Mountains and Follicles and Passover, Oh My!

We are back from our long weekend away with friends, and it was fantastic. Just what I needed.

We had eight adults and four toddlers, and we rented a five-bedroom cabin in the mountains. LL loved having all the people around, and he loved sledding and playing outside in the snow. (For comparison: two of the other kids screamed bloody murder every time we went outside, and the third one took half an hour to get used to the weather every single time we went out. While the other children were fairly miserable in the cold weather and thin air, LL ran circles around them and kept trying to hand them snowballs. The other kids spent a lot of time inside the cabin.) One of my friends is hyper-organized, and thanks to all of her pre-planning, all of the logistics went smoothly. We all drove to the cabin more or less together, we stopped together for lunch, we stopped again to play at a park to give the kids a break, we checked into the cabin without a hitch, we each brought a small collection of groceries such that all of our meals were planned and ready to go... it was wonderful.

I was most worried about whether LL would sleep in the cabin, since he usually doesn't sleep well in a pack'n'play, but it actually wasn't too bad. He went to sleep well each night. He then woke up around 1am, and we just brought him into bed with us and he went back to sleep (after flopping around for a bit). In the past, whenever we've attempted to co-sleep, none of the three of us got much sleep. I don't know if all the heavy playing wore LL out, or if he's just older and more adaptable, but this weekend it wasn't so bad. And the cabin was a bit cold at night, so I actually appreciated the hot little body in footie pajamas that insisted on sleeping on top of me.

Best of all, since we were all staying in the same cabin, we weren't constantly needing to leave in order to get kids home to nap or eat or whatever. We all got some adults-only time each day during naptime, and again at night after the kiddos were all asleep. And we traded off subsets of adults playing with all the kids, so we each got a fair amount of time during the day to put our feet up, have a drink, and chat with other adults. Heavenly.

And now... back to reality. I had another follicle scan, which showed that my one and only little follicle had been reabsorbed back into my ovary. It didn't grow, it didn't shrink, it definitely didn't release an egg (if it had, the corpus luteum would have been visible on the ultrasound). Instead, it just faded away. Since I'm already at cycle day 20+, Dr. M gave me a progesterone shot to quickly end the cycle, so we can move on to the next one. We're going to try one more cycle with 200mg of clomid.

In the mean time, I need to turn my attention to more pressing matters. Like the fact that my entire family is arriving for Passover in less than two weeks, and I have done none of my normal pre-holiday prep. Passover seders for 30 people don't just plan themselves. Also, I'm theoretically graduating in less than 90 days, and my thesis isn't going to write itself.

Status Memo II

Busy busy busy don't have to time to stop must get through the next week... month... 6 weeks. But as busy as things are, they are getting better. Not so much better that I have time to write an essay, but enough better that I have time for another set of bullet-point-ish paragraphs.

Sleep: We're getting some. Not a ton, but hopefully enough. LL isn't completely reliably sleeping through the night, but he's doing it most of the time. He still seems to be sleeping more lightly than usual, so we've instituted some desperate "please oh please don't wake the baby!" measures that we normally try to avoid. He's mid-transition from two naps to one, which isn't helping. S and I are going to bed earlier and earlier ourselves to compensate, as much as that has been possible while also getting done all of the work and chores on our ever-present to-do list.

Health: I'm probably at about 85% right now. Definitely getting better, definitely still a bit weak. I'm still having some nerve pain, but it's at the Advil-can-help stage rather than the Vicodin-barely-works stage. And my fever is gone. Sleep is my friend.

School: A carefully worded email to AdvisorA has brought her back into my corner. "Hi! Remember me? Your student who is graduating very soon? You don't have very many former students out in the world, and it would really help your reputation if the ones that you DO have don't hate you. Also, it would help you if they had really good jobs that you could brag about. Can you perhaps think of some ways in which you could help me to get a good job and not hate you?" (I'm paraphrasing. She seems to have figured out the whole "helping me will help you" part mostly on her own.) She's suddenly super psyched about helping me to find an awesome job.

Jobs: Interview number one, at a mature mid-sized company doing some fairly cool work, went really well, despite the fact that I had a fever of 101. (In general, I don't recommend interviewing while delirious with fever. But my particular delirium convinced me that I wasn't impaired at all, so I didn't reschedule like I probably should have.) Luckily, the CEO loved me, and has all but promised me a job offer. He loved me so much, in fact, that when I told him that I didn't want to make any final decisions until March or April, so that I could see what happens with academic positions, he said, "No problem; we'll make the offer and you can hold it until you're ready." I'm not sure whether this job is something that I'd want to do, but it will be good to have something in hand while I look around. Most of my effort is going into applying for tenure track assistant professor jobs. Applications, for the most part, are due at the end of the year. I'm frantically working on application materials now. (CV: draft done, being reviewed. Research statement: 20% done. Teaching statement: 80% done. References: three confirmed, lining up two more. List of schools to apply to: currently at 9.) Hence the 6 weeks of busy busy hell.

Thanksgiving: Everything that could be made ahead has been made. Two 18-pound turkeys have been ordered (I'm roasting one on Wednesday, the other on Thursday). The house is clean, and the furniture has been rearranged to accommodate all the extra people. Other than a small list of fresh vegetables and fish that I'll need to buy on Wednesday, all of the shopping is done. By the way: yes, fish for Thanksgiving. S's family is from Hawaii, so poke and lomi-lomi salmon are required dishes at Thanksgiving. Also, seaweed salad and fried saimin and arare and spam musubi. When I host, I also add Jewish favorites like brisket and noodle kugel and mandelbrot (my grandmother's recipe, with chocolate jimmies). This is all in addition to the traditional turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, and pie. Can you see why it's good that we only have to host once every six years or so?

The Thanksgiving guests all arrive tomorrow. Happy Turkey Day to all, and to all a good night.

Status Memo

Thank you for all of the encouraging comments on my last post. It's good to get kicked around sometimes and reminded that worrying about contingencies does very little good. Just take one step at a time and keep moving forward. I'm working on it. Here's my status:

Teeth: LL is up to 14 teeth. All 8 incisors, all 4 canines, both top molars. The bottom molars seem to have receded a bit for now, so we're hoping for some relief. It seems that, at just under 14 months, he is almost ready to rip apart steak. Gnaw the meat right from the bone. He is a toothy force to be reckoned with.

Sleep: We finally took LL to the doctor because his sleep was getting worse and worse. We were dosing him with every child-safe medication we could get our hands on (Motrin, Tylenol, Benadryl, teething tablets) and he was still waking up by midnight every night and refusing to go back to sleep unless held upright in the glider by a loving and perfectly still parent. After several weeks of sitting upright in the chair for 6+ hours at a time, averaging only 3 hours of sleep/night for myself, something had to give. The doctor noted a little fluid in his ears (but no infection) and gave us prescription ear drops to add to the nightly regimen. He is now finally breaking through. Two nights in a row now, he hasn't needed us at all. It could be that his ear pain is resolving. It could be that the troublesome teeth broke through. It could be that he's just ready to be sleeping again. Don't know, don't care. Sleep is good.

School: AdvisorA is officially ignoring me. I don't know if it's because she found out about the funding thing, or if she just doesn't care. I haven't spoken to her on the phone for months. When I send her an email, there's typically more than a week's wait for a reply. I've been trying to set up a phone conversation with her for the last two weeks, and it still hasn't happened. Her latest "effort" earlier this week was an email that said she was available at 4:30 this afternoon, was I free then? I saw her email within an hour of her sending it, and replied that 4:30 would be great. A day later, she replied that by the time she saw my email, she had scheduled that slot with someone else, sorry, but she might be available sometime on Friday. I should just wait by my phone between 9am and 1pm on Friday, because she might call me then. Or she might not. Um, thanks.

Jobs: I have two job interviews. Yippee! Here's to hoping that LL lets me have more than 3 hours of sleep the night before.

Health: I came down with a horrible virus this week. Quite possibly the worst I've ever had. Not flu, but really really ugly. Like, attacking my nerves ugly. When I finally saw my doctor today because good lord I feel awful, she was a little shocked by how bad I was, and asked me if I was under any stress or missing sleep lately. Heh. I summarized the above bullet points, and she prescribed meds. And urged me to sleep, as if that's something I have control over. And told me to expect to feel like crap for several more weeks. At least the prevailing medical opinion is that I am not contagious, so I can continue my ridiculous life while I convalesce.

Thanksgiving: So far, I have made two briskets, one noodle kugel, one sweet potato casserole, two cranberry nut breads, two pumpkin breads, and one poppy seed cake. They are all happily snuggled in the freezer, awaiting the upcoming holiday. Spinach bars and mandelbrot are next. Twenty out-of-town relatives arriving in twelve days, and staying for a week? Bring it on!

S asked me this afternoon how in the world I'm still on my feet. I'm not entirely sure. One step at a time, right?

Perfect Storm

We have a lot going on right now. I'm almost done with a huge experiment at school, hopefully the last big one that I'll need to do for my dissertation, and I'm almost ready to start analyzing data and writing up results. I'm half-heartedly looking for a post-graduation job, which I should really be doing whole-heartedly but, um, I'm not. S just had a project canceled at work, followed by a big reorganization, so his work life is in chaos. And in less than six weeks, S's entire extended family (~20 people) are descending on our house from out-of-state for an entire week of Thanksgiving merriment. Thanksgiving is a HUGE deal in S's family, and hosting the festivities is such a big job that they rotate it around from year to year. We've only hosted once before, and it's our turn again. Hosting Thanksgiving involves planning all meals and entertainment (including several prepared games, shows, and craft projects) for every day of the week. And the meals are all elaborate productions involving many traditional American, Hawaiian, and Japanese dishes. Last time we hosted, I started all the planning and prep work in early October, but this year I've done nada, nothing, zip so far. Which has me a little bit panicky.

Normally, finishing a dissertation and looking for a job and planning a week-long holiday celebration for twenty in-laws would be plenty to both fill my time and stress me out. But instead, they're all taking a back seat to LL and this I am Toddler, hear me roar! clingy temperamental sleep-is-for-babies-who-haven't-yet-turned-one "thing" he's going through.

We seem to be facing a perfect storm of circumstances for LL over the past month. There have been a lot of disruptions and new things for him to deal with all at once, starting with the daycare change. You may remember that a month ago, Natasha's mother was in a bad car accident, and Natasha flew home to be with her. Sadly, her mother never awoke from her persistent coma, and has passed away. Natasha has had a devastating several months, after losing her father back in February. She is now back, she reopened her daycare this week, and she seems relieved to be back with her children. LL is definitely thrilled to be back with her and all his daycare friends after more than a month of a rotation of new care providers.

In addition to all of the daycare changes, LL also reacted poorly to his 12-month shots. And his growing brain has clearly made a bunch of new connections all of a sudden, as he has suddenly figured out how to climb, how to better manipulate small objects, and how to participate in conversations. (He only knows a few comprehensible words, but that doesn't stop him from babbling nonstop. I ask him a question, and he responds with entire paragraphs before pausing and looking expectantly at me, waiting for my response before continuing the conversation. He totally gets the give-and-take of verbal interactions. All he's missing is the speak-an-understandable-language part.) He's also gone through an amazing growth spurt -- tables that he could stand underneath just a week ago are now a source of frustration, since he stands up and smacks his head on the underside. He's also mid-transition between two naps and one. (Good lord, nap transitions are a pain in the butt!) And he sprouted at least three more teeth this week (two incisors and a molar on the bottom, possibly more on the top but he won't let me check).

Any one of these factors (daycare changes, brain development, growth, teeth, vaccines, dropping naps) would individually be enough to disrupt him a bit, but all at the same time? He's a clingy, sleepless mess. He seems to want to be independent yet simultaneously attached to me, and we haven't quite figured out how to achieve that. He crawls to me and begs to be picked up, but doesn't actually want to be in my arms. When I return him to the ground, he throws a temper tantrum. If I sit on the floor with him, he does not want to be in my lap, yet he claws at my shirt as if he wants to be held. When he's in this mood, the only thing that works is for me to lie down in the middle of his play area and let him crawl back and forth over me, which he finds endlessly amusing. (He also loves being tickled and he loves being chased and he loves chasing me, but he has to already be happy before engaging in any of those activities.)

He's waking up at least once almost every night. Usually he wants to be held for a little while (and to have a middle-of-the-night chat -- like I said: nonstop babbling) but two nights so far, it's been night terrors, which are horrible to deal with. (For the uninitiated: night terrors are when children start screaming and thrashing around in the middle of the night. They're not awake, but it looks like they are. They don't react to your presence and usually cannot be calmed down no matter what you do. And apparently, children are totally unaware that it's happening.) Some night terrors are just random, but apparently all those disruptions mentioned above can trigger them in toddlers. We're hoping that they'll go away soon, as things start to settle down. And we absolutely need to get him sleeping through the night again, because S and I are walking around like zombies these days. (We were both sick last week, too. Sleep deprivation probably made us easy targets.) S is lobbying for some cry-it-out experimentation, but I'm hesitant to do it while LL is in a separation anxiety phase.

So, um, that's what's going on in our house right now. Both the dissertation stuff and the job stuff probably deserve their own posts. There's also starting to be this lingering second-child question, which seems like a ridiculous thing to even bring up in light of everything else, but it's there nonetheless.

Separation Anxiety

I'm an idiot. Seriously -- a complete moron. Why do I ever write things like "LL never went through a clingy phase"? What was I thinking when I wrote that in my last post? Haven't I learned by now that putting statements like that in writing is the surest possible way to guarantee that they stop being true?!?

LL is now completely 100% no-holds-barred in a clingy separation anxiety phase. He climbs all over me as soon as I pick him up in the morning. He cries and clings to fistfuls of my clothing (or hair) when I try to drop him off at daycare, or to hand him to someone else. The clinging is accompanied by a look of pure terror and pitiful wails. (In true toddler fashion, he stops crying and goes happily about his day 30 seconds after I leave, which is great for the daycare but sucks for me, because I hear his whimpering and sniffling in my head for the rest of the day.) It's slightly better if I try to hand him to someone he knows very well, but even then, as soon as he's comfortably settled in that person's arms, he turns and reaches for me to take him back again. (If I don't take him back immediately, he proceeds to the pitiful wails.)

When I pick him up from daycare at the end of the day, he insists on being attached to me for the rest of the day. If I try to put him down, even if it's just to play with him on the floor at home, he screams and grabs at me until I take him back into my arms. He doesn't want to go down for naps. He doesn't want to go to sleep at night. And for the past two weeks, he's been waking up around 11pm and screaming and sobbing until we go in to get him, and then he stays up for hours at a time. (We discovered a few nights ago that he goes back to sleep better if S goes to him instead of me, but he's still up for at least an hour.)

It's clear that LL is exhausted -- he has little bags under his eyes, and when he's awake in the middle of the night, he puts his head down and whimpers. I'm certain that he wants to be asleep. But he seems so full of anxiety that he can't fall back asleep. Baby insomnia. And none of our regular tricks are working -- milk, fresh air, rocking, singing, walking around the house, patting his back.... He just can't calm down enough to go back to sleep.

My friends tell me that these phases usually only last a month or so before they fade (and then reappear, and fade, and reappear, ...). I hope so, because it's both mentally and physically exhausting. I also think that it has been made worse by all of the daycare changes, and I think that it's also being compounded by teething (yep, fairly certain those molars are on their way). I can't take much more. I have a new baby carrier (a lovely mei tai that LL seems to really enjoy riding in) and it's the only thing keeping me sane in the afternoons. As soon as we get home, he goes into the mei tai and stays there until dinner, because otherwise my arms would fall off from carrying him. But even with the best carrier in the world, 22+ pounds is a lot of active toddler to be carrying around for hours every afternoon.

I know that almost all babies go through a separation anxiety phase at some point (or multiple points) during the first two years. But the "oh my goodness, my mommy is abandoning me, I can't believe I'm about to be left all alone in the world, if I can't see her and touch her I will surely perish!" thing is bringing on a horrible bout of mommy guilt. All of which is made worse by the fact that I'm hating school right now, and I'm hating the process of looking for a job after I graduate, and I feel like there's absolutely nothing that I want to do professionally right now, so why in the hell am I abandoning my child if I'm not even enjoying what I'm abandoning him for? But that's probably the renewed sleep deprivation talking. Right?

Two Years!

Last summer, when I was six months pregnant, I ran into M, a former coworker who is now a respected professor at an excellent university. When he saw that I was pregnant, he told me that his first child was born while he was still in grad school finishing his PhD, and he didn't get any research done at all for two full years after the baby was born. The only way he managed to graduate was that his wife eventually quit her job to stay home full-time, thus allowing M to ignore his family for a while and really focus on finishing his dissertation.

M is a really nice guy. He's friendly and sociable and I've never heard him be mean to anyone. He's normally a super supportive kind of guy. So it really took me by surprise when he assured me, several times, that if my husband was going to keep his job, he was fairly certain that I would never graduate. Ever. And as we talked further, he kept shaking his head and calling me naive. (He didn't use the word "naive." Like I said, he's not mean. But that was the basic attitude.)

At the time, I was very much taken aback. And not a little pissed off. But you know what? I haven't really made any progress on my research in the past nine months. The last two months of my pregnancy, I was uncomfortable and distracted and suffering from pregnancy-induced RSI, which made it very hard to accomplish research that is almost entirely done in front of a computer. Then I was on maternity leave for four months, which kind of turned into five months because of childcare problems. But I've been back at work full-time for two months now, and I've still gotten nothing done. And I feel horrible about it. And my advisors are, um, noticing. (Yeah, they didn't notice until recently. Which actually isn't too weird, because that's sort of a result of where I am in the PhD process right now.)

When S and I were trying to get pregnant, and even during my pregnancy, I had this plan for what it would be like to be in grad school while taking care of a baby. My mom was a working mom, I saw how she balanced things for my entire life, and grad school is basically a job (though a bit more intense and all-consuming than your average job). Also, despite M's attitude, I can now say with a fair amount of certainty that I wasn't naive about how much work it would be taking care of a baby. I was a little naive about the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, and I'll admit that I really thought that LL would be sleeping through the night by now, but other than that, I wasn't too far off the mark in my expectations.

But I now think that I was wrong about one major thing. I was convinced that succeeding simultaneously at school and motherhood was going to be all about multitasking and being organized. And those things are definitely important. But there's a third piece that is at least as important as those, and it's something that I didn't take into account, and I'm discovering that it's something that I suck at: compartmentalization. I desperately need to learn to compartmentalize. A lot of why I haven't been getting any research done, despite being hyper-organized, is that I simply cannot focus on work when I'm at work. I get to my office, and my mind is flooded with all things LL.

When I'm home with LL, I am very focused on him. What I'm not able to do when I'm with him are tasks related to him that require some brain activity and focus. Things like reading about naps and sleep habits and getting infants to sleep through the night. Reading about upcoming developmental milestones. Figuring out if he's eating enough milk, and how much solids he's supposed to be eating at this age. Planning for upcoming travel with LL. Making plans for everything that we'll need to do (very soon!) to baby proof our house. Making lots and lots and lots of to-do lists. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Compounding the problem is where I am in my graduate career. Most of my research is done, but the bits that haven't been finished yet are those random nebulous ones that are a bit hard to define and require more brain power than anything concrete. The main project that was funding the first several years of my research is over, and I'm being supported mainly on overhead funds meant for end-stage PhD students, which means that nobody is really counting on my results right now except me. And "results" is a strong word, since the stuff that I'm trying to finish right now is fairly theoretical, so it would be hard to measure progress anyway. It's all fairly squishy as far as evidence-of-work-or-progress is concerned. From talking to friends who have finished their PhDs, I understand that it's fairly common for students to stall a bit at this point in their grad school careers. The big things are done, the hard-core writing isn't happening yet, but the tying-things-together-and-finishing is so abstract, and progress so hard to measure, that it's normal to spin your wheels for a bit. (For example, check out this graph. That global minimum in the fifth year? When your advisor loses funding and you haven't defended yet? That's me.)

But for me, the combination of baby distractions and thesis wheel-spinning seems deadly. And it's all compounded exponentially by the months of sleep deprivation, which have left my brain in a pervasive fog that I cannot seem to lift. A perfect storm of non-accomplishment.

I've tried all the normal things to get myself focused. Setting near-term deadlines. Breaking up tasks into small, bite-sized tasks. Making daily schedules. But then I sit down to work, and my mind gets irretrievably distracted. And then I feel terrible about myself for wasting time and not getting anything productive done. Again. Which doesn't help. I just feel like I'm continually treading water at work, but not going anywhere.

Oddly, the only thing that makes me feel at all better about the situation is my friend M. His comment about his research stalling for two years, which pissed me off last summer, now makes me feel comforted. He didn't make any progress for two years, yet he still graduated (eventually), and is having a very successful research career. So maybe I just need to let myself wait out the suckiness that is my work life right now, and trust that I'll still graduate some day.

Nap Experiment

LL takes three naps each day. One at 9am, one at 11:30am, and one at 3:30pm. Each one is reliably between 60 and 90 minutes. On very rare occasion, he skips one of the first two, usually because of something like teething pain or grandparents refusing to stop playing with him. Lately, he had been skipping the third nap on a semi-regular basis... maybe two or three times each week.

Just as we were starting to think that maybe he was ready to consolidate to two naps (by pushing the mid-day nap a little later, to say 1:00pm or so, and eliminating the afternoon nap) we ran into a forcing function. LL is the only baby at Natasha's daycare. All of the other kids are right around two years old. They all take a single nap, at 1:00 every afternoon. Normally, nap time is when Natasha can sit down for a moment, eat lunch, straighten things up a bit... you know, the same things that normal people do when their kids nap. Unfortunately, LL is always waking up from his midday nap just as the other kids are going to sleep, which means that Natasha doesn't get any down time at all.

When LL was smaller, she carried him around with her while the other kids napped, and sometimes put him in a swing to hang out while she ate, which was fine. But now he's kind of big to lug around all the time, and he doesn't always agree to play by himself on the floor while she eats or cleans up. (I know this from experience -- he's happy to play on the floor if I'm playing with him, but heaven forbid I try to focus on something other than him, even if I'm sitting right next to him.)

Anyway, Natasha was slowly losing her ability to cater to his unique schedule. So, she reluctantly gave us a choice: we could let her move LL's midday nap closer to 1:00, so that it overlaps with the other kids, or we would have to find another daycare. (When I say she was reluctant, I mean it -- she was practically crying at the thought of losing LL, which is probably also a sign that she's really really tired to have brought it up in the first place.) The whole thing also sent me into a horrible panic, because we've been through enough daycare searches and turnover to make me know that I do not want to find someplace new. But then we said, hey, we were thinking about consolidating his naps soon anyway -- no time like the present!

So, Saturday and Sunday, we did two naps, 9am and 1pm. Each day, by 1pm, poor LL was a sleepy little zombie. Totally exhausted. And his normal bedtime is 7:00, but by 5:30 each day, he was yawning and looking at us with these pitiful little eyes, pleading to be allowed to just go to bed already. And he was so grumpy by bedtime. Noon to 1:00, and 6:00 to 7:00 were ugly. I mean, I'm cranky when I'm tired, too. (Honestly, I feel like I've been a bit cranky for several months now, thanks to constant sleep deprivation.) But LL is normally so good-natured, that it was horrible to watch him be in such a bad mood. I kept telling S that it felt like we were breaking the baby.

But we thought that maybe he just needed to get used to the new schedule, so we kept at it. LL is with Rosie on Mondays, so we told her about LL's new schedule. But when I got home, Rosie told me that LL was tired and cranky by noon, and she couldn't torture him, so she put him down for his nap at 12:30. And then at 4:00 he was falling asleep while playing, so she put him down for another nap. She told me that he was very fussy, then asked if "fussy" was the right word, because English isn't her first language, and she'd never before had to describe that type of behavior from LL.

I was almost scared to bring LL to Natasha's on Tuesday. When I dropped him off, I told her that she could try the 1:00 nap we had discussed, that he's been doing that for three days now, but that he was still adjusting. I picked LL up at 3:00, and asked Natasha how his day had been. Apparently, he started yawning and rubbing his eyes at 11am, so she put him down for a nap. He woke up shortly before 1pm, but consented to play by himself, so it wasn't too bad. And then he fell asleep in the car on the way home, and slept until after 4:30. (He had to work off all that sleep debt from a weekend of missed naps, I guess.) I told her that we had been trying to push back LL's nap to make her life a little easier, but she shrugged and said that while she appreciated the effort, she knows that forcing babies to change their schedules doesn't make anybody happy, so she'd try to make do.

So, clearly he's not ready to give up his third nap yet. On Tuesday, Natasha seemed so relieved that we were even willing to try it that she told us not to worry, that she could work through it for another month until he's ready to try again. But the whole experience left me a little nervous. I'm nervous about traveling next month and dealing with a nap-deprived LL. And now I'm nervous that we'll have to find yet another new daycare.

I'm a scientist, so I have to admit that I like experimenting a bit on LL. Food experiments, in particular, are a lot of fun, though messy. But sleep experiments suck. Blech. I'm hoping that LL is well behaved at daycare for the next few weeks, so that we don't have to run another nap experiment until he's really ready for it.

Strait Jacket Weaning

Holy cow, LL finished his seventh month yesterday. We've managed to keep up with his professional photos for each of his month birthdays, so he had his picture taken on Saturday. When LL was born, my brother got us one of those frames that has a slot for a photo of baby each month up to a year, so we searched for an inexpensive way to be able to fill in those slots each month. We ended up joining the photo club at one of the big department stores; the photo sittings are free and we just have to pay for prints. We usually just get a picture or two for us, one for the grandparents, and occasionally we send a really cute one to aunts and uncles. The whole thing is usually less than $10/month, and it's really amazing to look back and see how much LL has changed in such a short period of time. Anyway, LL giggled for the entire photo shoot this time around, and he was so cute that the photographer actually asked if he could keep two of the shots for himself, to put in his portfolio. This month was also the first one for which LL could sit on his own, which makes taking photos a lot easier, and more fun for everyone involved.

In honor of being so big and grown up, LL decided that he was through with the baby strait jacket, at least at night. Until last week, LL was always swaddled at night and during naps. He almost always worked his way out of it by the time he woke up, but he really seemed to rely on the swaddle to help him to fall asleep. Over the last few weeks, though, he was increasingly trying to work his way out of it while awake. We would put him in his crib, drowsy and almost asleep, and he would spend the next 15 minutes trying to free his arms, after which he would cry because he was unwrapped. We also started to find him entangled in his blankets in ways that started appearing somewhat dangerous. (Several times, he had worked his hands and forearms out of the blanket, then used his limited freedom to push the still-tight blanket up around his neck. Um, that's not good.) As we approach summer in our mild-but-sometimes-agonizingly-hot part of the country, we also had to acknowledge that tightly wrapping LL in a blanket was going to be unpleasant for him very soon. So, last Monday night we started our No Swaddle Experiment. (And just in time, because yesterday and today we had our first freak heat spell of the season, with temps in the 90s, and I don't think I could have swaddled him when our house was that warm.)

Our plan of action: continue to swaddle for naps, for now, but stop swaddling at night. When LL has a bad night of sleep, he still remains remarkably chipper. But when he misses too many naps, watch out! Also, missing naps tends to make him stay up at night, but not the other way around. So, by continuing to swaddle him for naps, we're guaranteeing a sunny disposition, and giving him enough daytime rest to try to encourage good sleep at night. Once he's totally comfortable with the no-swaddling at night, we'll move on to naps.

After one week, things are going pretty well. Six out of seven nights have basically been the same pattern as before the No Swaddle Experiment. We spend a little extra time soothing him to sleep at bedtime (7:00), so that he's extra-drowsy by the time we lay him untethered in his crib. He wakes up once in the middle of the night to eat, usually around 3:00am. We have had to spend a little extra time soothing him after his middle-of-the-night snack, too, but he does go back to sleep, and stays that way until morning. (The question of why he suddenly thinks that 5:45 is "morning," rather than a respectable 7:00, is a separate issue.) The extra soothing time (and his new habit of eating really really really slowly) does mean that we're up for an hour or more in the middle of the night, instead of the 20 minutes we had grown accustomed to, but still... not too bad. (Note that I said six out of seven nights have been like this. We had one really bad night when LL decided that he didn't want to be alone. Between 11pm and 6am, he cried out for us eight separate times, and only remained quiet if S stood next to his crib with a hand on his tummy until he fell back asleep. But the next morning, LL had noticeable slits in his upper gums, so I'm hoping that one bad night was because of teething pain, and it will soon soon please for the love of all that is good in the world soon be over and those damn top teeth will finally come in. But I digress.)

One unarguable perk of LL being entirely bottle-fed these days is that Daddy can be on duty all night long while I get some rest. S and I have agreed to a schedule of alternating nights, with the small addendum that if LL sleeps through the night, it doesn't count. (We added that addendum after a week in which LL slept through the night every other night, only waking up on nights when I was on duty. Which also started our tradition of always telling LL that Daddy's on duty, in the hopes that it will make him sleep. Didn't work. Instead, he just stopped sleeping through the night for both of us.)

Even though I get to stay in bed all night long every other night, I still wake up when LL gets up, so I'm only getting a little more sleep than before. And it turns out that S is a real wimp when it comes to sleep deprivation, so even though he's only getting up on alternating nights, and he's only been doing it for less than a month, S is rapidly becoming a bleary-eyed basket case.

Thus, once LL is comfortable with the no-swaddling, we're going to be moving on to the elimination of the middle-of-the-night bottle. Now that LL has recently slept through the night several times, we know that he can do it. We just need to convince him to do it more often....

Six Months!

Hard to believe that LL is already half-a-year old. He had his checkup yesterday with Dr. K. His head size is still right around the 50th percentile, where it's been since he was a month old or so. (It was giant at birth, but he's grown into it since then.) His length had been dropping a bit, but now he's back up just above the 50th percentile, as we suspected; he suddenly started looking really loooong a few weeks ago.

But his weight... try as we might, we just can't seem to make him gain much weight. This kid LOVES food. He slurps happily when he breast feeds. He astounds Natasha and Rosie with how much he eats from bottles during the day. He still wakes up 1-2 times each night to eat, and he tends to eat a LOT during those feedings as well. We resolved his GI problems more than a month ago, and he's been eating even more ever since. Yet despite starting life around the 85th percentile for weight, he's been dropping ever since then. At his 4-month checkup, he was at the 25th percentile, and he's looking a lot chubbier now than he was then -- he's got the classic baby leg rolls, the chubby cheeks, everything you look for in a healthy baby. But he has now dropped to the 18th percentile. (You would think that at 18% for weight and 55% for length, he'd look thin, but somehow he still looks chubby. All fat no muscle? He really does take after his mommy!)

We had been waiting to start solids, so that we could stuff him with more high-calorie milk instead of nutritionally-empty cereals and watered-down vegetables, but we can't really wait any longer. So, he starts solid food tomorrow (for some loose definition of "solid"). Probably oatmeal and peas.

I am a little worried about him, because he doesn't seem interested in much gross motor development. He loves playing on his back, and is amazingly active, but when you put him on his tummy, he just puts his head down, resting his cheek on the floor. It's very cute, but it's not doing anything to strengthen his arms, neck, and back. He doesn't roll over anymore unless you get him started. He's not interested in sitting -- if you try to put him in a sitting position, he straightens his back and wiggles until he's flat again. He's also not interested in standing -- if you try to stand him up, he bends his knees and refuses to support any weight. I know that he CAN bring his chest off the floor on his tummy, and he CAN roll over, and he CAN sit, and he CAN support himself on his legs, because he'll do all these things when he feels like it. But most of the time, he doesn't want to be bothered. He'll just lie on his back and chew on his toys, thank-you-very-much. Laziest baby ever. I'm trying hard not to stress about it.... I always swore that I would never get worked up over these milestones, and I know that boys often do all of these things later than girls, but it's hard. Especially when he just doesn't seem interested in any of it.

His top front teeth still aren't in, and the teething sucks. He's drooling and chewing like a mad man (including several downright vicious bites to my nipple), he's in too much pain to nurse on many evenings, and he's starting to refuse to take his afternoon nap, which only makes him crabbier. And he is still waking up several times a night -- once or twice to eat, and anywhere from zero to six times for soothing. Every time I think we're past the night wakings, the teething gets worse and it starts up again. We're not having much fun lately.

Anyway, I'm hoping that solid food might just help to fill him up a little more, so that at least he'll sleep better. And we persevere with the tummy time and free play on the ground, including a LOT of dragging him into a sitting position as much as possible, to try to strengthen him up, even if it's against his will. And with the exception of the late afternoons when he's in pain from the teething, he is always always always in an awesome mood, smiling and giggling and laughing and babbling. So really, how bad could it be?

I keep going back and forth about buying him a jumperoo... will it encourage him to jump and strengthen his legs and back? Or will it just be another thing for him to sit in and be lazy, in which case he's better off on the ground?

Oh, and he had a lovely little stomach bug Monday and Tuesday. He recovered very very quickly, which makes me think that it may have just been the teething, but on top of everything else, it's made for a tough week. TGIF.

Schedule

When LL started at Baby Factory in mid-January, he was on a sort-of schedule. He was taking three naps a day, but there was a lot of variation in length of nap. Since his next nap depended on when he woke up from his previous nap, we never really knew when each nap after his first one was actually going to happen.

When we hired Rosie in mid-February, he was starting to get more regular, to the point where we could tell her approximate times for each of his naps. We gave her a lot of flexibility, though, to move naps forward or back if the previous nap went long or short. Still, for the sake of being able to look back later, I wanted to record his schedule as it existed at the time.

The basic structure of this schedule was in place by the time LL was 4 months old. It was starting to be more regular by the clock when he was approximately 5 months old. It was clock-predictable by 6 months. Sometime after 7 months, he would sometimes drop the third nap. By 8 months, he was regularly dropping the third nap, and moving towards dropping a bottle as well.

Recorded for posterity:

LL's Daily Schedule:

7:00 -- wake up (we tried not to start his day any earlier than this, even if he woke up)
7:30 -- milk (and after 6 months, solid food)
9:00 -- nap
10:00 -- wake up, milk (sometimes he would sleep longer; he ate whenever he got up)
12:00 -- nap
1:30 -- wake up, milk (sometimes only 1 hour instead of 90 minutes)
3:30 -- nap
4:30 -- wake up, milk (and after 6 months, solid food, usually around 5:00)
7:00 -- bedtime routine, milk (in the beginning, closer to 6:00, whenever he looked tired)
7:30 -- sleep

From 4 months to 7 months, he would wake up once each night to eat. For a while, it was reliably between 3-4:00am, but as time went on, it got more erratic. After 7 months, he would occasionally skip it, leading to us purposely eliminating the middle-of-the-night feeding (except when he was really really upset or sick) by 8 months.

When It Rains

Holy crap. Too much happening. Cannot cope. Seriously. Let's recap my week:

After some unusual and odd symptoms in LL, I innocently called his pediatrician to make sure that everything was okay. I expected to hear, "Yeah, don't worry about it!" over the phone. Instead we had two emergency pediatrician appointments, a just-in-case exam that made him screech in pain, and a referral to a specialist. Right now, we don't think that it's anything too serious, but whatever it is, it will need to be taken care of, and it's breaking my heart.

Next, S's grandfather suddenly and unexpectedly passed away this week. He lived far away from us (as in, there's an ocean between us) so he hadn't met LL yet. We had mailed him lots of photos, and we were planning on bringing LL to visit him in April, which ended up being two months too late, though there was no way we could have seen this coming. He had been so excited to meet his first great-grandchild. We've been asked not to bring LL to the funeral, but S is trying to decide whether he will be able to fly there himself. Given LL's medical problems, though, he's understandably reluctant to leave us alone, even for a few days.

Next up: S's company had major layoffs this week. S's job is still safe for now, but several of our close friends lost their jobs this week. And the layoffs mean extra work and longer hours for S, which is particularly stressful on top of everything else going on right now.

The layoffs and longer work hours for S means that he isn't able to stay home at all with LL, so I didn't work again this week. (We had been planning to trade off, so that I could work a few days, too, but alas, it's not going to happen that way.) We did hire a part-time nanny, who worked one day this week, but since it was her first day, I stayed home to show her the ropes. Some friends of ours who recently moved out of the area referred her to us, since she was a nanny for their daughter for more than a year. She's only available two days a week, so over the next two weeks, I'll be able to go into work for just four days. It's just as well, since LL isn't feeling that great, and I want to keep an eye on him. Also, one day of the nanny costs almost as much as a full week at Natasha's, so we couldn't afford more than two days each week anyway.

And, just in case a death in the family and layoffs and childcare problems and LL being sick weren't quite enough to deal with, S was in a (very minor) car accident this week. With my brand new car. No injuries, but it was unquestionably S's fault. (Yeah, he's distracted. See above.) It ended up being cheaper to pay for the damage (our car and the other car) out of pocket rather than making a claim through insurance, so we've been dealing with the other driver and repair estimates all week.

To cap it off, my brother called last night because he thinks that he's starting to see early Alzheimer's signs in my mother, and he wanted to know if I'd noticed anything. (I haven't, and I think he's imagining things, but holy cow it's hard not to be paranoid and over-analyze everything now. Alzheimer's does run in our family.)

Also, LL has been waking up several times each night, then getting up at 5am, and wanting to be held for the rest of the day. And he's not napping. I'm averaging 4 hours of sleep a night. This morning, I had my first shower all week.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Random Thoughts

I'm at home with LL (still) and jotting down notes during his naps. Another week without being able to go into work. Anyway, this post is going to be really random. Don't even bother looking for a common theme or anything.

There are a lot of icky daycares out there. Like the one where the woman wanted to give my child some bizarre herbal supplement, and I got the sense that she'd start adding it to his bottles (against my wishes, obviously) if we left him there. Or the woman who held LL for 30 seconds, then handed him back to me in a panic the moment he started to fuss a little. Or the woman whose extremely creepy husband and heavy-metal-t-shirt twentysomething son are both also in the house all day. Or the woman who happily told me that she and her two assistants take the 15 kids (including infants) on field trips once every week or two; when asked how they get around, it turns out that the three women take all 15 babies and toddlers on city buses. Or the woman who told me, when I asked why she likes running a daycare, that she only does it because her husband doesn't make enough money. (At least she's honest.) Or the woman with a house that is even less childproof than mine, who told me not to worry about it because the children spend the entire day in the playroom, which is a room the size of a small walk-in closet, with no windows.

One of the daycares that we visited was called Julie's Little Angels Day Care. On the printed information that Julie gave me, there was a typo so it said "Little Angles" instead of "Little Angels." S suggested that maybe it's Little Angles because all of the babies are so acute. I really love my husband. But we still don't have childcare.

I recently took an online quiz in which you answer a bunch of questions about your interests, your climate preferences, hobbies, outdoor activities, career, and family, and then the site recommends that top 24 cities in the US where you would be happy living. Out of these 24 cities, my number one city ended up being the city in which I was born and raised. (I haven't lived there since I left for college at 18.) Number six on the list was where I went to college, more than 1,000 miles away from where I grew up. Of the remaining 22 cities on the list, 18 of them are within 150 miles of where I grew up or went to college (and most of them are actually within 50 miles). None of them, not a single one, is within 1,000 miles of where I live right now, where I've been living for the last 10 years. And people wonder why I plan to move after I finish my PhD.

LL finally, finally only woke up once last night, instead of the 3x he's been doing for the last few weeks. Sadly, the I'm-up-for-the-day time seems to have permanently moved from a reasonable 7:30am to a pre-dawn 6:15am. I think that's something I'm just going to have to live with.

LL is starting to wear 9-month clothing. The 6-month stuff does still technically fit him, but when he's in cloth diapers, they're very tight at the crotch. Now that I've emptied his dresser of all 3-month clothing and a good deal of the 6-month clothing, it is obvious that we're starting to run out of clothes. The mountains of clothing that we received as gifts seem to taper off around the 6-month mark. I think we'll still have enough clothing to keep LL comfortable while he's in 9-month sizes, but once he outgrows those, we're actually going to have to go shopping. To date, I've purchased three outfits for him, and everything else has been gifts or hand-me-downs. That's going to have to change in a few short months.

LL's consistent rolling from tummy to back seems to have stopped. (It only lasted one week.) Last week, it seemed like an awesome way for him to avoid the work of using his arms and abs and neck muscles when put on his stomach -- he could simply flip himself to his back. This weekend, he discovered another way to effectively avoid tummy time, without even having to do the work of rolling over: simply rest your head on the ground. We put him on his stomach, he briefly lifts his head, then he turns his head to the side and rests his cheek on the blanket. No exercise required. This maneuver seems fairly obvious now that he's doing it. Any suggestions on motivating a lazy infant to exercise on his tummy? Shaking toys above him doesn't do it. He just gives me this look that seems to say, "You want to play? Move me to my back! Otherwise, I'm just going to rest right here and suck on my fingers."

S and I are both only fluent in English, but people sometimes assume that I speak Hebrew, and that S speaks Japanese. Someone asked me the other day what LL's first language was going to be, and I said "I dunno, maybe Lisp." It wasn't until I got a really blank look that I realized what they actually meant. You think that LL is doomed to be a nerd?

LL and I visited my tech start-up again yesterday. He thought one of the robots was really cool until it moved its arms, which seriously freaked him out. So I guess we're not ready for robots yet.

Rolling, Sleeping, Partying, Oh My!

LL is 20 weeks old today. That's kind of an unwieldy number for weeks... I'm pretty sure that I'm only supposed to be talking in months at this point. He's four and a half months. And we had a few new milestones this week!

LL rolled over! LL hates tummy time with a passion. He rarely tolerates it for more than a minute, whining uncomfortably for 30 seconds, then moving to all-out hysterical screaming until he is rescued and returned to his rightful position on his back. Nonetheless, we've been told that we need to keep attempting tummy time, to strengthen his upper body. On Monday, he realized that, when he was put on his stomach, he could Do Something About It. He rolled to his back. And gave me a smug what-are-you-going-to-do-now grin. I thought that it might be a fluke, so I returned him to his stomach. Nope, he definitely knows how to roll. Every time he is put on his stomach, he now rolls to his back within 30 seconds or so. Every single time. The era of tummy time is over.

Possibly related to the increased strength and flexibility needed for rolling: he has fallen in love with his own feet. For a while now, he's had a habit of holding onto his knees, but he wasn't interested in reaching all the way to his toes. Now, he grabs each foot in his hands and stares at his toes in amazement. Endless entertainment.

Also, a milestone for me and S: we hosted our first party since LL was born! (I'm not counting the bris, which was a big party, but it wasn't at our house, and we did most of the prep for it before he was born.) We had 20-some friends over to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, including several children, which was a lot of fun. It did bring about several annoying conversations, though. ("Your house isn't childproof." "Yes, I know, we haven't done any childproofing yet." "You know you're going to have to childproof." "Yes, I know." "That right there? You're going to have to get rid of that. It's not childproof." "Yes, I know. We know what we have to do, we just haven't needed to do it yet." "Also, that over there." "YES, I KNOW.")

We're also firmly in the middle of the infamous Four Month Sleep Regression. LL had been so fantastic about going to sleep easily around 6:30, sleeping until 4am, going immediately back to sleep after eating, and then getting up sometime after 7am. Now, he struggles more in the evening, not wanting to go to sleep. He wakes up around 10:30pm and insists on eating. He wakes up again around 1am to eat some more. He refuses to go back to sleep after eating, a problem that we haven't dealt with since he was two months old. If we try to soothe him back to sleep without eating, he gets hysterical. And then he wakes up at 5:30 or 6:00am and will not go back to sleep. Last night, S had to walk him around the house for an hour, from 2-3:00am. I also don't entirely know what to attribute it to. Yes, it could be the normal four month thing. But it also coincides with me returning to work, and I've read that lots of babies start waking up more frequently at night, wanting to play more at night, wanting to nurse more at night, after Mom returns to work, to make up for missed time during the day. It could also be that my menstrual cycle returned this past week, which I've read can alter breast milk and throw babies for a bit of a loop. S and I are both exhausted from dealing with it all. Hopefully LL will calm down soon!

Also exhausting us: the search for daycare. We've looked high and low, investigated lots of possible solutions, interviewed several more places, and we've got nothing. I've been home with LL all week. Natasha isn't reopening her daycare until March 2, which means that we've got three more weeks to figure out. And to answer some questions on this topic: yes, we had a plan for backup childcare, for when Natasha was sick: I could take a few sick days, S could take a few sick days, and a few friends could take LL for a day or two if necessary. But none of that covers the scenario of having no regular childcare for an entire month. As for having our parents help us out... my parents aren't retired, so they can't fly here for a month. S's parents are retired, but they still have very busy lives. They might be willing to come out here for a week, but that's about it. And even if they could come for longer, I think that I'd go nuts having my mother-in-law living with us for a month. Seriously, I'd go batty. Nevermind that she refuses to follow any of our wishes for how LL should be cared for; she doesn't believe in naps (!); she doesn't like cloth diapers; she wants to feed him every hour; .......

So, for now, I've just warned my advisor not to expect much out of me for a while. Which didn't go over very well, but there's nothing I can do about it. Our search continues.

Week Twelve (December 12)

That one good night of sleep last week was the precursor to quite the growth spurt, during which LL was constantly waking up to eat. It was exhausting, especially coming right after a very trying week at the in-laws and the clingy reprogramming days that followed it. By the end of the week, I was totally burnt out, more than at any other time in the last three months, leading to our sleep breakthrough, described here. We were on our way to better nights!

This week was also when we figured out what to do about day care. I'm going back to work in mid-January, one month away, so we needed to be firming up our day care plans. My top choice, sadly, won't have an opening until March or April, so instead we have reserved a spot at our second choice place. Visiting day cares and making a final decision was traumatic (it still makes my heart stop a bit to think about it) but that is definitely a full post on its own, so for the Week Twelve update I'll just say: we reserved LL a spot in daycare.

On a happier note, this week was LL's first holiday party! S called from work to invite us to a party that afternoon in his office, and LL had a lot of fun cooing and giggling at S's coworkers. Although it still surprises me how weird people are about Christmas. All of S's coworkers know that we're Jewish, yet almost all of them asked me if I was going to have LL's picture taken with Santa, and then looked at me like I was the worst mother in the world when I said "no." Why is it so hard for so many people to get the concept that we don't celebrate Christmas?

This week was also my first night away from LL. My New Mom's Group planned a dinner without babies! A group of us went out for Mexican food, leaving the babies at home with the daddies. The evening alone with LL was particularly easy for S, since LL was asleep when I left for dinner, and was still asleep when I came home. Evening out for Mommy; evening to stay home and play video games for Daddy. Everybody wins.

Week Eight (November 14)

It was good timing to regain all that independence during Week Seven, because I needed it this week when S went back to work. Week Eight was my first real time alone with LL for more than an hour or two. I was very nervous about doing everything myself without relief, especially since S was generally better at soothing LL than I was. Also, until this week, S had been changing the majority of the diapers. I'd been doing the diaper changes in the middle of the night, since S generally slept all night and left all of LL's care to me until morning, but during the day, he did more than his share of the non-feeding care. (Before LL was born, S and I had agreed: I was in charge of input, S was in charge of output.) Still, the week went fairly well. I was definitely exhausted, but S came home from work every day by 5:30, which helped. We also managed to bring LL to his first "dinner party" this week -- dinner at my cousin's house. As expected, LL slept the entire time.

We really focused on sleep this week, keeping a journal of when LL was sleeping, day and night. He generally was good about going to sleep around 7:00 every night, in his bassinet in our bedroom, but he was still waking up 2-3 times during the night to eat. Also, while he was very considerate about sleeping whenever we went out, he rarely agreed to nap at home, and I had my doubts about how deeply he was sleeping in restaurants and coffeeshops. I hoped that getting him to nap more at home during the day might encourage him to also sleep longer at night. ("Sleep begets sleep" according to the experts.) It worked a little, and by midweek, I'd established a pretty good rhythm with LL, with eat-play-nap cycles every three hours or so during the day.

This week's big milestone: LL discovered his hands! As we were driving home from New Mom's Group, I heard him spit out his pacifier. I braced myself for some crying, but instead, I heard loud messy slurping coming from the back seat. Fingers -- yum! From this point on, we only use the pacifier when we're soothing LL to sleep. When he's out and about, playing or observing the world, he relies on his fingers to satisfy his comfort sucking needs.

Sleep Breakthrough

Ever since we brought him home from the hospital, LL has been waking up every 3-4 hours during the night to eat. He occasionally does a longer stretch when he first goes to bed, but then he's up every 3 hours after that. That initial long stretch doesn't do me any good, though, since I don't go to sleep at 7:00 when he does. And the following 3-hours stretches are actually only 2 hours of sleep for me at a time, since the kid tends to eat for 45 minutes for each meal. (Our little gourmet....)

We had one good night last week Friday when he went to sleep at 6:00pm, woke up to eat at 1:00am, and then actually stayed asleep until 7:00am. I didn't benefit very much, though, since I was still awake from 3:30-4:30am, as my body refused to believe that I didn't need to be up. And the very next day, LL started a growth spurt, which lasted through mid-day Monday, during which he ate every two and a half hours, for 90 minutes at a time. (Yes, each meal lasted a continuous hour and a half!) It was totally exhausting, I got no sleep at all, and when the growth spurt was over, he'd forgotten that he was starting to sleep more, and went back to waking up every 3 hours.

Thursday morning, I completely lost it. I hadn't had more than four hours of consecutive sleep in five months (the last two months of pregnancy, plus almost three months of nighttime feedings for LL), and most nights my sleep was in two hour chunks. After feeding LL at 7:00am on Thursday, I handed him over to S and then broke down crying and sobbing for almost an hour. My breakdown included pointing out to S that I was pretty sure that LL was violating the sleep torture provisions of the Geneva Convention, and I was seriously going to lose my mind soon if something didn't give. I was just so exhausted.

So, Thursday night we tried The Experiment. LL had proven that he could go long stretches without eating at night when he wanted to, so we would try to convince him to just go back to sleep when he woke up. The plan was that when he cried, S would go in and try to get him to go back to sleep without eating. Change a diaper, put a pacifier back in, rock and sway and soothe... whatever was needed. If he was still crying after several minutes, I'd come in and feed him, but we'd let S try to manage without me if he could. LL went to sleep at 6:30pm. He woke up at 11:00pm and cried and cried, so I fed him. He woke up several more times (2am, 4am, 5am) but each time, S was able to immediately put him back to sleep, without involving me at all. Score! Mind you, I still woke up each time LL woke up, but I didn't have to get out of bed, and I was asleep again 5 minutes later. Good stuff.

Friday night, we tried the same strategy. Same pattern: asleep at 7:00, fed again at midnight, and didn't need Mom again until morning (7:30am). That's only one feeding in 12+ hours!

Saturday night, we decided to skip the crying at that midnight-ish wake-up. We'd put him to bed at 7:00, I'd feed him the first time he woke up, and S would handle the rest of the wake-ups until morning. You can imagine our surprise when his first wake-up wasn't until 5:00am. Yes, that's right, he slept from 7:00pm until 5:00am, continuously. And after I fed him at 5:00, he went right back to sleep and slept until his usual 7:30am.

Last night, we avoided even the 5am feeding. Asleep at 6:30pm, woke up at 7:30am. Not a peep in between. After four nights, I'm ready to say that this isn't a fluke. It still may not happen every night, I fully expect the occasional needy night, and who knows what happens when we travel next month to visit my family in Wisconsin for a week. But for now, life around here is great.

Oh, and did I mention how totally cheerful LL has been the past several days? Getting lots of sleep clearly agrees with him. He's all smiles and giggles, goes down easily for naps in his crib, hardly ever cries. I could get used to this! We're one happy well-rested family.

Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

Holy cow, LL is more than two months old, halfway to three! And wow, he's huge! I was looking at some of the photos from his first week or two and I can hardly believe how much he's changed. Crazy.

I've been meaning to write weekly updates on what he's up to, but somehow I can never find the time. During my pregnancy, I was really good about, at a minimum, writing a post every Tuesday when I "rolled over" to the next week. I've been meaning to do the same thing now every Friday, when LL hits his weekly "birthdays," but so far, I haven't managed to do a single one. I do actually have some of them written, though, from the early weeks, and I'm debating whether I should backdate them when posting them, or just append them all together as one giant catch-up post. We'll see.

In the mean time, I'll just mention that Thanksgiving kind of sucked. Last year, Thanksgiving sucked because we spent the holiday with S's family, including a close family friend who brought their 2-month-old along. S and I were in the middle of fertility treatments at the time, so I was hopped up on hormones, physically sick from the side effects, and depressed after more than two years of trying to get pregnant. Everybody was totally charmed by the baby, but I couldn't even bring myself to hold him because it made me cry. The entire weekend revolved around the baby, and with S's family pressuring us to have children. S's mom, in particular, kept holding up the baby in front of me, exclaiming about how cute he was and bemoaning the fact that her selfish son and daughter-in-law hadn't made her a grandmother yet. I was miserable the entire time.

This year, Thanksgiving sucked for different reasons. After last year's holiday, I kind of expected that LL would get the same treatment that our friend's 2-month-old received last year. Instead, my in-laws had planned all sorts of events that are impossible with a young infant. Last year, we spent the entire 4-day weekend at one uncle's house, and the baby (and his family) were staying at a hotel 5 minutes away, so they could return to their hotel whenever they needed to (though things were very calm at the uncle's house, so they rarely needed to). This year, S's family had us running all over the fracking city. After a day of airports and layovers and air travel, we discovered that we were expected to go immediately from the airport to a cousin's house 45 minutes away, have dinner there, and stay late before being driven home to S's parents house (another 45 minute drive). After much discussion and attempts at guilt trips, we put our foot down and just refused to go, because poor exhausted LL needed to just go home and go to sleep. Things got worse from there. (You expect us to bring a jet-lagged infant on family outings to art galleries and casinos? Really?)

So, the scheduling is the first reason that Thanksgiving sucked. The second reason was that nobody actually respected that I was LL's mother and needed to look out for his welfare. After struggling to get him to nap in yet another different location, I'd walk away for 30 seconds to get something to drink, only to return to find out that someone (usually my MIL) had woken him up so that they could play with him. Once, I finally got him to sleep, but he was in a bedroom at the far end of the house, so I needed to leave the door open so that I'd be able to hear him if he cried. The problem was that there was a cat in the house that kept trying to sit on LL and smother him. When I asked the people whose house we were at if we could put the cat in a different room for an hour while LL napped, I was told no, because the cat didn't like being cooped up. Yes, the cat's comfort was put ahead of my child's health. Sigh.

So, the only way for LL to nap was if I was with him and holding him the entire time, yet I had people reach over and wake LL up while I was carrying him, and whenever I protested that he needed to nap, I was told that I didn't know what I was doing, LL wanted to play not nap, and I was keeping him from his family. And then every evening, when LL completely melted down from exhaustion, everyone scolded me for clearly not meeting his needs (or else he wouldn't be crying). Consider this interaction with my mother-in-law:

MIL: Wow, he's really crying a lot.
Me: Yes, he's really over-tired.
MIL: No, I think it's probably something he ate.
Me: Um, really? Because he has a pretty limited diet these days.
MIL: Okay, then it's probably something that you ate that you shouldn't have. What bad thing have you eaten?
Me: We're staying at your house. I've pretty much only eaten the food you've cooked for us.
MIL: Oh.... So, then, maybe he's just tired.

Did I mention how happy I am to be home?

So, yeah, that was LL's 10th week. Today he's 11 weeks old, so I owe you 10 more weekly updates (including one for this week!). They're coming soon, I promise.

Baby Science

Many people are familiar with the quantum physics paradox of Schrodinger's Cat. Briefly, a cat and a vile of poison are sealed in a box, with the release of the poison linked to the detection of radiation. The paradox says that, because of quantum mechanics, before one looks in the box, the cat exists in a state of being both alive and dead. Once the box is opened, however, in order to check the status of the cat, one sees the cat in one of the two states, not in both at the same time. This paradox is often interpreted, in lay terms, as an observer's paradox: the act of looking at the cat, in a way, forces the cat into one of the states.

That's all well and good, as far as high school physics is concerned. But are you familiar with the lesser known paradox of Schrodinger's Baby? It goes something like this: a quiet baby in a darkened room exists in a state of being both asleep and awake (ie, if the baby is quiet, you don't really care which state the baby is in). However, the act of walking into the room (or in some other way spying on the baby) forces the baby into the awake-and-waiting-to-be-picked-up state. Even if you make no noise at all.

From my own field of theoretical computer science, there exists a problem known as the Halting Problem. It says that, for certain types of computer systems, if you ask a question of a computer, you may never know the answer, because the system might take an indeterminately long time to respond. A simplistic analogy: remember calling someone on the telephone before there were answering machines? If the person answered the phone right away, you knew they were home, but if they didn't answer, how many times should you let the phone ring? If they don't answer after, say, 5 rings, you can't conclude that they're not home, because maybe they just haven't gotten to the phone yet. No matter how many times you let it ring, you can't actually conclude that they're not home, because maybe they would have answered on the next ring. The only way to be 100% sure, in fact, is to let the phone ring forever.

Which brings me to the Baby Halting Problem, in which we attempt to determine whether a baby has finished pooping. How long do you wait after the last grunt and fart before concluding that it is safe to change the diaper? No matter how long you wait, you might still be surprised by the sudden arrival of more poop once the baby is naked on the changing table. The only way to be sure is in fact to wait forever, which is supremely uncomfortable for the baby, and results in an infinite amount of poop.

The Baby Halting Problem actually has a second, less messy statement, in which we attempt to determine when a baby has been successfully rocked to sleep, as opposed to just faking it by closing his eyes and lying slack-jawed in your arms, waiting to surprise you the moment you attempt to put him down. The formalization of this alternate statement of the Baby Halting Problem is left as an exercise for the reader.