You may be asking yourself, "what is that circle up above?". Well, that is about how far dilated my wife is currently. After a very painful day for my wife which involved me taking part of the day off to rush her to the hospital, we are back home. A month of pains which restrict her movement and now sharp pains throughout today, the pregnancy has certainly not been fun for her. Today however we found out that she is now roughly 0.5cm dilated. I guess we can consider this a milestone and possibly a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Here's to hoping that the rest of the 10cm comes quickly.

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My wife's shoes seem to get smaller and smaller everyday. For some reason she just cant seem to fit into them as she used too, say 5 months ago. Of course that would likely be due to the fact that my wife's ankles have completely disappeared and instead been replaced with gallons of excess water. My wife likes to refer to her feet as elephant feet. While they are quite inflated, I wouldn't go as far to say they look like elephant feet. She seems to have a terrible time putting her shoes on to leave the house and I wouldn't be surprised if the tedious shoe process has now added 3-5 minutes of waiting time before we get to finally leave. I am however quite impressed that she has increased 2 shoe sizes in about 5 months. I can now see why so many women stick with sandals near the end of their pregnancy.

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A recent NYTimes story entitled Supersize Strollers Ignite Sidewalk Drama laid out that most people do not like the superwide strollers. They say that $700 strollers are being used as a type of battering ram to get from one place to another in a quicker manner. I would agree that double wide strollers can certainly be a bit bulky in some situations. I don't recall ever seen a triple long stroller in person but I imagine it looks like a tank of some sort. Many people have nicknamed these superwide strollers as hummers and relate them to people who buy SUVs so they can mow down anything that gets in their way (let me know when they have a stroller with a turret on it and ill pick one up).
If a double wide or a triple long stroller just doesn't meet your needs, try one of these. BergDesign has come up with a steel welded strollers for 2 to 6 children. While these are impressive, I don't know where you could get away with using one.

My wife can agree that when it comes down to it, I don't like other people to be irritated because of me. I am a person who if I see people behind me at a self check-out line, I will speed up to get the job done quicker. I would ask for the same respect if I was behind someone as well. This goes hand in hand with strollers. There is a certain etiquette that I am beginning to see as I get closer to delivery date.

While recently out shopping, I began to see things parents do with their strollers that either irritate me or simply want me to pat them on their back. Here are a few stroller etiquette rules that I have come up with.

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What do Dave Matthews, Phil Collins, Jon Secada and other artists all have in common? They are all fathers. Recently my wife and I went to see the Corpse Bride movie and while waiting for the show to start, they showed an advertisement for a CD entitled, Golden Slumbers - A Fathers Love. The artists came together to make a CD to celebrate the important role fathers play in their children's lives. With the child market aimed towards mothers, it is nice to see something for the fathers. Its great to see fathers coming together to show to the world that fathers are important. Artists were given the chance to add a song to the CD that they best felt showed their view on fatherhood.

You can take a listen to the CD off the website. Many of the artists I have never listened too but the music is nice. It looks like you can buy the CD all over the place and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Golden Dads Project and the National Fatherhood Initiative.

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Everyone you speak to has different methods to soothing a child, but the most often heard one would certainly be the fact that babies love the car vibrations. With this in mind, Australian company BabyHugs has created an "innovative product that will gently rock a cot". The Lullabub Cot Rocker has 4 modules (feet) that are attached to the bottom of the crib and with 4 different settings, can simulate the ride in a car. The company believes that this device could benefit the entire family by allowing everyone to sleep better.

The device idea seems like a great one and the concept seems like it would work well for the child. The company has not released a possible price however they believe the product will be available to purchase online in the late part of 2005. One could only imagine that the price of this will be high. Only time will tell whether or not it will become another product that can be passed on or if parents wont be able to live without it.

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I am always looking for more parenting information on the Internet and recently, I have attempted to find some great parenting forums. Just like father and mother blogs, there is a plethora of forums. Some of these are better than others but all of them have a couple significant issues.

First off, while mother blogs outnumber father blogs by the thousands, this holds true on the forums. I imagine if you take a look at the memberlist of one of these forums, the numbers will be similar to 1 male to every 150 women. Unfortunately, this causes a lot of men to generally not feel welcomed and furthermore, the information from a mans standpoint is hard to find.

Two pet peeves of mine when it comes to forums occur within the signatures that many people create. It seems that women mainly like to fill their signature with a large amount of randomly sized baby pictures that are not coordinated at all. It seems that the signatures have turned into a battleground among these women and they are fighting to see who can pile in as many pictures as possible. Now great, you may think you have a great looking baby but after you have posted 4 times on a thread, I am just sick of seeing your child and will stop following the thread soon after. Call me a grouch, but that's the way it is. Furthermore, in between these baby pictures are randomly placed blinkies. Blinkies for those who dont know are those small images that have blinking edges, dots or text. Quite possibly one of the most annoying trends to hit the Internet in quite a few years. Luckily, these blinkies are commonly only seen on teenage girl websites and mother forums. Again, just like the baby pictures, it seems there is a contest to see how many of these blinkies one person can put into their signature. The combination of the 2 creates a very distracting collage of junk. Junk that only adds to the page length and load time.

Here are a few of the forums that I sometimes checkout.
Baby and Me
MyMomsBest
ParentingClub

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It has been a while since I last updated the weblog with information about my wife and baby. Last week my wife was told that her belly size shows that she is 2 weeks larger than she should be. Today we were able to confirm this with a third ultrasound. After a bit of measuring, the technician was able to confirm that the baby is 1 to 2 weeks larger than normal. My wife is 35 weeks 5 days and the ultrasound says 37 weeks. The technician guessed that the baby could currently weigh about 6.5lbs to 7lbs (71% percentile). My wife has been complaining that the baby is too big lately and now we understand why.

The rest of the ultrasound went great and we got to see some more great pictures of the face, heartbeat and even his lungs practicing to breathe. Everything appears to be as planned and other than the additional size of the baby, it appears to be good. My wife will have a doctors appointment next week in which we will get a bit more information and see how the doctor wants to proceed. The ultrasound below shows a pretty decent shot of his chubby face. I was also born with a chubby face and later turned into skinny kid (gotta love that high metabolism). The first thing that came to my mind when seeing this new picture was that my sons face looks like the face on Mars. Interesting.

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My wife and I have been on the hunt for a nice rocking chair that would work well for her and the baby. Unfortunately, that idea was shot down when we came to find out they cost a bit over our budget and any garage sale find had yet to be found. Flipping through the weekly ads however showed us the Heritage Collection Glider Rocker with Ottoman from Kmart. The store itself when we went in was a ghost town. I have never seen such an odd ball bunch of employees and a store completely empty in the middle of the day. It was a site to be seen in itself. The glider rocker however was on sale and seemed to match our existing room color perfectly so after much waiting (rain check) and being passed around to about 8 people, we were told it was in stock.

Overall, the glider rocker works great for our room. Frees up a bit of space compared to what we had in the corner prior and generally looks much better. The assembly time on this was next to nothing. A mere 20 minutes as the parts are nearly completely assembled out of the box. General blemishes here and there confirm the reason for the lower price but looks good none the less. My wife seems to enjoy the comfort of it however for me, the thing is rock hard. The padding may just need some time to relax but dang its like sitting on a brick. I think for the price paid ($79.99), it was a great deal compared to some of the higher priced glider rockers and rocking chairs. I would suggest testing the chair out prior to purchasing it however, to make sure its a comfort you can handle.

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*Clears throat after talking too much like a pirate*

My wife and I had a baby shower thrown for us on Saturday and I am happy to say that we made off with some great loot. I feel like we robbed a baby store. I definitely want to thank everyone for coming to the party and for all of the wonderful gifts. I appreciate the fact that we really didn't get any super generic gifts and it seems that everyone really put thought into their gift choices. Without knowing our baby theme, everyone seemed to get us pooh bear items. While yes it is a bit overdone, there is a reason for that, its neutral and looks nice. We got all types of pooh bear related items including framed pictures, piggy banks and mobile. We got a couple great looking books which I look forward to reviewing and posting on the site for others to see. A couple toys as well will be reviewed and posted. The baby clothes that we received are great and with a wide variety of ages, its going to make our lives a lot easier when those days come. With the likely hood of spending hours and hours in a labor room, the gift that I myself will use the most often will be the sets of Legos that were given. How many creations can you make while your wife is in 24 hours of labor? Ill report back and let you all know. Anyways, thanks again everyone for coming and for the wonderful gifts, we really had a great time.

Debra, the food was great as well.

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Avast ye scurvy dads! Squint your eye and show ye grin as today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Let ye kids know that today it be al'right to talk like a pirate. Arrr! And if ye don't have a child yet, talk like a pirate anyways. Aye, sit down with ye wench today and sip on some grog (non alcholic for the pregnant women) as that's the pirates life. I'll be sailing off to annoy my land-lubber coworkers. Arrrr!

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11 adopted children were recently discovered to have been locked in 40in deep X 40in tall cages. Kids ranging from ages 1 year old to 14 years old were taken from this awful situation. The parents, Michael and Sharen Gravelle, 56 and 57, allowed a Department of Job and Family Services officer enter their home and after seeing a "little face" behind a cage, he immediately was issued a search warrant. According to one of the boys, he told authorities that he was forced to sleep in the cage for the past three years.

Its amazing how the adoption agencies never picked up on this issue. The parents must have done a wonderful job at hiding the evidence. The parents seemed to believe that it was alright to have their children locked in cages which leads me to believe that they possibly did not hide what they were doing. At least 2 neighbors reported the issue, one after the neighbor noticed the children working in the yard for a long amount of time. On a good note, they say that the children showed no signs of being malnourished or physical abused. Read more here.

On a side note, if you are interested in caging your teenage daughter who wants to get herself in trouble by sneaking out, try this on for size. The teenager cage, yours for only $999. [Link] [satire]

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It is never too early to learn valuable information so when I saw an article recently entitled How to Diaper a Standing 2-Year-Old, I had to take a look at it. I can only imagine that changing the diaper of a toddler would be crazy and standing up must make that taskt all the more difficult. This website gives you 5 steps to changing the diaper of a standing 2-year old. There is such a vast amount of tips that parents have that have never been released. It is exciting to see these kinds of ideas make it to the general public and help everyone including us dads.

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The other night my wife and I were purchasing some groceries at our local grocery store. Out of the corner of my eye I see a stroller and the kid inside of it begin to tip over. After a bunch of commotion and the kid crying, the women picks up the stroller and places the child back into it. Turns out the women had also been shopping and decided that after purchasing her items, she would place the bags over the back arms of the stroller. Common sense would tell you that the stroller would tip with the amount of groceries she had. The women had her child in a cheap (under $10 at Walmart) type of stroller which in itself is not balanced very well. I understand that some people cannot afford a more sturdy/expensive stroller or possibly she didn't want to lug around such a large stroller but this is common sense people. Maybe I need to do a stroller test and see how much weight in groceries their handle bars can withstand before tipping over. A test not necessary if people simply used their common sense.

On a side note, the number one way you know you are going to be a parent is you begin to notice all bad things that other parents do. You begin to get that parental instinct.

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It's that time of the year again where the school kids are out in force trying to sell odd ball items from a catalog. Items ranging from chocolates to gift wrap and even cactus shaped bowls (only in Arizona). I believe we have all either participated in such an event or at least seen a kid trying to get your money. I recall when I was a kid, I came to school one morning and let them know I sold X amount of items and I got to spin the prize wheel and wham, I won $50. An amazing feet for a boy in say the 5th grade. Anywho, the past couple of years have been difficult around this time of the year because I feel so obligated to purchase something. Not because I feel bad that they wont get their prizes that they lust for but just the fact that each little boy that comes to my door reminds me of myself at that age. Funny looking kid with glasses not knowing what to say when the door opens. The day came again today and unfortunately I had to turn him down as the money in my pocket isn't as plump as it used to be. Anyone else have any experiences/memories about your candy selling days?

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The Challenge

I am dedicated towards being a dad that will be there for my son and want to make sure his life is a good as it can be. Because of this, I have attempted to sample 5 different babyfood flavors to see for myself, which ones are edible, and which ones are certainly not. Please do not try this at home as side-effects may occur.

The Tests - Rated 1 to 5 (5 being best) unless otherwise stated.

Smell: That initial whiff after opening the jar can be overwhelming.
Taste: The taste is indescribable on all but the dessert foods.
Appearance: The appearance of the food can go from thick and clumpy to very wet. The color also fell into this category.
After Taste: Sometimes, time doesnt heal problems. Like the problem of a bad taste in your mouth.
Gag Reflex: Simply put, this measures the possibility of vomiting. Rated 1 to 5 (5 being least likely to vomit)

The Verdict



The results were not necessarily unpredictable. As shown in the following image, the vanilla custard clearly beat out all of the other baby food flavors. The creamed spinach nearly made me throw up twice and because of that I was forced to give it a negative rating on the Gag Reflex test. It is easy to see that babies will likely enjoy the dessert foods better than a main course and certainly the sides.

Final Comments

There are many flavors and brands of baby food and while I only sampled 5 of them (thank god), it is possible that other people/babies may have a taste for them. It may be a good idea to let your child sample different flavors but please for the sake of your child, stay clear of the creamed spinach. I understand that babies taste buds are still in the deveopment stage so some of these flavors that I did not like may be taken well by an infant. None the less, I dont understand why baby food must taste so bad. Maybe I should prepare now and learn how to make my own baby food.

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Ensure, the company best known for their nutrition drinks, has recently come out with their Healthy Mom products which include snack bars and nutritional drinks. Both of these are geared towards pregnant women and mothers and are too be used in addition to their prenatal vitamins.

My wife recently picked up a box of the 'Chocolate, Chocolate Chip Snack Bars' and she is surprisingly happy with them. My wife can best describe them as being similar to granola bar and while she does not like granola bars normally, these she has no troubles eating. I agree that the consistency is somewhat similar but I believe that they are quite a bit more dry. The taste of the bars however are not that bad, especially for a nutritional bar. We have not yet tried the 'Fudge Graham' flavor but will likely in the future. Ensure also has nutritional drinks for moms that come in 'Homemade Vanilla' and 'Creamy Milk Chocolate' flavors.

After a bit of surfing, I came across a rebate form where Ensure will reimburse you for your purchase. I was also able to find a free sample form.

Update: My wife has now tried the 'Fudge Graham' and believes that it may be a bit better than the 'Chocolate, Chocolate Chip' tasted before. It doesnt seem to be as dry is the big reason why its better. I personally think that the flavor will get old quickly and would prefer the chocolate between the two.

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Over the past couple of days, WebGoonies.com has been migrated to Movable Type. This is a much prefered method over using Blogger. Please, if you link to me, make sure your links point to http://www.webgoonies.com rather than http://threepts.blogspot.com. Thank you.

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I just noticed that Babystyle.com is having a 40% off sale from their outlet. You must use the code SALE40 when checking out. Surprisingly, they have quite a large selection of items in their outlet. I guess I will need to hide my credit card again as my wife would have too much fun with this.

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Used by the European elite beginning in the late 17th century, birth announcements have been used by the royal class to announce the new member of their family. Hot wax seals were used to close the envelope and servants would hand deliver them to their recipients via horseback.

Last time I checked, I am not one of the elite and I certainly don't own a horse. My wife and I have however dedicated the past few nights towards creating our own birth announcements. While we did not handwrite them like in the past, we used a new modern technology called the computer. We are curious to see peoples opinions on our creations. Please leave a comment with your opinions. We are looking to use one of these designs if everything works out.

Click image to enlarge.

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I have begun researching a dream that I had last night. I recall no more than the fact that I saw myself as a young child and after I picked myself up, my younger self began to cry so I put him down. What could this mean? Possibly that my son will bring back a bit of my child hood? Maybe the fact that my younger self cried would mean that I wont be a great father? Maybe its simply a glimpse of what my son may look like. He definitely looked cute (why wouldn't he, he is my son after all). Does anyone have any opinions on this?

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Everyone wants to be the best parent they can be. They also want a bit of alone time as well. This leads to one thing, a babysitter. While I imagine most baby sitters do their job just fine, baby sitting incidents do occur. A new product called the Shaking Baby Monitor [via OhGizmo] by Esche Jacobsen hopes to put parents minds at ease. The device simply attaches to the clothing of the infant and will inform the parent via their phone if any shaking happens. Now at first thought you may think this is a great idea. Maybe something you have been hunting for recently. Think outside the box and imagine this. The device attaches to the child clothing. Call me crazy, but would the abusive baby sitter not be able to simply remove it before shaking?

The product website appears to still be in development. Hopefully the design of the monitor itself is still in design as well.

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Click image for the How-to.

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Link: Willow Tree By Demdaco “New Dad” Figurine

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Link: NBC6 - Baby Girl Born During Hurricane Evacuation

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Link

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