pewfie.com

...

Yesterday was the Shaw childrens Christmas party at Crash Crawlies, so Kadin and I spent about 2 hours with probably 100 co-workers and their families. As Tonia's parents are coming into town on Wednesday, she opted to stay behind and get a head-start on some much needed cleaning!

It was a great time though. Last year, Kadin was only 2 months old, so his most athletic feat was staying awake for 10 minutes at a time. This year, he was able to play in a giant pit of plastic balls!!!!!!!! Now, he had a fantastic time doing that, but my little Kadin is an odd cookie.

Picture this. A GIANT PIT OF PLASTIC BALLS, and about 5 children aged 1 - 5 playing in it at any given time. Most children are entering from one side, walking around a bit, and exiting on the other side where the slides are. Kadin however, is quite content being buried up to his neck in the balls and not moving.

I stood beside him for like 15 minutes, watching his shaggy hair wave back and forth as he turned to watch the other children, but him not moving at all! I thought he was bored at one point and picked him up, but he cried until I put him back in and buried him again. When the head started sinking, I was then sure it was time to go.

....

Now it's bed time, good night!

....

So tonight while Kadin was screaming (he does that you know, scream) himself to sleep, I decided to have a little fun.

I mean, I KNOW he's not in pain or hurt..he's crying out of ANGER which is directed at me for leaving him in the crib and having the gall to make him sleep there!

But anyways, after watching him cry and cry, we engage in the following game.

(I snap my fingers)
Kadin makes a "light-bulb turning" motion with both hands.
(I clap my hands)
Kadin claps his hands
(I cluck my tongue)
Kadin clucks his tongue
(I ball my hands into fists and turn them over each other, over and over)
Kadin balls his hands into fists and turns them over each other, over and over.
(I blow him a kiss)
Kadin blows me a kiss.
(I say "GOOD JOB!")
Kadin blows a snot-bubble and screams louder.

At that point, Tonia switched with me. I think she winked, cast some sort of Newfie magic, and Kadin was asleep before I made it down the hall. Hrm.

Be afraid..

What is the most terrifying creature in existence?

Kadin when he misses a nap. It's been a very long day.

Our day started with a trip to the dentists office for 9 AM as Tonia had an appointment. Things went well enough for the hour she was in there; Kadin and I roamed the mall, he winked at the ladies, and I fed him a hashbrown. Life was good.

As much as Tonia hates the dental experience in general, she was ok when she came out. Sure, she had some freezing and a little drool on the go, but good otherwise.

Something happened over the next hour though, that resulted in Tonia quickly developing a headache that escalated to a vomiting spree that went on until about 4 PM. During that time, Kadin decided he would protest something or other and forgo his afternoon nap.

There are several divinely beautiful things that happen to Kadin when he is tired.

1 - He cries.
2 - He cries louder.
3 - The louder crying transforms into screaming.
4 - The screaming results in his nose running.
5 - Beyond just having a runny nose, a giant wet snot finds it's way to the side of his nose or on his forehead somehow.
6 - Since he is crying + crying louder + screaming, any attempts to wipe the aforementioned wet booger on nose and/or forehead result in him shrieking, and the wet booger invariably finds it's way into either his hair, sheets, or Tonia's pillow (my pillow seems to be immune to all substances other than urine..more on that subject later)
7 - Hasan dials random numbers in the phonebook looking for a Heroin fix.
8 - Hasan hits redial and indicates that his previous request was in fact a joke born out of desperation.
9 - Crying + crying louder + screaming + wet booger emitting Kadin starts hiccupping.
10 - Kadin gets a bottle and falls asleep in 0.0000052532 seconds.
11 - Seeing him blissfully asleep makes us forget steps 1-9, and parts of 10 as well.

So Kadin is in bed as of 5:30 PM, and Tonia is relaxing after having feasted on the honey garlic ribs that _I_ made. Ok, so she was giving me advice between bouts of vomiting, but I still did all the leg work.

Halloween wind-down and vengeance on the seafood industry

So just a quick QUICK update that Kadin was indeed in fine health when he woke up Sunday morning, so we had a fantastic time taking him out for Halloween with some friends.

I'm typing very slowly and very softly while Tonia attempts to put him down for his nap. If my typing should wake him, rest assured I'll find my head inside the monitor!

More later when it's safer to type loudly...

(Thursday, 10:46 PM)

...and here we are.

On Sunday we went to our friends place in Langley so Kadin could go out trick or treating with her 2 year old daughter, and the 2 year old daughter of her neighbour. Funny enough, both girls were dressed as Tigger!

As they lived in a nice and quiet cul-de-sac, it was very safe and relaxed taking Kadin door to door. He absolutely LOVED being outside and walking about! I almost killed myself watching him attempt to walk up driveways though. It looking something like an adult walking into a hurricane; he would lean forward and try and walk up the slight incline, and half the time he would just start tilting backwards until Tonia or I gave him a little push to get him going.

Watching him go back down the driveways was funny and terrifying at the same time, as he would just run like a bullet until he tripped and fell.

He managed to walk to three houses on his own, at which point we put the very tired but very, very happy bobaloo into his stroller to walk the rest of the way. He was kept occupied and content by being allowed to sift through his little pumkin bucket which had maybe 9 pieces of candy in it.

About 7:30 we had to call it quits and head home. Kadin slept very well that night. The rest of us, not so much.

Tonia is something of a light sleeper, so the constant fireworks around our building resulted in her being up most of the night. Since I sleep like the dead, I think that they caused me to stay awake for about 0.000002324 seconds longer than normal.

Stay tuned for pictures!

Of parks and seafood

Today we had some lovely weather so Tonia, Kadin, Daisy and I went to the park.

We had a great time watching Kadin walk around kicking his soccer ball . As much fun as he had with the ball, he had even more fun standing in one spot for 20 minutes and methodically picking up every single leaf and twig and handing them to me, one by one.

We got home at around 2 PM, fairly close to Kadin's regular nap time. By 4 PM he still hadn't gone down for his nap, so we figured we would cut our losses and just go ahead with his supper.

For supper we had some pan fried cod we picked up at the market today. Kadin has had fish a few times, though the last time resulted in a bit of a situation.

He gobbled up the fish and the mashed potatoes, so we had every reason to believe all was well in the world. By 6 PM he had fallen asleep in my lap, so we decided to just put him down and see if he would sleep through the night.

Maybe 30 minutes later he woke up crying, so we brought him back out with us to see if he would last another hour until his regular bed time.

He continued crying quite steadily so we gave him his evening bottle to see if it wasn't just hunger. It wasn't; he vomitted suddenly and quite powerfully.

The next 2 hours were filled with a lot of heart-breaking crying resulting from about 5 incidents of vomitting. The obvious culprit is the fish, though it's a mystery why the last two times he's had this reaction when in the last 3 months he ate fish 2 or 3 times without incident.

In any event, having gone through this just a few weeks ago, our collective level of anxiety was much lower than before. We kept him hydrated, and at the time of this writing he's been asleep for just over 2 hours.

If his reaction is consistent with the last one, he should be in fine fighting form by tomorrow for trick or treating with some friends of ours.

I'll follow-up on how he's doing as soon as I get a chance tomorrow.

....sleep?

Kadin has become rather...fussy..when it comes to sleep.

In the not-so-distant past, his routine was to get a bath at about 6:30, get his evening snack and last bottle for 7 PM, then by 7:30 or 8 at the LATEST, he would either be asleep in our arms or asleep within a few minutes of being put down into his crib.

Now, not so much.

He'll get his bath and snack around the same time, but despite the baggy "pisshole" eyes (taken from the saying "like pissholes in the snow"...heh) and general crankiness, he refuses to go to sleep any earlier than 8:30 or 9 PM. Even then, he NEVER falls asleep on his own. It requires either Tonia or myself to lie down with him in our bed and using nothing other than the AWESOME POWER OF OUR MINDS, will him to sleep.

This is a 15-60 minute process depending upon various factors such as his mood, windspeed, barometric pressure, and/or the phase of the moon. He'll go through various stages when falling asleep as well.

In no particular order:
1 - Smiling
2 - Laughing
3 - Screaming
4 - Banging his head on the wall
5 - Suddenly headbutting me in the face
6 - Screaming
7 - Screaming
8 - Pulling on the blinds
9 - Screaming
10 - Screaming
11 - Banging his head on the wall
12 - Snoring

Since I think I have some sort of combination of Attention Defecit Disorder and Narcalepsy, 99% of the time I fall asleep along with Kadin no matter how much I want to stay awake past 9 PM. I'll usually wake up briefly at like 2 AM , extremely disoriented, and with vague memories of Tonia trying to get me to push over before giving up on me with disgust.

Now I must clarify that all of the above is MY experience in putting him to bed.
Here's Tonia's:

1 - Wait for Hasan to work Kadin up to a screaming frenzy.
2 - Walk in, resulting in Kadin immediately stopping whatever he was doing.
3 - Count to 10, listen to Kadin drift off to sleep and start snoring.
4 - Leave the room.
5 - Mock Hasan.

Oh, his hair is long to the point of it starting to curl at the back of his head. VERY CUTE.

...

So apparently we're supposed to find some small amount of time each day updating his site. I'll be sure to sit Kadin down and let him know he has to budget his day a bit better.

Since Kadin's shots a week and change ago, he passed about 10 litres of really gross ( as opposed to the rare but quite lovely variety) snot while finally kicking the last of his cold.

Once he realized that he was once again physically well, he must have felt a bit confused and so decided to throw his sleeping schedule entirely out the door. The last few days have been a bit of a blur, but it all got really really bad on Thursday when he decided to stay awake until 11:30 PM. I think he was still awake at that point, but I'd had enough and just put him in the bed next to me and went to sleep. I used a strategically placed leg to make sure he was safe from falling out, and since he was still there in the morning I guess it worked!

On Friday he got his revenge.

Essentially, he didn't go to sleep until 9:30 or 10, then was up again at 11:30. He went back down soon after, then up again at 12:30 until about 3:30. Then he woke up again at 5:30, and dozed for a short period until 7 when he was fed up (!!) and started his day.

Even though were zombies, Tonia & I were troopers and went out for an hour or two to run some errands. He took a grand total of 36 minutes of naps that day, then slept for a fairly solid 12 hours last night.

............

He's napping now, so he might be going back on to some sort of schedule. WOoo!!

When we were all in the bedroom folding laundry earlier, he said "Daisy" while playing with Daisy and pulling her hair. To celebrate that momentous occasion, we let him run around naked for about 30 minutes until the risk of him peeing on the floor was too great to ignore.

Oh, a reminder for my family, the latest Newfoundland Pictures are up and ready for viewing!

9 days, 1 hour, 35 minutes to go...

Oh, and Kadin has

MEASLES

He's doing well though, all things considered. More on this later, as I'm late for work.

10.5 days to go

I miss him very much. I mean, just look at him, would ya?

12.5 days to go

Being apart from Kadin and Tonia is incredibly difficult. There really is no other way of saying that, really.

The last 9 days have been smudged together, since outside of work I really haven't done anything to separate the days. The only memorable thing is the family tree that I have been obsessively working on.

I haven't even had the heart to sleep in our bed, so the couch it is!

In talking to Tonia & Kadin at least twice every day I know that he's been having a great time being spoiled by his nanny and poppy, which even through my missing him makes me happy that he's having a good time.

Today however almost killed me.

Tonia called me at work to let me know he had woken up with a mild fever, but after taking some tylenol and a cool bath, he was doing A-OK. A few hours later the fever crept up again, but tylenol did the trick to bring it down.

Just as I got home I got a call that he had a 104 degree fever (he just woke up from a nap and was very, very warm), so Tonia was taking him to the local hospital which was a short drive away.

Tonia had her friend Heather's cell phone on her, but wouldn't be able to call me until after he had been seen in the hospital. What followed was the longest 45 minutes EVER.

Anyone who has had a sick child knows what I was going through, however that pain and fear was made a thousand times worse by the fact that my baby was clear across the country and there was NOTHING I could do for him.

In those 45 minutes I sat in silence waiting for the phone to ring, my mind racing through all possible things that might be going on at that moment. To keep myself occupied, I did a 30 minute online survey regarding the use of household detergents and fabric softeners.

I nearly sobbed when Tonia called and explained that he had been seen by the doctor who prescribed pennicilin for essentially the flu (or cold, the only part of that conversation that I'm clear on was that he was ok). His fever was down to a much safer 101 when checked in the hospital. Both of them are at her mothers house now and at the time of this writing, fast asleep.

Being a father has done some odd things to me, I've realized. It's quite odd actually writing this, however it seems some genetic protection mechanisms became active the moment Kadin was born. Whenever there is even the slightest glimmer that his health or safety are in jeopardy, about 99% of my brain shuts down. Whatever is left working combines with some non-thinking parts to protect him.

This mechanism has sometimes kicked in at odd times, like when he's been up at 3 AM with gas so bad he's literally shrieking; I'm running through the apartment with a little dropper full of Gripe water, RACING towards him to make the pain stop.

So going back to the interminable wait for Tonia to call me, I was going through plans of taking a midnight flight to Newfoundland to possibly get there for Saturday morning.

I know my writing is rather disjointed, but my mind is still racing and the flow of writing does somewhat mirror that.

When I was 6 years old I went to Pakistan with my mother, but my father had to stay in Ottawa for work. We were gone a total of 6 months (or a little more), but I was separated from my father for at least a few months before he was able to join us for a brief time.

In talking to him the other day, I asked him how he could have possibly lived with being separated from us for months; I was a broken man after only a week. He at least had his sister and her family in Ottawa, so he spent a significant amount of time with them. I look forward to going to work, and standing in the rain at 11 PM waiting for 2 dogs to poo. Heh.

I think that's entirely too much broken writing for one evening. Kadin has his birthday party planned for tomorrow, which at this point depends entirely on how he's feeling in the morning. I hope my bobaloo feels better in the morning.

Doctor Doctor...

Today we took Kadin in for his 12 month Dr's appointment (he's 12 days away from the big oh-one, but close enough).

Before I get into the details, it never ceases to amaze me that our Dr can open up his diaper, "examine" him, then go on for 10 minutes talking about what a cute baby girl we have. She even went on to exclaim "He looks just like a girl!".

On my face, a smile. On the tip of my tongue and held back only by willpower and the looming threat of Tonia smacking me upside the head "Honestly, do you see many baby girls with a penis?".

But of course this is a childs website and we were at a childs doctor and so such thoughts must not be thought of. Moving right along...

Kadin did wonderful. He weighed in at 26 lbs 10 oz, 78 cm tall and 48 cm around his head. Looking at his growth chart, he is for the first time no longer "off the charts" and has fallen into the top 10 percentile.

He has also been cleared for milk, eggs etc. We figure we'll pick up some homo milk for him tomorrow and just use up the last can of formula this week. By the time he heads to Newfoundland he'll have kicked the formula habit.

Speaking of which, it's less than 2 weeks before Tonia & Kadin leave. Aaaagh.

Ok, well past my bedtime. G'night!

Favorite Things

An idea came to me this morning. Kadin will be one year in about 2.5 weeks....WOW!! Holy F!@cking WOW! I wanted him to look back on this (maybe...a big maybe) someday and see what his fav things to do were...so here goes.

Kadin's Favorite:

Book - Zoey's New Bike
Show - BooBah
Outfit - Diaper
Word (this week) - Yeah
Food - Spaghetti
Drink - Water...well formula really but I'm trying to trick him into being weaned
Toy - String..any type of string attached to anything - facinates him
Forbidden thing - remote control
Word to Hear - No...makes him laugh hysterically
Cookie - Pablum Banana
Cereal - Cheerios
Place - Mall (or mommy's arms but we are trying to be fair right Hasan?)
Time to Sleep - 7 pm
Time to Wake - 5 am
Song - Black Eyes Peas - Hey Mama (Hasan says his next word will be Fergie *sigh*)
Commercial - Bouncing red period for Kotex Tampons
Mess to Make - Vasoline in Hair

and finally...

Reason to Cry - No reason at all......

Poop obsessed (cont)

Update: Not 30 minutes after the last post, Kadin had a healthy and wonderful(?) poop. Then he threw up all over himself. Then he smiled. Many a picture was taken.

Poop obsessed

Laugh if you will, but it's true. We heard all the jokes about how obsessive new parents are when it comes to their newborns movements, but we had no idea it would be like this.

Laugh if you will, but it's true. We heard all the jokes about how obsessive new parents are when it comes to their newborns movements, but we had no idea it would be like this.

Our first few encounters with Kadin's pediatrician and later the G.P., I found myself going on at length about the colour, consistency, amount, celebrity resemblences etc of his poop. All they actually wanted to know was if he had pooped in the last 24 hours, sans details.

Now I find myself calling home two or three times a day, asking "Did he poo yet?" or "He's really due for a poo now" or "Should we call someone if he doesn't poo in an hour?"

I think he knows this, and so purposely holds back his poops until we're about ready to freak out, then giggles and unleashes liquid hell.

We'll pay him back though. See, we took pictures of El Squirto in action. Muahahaha. I'm sure years from now, his girlfriend will love to see those.