We figured out a way for Brenden to earn his keep around here: housework! His technique needs a little polish, but he definitely gets an A for effort and multitasking.
Category Archives: Brenden
Brenden’s Birthday Party Pics
In the process of editing Reagan’s birthday party pics, I realized that I never did anything with Brenden’s birthday party pics from a month ago! So I created a separate album for them:
Baby Name Quest
The quest has begun for a name for our new son. This is hard.
As with Brenden, we each have certain criteria to meet. For Jenny, Newbie’s first name can’t be extremely popular, can’t be the same as one of her exes’ names, and can’t remind her of any annoying people from her past. For me, his first name must have at least two syllables, can’t be “trendy”, can’t lend itself to easy shortening, and must be the name we actually call him. There are others, but you get the idea. It also has to sorta work with Brenden’s name since they’ll be said together often.
One interesting site we found is the Social Security Administration’s list of baby names for each year. You can break it down by state, year, or decade. I found that parents are much more creative today than they were in the late 70s when we were born. In 1976, for example, the most popular name was Jennifer with 3.78% of all female babies. In other words, on average every coed classroom of 25 kids had a roughly 50/50 chance of having a Jennifer. The top 10 girl names accounted for 16% of all female births. The top boy name was Michael, even more dominant at 4.1% of all male babies. The top 10 boy names accounted for an astounding 24% of all male births.
In 2008, new parents are much less likely to see another baby in the nursery with the same name as their own. The top girl name, Emma, only accounted for 0.9% of all female births. The top ten girl names only accounted for 7.7% of all little girls, compared to 16% in 1976. The top boy name, Jacob, was given to 1%. The top ten boy names accounted for 9.7% of all little boys, compared to 24% in 1976. I imagine part of this change comes from the increase in immigration. People from other countries who have babies here don’t necessarily gravitate toward the same names that 5th generation Americans prefer. Other reasons probably exist as well – a desire for their children to have a less common name, perhaps? Do you have any ideas?
Regardless of the causes, our children are less likely to have classmates who share the same name than we were. I remember having a Matt P. and a Matt W. in some of my classes. Jenny had three other classmates/friends who shared her name. My high school tennis team had two Andys. Even if we choose one of the more popular names for Newbie, he’ll still have a good chance of being the only one in his class.
Right now, my current favorite is Mel.
Observations of a Mama – toddler edition
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so I thought I’d catch all the Brenden fans up on his newest tricks.
1. He’s doing fairly well eating with a fork and spoon. Unfortunately, he hasn’t quite got the hang of which side is “up” on them both, so it’s a pretty messy process. But he’s a fan.
2. We found out this week he likes spicy stuff – chili, black beans and rice, etc – which is kind of nice since that is getting him closer to eating what we eat.
3. But he’s definitely still a picky toddler. What he likes to eat today will probably be spit out and cause a fit tomorrow. I don’t understand that.
4. After his last fit at Chili’s, I don’t know if we’ll be going out to eat as a family again anytime soon. Maybe when he starts college. It was a doozy.
5. Speaking of fits, they’re getting pretty bad. Throwing himself on the floor, wailing, rolling around like he’s possessed….they’re actually pretty funny if you’re in the right mood. I’ve started walking out of the room, which seems to end them quicker.
6. We try to go to a park at least once a day if the weather permits. I walk him around until he’s tired. We play on the slides and playground and then pick up pecans off the ground. He’s usually super dirty by the time we get home, but nice and worn out and ready for a nap.
7. His other favorite activity is to play in the water. The water hose is the best…..you can get everyone wet that way. We usually just strip him down and let him loose in the kiddy pool in the back yard.
8. His vocabulary hasn’t grown much – everything is a “B” word – “bah” pretty much covers it. He’ll say enough syllables of “bah” to get the point across. “Nutrigrain Bar” is really funny sounding coming out of a one year old. However, he understands pretty much everything you say to him, which is nice.
9. He also knows when you’ve told him to do something (or stop doing something, which is most of the time) and he’ll look at you, grin a big defiant grin, then keep doing what he wants. That’s not nice. Disciplinary times at the Box house!
10. My dad taught him to grunt and growl. He now sounds like a boy.
11. He’s walking pretty much all the time now – we let him walk to the car, into church, to the park, etc. The only problem is that he will not hold your hand at all. Mr. Independent wants to do it all by himself. I want to get one of those backpacks with a leash!
12. The boy has no fear. He’ll go down a slide by himself, no matter how tall. And if it happens to be a fast slide, that’s even better!
Have a good week, everyone!
Parenting Versus Babysitting
Brenden is now over 13 months old. (!) Along the way we’ve worked hard to take good care of him by meeting his physical, emotional, and mental needs. He’s on a pretty good schedule now, gets good sleep, is active and mostly happy, and eats about normally for his age. But this week we’ve decided that the time has come to focus more on actually parenting him rather than simply making sure he survives. He is a little person entrusted to our care, a lump of clay that we are called to mold into a Godly young man. There’s only one main problem:
We’ve never done this before.
We’ve taken care of babies and young children, but handing out snacks and changing diapers while praying for their parents to arrive soon is much, much different from actually being a parent. We must find ways to teach him the right values, to challenge him enough to help him grow without overwhelming him with a yoke he cannot bear, to help him understand that he is a member of a team rather than the center of the universe. We must work together on a plan to raise him consistently, setting and enforcing the same rules in the same way.
Brenden is a smart little boy who understands a lot of what we say and do even though his spoken vocabulary is very limited. He also inherited my stubbornness and our independent spirits. We need to find a way to teach him the right lessons even though he doesn’t completely understand English or cause and effect quite yet. Since my preferred method of communciation is written English with long, flowing sentences, I must struggle to translate my thoughts into spoken Toddler English that he can understand. I also prefer to think in black-and-white in a maddeningly grayscale world.
What I need is a road map. Turn-by-turn directions are too much to ask, but I want to know generally where we need to go. We’re looking for ideas about books, websites, or other resources on parenting toddlers. If you’re a parent, what have you found that works?
10 Things We Never Dreamed We’d Say…
…before we had a baby:
- Please don’t fart on me.
- Don’t step on Daddy’s crotch.
- Don’t put your pacifier on your penis.
- Stab it! Stab it! YAY!!!
- I just don’t want to go out on Date Night covered in boogers.
- Why are you holding on to the cat’s leg?
- No, that bone is not for you to chew on. Chew on this.
- The toilet is not a drum.
- Mommy can’t breathe if you’re on her throat.
- The doggie doesn’t want to eat the giraffe.