AC Capehart capehart

When I was growing up, I didn’t have to worry about what my parents wrote about me. Neither of them wrote much. OK, my mom’s great about letters and cards, and my dad’s pretty good about postcards from key locations, or travel events. And I know my mom journals. But that kind of communication is, I think, fundamentally different from the public forum of blogging. As I continue to be a daddy blogger, I pay attention to others of the same ilk.

I have just finished my first WordPress plugin. If you’ve noticed Sam’s age popping up at the bottom of posts in the Childhood & Fatherhood category, that’s my plugin at work. If you’ve noticed pages not acting quite right, well, that’s my plugin when it wasn’t working. 🙂 I think I’ve gotten it all fixed up now, and am releasing it to the relatively small community of people who read my blog.

I write a fair amount about my new daughter. Becoming a dad has shifted my life around quite a bit. As I write things about when she first smiled, or first rolled over, it was keeping the date of when those things happened, but the I’d have to do date-math in my head to figure out how old she was. I don’t like doing date-math in my head. So, I wrote a wordpress plugin to do it for me.

This is the parent page for wordpress plugins that I write. It may end up being a fairly small list, but I’ve been impressed with how easy it is to throw together a plugin for wordpress, so as other wordpress-thorns appear in my side, I may soothe the itch here. In the meanwhile, there’s just “Duration” — A plugin to include how long it has been since some event (or until some event) calculated between the time the post was written, and an arbitrary event set by the blogger.

I realized today as I was feeding Sam that there were worries that I’d had when she was younger that I no longer have. I took a moment to revel in them. Breathing — OK, we aren’t out of the woods entirely for SIDS at this age, but we’re past most of the serious danger area. When Sam was a few weeks old, I remember waking up in the night, and not being able to hear her breathe.

We did it. And it was at least a moderate success. Sam had her first non-milk, non-formula food today! We mixed up some rice cereal with formula, and fed it to her with a spoon. A real (baby) spoon! It’s hard to tell how much she actually took, as a great deal of it landed on her bib, her clothes, her parents, her chair, her floor, etc. (Not really all that bad.

We’ve taken some grief recently over SamTrak. People seem to think it’s a bit beyond the pale to be tracking Sam’s feeding and elimination habits on the Internet. But, there is reason to my madness. Because of her size, we needed to track feeding and elimination. Because it’s me, it seemed easiest to do this online (access from any computer instead of “Where’s the little black poop notebook?”). Now, I could have done it on my private house-network, but then Carolyn couldn’t have accessed the information from work.

Sam had her 4-month checkup at the pediatrician last Thursday, and in addition to shots, got a clean bill of health. Her percentiles are generally up as well, and she has a good weight “velocity.” This means that a lot of changes are starting now. We’ll be able to start giving her solids as soon as we like. We need to start setting good bedtime habits and establish a bedtime routine.

When Mom was away at work, Dad declared that it was time for a fashion shoot. Unfortunately, Dad was so lazy, he didn’t even go upstairs to get a white sheet as a backdrop, making do, instead, with a few gauzy cloth diapers. It didn’t come too well, but it’ll just have to do. So, here you go. Altoona’s youngest calendar girl is now also a fashion model — showing off all (well, some) of the 0-3 month styles before she outgrows them.

I don’t want to do a blog category on marketing genius, but I’m afraid it’s come up again here. Partly because we have a good friend who’s a P&G baby, partly because P&G supports Upromise, but mostly (and I really do mean mostly) because it’s cheap, we buy “Joy“dishwashing liquid. First off, I think “Joy” is an odd name for dishwashing liquid. Expecting a chuckle of support and a comment like “Yeah, why don’t they call it ‘kleenzgud’?