Daddy Day Care

So last week I attended the Daddy 411 class at the hospital. Or as I like to call it, "Scoring Points With Mommy Class".

Now, of course this class it all men who's wives are with child. Easy right? You would think that most people got the point that it was men ONLY, but of course there's always one. One lady comes in with her husband, does a little meet and greet, then proceeds to sit down on the side of the class against the wall (the menfolk were all sitting at the tables). The instructor walks up to the lady ever so kindly and says, "May I help you ma'am?". She says, "Oh I'm ok, I'm just going to sit over here out of the way". "Well, you can't sit here or anywhere because this is for fathers-to-be only. No women allowed, sorry". She then says, "Well, if I don't stay, then he won't pay attention and I want to make sure he pays attention because this is important". WOW dude! Not only was your woman the only one that even showed up, but she tried to stay AND told everyone that she needs to keep an eye on you. Not cool dude...not cool.

Once the instructor convinced the lady that he would guarantee her husband paid full attention, she agreed to leave. I have no idea if she really left or not. Next up was making sure everyone paid the $20 before we got started. This was disguised as roll call. Sadly, none of the men (myself included) had no idea if we'd paid up or not, cuz ya know, our wives took care of that. So once he got to your name, it was like Maury Povich or something. Josiah......you DID pay!!!

So after we got the money situation straight he had us line up by in order of when our baby is due. We ranged from "any minute" to "6 months from now". There was about 16 guys in the class and I was near the front since Madison is due next month. This really made me realize how close it is. We then had to stand up and say our name, whether we were having a boy or girl and when we were due. After all the pleasantries, we got down to the nitty gritty.....we watched a video.
Ok, after the video we got down to the meat of the class. I can say that we learned how to wrap up our baby like a burrito (this was harder than it looks), how to carry the baby in may different fashions and how to change diapers.

I would go into more detail, but...well, frankly the class was for men only and I can't share everything we talked about (wife might be reading...shhhh). I can however share some pictures with you. Enjoy...

(my handwriting is terrible)


(that baby was heavier than it looked)


(I promise I was paying attention)

Time has become crunchy

Yeah it's been a while. Just like when I was blogging a lot when the house was being built, there comes that time when it's getting down to the wire. That's when things get REAL busy. I think the kids call it "crunch time".

So what have we been doing? Well for starters, we recently went to our District Convention. We were looking forward to this for a couple of reasons. First of all, we look forward to it every year. It's the highlight of the summer without question (this year didn't disappoint either). Secondly, since Ivori's been pregnant we've kinda been a little on edge about going to the convention when she's so pregnant. Thankfully it didn't go too bad. We decided to stay up in a hotel, which ended up being a great idea. Mainly because Ivori doesn't like long car trips (it's about an 1hr 15 min away which would have meant about 7.5 hrs driving for the weekend). Another reason it ended up working out is because Ivori got a little sick on Saturday. We tried to sit in the car for a bit and listen on the radio, but she wanted to lay down. It was good that we didn't have to drive all the way home. I was able to drop her off and come back and make the rest of the Saturday program. Also the pool, HBO and continental breakfast is some stuff we don't happen to have at home. By the way, what makes a breakfast continental? Does it depend on what contient you're on? All in all it was a great weekend.

What else have we been doing you ask? Well, we've been working on the baby's room. First off, I put together the baby's crib. I was going to make a whole post about the significance of putting together the crib that your child will sleep in. I was going to write all about the expirence of my first "Daddy Duty" of constructing this piece of furniture. However, it was a little anticlimactic unfortunately. It only came in about eight pieces and the instructions were on about one page (two if you folded it) which was written in a very "Constructing Cribs for Dummies" kind of way. I think it took me about 35 minutes. But it does look nice and my baby will have somewheres to sleep. Here's a couple pictures...



After that we had some molding put up in the baby's room. This I did not do. I would not have nearly looked this nice. Props to Julio the Handyman who's done quite a bit of work around our house. Here's a picture...


So yeah, we've been a little busy and there's still plenty to do. We're currently working on making sure we have the suitcase packed and ready to go when the time comes. I'm not sure what our readiness level is on that, I'll have to get back to you. All in all, everything is going as planned.