First Waves at the Stoked-O-Rama!

October 8, 2016

So this is kind of a big deal...

Owen caught his first waves. He was 5 months old, and caught 2 waves with his dad on a boogie board at T-street.

Heres the story:  We went down to T-Street to support our friends, the Gudauskas Brothers, and the event they host each year at T-Street called the Stoked-O-Rama.  The G-Boys are professional surfers, and are fortunate enough to travel the world doing what they love. They wanted to give back to the community, so they started a surf contest for the local kids. The event is free, paid for by the G-Boys and sponsors, complete with insanely cool goodie bags (think free shoes, sunglasses, etc). The G-Boys are there and hang with the kids all day, supporting them along the shoreline and throwing high fives until their hands are sore. The coolest part is that they are able to raise money though the contest to pay for scholarships for kids to participate in the San Clemente Jr. Lifeguards. The event is so inspiring. Parents wait outside Jack's Surfshop at 3am to get a spot in the contest, as it fills up in less than an hour. Our favorite event to watch is Pops-n-Pups (8 and under). The little grommies head out into the water and their dad or mom push them into waves. Some of the kids can barely paddle, but when they stand up on a wave, they absolutely rip. Owen, are you ready for Stoke-O-Rama 2022?

We hung out with the kids all day, rooting them on and thinking about what a great community we are a part of.  The water was warm, the sun was out, and Owen was as stoked as always to play in the water. Owen really, really likes the water. When people see him in the ocean, they are amazed that he is ok with the cold water. We never forced him in the water, but from his first experiences, he was always happy.  So, we were playing in the water and decided to see if Owen would like laying down on Mac's boogie board.  Again, he was stoked and was having fun, so Brandon put him up on the nose of the boogie board and rode two waves with Owen. Owen loved every second of it. Kalli got some great photos, thank goodness! We stopped at two waves because we wanted to end on a high note while Owen was still happy and stoked.  Wow. How cool is that?  Catching waves at 5 months?  Owen is seriously a San Clemente local now. Atta boy...

Daycare

July-September

Owen is one lucky dude, and so are we.  When I went back to work when Owen was 3 months old, we had a hard time finding daycare. Most daycares can only have 2 infants at a time, so the spots are in high demand.  We were able to get him a spot at an in home daycare, but they couldn't take him until September.

We were so fortunate that our good friend Cami Vorell (Fowler) and her family were able to watch Owen 2 days a week for 2 months while we waited for the daycare to open up. It turned out to the perfect transition for Owen. Cami has 4 kids and a puppy, so Owen got to be around lots of love and attention, before going to daycare where there would be even more kids.  Cami and her family are so loving, and they honestly treated Owen like royalty.  Cami's youngest daughter, Ellah, referred to him as "her baby Owen", and still does. It is so cute. Hannah, Adah and Nate all helped hold and play with Owen throughout the summer. When Kalli and Mac came to visit their cousins, Owen got even more love!

 

 

Owen then transitioned to daycare with Kim Eck in Forrester Ranch. She will be able to take Owen 4 days a week when I go back to work full time. I learned about Kim through Renee Gold (Henshill), as Kim and Renee's mom are close friends.  Kim happens to be the aunt of our old Montego house neighbors, the Plasky's. Kim is Renee Plasky's sister, so I probably met Kim as a kid during holiday parties at the Plasky's house. Kim has also taken care of the kids of other people we know, and she has had her daycare for 26 years. Since being with Kim, Owen loves going to daycare. He loves being around all of the kids and wants to watch what they do and how they play. We think Owen will be a very social kid!

5 Months

September 25

Owen is 5 months old! He is growing so fast! He loves food, just like his dad. Owen watches his mom and dad eat, and tries to grab their food for a taste. He loves going to the beach and going in the water. He likes to splash in the waves and feel the sand between his toes. He also likes to help his mom and dad do the dishes while hanging out in the BabyBjorn.  He likes chasing Reef in the backyard and playing in his jumperoo.

First Foods

September 19

After talking with the pediatrician, Owen started his first foods at around 4.5 months. He had been drooling profusely, especially while watching mom and dad eat their food. He was very interested in foods, so we gave it a try.  We started with infant rice cereal, and he loved it, but the cereal gave him gas. We switched to oatmeal, and it has been smooth sailing ever since.

Owen loves oatmeal and apples for breakfast.  For dinner, he likes sweet potatoes, squash, avocado, peas and green beans. Come to think of it, there really isn't anything that he hasn't liked so far.  He must take after his dad!

Preconceived Notions

September 19

The best word I can use to describe our initial experience with parenting is "humbling". Before we had Owen, I had many preconceived notions of what I thought parenting would be like, and how we would teach Owen to learn and grow with our family.  A few of those thoughts were: (1) to avoid the struggle of getting a toddler to sleep in their own bed, our baby would start sleeping in their crib as soon as it made sense; (2) we would breastfeed exclusively until 6 months; and (3) we would never consider one of those infant helmets for flat head syndrome (was it a gimmick?).

Owen is teaching me that he is a person, first and foremost, and he has a say in how he wants to live. Yes, we are the parents and we can have goals we want to work towards, but at the end of the day, I don't get to decide for him how he is going to feel and react to life. He has one by one, dismantled each one of the thoughts I had for raising him in his early weeks. To recap:

(1) Owen slept  like an angel until he was 3 months old. He still slept very well for his age until 4 months old as well.  We thought WE had done something right. Haha. No so.  He was just an infant and had some growing to do.  After 4 months, specifically the night we returned home from Mammoth, Owen decided that sleep wasn't really his favorite thing.  We were on a emotional rollercoaster of sleep deprivation (Owen and us) when he. just. wouldn't. go. to. sleep. from 2am onwards.  We tried everything. At some point, after weeks of not sleeping and him just not being ready for sleep training, we gave in and would do anything to get the guy to sleep. At 5.5 months we actually visited the pediatrician because our daycare provider, Kim, said she was getting worried about his lack of sleep as well. He stopped napping and sleeping at night, which is very rare considering he is so happy and full of life all day long.  I think Owen just loves to be around people and is so social that he has FOMO (fear of missing out) at night and during naps.  We described what was going on to the pediatrician and she said, "oh wow, that sounds really bad!" This made me feel marginally better in my sleep deprived state. I wasn't just being a baby; Owen was actually being a tough little cookie.  The pediatrician prescribed zantac because she thought he may have silent reflux, and said to stick to a strict sleep and nap schedule.  So far it's been a week and a half and things are improving. Owen is napping like a champion again, and sleeping at least half of the night on his own. Was it silent reflux? Was he just ready to figure it out on his own? Is it teething? Who knows. But at the end of the day, when Owen wakes up screaming at 2am and just. won't. stop, preconceived notions be dammed.  We pick him up and cuddle him on the couch or in bed until he falls back asleep.

(2) Owen has been difficult to feed since early on. He never had an issue latching on or any other physical issue, but ever since I went back to work he preferred the bottle to the boob. Maybe bottles are easier to drink? I don't know. He liked nursing in bed at night, but other than that, nursing was a battlefield for 90% of daytime feedings. At some point I realized that it just wasn't worth the tears (for him and I) to get him back to breastfeeding. So, I pumped and I pumped and I pumped to give him breastmilk exclusively, like my goal, even when I was home and the one doing the feeding. Owen, you owe me big time for this, buddy. I felt like the pump was an extension of my body for months, but I tried my best to be positive and realize that either way, you were getting the best nutrition we could give you. After a while, my production began to decrease and I couldn't keep up. We went through 3 trash bags full of frozen milk in what felt like an instant. When we returned home from Yosemite, we gave you your first bottle of formula, and while I thought I would cry at the end of an era, I actually felt some relief. My preconceived notion of breastfeeding exclusively until 6 months was not realized. We got you to 5 months, and you've been doing great on formula ever since.

(3) Owen started having a noticeable flat spot on the back of his head around 3 months. We didn't know that we should have been turning the direction he was facing in his crib each night since he was born. There is just so much to know about being a new parent, and this little tidbit of information just slipped through the cracks.  We began switching the sides we laid him down, and even turning his head after he feel asleep at night. We began to go crazy trying to get him to lay on the other side of his head. We bought a little pillow that kept the back of his head off the floor, and tried to get him to do as much tummy time as possible. But it just wasn't working. At our 4 month check up, the pediatrician said the words that we dreaded hearing. "Have you thought about a helmet? His flat spot is moderate to severe. You should really think about getting one before he is 6 months old. The shape of his eyes and ears could be affected". Ahhhh! Really? Months before I had talked about how there was no way this would happen to our little guy, and now we were having THAT conversation with the pediatrician.  We vowed to do more tummy time and give it another month, but the pediatrician said that some kids are just more prone to flat spots than others. She said that in some families, all the kids get flat spots regardless of doing everything right, while other kids have no issues without any effort. At our 5 month check up, the pediatrician said things were improving, but not 100% yet. She recommended getting a head scan as a baseline to see if he was getting better.  We hemmed and hawed, and ended up having to see the pediatrician at 5.5 months for his sleep issues. She said Owen's head was looking much better, and not to worry about it anymore.  Phew. Good job, Owen.

I've learned that yes, indeed, we hit the baby jackpot with Owen. He is so happy and easy and cute and cuddly.  But even an "easy" baby is hard. And it's ok that it's hard. It's not anything that we did wrong, or even right. He's his own person, and we just have to love him for who he is.

Visit to Ventura and Carpinteria

September 15

It has been hard to be away from the friends we met while living in Ventura, and once Owen was born, we knew we had to go up and show off the little guy. We went up north for a day trip on one of Colleen's days off, and tried to schedule the drive during Owen's naps. 

We got up to Ventura just in time for Owen to wake up hungry.  We sat at the Ventura Harbor while Owen woke up and ate, watching surfers at one of our favorite spots down the street from our old house. New Jetty looked super fun!

Then we stopped by Colleen's old work, the Ventura Fish and Wildlife Office. Everyone was really excited to hang out with Owen for the morning, especially Lena.  Lena hadn't seen Owen since he was about a month old, so it was really fun for her to see him get bigger. 

During Owen's morning nap, we drove to Carpinteria and said hi to Brandon's old friends at Channel Islands Surfboards.  It was awesome to see Blake and Che dog, and the rest of the guys at the shop.  Mike Walters was expecting his first baby any day, so it was cool to get to talk about this next chapter in our lives.  

We stopped at Carpinteria Bluffs to feed Owen, then made our way home before LA traffic. It was a perfect day!

Yosemite and Red's Meadow

September 9, 2016

We left San Clemente at 2:45am while Owen was still sleeping, and drove through the dawn light, arriving in Mammoth Lakes for breakfast. We drove up to Red's Meadow and Eric snagged a few campsites right on the meadow. We were right where Eric and I had last camped many years ago. We met the locals (pack horses in the meadow), and gathered a trail lunch.  We set out for a hike while Mike, Channel, Jim and Kevin went bushwhacking in search of a fishing hole on the San Joaquin River. We followed Eric, Christine and Maya dog on a trail loop through Devil's Postpone and Rainbow Falls. The 6-mile hike was beautiful! I was tired from hiking at elevation with Owen in the backpack, but it was a great way to shake off the long drive. Devil's Postpile and Rainbow Falls were really neat to see again, and we had a great lunch and swim in the River along the way. Owen was a total trooper!

The next day we woke up and met the Davidson's at Troutfitter in Mammoth for some fresh flies. We drove to the Woah Nelly Deli and had awesome breakfast burritos. We made our way up the Tioga Pass into Yosemite National Park, and hiked along the John Muir Trail to Lyell Creek.  We spent the afternoon fishing, swimming and relaxing along the creek with great friends. The fish were biting, and our group tried their luck flyfishing. Lisa turned out to be the MVP fisher of the day, landing 3 fish with 4 consecutive casts on her fly fish set up on her spinning rod. It was so cool to watch! Owen took a nap with Lisa in the afternoon, and Brandon and I got to swim in the chilly rock pools. It was an incredible day.

We got to the campground in Yosemite Valley at dusk and made a quick dinner. Owen took a bath in the camper sink and we got to bed early.  When Owen woke up to feed at 4am, we packed up and started the drive home.  Owen slept most of the way home and we got back at 11am! It was a whirlwind trip, but we would do it again in a heart beat. We will always remember taking Owen on his first trip to Red's Meadow and Yosemite National Park!