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My son’s cries are lost in translation

In this installment of Father Knows Best I take a question from yet another anonymous asker. What’s with all the secrecy people? Also, don’t forget that you too can ask me a question about fatherhood and I will improvise the answer for you. Click on the link in the first line of this paragraph to submit your question.

Maybe this is a ridiculous question (for all I know, you could be its creator), but will you be purchasing the CryTranslator iPhone app to help you understand Chandler?

http://bit.ly/5ymhNr

Not a ridiculous question at all! Remember kids, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

The quick answer is no. I will not be buying the CryTranslator app.

The long answer is…My wife and I have looked into the whole translating a baby’s cries thing. A long time ago on Oprah there was a lady who talked about doing this. It was pretty interesting and seemed really convincing.

Flash forward a few years to now and Ashley and I wanted to give it a try. We found some of that lady’s videos online and watched them to see if we could figure it out. Certain sounds meant different things. You needed to listen to your baby closely and you could hear either a “nah” sound or an “eh” sound. One of those meant “I’m hungry” while the other might have meant “I’m tired.” Stuff like that. It definitely seemed plausible.

But the more and more we dealt with Chandler, the more we established other methods for determining his needs. For instance it was pretty easy to tell if he needed his diaper changed. For that, instead of listening to our baby, we smelled him. We also came to recognize several visual cues for when he was tired. If he wouldn’t make eye contact with us no matter how hard we tried to look him right in the eyes, that was a good sign that he was ready for bed.

And as far as feeding him went, we developed a routine that was built into his sleeping pattern. He basically gets fed every time he wakes up from a nap. Other times when he is fussy and none of the other things seem to be the answer, we just try feeding him. If he eats, then we know that is what he wanted. If he doesn’t then we get out a ouija board and try to figure out what he needs.

For the most part, we know what Chandler is going to need before he cries for it. And actually a lot of that is because of the app we did buy, Baby Activity Logger, by Nerdtown. It was only $4.99, as opposed to the CryTranslator which is $29.99. But the great thing about this app is that it lets you input when your baby ate, how much your baby ate, when your baby slept, how much your baby slept, when your baby pooped, how much your…no it doesn’t go that far. Having all that information in the palm of your hand helps you see your baby’s patterns and helps you predict what is coming up next. It’s like a basketball coach looking at game footage of his opponent.

That being said, I am definitely interested in communicating with my son and understanding his needs better. We are fast approaching the age when he will be capable of using sign language to talk to us. Ashley and I plan on giving that a shot. So look forward to a post about that sometime in the coming months.

Thanks again to everyone who has been submitting questions. If you haven’t submitted one yet, or you have submitted but you have more questions, please ask away. Go to improvisingfatherhood.com/ask.

Roughing It

I had a pretty rough week. I spent most of it in the wilderness. By wilderness I don’t mean I was sleeping under the stars or setting up camp in the woods. I was in a perfectly nice house with running water and fully functioning AC and heat. But this house just so happened to be located in the quaint little village of Elsah, IL. And Elsah is an Internet and cellular DEAD ZONE.

I got off the plane and was greeted by my parents. They were so excited to see my 11 week old baby. I was so excited to check my email and Twitter on my iPhone after two hours of mile high exile. We drove towards their house and as I caught up on my facebook news feed I watched my reception drop off.

And then it was gone. “No big deal, I’ll just use wifi at my parents place,” I thought. We arrive at their house and Ashley gets the baby settled in as I set up our mobile electronics command center. iPhones are charging and the MacBook is ready to connect.

No wifi. Okay, I’ll just use the Internet on my parents’ computer.

No computer.

No Internet?

The adventure was about to begin. I remember hearing about the book Swiss Family Robinson, and watching ABC’s hit show LOST, where ordinary people were forced to live like cavemen and fend for themselves in the wild. And now I was living it. What was I going to do? I had a child to care for. Well…my wife had a child to care for…and if she’s taking care of him, who’s taking care of me?

I hunkered down and mentally prepared myself for the week ahead. I was going to have to find other ways to entertain myself. And then I heard it. A small baby-like sound. It was coming from…my baby. Holy cow! I have a child! A son even! And he does stuff!

Playing with Chandler is similar to playing a new game on my iPhone. At first it can be hard to figure out the controls, and I really want to make sure I don’t drop him. While Chandler seems to be impervious to liquid damage, his battery life is no where near as long as the iPhone.

Nevertheless this week was really fun. Every morning we woke up with Chandler and he had breakfast in bed (thanks Mommy!) and then playtime. There were so many priceless moments. I have never seen Chandler smile as much as I did this week. We even heard a legitimate giggle from him.

Chandler did so many cute things and at first every time he did something I’d reach for my iPhone so I could tweet to the world what he had done. Each time I was reminded that I was disconnected from society and the only people I could send status updates to were sitting in the room with me.

“Chandler just smiled! Would you like to comment or say that you liked my post?”

Now we are on our way home. Back into the warm embrace of the Internet. And while I can’t wait to reconnect with all of my facebook friends (most of whom I’ve never met), I want to make sure I continue to stay plugged in to the people who are right next to me.

Hopefully there’s an app for that.