Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [15]
Right now since Hank is in the off-season for football, he’s in his “on-season” with the baby. When Hank is playing football, I’m on. But we are very lucky; Hank’s a morning person and overall if he’s around he likes to do mornings. He offers to keep on that schedule so that when football season is back, he won’t have a tough time waking up. It’s for his own benefit, or at least I try to trick him into thinking so.
One of us will usually go downstairs with the baby (he walks downstairs by himself, and every step he makes he says, “Step”) and sometimes it can take a few minutes! Hank goes into the kitchen and blends him a smoothie right away, all-natural smoothies with banana, strawberries, and blueberries with a little bit of yogurt. While he drinks a smoothie, we make eggs and we put natural freshly sliced ham and turkey on the griddle. Hank Jr. drinks the smoothie throughout the morning and we make freshly squeezed juice for the rest of the day. Then we take him for a walk outside. We like to think of our mornings as a great way to start off the day, with fresh fruits and proteins followed by a walk. If everyone could start off his or her day like Hank Jr., what a healthy world this would be. It gets his brain working because we like to teach him stuff outside and words like “tree,” “sky,” “clouds,” and “houses.” I believe that’s as good as staying inside and reading a book. We do the reading thing throughout the day but real-life experiences are so important. I would rather him know “tree” and “sun” and “sky” and “clouds” by seeing them rather than just reading about them.
At ten A.M. he usually starts rubbing his eyes and will sometimes go down for a nap until twelve P.M. Now that he’s one and a half, Hank Jr. rarely takes his afternoon naps. I wish I was one of those parents who could get their kid to nap in a stroller or a car, but for some reason Hank Jr. really likes his crib. And we are very strict with his schedule and try not to stray from that. So he has to be in his crib.
If he’s napping from ten A.M. to twelve P.M., I get to do my thing. The second that baby is out, we turn on the shower, get the coffee going, and start spending “adult time” doing errands and taking care of business. We know we’ve got a good two hours of (hopefully) silence and peace where we can do whatever we need to do. To a parent, two hours is like a day and a half. But throw in a shower, life obligations, or a workout, and next thing you know it’s over. So we try to do it all as fast as we can. It’s during this time that I’ll run out to the grocery store and stock up on groceries, or make sure the tank is full of gas, or that anything else we need for the house is taken care of.
As we approach twelve P.M. we start to get his lunch ready. One practice we try to live by is to prepare in advance for the rest of the day instead of being spontaneous. Hank and I have found that trying to plan out everything, from knowing the weather to what we are going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as soon as we wake up, helps us be prepared for the full day. We think about the day and our schedules ahead of time, so we don’t stress out if anything changes last minute. Preparing everything the second we wake up is the way to go. We have a set day by lunchtime. This also helps us avoid unhealthy decisions like just ordering pizza because we are too tired to make anything.
But as Hank Jr. gets older he naps less and has more energy, so we drink as much coffee from ten A.M. to twelve P.M. as we can, because we need all that energy to chase him around until he starts tiring out at seven P.M.
We’ll never let Hank Jr. stay up past eight P.M.; we are very strict. I see some of these Hollywood parents dragging their kids out to five-star restaurants at eleven P.M. on a random weekday or even babies up and about in the Walmart parking