Adventures in Babysitting

Taylor here. According to Matt, he's too "intimidated by my blogging skills" (read: lazy) to update very regularly.

Things have been going well in the Jones household. I've made the transition to working fairly massive-emotional-breakdown-free and Matt has been a superstar as a stay-at-home parent. Seriously... He's much better at this job than I was. The first few days were a little hard on him (and Silas), but now, they have an awesome routine going. Matt has even gotten Silas to a place where he naps regularly and goes down without a massive battle of wills. And Silas seems really happy.

Good times!

That doesn't mean that the two of them haven't had any amusing adventures, however. The penalty for making your wife write the blog entry this week: she's going to tell the four people that read it about some of your more hilarious moments in parenting.

Adventure #1: Like I said, the napping situation is much improved. But this was not the case when Matt first took over. The first few days, Silas fought each nap with every ounce of will in his tiny 17lb body. Matt, reasonably concluding that this situation was untenable, perused the fifteen baby sleep books I had purchased when I was at home with him dealing with the nap situation myself and decided to try out the "Pick Up Put Down" method of sleep training. This method requires you to lay the baby in his crib for naps and once he starts crying, you may pick him up. You may only hold him, however, for as long as it takes for him to stop crying. At that point, you have to put him back in the crib immediately. If he starts crying, pick him back up. Once he stops, lay him down. Rinse. Repeat. Matt tried this... 45 times. When (shockingly) it didn't work, Matt decided to try the one thing that the sleep training book described as a "last resort."

He climbed into the crib with Silas. Yes, folks, my husband hauled his 160lb body into our child's tiny crib. When I inquired as to how he got out of the crib without waking Silas up, he looked at me like I was crazy and explained that he stayed in the crib for the duration of the nap and just fell asleep himself.

Yes, honey, I'm the one that's crazy here. You're a thirty year-old man who just napped in a crib.

(Thanks to Matt for being a good sport and reenacting the scenes from this week's adventures so that I could document them for the blog)

Adventure #2: Yesterday, Matt decided to do some straightening up while Silas played on his playmat in the living room. As he cleaned up the kitchen, he noticed that the trash needed to be taken out. He grabbed the trashbag, headed down the basement stairs right out the back door to where our outside trashcans are and he shut the door behind him. When he tried to go back inside, he realized that the door was locked. He ran around to the front door and found that it was locked as well. Right around that time, he heard Silas start to cry, alone, by himself in the living room. So, Matt did what any reasonable, completely panicked parent would do. He scaled the side of the house, and shimmied in through a window that no adult man should be able to fit through, destroying the screen and knocking over several glass picture frames in the process. And Silas was fine. He was probably only alone for five minutes or less.

I knew Matt's monkey-like ability to climb would come in handy one day

I don't know, that's a really tiny window.

And still, he fits through it. Huh.

We also had a great visit from our friends Julia, Dayana, and Karla this week. Silas got some cute clothes, a growth chart with a dinosaur on it, and some sweet sweet kisses.