Baby Gant Days: Hanging with Daddy

Now that there are three boys in the house, they sometimes band together. So far at least they haven't banded against me. :)

Jasper loves to hang out with Drew while Drew is bottle-feeding Benjamin and even help him a little. Here he was mimicking Drew a little bit with his own baby.

Jasper is exceedingly proud to be a big brother!

Thankfully Benjamin takes a bottle just fine. Phew!

After work, Drew likes to spend time bonding with the boys. It's generally a short amount of time he can spend with Jasper before bedtime, but he does the best he can to make it fun and intentional. He of course also likes to hold Benjamin. Benjamin is a cuddler at this stage, and it's tough to go 12 hours without holding him like Drew does every work day.

The set of truck puzzles on the floor is one of the activities Drew likes to do with Jasper. There are four puzzles: a dump truck, an excavator, a bulldozer and a cement mixer. Nana Jasper brought these puzzles (geared for kids age 3+) for Jasper when she came last month. Initially it took a little work & outside help for him to figure them out. Now he can snap through them. So Drew decided to make it a little more challenging and turned over all the pieces, mixed them up and then asked Jasper to pick out the pieces for individual trucks / puzzles. Not only can he pick them out, but he can generally do it without guessing and without making mistakes. He'll pull all the pieces for the cement mixer out then put it together. And yes, he is quite proud of himself when he does it.

Here Jasper is trying to take a picture of Drew.

Here is Drew multitasking: calming Benjamin with his pacifier and giving Jasper a horse ride.

And this is classic bonding time with Benjamin. After his last evening feeding (which can come anytime between 9-11pm), Drew gets to burp him. And since we think he might have some mild reflux, we're trying to keep him upright for 20 min after each feeding so the milk is less likely to makes its way back up and irritate him (aka make him scream). This helps to make us less irritable, too. I think Drew thought Benjamin was more upright than he actually is, but regardless it was a peaceful evening.