Well we decided to buck that trend and head out on a Monday. We pretty much had the pick of the litter when it comes to restaurants since Mondays aren't known for their going-out-ability. We hit up a nice local Italian place and had a nice dinner.

At one point during the meal, I looked my bride and said, "Is this what we have been reduced to in order to just hang out? A Monday date night..." She smiled ever so lovingly and said, "Yes, and if we have time, we are going to stop by Target to get some Easter clothes for the kids." Well, thankfully we had a lot of stuff to talk about and we didn't get to swing by Target. Damn. We then went home, washed our children, and were passed out by 9:30pm. Don't hate the player.

The Half-Marathon of Parenting

I did it! I did it with no tears, very minor amounts of bribery, and I accomplished it before my wife did. I successfully put all 3 children down for bed with no assistance while my wife was celebrating not being pregnant anymore. I really don't know what else to compare this accomplishment to. I mean its not like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, but then again its also no easy task. So given the time of the event to occur (roughly 2 hours of alone time) I will go ahead and compare it to my recent half marathon finish. While this may seem like a novice task for you seasoned veterans out there. Let me at least try to build the credibility of this up before you don't acknowledge it as a huge win.

This is how it feels.

I love my 3 kids all dearly, but to sum them up quickly my  kids are as follows: Emotional 5 year old Girl, Volatile 3 year Girl, and Hungry 1 month old Boy.  The dynamic kind of works like this. The 3 year old almost runs the show in the house. She is the wild card. A large girl that weighs about 3 lbs less than the 5 year old and a propensity to pull hair and hit the 5 year old when the parents are out of the room. The problem is the 5 year old just sits there, takes it, and cries. Meanwhile the 1 month old is one of 3 things (along with the percentages of time throughout the day): 1) Awake and calm 10%, 2) Awake, Crying, Hungry 45% 3) Unconscious 45%.

As you can see there's essentially a 50% chance my little dude was going to be awake, hungry & crying for the 2 girls' departure to dreamland. the planning involved to accomplish such a task is tough. Not only do you have to focus on the little guy but you need to make sure the older ones are worn out enough to sleep, but have calmed down enough to be ready for bed. It was about 2 hours or playing, bouncing, shooshing, & correcting, but it happened. The 2 girls faded off to sleep with little intervention from me. Well, the 3 year old has the equivalent of restless leg syndrome in her entire body and it takes her about 30 minutes of flopping around in bed and asking for candy before she dozed off. Regardless, they didn't cry and it was magical.

I think I even surprised my wife when she came home and stuff was cleaned up. I rule.

Anyone have any amazing single fathering stories they'd like to share? Leave them in the comments or contact us and we'll let you blog about how awesome you are.

Name Challenged

Back in March. My wife and I officially announced that we were pregnant with our 3rd kid. Well as the October 4th due date has drawn closer, we have figured out a bunch of stuff. The most important is that the baby won't be born on October 4th. In fact the baby will be coming no later than September 29th as we are scheduled for an induction.

With pending babies and multiple SAP conferences we have been a little slammed and our writing & your reading enjoyment has suffered. With that consider this our first dream sequence post where we shamelessly recycle come old post and make it new again.

This one is pretty fitting since we are about ready to name our new kid. So here are the 8 rules in naming your child (from a Suburban Father Perspective). Funny how some of these sounded like a good idea 6 months ago.

http://suburbanfatheralliance.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-in-name.html.

The Red-Shirt year

A few weeks back we wrote about the right of passage into Kindergarten. Its a huge step for your kid, but what if your little angel is right on the cusp of heading into kindergarten or being held back a year? Well, we were forced with a decision this year that possibly could make or break our oldest daughter's future in school. As you can see by the witty title of this post, we are deciding on holding our kid back a year, but want to get some perspective from other parents on what they've done.

While the above paragraph is wonderfully written, its not enough for a full blog post so I'll go into our decision on holding our daughter back. My oldest has always been a girly girl since she decided to have a personality. Also like many first-born's (so I've heard) she has been very cautious, shy, and critical of situations before jumping in head first. We have never had to worry about her at a pool and just heading for the water. At times she can be kind of needy, but perhaps she is a bit more than most kids. She constantly seeks reassurance and needs a lot of pushing when it comes to trying new things. Its how she's wired. We love her personality and can think of 1000's of situations that would be way worse than our kid being a tad timid.

As this school year was coming up we knew we had a decision to make. We had already decided that our kids will go to the local private school* for grade school, but we just weren't sure that Hannah was fully ready for kindergarten. So the alternative would be sending her to the Public School for kindergarten for this year and then having her do a victory lap of kindergarten next year at the private school. After some thinking, debating, and just going back and forth on the subject, we decided on the "victory lap" theory and will send her to the private school to do kindergarten again next year. We have thought long and hard on this decision and after talking with a lot of parents we never once heard them say that they regretted holding their kid back. On the contrary we ran into a lot of situations where people wished they would have been held back.

So with that, we'd like to hear your opinion what you think or stories about the decisions you made as parents.

*Disclaimer: Before you pass judgement on the whole public/private decision, please know a few things. 1) St. Louis is weird and a ton of people go to private Catholic schools. 2) We live in an awesome school district that is rated very high and we are big fans of our Public School. My wife is actually an Occupational Therapist in our district. 3) I am not rich by any stretch of the word. Our Catholic school is about $2k LESS a year than day care.

Are we stressing out our kids?

I am supposed to be writing a blog entry for the Monday release of the SFA. Its a good one. Its on my picks of the top 5 rappers of all time. However, I can't write it right now. My creative juices have been stymied by a 3 & 5 year old and their unwillingness to be unconscious. A while ago we reviewed the book "Go the F**k to Sleep." I wasn't terribly impressed with it. The first 2 pages or so are pretty funny the first time you read it and then well its a list of words that just rhyme with sleep and some cuss words thrown in between. Tonight, though I can't get the book's title out of my head.

We have a cornucopia of messed up stuff going on in our house right now. We have an unfinished kitchen, I sleep with a pregnant gal, my 3 year old has moved out of her own room & crib into a room with the 5 year old and big girl bed, and the 5 year old is started kindergarten on Tuesday. Crap, I guess I know why they can't sleep... But can kids really get as stressed as adults? Stress is something I am very aware of and feel that it is the cause to a multitude of health issues. Well there's also doctors and studies that say the same thing but I'd still like some part of that theory. Now taking a step back at our family life and how "unconvential" my kids have been acting as of late, I wonder if stress plays a major role in their life like it does in adults. Typically kids feel no pain. They can run forever and pretty much bounce back from a fall quicker than anyone. You distract them, they go about their merry way as if it never happened. Problem over right? Wrong. At least I think its a bad conclusion. Here's the funny thing, if you google Stress in Children you get all kinds of articles on the symptoms of stress in kids, but when it comes to treating it, there's not much out there.

I deal with some social anxiety issues but I am happily medicated and I think I am as under control as the next person, but my kids are too young to be medicated and I don't want to go down that road if I doon't have to. So, how does a parent get their kids to calm down without dipping the binky in whiskey? My answer right now, is that I have no idea. This is one of those things that I guess I'll learn about and take in stride but I feel bad for my kids. Change isn't always good in their structured lives.

So here's my plan of attack to help my kids and their stress.

• Use diversion more frequently and effectively - Like Cypress Hill said "When the $&!* goes down, you better be ready." Hopefully these diversions can take their minds off what's bothering them


• Try to think before I act/speak - No I don't hit my kids but physical reactions to situation can be as powerful as verbal reactions. so If I get all slouchy and huffy with them, they won't react well to that.


• Play with them more - If I can get down on their level and play a bit more I think it will help relax them and hopefully wear them out so they can sleep easier.

Sound like a good plan? Have any other suggestions? We'd like to hear them.