Kermit Update

I am now 26 weeks along. That magical potential-viability-outside-the-womb stage. About to enter the third trimester. Less than 100 days left to go. Things are really moving along!

On the GD front, I can finally say that I don't have gestational diabetes. My entire medical team finally agrees. I've said this from the very beginning. My OB agreed with me early on, but wasn't allowed to remove the diagnosis without buy-in from the endocrinologist. The endocrinologist said that she didn't think that I had it, either, but wanted to monitor me anyway, just to be sure. So I've been meeting with the nurse every month or so, to go over my food records and monitoring numbers, and at this month's appointment she finally threw up her hands and said, "Yeah, I don't believe that you have gestational diabetes." I'm at that point where, if you have gestational diabetes, it's going to be running rampant by 26 weeks. But my numbers right now are actually lower than they were back at 10 weeks, which completely supports my claim all along that pain and stress from the stupid car accident was artificially (and temporarily) elevating my blood sugar.

This past month, I've ignored the GD diet guidelines on a regular basis. I gave in to a craving for donuts at breakfast one morning. I've had fruit smoothies. I've had big bowls of pasta. I've been drinking more milk and eating more fruit, including at breakfast and bedtime, which are supposed no-no's. Yet my blood sugar numbers remain at the low end for normal non-pregnant people. On Friday, I even repeated an A1C test, which measures average blood sugar over the last three months, and it came back not just normal, but even a little lower than last time. So, the nurse told me to just eat whatever I want. Test myself occasionally, but don't worry about it. She said to try to do a full week's worth of monitoring before my next appointment with her (more than a month from now) but between now and then, don't bother much. She called me an anomaly. I'm not sure that it counts as an anomaly if I can scientifically explain what's going on, but whatever. It's good news.

All other pregnancy-related health signs are looking good as well. I'm ever-so-slightly anemic, almost exactly the same as this point in my pregnancy with LL. Last time, I was told to eat more hamburgers and spinach, because it was too borderline to warrant any more heavy-duty intervention. Which is fine with me, I like spinach. And Kermit is regularly kicking up a storm, much more targeted than LL ever was. In particular, Kermit keeps kicking my cervix, which I don't remember LL ever doing. What's up with that? Trying to dig himself out?

We also settled on a skeleton of a labor plan. Dr. M is supportive of trying a VBAC, but only under certain conditions. For one, I need to go into labor on my own (no induction) and I need to progress entirely on my own (no pitocin augmentation) because the use of augmentation drugs dramatically increases the risk of uterine rupture during VBACs. This might be a hurdle for me, because I never went into labor with LL, and even when I was 8cms dilated and my water had already broken, my contractions would disappear when they turned down the pitocin. I'm a little hopeful, because I'm already having Braxton-Hicks contractions, which never really happened with LL, so maybe my uterus is actually prepping for something this time!

The other condition that we'll need to meet is that I need to go into labor before 39 weeks or so. LL's c-section was necessary because of a rare condition called CPD, in which the baby's head is too big to fit through the mother's pelvic bone. A number of factors probably contributed to the CPD (LL's gestational age at delivery, which was 41w3d; LL's enormous head; my apparently narrow-ish pelvic bone; a lack of elasticity in LL's skull). This time around, we can't be sure how many of these factors will be present. My pelvic bone is likely to have spread a little more, since this is a second pregnancy, which will hopefully help. On the other hand, Kermit's head is so far measuring even bigger than LL's. Kermit's head might be more elastic, which would help a lot, but we won't know until I start pushing. (Most babies' heads deform to fit through the birth canal; this is why they often have cone heads for a day or two after birth. Even after hours of pushing out LL, his head remained nice and round and didn't deform at all.) The only thing that we have any control over is gestational age, which is why Dr. M won't let me try a VBAC too late into the pregnancy. Basically, he and I both want to avoid a situation where I have another full trial of labor, several hours of pushing, and then end up with another c-section. That outcome might not be entirely avoidable, but we can minimize the odds, and one way to do that is to set an eviction date, a scheduled c-section.

Right now, we've scheduled a c-section for January 3, when I'll be 39w1d. Which is a hair less than 3 months from now. I might try to push it back a few more days, to 39w4d, just to give myself a few more days to go into labor. (Dr. M originally scheduled it for 38w5d, but I wasn't comfortable with it being that early, so he agreed to wait a few more days.) But basically, that's the plan.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the VBAC question since before I was even pregnant with Kermit, and I'm happy with this plan. When LL's birth ended in a c-section, I was disappointed, but not as crushed as some other women seem to be. I felt like I had missed out on the experience of giving birth, but goodness knows that 23 hours of active labor certainly gave me a sense of what that experience would be. And I resented the longer recovery period and incision pain, which was compounded by the long trial of labor and pushing before eventually having the surgery, but it's not like a vaginal birth would have avoided pain and recovery. At the same time, I definitely know in my heart that the c-section was unavoidable. I don't have any "what-ifs" in mind where I think that the c-section could have been reasonably avoided. I wasn't "pushed" into it by over-eager doctors, I wasn't rushed in any way. Every decision we made, I would make again. So even though I didn't want the c-section, I know that LL would never have been born without it, and there's a certain peace that comes with that.

I've poured over the data on the risk of VBAC complications in various settings, and I feel like trying the VBAC in a supportive hospital setting with trained doctors and nurses who assist with them all the time will bring the risks down to a level that is comparable with other types of birth. If I don't go into labor before the eviction date, I will be a little disappointed. But I also feel like, by the time I'm that far along, the odds of a successful VBAC will have dropped enough that it probably wouldn't happen, anyway, and I'd have the same double recovery as last time. So this plan seems right to me.

In the mean time, we're trying to step up the preparation for actually having Kermit in our lives come January (or, let's be honest, possibly late December). The odds of us moving into a larger house between now and then are shrinking rapidly, so we're strategizing about where to put things in our current house. Bassinet in our bedroom. New rocking chair, also in our bedroom. Changing table in a location TBD. Nursing stool next to an existing chair in our living room, so that I can nurse somewhere without waking up S. Kermit's clothes stored in our closet. No crib or dresser purchased for Kermit until 5 months old or we're in a new house, whichever comes first. Boxing up all non-essentials in our office so that the room is de-cluttered enough that my mom can sleep on the hide-a-bed in there for a while after Kermit is born.

There are a few things that we'll need to buy, but not much. New rocking chair, new changing table. Bouncy seat. New boppy. New stroller. (Probably a sit-n-stand, like this one, since I don't think we'd need a full double stroller for very long, but might want one for the first 6 months or so. If anyone has experience with these, please let me know, because I've barely done any research on these yet.) Not much else.

Oh, and we do still need a name other than Kermit....

Happy Birthday, LL!

Time moves in odd ways when you have a baby. The old saying goes something like, "The days are slow but the years are fast." I don't think that I ever really internalized that sentiment until LL was born. But this weekend, faced with the fact that I now have a one-year-old, I couldn't help shaking my head at how quickly the year has gone, yet how far away the time before LL seems. Being pregnant was ages and ages ago, yet surely he was a tiny squawking newborn only yesterday. For the last few weeks, I've been working on putting together LL's baby book, covering his whole first year. Going through old photos month by month has been fun, but seeing the passing of time lined up in front of me has been startling. It really hits home how much he has grown and changed. His face is different, his hair is different, his eyes are different. No longer helpless, he can now move where he wants and reach for what he wants and smile and wave and share toys and share hugs to show us that he loves us.

This past month alone, he has developed so many new skills. He pulls himself up on every piece of furniture in our house, and has begun tentatively taking steps as he cruises along. He loves opening drawers and cabinets to discover hidden treasures. Faced with a room full of toys, he ignores every age-appropriate thing around in order to play with drink coasters and shoes and tupperware and VHS tapes. After a week or so of pinched fingers, he has learned how to properly close drawers without hurting himself. He is growing increasingly adept with a spoon, and insists on feeding himself a few spoonfuls of food at each meal. And his random babbling is starting to become remarkably ordered, organized into sentences with beginnings and endings, intonation and emphasis, with real words occasionally shining out from the randomness. After a week of babbling the same syllables over and over and over, we discovered that he was actually saying something in Russian, phrases that he picked up at daycare and uses in context-appropriate ways. We wonder now whether he has even more words than we think, split among English, Russian, and Spanish.

He has always been a very social baby, and continues to love large parties and being among friends, both old and young. He crawls after babies his own age, he tries to imitate the behavior of toddlers and preschoolers, he happily shares toys with kids of all ages. He never went through a real "stranger danger" clingy phase, but he has started crawling over to me and just resting his head against my leg for a few moments when he feels overwhelmed. After a brief mommy recharge, he goes back to playing. When I walk into a room, he immediately gives me a giant smile and crawls over to say "hello!" before returning to his activity. I love that he is social, that he immediately started playing with his grandparents when they arrived even though he hadn't seen them in five months, but deep down it also warms my heart to know that he knows I'm his mommy, and that he sees me differently than he sees everybody else. It's great that he'll let new people feed him and play with him, but he knows that I'm Mommy. We're not all interchangeable after all.

He is increasingly aware that people bigger than him have the ability to do things that he can't do yet, and has begun asking for help when he wants to do something beyond his capabilities. He hands blocks to me, pointing at a tower to indicate that he wants me to keep building it bigger. He loves the buttons and levers on his activity box, but doesn't quite have the dexterity to turn the nob, so he gently takes my hand and places it on the nob with a "dah!" command, requesting that I turn it for him. He hands me his caterpillar pull toy, then giggles and gets into crawling position, waiting for me to start pulling the caterpillar around the room so that he can chase it.

He had a wonderful birthday weekend, playing with grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. At his party, he happily ate a collection of his favorite foods: kiwi, watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, cheerios, cheddar cheese, and crackers. He was enthralled investigating his first helium balloon, and clapped when he saw the "Happy Birthday!" banner. He wore a birthday hat without complaint. And the highlight, his first dessert, provided all the smiles and giggles and mess that I had hoped for. I made him a vanilla cake with lots of gooey frosting, and he happily ate some and played with some and mashed some and rubbed some into his hair.

LL had a great visit with all of his family, and is spending this whole week with S's parents. (When they found out that we were having daycare problems, they made plans to stay the week to help out. They were very very excited to have him all to themselves for the whole week, so when we solved the daycare problems and didn't need them anymore, they were crushed. So, we told them that they could stay anyway. I love my in-laws, but having them in the house for the whole week is stressful, and it's only Tuesday. But LL is loving all the attention.) He had his one-year check-up, where he weighed in at just over 22 pounds, maintaining his below-average weight class. He shot up in height, though, to the 85th percentile, which means that he has officially outgrown his infant carrier. And he still has a big head.

Most important: he's healthy and happy and learning and growing. He eats and he sleeps and he plays and he laughs. My baby is one year old.

Independence!

It turns out that LL has spent the past several non-crawling months plotting out exactly what he would do once he learned to crawl. He has been mobile for less than 72 hours, and much of that time, he has been asleep or out of the house at daycare. Nonetheless, in the past three days, he has managed to:

• run the closet door over his foot;
• defeat the lock on our entertainment center;
• slam his fingers in the drawer of his dresser;
• attempt to eat a plastic garbage bag;
• pull on a tuft of carpeting, unraveling a good chunk of it;
• chew on a gel insert in a tennis shoe;
• have a go at the safety plugs in several electrical outlets;
• pull a wine bottle off the wine rack and give it a good whack on the tile floor;
• angrily shake the safety gate keeping him out of the office, then immediately zero in on the latch that opens it.

And those are just the activities that rate in the moderate-to-high danger zone. He has also discovered a totally safe love for dirty laundry and old VHS tapes. Still, we should probably get cracking on the last of that baby-proofing.

With his brain now free of the all-consuming puzzle of figuring out locomotion, LL has turned to more intellectual pursuits. Yesterday, he drank several ounces of milk through a straw, something that we've been working on for weeks. (His normal behavior was to either blow bubbles, or to suck a little liquid into his mouth and then immediately spit it out. Anything but suck on the straw and actually consume what came out.) This morning, he suddenly mastered the arm movements for "How big is LL?" and giving high-fives. By the end of the week, he should be ready to learn how to drive.

LL is not the only one who has new-found independence. I am happy to report that my grad funding situation is resolved. AdvisorA's final comment on the matter, a week or two ago, was that she had no money for me anywhere, she had no plans to look for more money, and I was completely financially on my own. If I wanted help with funding, I should talk to other people, but not her. End of story. So I had a chat with my department's financial manager, Pepper, who had heard about the situation from AdvisorB and was horrified by what had happened, but pessimistic about the chances of finding a good solution. Pepper looked around, and then called me to her office to tell me that she had found some money for me. How much? Enough to fully fund me for the entire academic year, all the way until my planned graduation in June.

I was dumbstruck. I mean, I had given up all hope of finding funding for the year, and had resigned myself to being a TA in the fall, and taking a leave of absence while I finished up after that. Instead, I'm completely out of the financial woods.

A windfall like this one doesn't just happen, so you just know that there was going to be a dark side. I was a little hesitant to find out, but I just had to know: where did the money come from?

It turns out that AdvisorA has a slush fund. Or rather, the lab that she and I belonged to had a slush fund, contributed to by many professors over the years. As the lab shrank, and many professors retired or left, the slush fund became the sole property of AdvisorA. The money is available for absolutely any purpose, except that it has to be spent at my university (where AdvisorA is no longer employed). When AdvisorA left my university, she couldn't take the fund with her, but nobody else had rights to it, so she hid it. And cleverly forgot to mention it when I, and AdvisorB, and Pepper all independently questioned her about any money she had access to that could be used to pay for me. (And before we give her the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe she really did forget about it: Pepper said that AdvisorA is still charging things to the account on occasion, as recently as a few weeks ago, when expenses come up that she can reasonably charge to this account.)

Pepper found the account, and discovered that it had more than enough money in it to fund me for the year. (At least an order of magnitude more, in fact.) Then she went to the Department Chair and suggested that the Chair transfer money out of this account into the department's overhead account, then use the department's overhead account to pay for me. Everything was approved, the transfer was done, end of story. I am now fully funded.

The one glitch: nobody told AdvisorA. I'm not going to be the one to do it, because it will look a lot like I convinced the department to steal money from AdvisorA. And Pepper and the Department Chair both feel like this account shouldn't really be AdvisorA's anymore anyway, that the entire account should have become the property of the department as soon as AdvisorA left, so why should they have to tell her when they spend their own money? And AdvisorB thinks that there's so much money in the account that AdvisorA will never notice the missing money, so why draw attention to it.

For now, I'm staying out of it. I talked with AdvisorA on the phone, and when she asked what class I was going to TA, I told her that the department found money for me. Then I played dumb and said that I didn't know the details, she'd have to ask Pepper if she wanted to know more. Given how little she cares at this point, I doubt she'll follow up. If she does, Pepper and AdvisorB are both prepared to lie through their teeth and tell her that I didn't know where the money came from. My only risk at this point is that she does find out, she does get pissed about it, and she takes it out on me by delaying (or preventing) my graduation. (She is still on my committee, and trying to remove her at this point would hurt me more than just dealing with whatever she decides to throw at me.)

Even though I know that there might still be some fallout, I am elated that I can stop worrying about money and just focus on finishing my research. And writing my thesis. And finding a job. And planning LL's first birthday party. And babyproofing the house.

One Small Step for Man

Thank you to everyone who commented that babies learn to crawl before they learn to bring themselves to sitting. Several friends also mentioned that babies tend to spend several days rocking back and forth on their hands and knees before they figure out how to propel themselves forward. The consensus seemed to be: rock on all fours; wait a week; crawl; wait a week; come to sitting. Sounds good! To all of the people who gave us this information, LL would like to (respectfully) stick out his tongue and blow a giant wet raspberry in your face.

As an aside: did I mention that LL was blissfully late to the blowing raspberries habit? He showed no interest in it at all until he met my old undergraduate advisor, a highly respected woman with many many career awards for a lifetime of scientific research achievements; she is a past president of the major research body for my field, and is currently the Dean of a large institute at a prestigious university. She taught LL to blow raspberries when she met him at our reunion. And now I get to tell people that, at the tender age of eight months, LL learned his first life skill from an Ivy League university.

Back to our story. Rocking, then crawling, then sitting. Pfffffttt! We woke up yesterday morning to discover LL happily sitting in his crib. Yes, sitting. And looking awfully proud of himself. But he wouldn't do it outside of his crib, which made us think that he was using the bars to pull himself up. When we went to get him after his morning nap, he was once again sitting, and this time when we put him on the floor, he showed us how he could sit up all by himself. And then clap, of course. Yaaay!

Two hours later, he was crawling. I put him on the floor, and I made a gigantic tower of stacking cups several feet away, and off he went! And oh my goodness, when he knocked that tower down, he immediately sat down and gave himself the most gleeful round of applause that I have ever seen. Pure joy.

After giving him gigantic hugs and lots more cheering, S and I grabbed the phone and called all the grandparents. Through the magic of the internet, we quickly set up a three-way video conference, and they got to watch as LL practiced his crawling technique for an hour, until he was so exhausted that he almost started his afternoon nap on the floor, on his way to another pile of blocks.

By the end of the day, LL was rocking his body on all fours before taking off, like he was revving his engines before crawling away. And I spent the entire day playing over and over in my head that first crawl and the unbelievably ecstatic little boy who clapped for himself afterward. One tiny little leap for mankind, but one giant step forward for LL.

Rocking, then crawling, then sitting, with several days in between? Not in our house. Pfffffttt!

Variety

We're past eleven months now. Less than a month to go until LL turns one year old. He's looking so much like a little boy these days, and he has almost completed a full revolution around the sun. After his birthday, it seems wrong to call him a baby, but he's nowhere near walking yet, so he's not a toddler. Is there a stage between baby and toddler? (We're currently leaning towards "really lazy toddler" because I'm pretty sure that he could do a bunch more physical stuff if he weren't so opposed to athletic exertion.)

What else can I say about my little sedentary munchkin? His favorite pastime remains sitting on the floor with a pile of books. Despite the non-walking, he now owns his first pair of shoes. LL doesn't walk or crawl, but he does like to stand, and the available standing surfaces outside of our house are not always kind to bare feet. After many many months (ten?) of eating anything and everything you put in front of him (except spinach... what is it with kids and spinach?!?) LL has now become a bit pickier in his culinary tastes. He wants variety, man! Not just between meals (for months, he insisted on starting every meal with oatmeal; now, suddenly, he's giving us these looks like, "Oatmeal again? Are you kidding me?") but also within a single meal. ("No, mommy, I've just had three bites in a row of watermelon! Perhaps a few bites of cheese, and then I will return to the watermelon.")

His need for variety has also extended to pacifiers, of all things. LL uses a pacifier at naptime and bedtime, but not when he's awake, so his pacifiers all live in his crib. He used to have a hard time finding a pacifier in the middle of the night, and we solved the needing-mommy-to-replace-the-pacifier problem by liberally sprinkling pacifiers around him in his crib. Wherever he reached his hand out, there was probably a pacifier for the taking. He doesn't have that problem anymore, but we still usually leave three or four of them in the crib, one in each corner, so that he can reach one wherever he is in the crib when he awakens. But now he has developed this habit where we put him down for a nap, and he insists on tasting each pacifier before deciding which one he wants. He picks one up, sucks for a second or two, removes it, tosses it aside, picks up the next one, sucks for a second or two, ...., before finally choosing one. It's... bizarre. We do wash them regularly, but do some of them maintain weird flavors? Have some of them deformed over time so that they feel different? Perhaps he thinks that one day we'll place a candy pacifier in with the normal ones, and if he doesn't check, he'd miss the opportunity to try candy?

(No, we've never given him candy. But he did try his first popsicle this week -- a 100% fruit thing that's basically frozen strawberries on a stick. LL though that it was the most awesome thing ever. After each lick, he would spend several seconds licking his lips to get every drop of frozen strawberry goodness. And then he held onto the empty popsicle stick for a good ten minutes after the popsicle was gone. As a memento.)

His frustration at not being able to crawl keeps growing. He also hasn't figured out how to get himself into a sitting position when he is lying down. Thus, every attempt to crawl involves him belly-flopping onto the ground, meager attempts to move, then lots of crying as he realizes that he's lying down and therefore unable to properly play with his toys. I spend all of my time with him dragging him back up to a sitting position, only to watch him reach for another toy and flop back down onto his tummy. I keep thinking that he'll figure it out if we leave him alone, but he quickly escalates to all-out hysteria if he's lying down and wants to be up and sees an adult nearby and nobody's helping him get back to sitting. Though he's very flexible, so he has developed this impressive move where he leans all the way forward so his belly is on the ground, one leg is behind him, and the other leg remains out in front of him so that, when he pushes with his arms, one of his legs is in position for him to be sitting.

I'm not sure if you're getting the visual there, but he's basically doing the splits, except he can reach several yards past the end of his front foot. Ouch.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Escaping from the crappy grad school situation for a moment (where things are happening; promises are being made and broken; people are stepping up and people are exposing themselves as sexist mercenaries) to discuss the life of a three-quarter-year-old.

LL is now over nine months old. When their babies reach nine months of age, many mothers like to mention with amazement that their babies have now spent as much time on the "outside" as they did on the "inside." Rather than guiltily apologize for not writing a nine-month update closer to LL's actual nine-month birthday, I am going to confidently assert that I did this on purpose, to penalize him for staying on the "inside" so long past his due date. Born late? Then you get a late nine-month update. So there. But first, a dinosaur-themed aside:

I once took a class taught by the late, great (and fascinating, and unbelievably egotistical) paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Staying away from any debates about the merit, or scientific accuracy, or usefulness of his work (because holy cow, paleontologists are a fanatical, argumentative bunch!), I bring him up because one of his primary scientific contributions to the field of paleontology was the idea of punctuated equilibrium. The idea that things remain remarkably stable until... all of a sudden they're not, and things are crazy for a very brief period of time!... until suddenly they're stable again. Interesting way to understand the fossil record. Fascinating way to evaluate human history and technological change. Increasingly accurate way to understand the development of LL, because after two months or so of relative stability and slow changes, my little LL is suddenly going through crazy developmental achievements. Though I'll admit that a few of them are the sort of "achievements" that only a close blood relative would really appreciate, so feel free to skim.

(And if you were drawn in by the idea of discussing dinosaurs, then I'd hate to disappoint, so here are a few things to fulfill the promise: LL's favorite song is "We are the Dinosaurs" by Laurie Berkner. One of his favorite books is "Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs!" by Sandra Boynton. Upon learning of these preferences, certain relatives began purchasing lots of dinosaur-themed clothing. LL wore some of them at our college reunion, mostly to show off for a dear college friend who is now a paleontologist. Our paleontologist friend had issues with LL's "Dino-Mite!" shirt, because the stegosaurus pictured on the front had the wrong number of tail spikes. Stupid Carters paleontologywear. Interestingly, our friend had fewer problems with the "Snugglesaurus" shirt, since he was not aware of how many spiky accessories a real snugglesaurus would have, though he was pretty sure that they probably didn't smile as much as the one pictured on the shirt. When I teasingly challenged him with a simple, "But how do you know they didn't smile?" I got a twenty-minute lecture on recent papers studying the shape and use of dinosaur lips. I then distracted him by mentioning the friendly T-Rex in Night at the Museum, because talking about silly Hollywood portrayals of dinosaurs is a useful way of distracting this particular friend when I want to change the topic. Like I said, paleontologists are a fanatical bunch.)

Anyway, back to our story.

Right after LL reached the six month mark, he learned to sit and he began eating real food and he stopped nursing and he started sleeping better, and then ... nothing terribly new happened. He continued to eat and he continued to sit, and goodness gracious he continued to grow. But nothing really all that newsworthy happened, for many many weeks, despite my attempts to find things to talk about at his seven- and eight-month updates. (Okay, he did a few new things, mostly under the heading of "communicating with people who don't speak baby," but mainly he improved on things he was already doing.) And then all of a sudden, during the last month, everything exploded. And are still exploding, actually, because he's clearly on the verge of still more new achievements sometime in the next few weeks. For starters, we were pleased to note that after plunging to the 18th percentile for weight, LL has rebounded to what we had thought were his normal growth curves: 40th for weight and height, 75th for head size. Yes, the kiddo still has a big head. He often sits with it tilted to the side, because it's just too heavy for his skinny little neck. He weighs just a hair under 20 pounds right now, and all the weight seems to be in his cheeks.

As for developmental explosions, a summary so far:

Teeth! LL got his first two teeth relatively early, at five months. He then went through month after month of frantic chewing and drooling, but no more teeth emerged. Then, suddenly, over a two week period, we saw the emergence of three additional teeth, in quick succession, so he's now up to five visible teeth. And I thought that I felt number six today, though he wouldn't let me thoroughly investigate to confirm it.

Mobility! Okay, saying that he's mobile is a bit generous. But he's not exactly stationary anymore, either. Crawling still eludes him, but he is finding other ways to end up in different places than where he was set down. His favorite involves sitting on the floor and bouncing a la Tigger, which is very cute but very inefficient. (He moves approximately three feet/hour, but it's a random walk sort of thing, which makes it even less productive.) He also does a roll-drag-bend-pull sort of thing that's even less efficient than an army crawl, and usually makes more progress backwards than forwards, usually away from his target, so he doesn't use it much. Still: mobility!

Standing! LL is discovering the joys of a vertical world. He loves standing, but only holding onto people, not objects. And he screams bloody murder if you sit him back down before he's ready.

Eating! LL went from only eating the mushiest of purees to suddenly loving chunkier fare. Cheerios are his new best friend. Fruit chunks are awesome. Crackers rock. A large part of the joy is that he can feed himself, which extends beyond food to include drinks as well. He prefers to hold his own bottle for all meals except bedtime, and he is loving the sippy cup of water that we offer several times a day. He's still a bit mystified at needing to suck on the sippy cup instead of chew it, but once we removed the valve so that the water would flow freely, he was happy. Wet, but happy.

Talking! LL has always been talkative. He gurgled and cooed from very early on, and had extensive conversations with me starting just before three months. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he was slow to move from cooing to the ever-more-sophisticated babbling. Then one day he discovered the letter B. After a day of "Ba! Ba! Aba! Baba! Ababa! Ba! Ba! Ba!", S declared that "aba" ("dad" in Hebrew) was LL's first word. That's one happy daddy. After practicing his B's for a few days, he added T, then (diplomatically) M and D on the same day. (He now often babbles "Amamadada!" which we've taken to be a joint "Mom and Dad!" word.) And L, G, and S. All over the course of like two weeks. He's babbling all the time now.

Sleeping! Not to jinx us or anything, but we've got this sleep thing temporarily figured out. Two naps, at roughly 9am and 1pm, but they're flexible enough to move as much as an hour without throwing him into total disarray. Bedtime around 7pm, also pleasantly flexible when we're out and about. He sleeps through the night more than half the time, which is victory enough for me, and more often than not, he'll sleep until something approximating 7am.

We've also had the chance to expose LL to a bunch of new things recently. My brother, sister-in-law, and their three children all stayed with us for several days, and it was a lot of fun watching LL play with his cousins. We took him to the beach for the first time, where he loved the sand, loved watching the ocean, and frantically objected when hit by an admittedly cold wave. He also "swam" in a pool for the first time, which he took in very calmly, right up until S dunked him under water, which brought more frantic objections.

Cold water and head-dunking aside, LL is one cool cucumber. He hates to be alone, but he is happy to play by himself for extended periods of time as long as there is somebody near him. Of course, playing with somebody else is better. Being in crowds of people is better still. We've been going to a lot of large group outings in houses and parks lately, and LL is in heaven sitting with his toys, surrounded by friends. He loves observing everyone around him and taking everything in. Some of our friends have even questioned whether he ever gets upset (um, yes he does, he's a baby) because he's always so happy and calm when he's hanging out with them.

Especially if there are blocks. Blocks are awesome. Blocks, and dinosaurs.

66%

LL turned 8 months old this past week. That's 2/3 of a year! A picture of his many skills and hobbies, to date:

Physical Skills! He's a master sitter now, but still no interest in crawling (thank goodness!). Still, he technically entered the realm of mobility by figuring out how to scoot along the floor on his back, headfirst, in a purposeful inchworm style (as opposed to the random flailing that moved him around occasionally in the past). But since he rarely lies on his back when he's out of his crib (why lie down when you can sit?) it's not really doing him much good. On the other hand, just by continuing to grow taller and stronger, he can now reach his mobile while lying down in his crib, so we had to remove it before he pulled the whole thing down on himself. (He still looks a little sad when he goes in his crib, since his mobile friends aren't there anymore. We added his teddy, Bingo Bear, to his crib as a replacement friendly face.) He shows very little interest in standing or pulling up. Some parents might be concerned at this lack of physical prowess at eight months of age, but S and I are just counting our blessings that we can get away with not finishing the baby-proofing for a few more weeks. (Take your time, kiddo. Those crystal wine glasses dangling just out of reach aren't going anywhere.)

Waving! He waves "hello" and "bye-bye." And by "wave," I mean that he sticks one arm out and opens and closes his fist. I saw him do "bye-bye" first, waving goodbye to Rosie at the end of the day. He added "hello" a day later, welcoming S home from work. And, intrigued by how everyone smiled and clapped whenever he did it, he has now taken to randomly waving at toys, plants, and furniture, in an attempt to get further applause.

Communicating! He asks to be picked up, by patiently holding both arms over his head in the classic baby "uppy" pose. This accomplishment is not only extremely cute, but also useful, since in addition to doing this when he wants to snuggle, he also does it as a way of letting us know that his diaper is wet and he'd like to be carried into his nursery for a change, please. We now have less whining about diapers! Yay! Though, oddly, after calmly requesting the diaper change, he then screams bloody murder as soon as we put him on the changing table, unless we launch into very loud singing of the ABC Song, on repeat, until he is dressed again.

Playing! LL is addicted to blocks. He will patiently watch me build a block tower, waiting until at least block four or five before knocking it down. When he sees a taller tower, he practically hyperventilates in anticipation of knocking it down. When presented with a box full of blocks, he will deliberate long and hard before deciding which blocks he would like to carefully pick up and place on the floor next to him. (I haven't yet figured out his selection criteria.) And, when there's no box and no tower, he will patiently chew on a single block while waiting for somebody to play a game with him. Thankfully, he has not yet learned how to throw.

Bath Time! LL has enjoyed bath time for a while now, but it's worth mentioning how much this kid loves playing with water. Especially moving water. Pouring water out of a cup, holding a showerhead in front of him, watching the faucet... all fascinating. And when we don't provide enough movement, he happily splashes to create waves of his own. Sometime soon, we're going to have to move his infant tub out of the kitchen sink, because the puddles on the floor are getting a little hard to deal with.

Music! LL loves being sung to, despite having two completely tone-deaf parents. We currently have about a dozen songs in our repertoire, ranging from traditional (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) to kid music (Down by the Bay), from folk songs (am I the only one who knows My Name is Yon Johnson? LL loves being bounced around the house to this one) to completely inappropriate parody rap (S has developed his own censored versions of Saturday Night Live parodies; current favorite is I'm On A Boat, but only because I banned him from singing Motherlover. Because really... ick!). Also, after months of refusing to listen to anything on the FM dial that wasn't NPR, LL has finally come around to appreciating some classic rock, with the Beatles at the top of his list.

Reading! LL has discovered literature. He loves loves loves books. Being read to is the best, but he will also pick up books on his own and attempt to flip the pages. Though, more often than not, flipping pages becomes tiring, and he resorts to chewing on them instead. Yum.

Eating! Cold pureed food: good! Warm pureed food: eh. Finger food: mysterious. We have started trying him on pureed meats (so far, just chicken) and have confirmed what we discovered about fruits and vegetables: foods that LL loves either room temperature or cold are completely rejected when heated to luke warm. I guess it's okay, because it's certainly easier on us to just serve everything to him cold, but still... weird. As for finger foods... he eats rice crackers, but we can't tell if he enjoys the taste, or just the novelty. He finds smaller foods (eg, little bite-sized puffs) to be more frustrating than fun, unless I put them in his mouth myself, which sort of defeats the purpose. And when I tried giving him a tiny chunk of banana, he repeatedly spit it out rather than eating it, even though he adores pureed bananas. So, for now, we're sticking with cold food on spoons.

Sleep! Every time we have a nighttime sleep breakthrough, LL gets sick. (Yeah, apparently getting a good night's sleep just overwhelms his immune system.) We had an awesome week where LL slept through the night five out of seven nights, and then he got sick again. The suspected ear infection was not an ear infection, it was just a minor head cold on top of the usual teething. For almost a week, he coughed and pulled on his ear but was otherwise in a fantastic mood, and then this weekend he moved from minor head cold to major head cold, the worst he's ever had. Horrible congestion and sneezing and coughing, and obviously a lot of pain and discomfort. The past several nights, the only way LL would sleep was propped up in my arms. He's mostly better today, but we still kept him home from daycare, in an attempt to be good citizens. As soon as the congestion is gone, we're hoping that he goes back to sleeping through the night.

Growing! I've been having more of those days where I get home from work and become convinced that in the six hours I was gone, somebody took my baby and replaced him with a larger version. At eight months old, he's tipping the scale at 19 pounds. That is still on the low end for his age, but it seems huge to me. We haven't measured his length lately, but he's sticking out of his infant car seat in unflattering ways, so he has clearly grown vertically as well. His face is maturing, too, and he's looking more and more like a little boy instead of a baby. And his hair is filling in, silky soft and curling a little at the ends. Good thing that he's keeping his puffy squirrel cheeks!

We leave for our college reunion in one week. I'm growing more and more calm about LL's ability to handle the time difference and general upheaval of being away from home, and more and more nervous about the flight. The thought of six straight hours on an airplane with him makes me a little nauseous. But I am feeling a bit giddy about showing him off to our friends.

Food! Sleep! Physics!

My writing lately has been fairly consumed by dealing with LL's nursing strike (which, by the way, continues. Everything I've read says that nursing strikes typically last 3-4 days, but "occasionally last a week or two." Apparently, nobody bothered to tell that to LL, because we're on Day 26 right now). Also, we had a house full of out-of-town guests for the past week, so I haven't had time to write anything at all. As a result, I've failed to record several other major changes in our lives. And since I use this blog to be my memory, there are a lot of things that I need to get written down.

It's unfortunate that the nursing strike began in earnest on LL's six month birthday, because that is also when he embarked on all sorts of new developments and firsts:

Solid Food! LL loves butternut squash. He's happy with oatmeal and sweet potatoes. He'll tolerate peas and carrots. He'll only eat green beans if fed to him by a grandparent. Other than the carrots, that pretty much aligns with my preferences as well. All in all, he gives Food, as a whole, a big thumbs up. Which is good, because he's mainly getting formula these days, and while he will occasionally gobble down a huge bottle of it and then ask for more, he often prefers to just chew on the nipple of the bottle and fuss. (Silly boy! If you like breast milk so much more than formula, you know what to do....) After forcing the kid to eat vegetables for several weeks, we're going to let him have fruit in a few days, which I expect will be a big hit.

Growth Spurt! In my desperation to find a fixable cause for LL's nursing strike, I brought him back to the doctor, even though he had an appointment less than a month ago. I wanted to rule out thrush or ear infection or any other illness that might have been undetectable a few weeks ago but causing nursing havoc now, just to be absolutely sure before I gave up trying to get him back to the breast. (It's pathetic when you find yourself hoping that your child is sick, so that at least you'll have something to fix.) The diagnosis was ... drum roll ... teething (like I didn't see that coming), and an obnoxious reaction from the not-our-regular-pediatrician who we saw that day. ("Yeah, he's teething. Just give up the nursing already. Six months is long enough." "Um, I wanted to nurse longer than this, and I thought that even the AAP recommends one year?" "Sure, if you can do it. But clearly you can't." Ouch.) LL was still mainly eating pumped breast milk at that point, so the only real change to his diet had been the addition of meager solid foods, which we'd been told often made babies stop gaining weight. My little LL, though, had gained a ton of weight since his last appointment, averaging almost two ounces/day. He has since slowed down his ridiculous gobbling of milk, corresponding with my further drop in milk supply, necessitating more and more reliance on formula, but each day he really does seem remarkably bigger. And he's starting to push the length limits on his car seat, so a new big-boy convertible car seat and non-infant-frame stroller may be looming in our future.

Sleeping! Before six months, I could count on one hand the number of times that LL had slept through the night without needing assistance. (To be precise: I could count it on one finger.) Then, he suddenly did it four days in one week. Oh, the joy of uninterrupted sleep! Of course, then he got sick and was up all night for several nights, and then the grandparents visited, so we're slowly working our way back. But, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sitting! Yes, my lazy little boy has discovered the joys of being upright. After lots and lots of setting him on his cushy cloth diapered bottom and immediately catching him as he toppled over, I put him down one day and he sat for a few short seconds. The next day, it was 30 seconds. The day after that, he could just do it. Just like that. He's still a little unsteady... you can see him making little corrections as he lists one way or another, and eventually he gets tired and just lets himself tip over backwards, but he can sit for a good long time now. And he can reach for toys and play and laugh and talk while he's sitting, so it's lots of fun to set him down and watch him go.

Jumping! We went ahead and got a Fisher Price jumperoo, as suggested. The first two days, LL seemed uncertain, sitting uncomfortably in the seat, batting questioningly at the toys, not moving his legs at all. He laughed when I bounced the seat for him, but he didn't get it at first. Then, like with the sitting, something just ... clicked. And now he's unstoppable. We put him in that thing, and he jumps jumps jumps without rest, wearing a big dopey grin the entire time. He couldn't care less about the toys, but oh the joy of jumping through the air! He also recently discovered that he doesn't need the jumperoo in order to jump -- all that's required is something (ie, me) suspending him upright over a surface. Any time I try to hold him in a standing position, he starts jumping and bouncing like a hyper puppy.

Passover! My parents, S's parents, my uncle, and my grandfather all flew into town for Passover last week. The first seder was just the nine of us. Second seder was our usual grand affair, topping out this year at 26 people. I cooked a few dishes in advance and froze them, but I did the majority of the cooking after all the grandparents arrived on Tuesday, so that LL would have lots of people to play with while I was busy in the kitchen. I even added some new dishes this year. (The pomegranate walnut chicken was particularly well-received.) We had hoped that LL would be awake for both seders, since we were starting at 6:00 and he generally begins his bedtime routine around 7:00, but all of the excitement of four grandparents all in the house at the same time proved to be too much for him. Grandpop held him throughout the first seder, with LL drowsily resting his head on Grandpop's shoulder, sucking on a thumb, eyes mainly closed, until we rushed through the last of the service so that we could get him to bed. On the second night, LL started yawning and rubbing his eyes at 5:45, so we just kept him up long enough to say "hello" to all the guests and pour the first glass of wine. He even slept through several raucous rounds of "Dayenu!" so the poor little guy must have been really worn out. The out-of-town visitors were gone by Sunday morning, and LL spent much of yesterday trying to figure out what happened to his entourage. This week, we try to get him over his grandma hangover and back onto his normal schedule.

Physics! Yes, that's right, my baby boy is figuring out rudimentary physics. The small course corrections needed to maintain an upright posture while sitting are just one example. He has also figured out that if he pulls on the blanket, the toy that is out of reach will move closer to him. If he lets go of the spoon over the edge of the high chair, it will fall to the floor (though he still peers over the edge just to make sure). And I spent an astonishing afternoon watching him figure out how to use a tool: he was lying on his back, staring at a wooden block that was just out of reach. He stretched and stretched for it, but it was just beyond his fingertips. After surveying his surroundings, he picked up a rattle, then turned and whacked at the block. His eyes grew wide as the block bounced a little into the air and landed in a different location. He stared and stared at it some more, then got a big grin on his face as he started hitting the block over and over and over, until it had bounced within reach. He immediately tossed the rattle aside, and triumphantly grabbed the newly accessible block. Problem solved! (Ten seconds later, he discovered that wooden blocks are rather boring when you only have one of them, and he dropped his hard-won prize, but you know, sometimes it's all about the journey.)

Communication! LL has always been an extremely expressive baby. For months now, he has been making liberal use of facial expressions and squeals and screams to indicate what he likes and what he doesn't like. But these last two weeks have brought a new level of communication. When we're holding him, he grabs and lunges for thing that he wants, much more emphatically and purposely than when he's playing with toys. He grimaces and pushes things away with his hands when offered something that he doesn't want (like a bottle, or a washcloth to wipe his face). When he was sitting on the floor with his grandma, and she accidentally let him tip over backwards so that he fell onto a hard toy, we expected him to act hurt and cling to Mommy; we didn't expect him to turn purposefully to Grandma and give her an angry scowl, accompanied by an extra-loud yowl, to let her know that he blamed her for his fall. (Gotta move faster, Grandma, if you want to avoid the wrath of LL! Luckily the guilt trip only lasted five minutes. He places blame where blame is due, but he doesn't hold a grudge.) And while he has enjoyed various games for quite some time, now he's taking a more active role in many of them. Covering up and revealing his own face for peek-a-boo. "Singing" along with Mommy and Daddy. Repeatedly picking out his favorite book from a big stack, then turning reliably to his favorite page. (He enjoys all of Karen Katz's Where is Baby's Belly Button?, but he laughs hysterically at the "Where are Baby's hands? Under the bubbles!" page, every single time.)

It's very cool to see more and more of his personality developing, and also a little scary to see how independent he already is, just shy of seven months old.

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.

And Then There Were Two

Two teeth, that is. I came home from work yesterday to find a fussy baby who had refused to nap all day. I reached into his mouth to massage the gums around his tooth, only to discover that next to his tooth was ... another tooth. Poor guy had less than 24 hours before sprouting the second one.

So, now we have twice the crying. Twice the sleepless sobbing. Twice the chewing. Twice the ability to inflict puncture wounds.

I went out last night and bought an assortment of teething toys, hoping that he'll decide that at least one of them is really cool, so that we can all have some relief. (He was up much of the night whining and sobbing on our shoulders.) So far this morning, we've had a limited amount of success with this bizarre thing. He likes the "bristles" at one end, it's easy for him to grab and hold onto, and he can get relief by chewing on absolutely any part of it. We gave it to him cold from the fridge, but he held onto it long after it had warmed up, so we may have a winner! All of the other teethers I bought were very cute (chewable snails and turtles and fish) but he seems to go for the purely functional. He gets that from his parents.

In other news... I ran into a (male) coworker yesterday who had a baby about a month before LL was born. I hadn't seen him since returning to work, so we stopped and exchanged baby stories. I'm still kind of cringing over their birth story: they had been given a 10-day range instead of a solid due date. On the earliest of these dates, his wife announced that she was ready to have the baby. She wasn't actually in labor... she just decided that since her due date had arrived, she should have the baby. So, they drove to the hospital and announced that they wanted to be induced. She wasn't at all dilated or anything, and her doctor thought that her actual due date wasn't for another week or so, but for some reason, they went along with her and did an induction. After a few hours, she was at 3 cm dilated (pretty reasonable for an induction starting from 0). But, she decided that it was going too slowly, and elected to just do a c-section instead. (And not because she was tired... her husband said that she wasn't in any pain yet, she was just impatient.) The baby was born weighing barely 6 pounds. Stupid stupid stupid. I waited as far past my due date as I could before consenting to an induction, then did everything in my power to avoid a c-section, and this woman wouldn't stand to be inconvenienced by her baby. I asked how things were going now (the baby is 6 months old) and this guy explained to me how annoying it is to spend time with babies... he works as much as he can to avoid being at home. His wife quit her job when she was 2 months pregnant because she didn't like working and couldn't handle working while pregnant, but is now looking into going back to school so that she won't have to stay home with the baby. He then started asking me questions about where I thought he could find the cheapest possible childcare, because he doesn't want to waste money. Um... okay. I'm torn between "To each his own" and "Why the hell do people like this have children?"

When You Have a Tooth, the Whole World is ...

... yours for the chewing, apparently.

Milestone! Milestone! LL has a tooth! At the ripe old age of 5 months 3 days, he has gained the ability to Chew On Stuff. Both LL and I would be very excited about this new development, except for two important facts:

1. Apparently, sprouting a very hard tooth through very soft tender gums for the first time is rather unpleasant. LL started the process by just being fussy and drooling a lot, and he has now progressed to really pathetic crying jags several times a day. It's very sad. The only thing that makes him feel better is Chewing On Stuff.

2. LL is very particular about what Stuff he wants to Chew On. We have a wide assortment of teething toys, all of which he has rejected. We tried cold wet washcloths. We tried small ice cubes wrapped in cloth. All rejected. The only things he wants to Chew On are things that he was already putting in his mouth before the eruption of the tooth. Pacifiers are okay to Chew On. (He pulls them from his mouth and chews on the hard handles.) His own fingers are okay to Chew On. My fingers are sometimes okay to Chew On. But you know what his very favorite thing to put in his mouth has always been? My breasts. See where I'm going here?

Five Months

After everything that happened last week, you know what rounded out my life this week? My grandfather was just diagnosed with cancer. Hey Universe -- thanks again!

On a brighter note, LL is doing much better. The temporary fix that the pediatrician recommended that we try while we wait for our appointment with the specialist seems to be working wonderfully, and LL's symptoms have completely disappeared. I'd rather not continue with this temp fix, since it isn't very enjoyable for anyone involved, but it's fairly small in the grand scheme of things, and if it works, then fine.

The new nanny worked two days this week, which means that I got to work two days this week. She's working out wonderfully. We're going to call her Rosie, because she's so happy and cheerful and LL adores walking around the park with her. And she reads lots of books to him, which he doesn't really get at Natasha's.

We're trying to examine our budget to see if we can keep Rosie on one or two days a week even after Natasha gets back. Natasha's daycare normally closes at 3:00, which is a bit early for me to end my workday. Having Rosie stay until 4:30 makes a huge difference in taking off the pressure for me to run to work, rush to get stuff done, and get out of the office on time. Even having just one a day each week when I can work a little bit later, or even go grocery shopping on my way home, seems like it would make a huge difference in my sanity.

For Valentine's Day, S and I stayed in and ate homemade risotto and watched a bad movie. It was nice. Every year, starting before we were even dating, S has bought me roses on Valentine's Day. He forgot this year, and I was kind of surprised to find that I didn't really care. I'm not sure what that means.

LL is five months old today. Sometime in the last five months I must have blinked or something, because he's suddenly looking less like a baby and more like a little boy. He enjoys tummy time for long stretches now, propped up on his elbows so he can look around, which makes him look... older. And his hair is filling in remarkably evenly, so it looks like he has a classic little boy haircut. People keep asking me whether we've cut his hair, but we haven't... it's just growing that way on its own. He's learning some games that I play with him, and reacts differently to different games. He knows Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Peek A Boo, and This Little Piggie, and How Big is LL. We video-chatted with my parents on the computer, and we got them to make funny animal noises to make LL laugh. He was very accomodating, even though Grandma's sheep sounded different than mine. And he gets all these complex facial expressions that give the strong impression that he's wise beyond his years.

Maybe he really is that wise. He wasn't just born yesterday.

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.

Four Months

LL is four months old today. In honor of his 1/3 of a year milestone, he had his picture taken this weekend (he was all smiles for the photos, then gave in to the worst of his cold later that afternoon, so we got some good pictures in just under the wire). We also had his four month checkup with Dr. K today, who confirmed that he is still quite the little peanut. Despite his gigantic entrance into the world, he is now firmly at the 35th percentile for both weight and length. (Significantly higher for head size... some things don't change.) He screamed bloody murder at his shots, but I think the combination of getting over his cold and getting poked with a needle just seemed like too much, and he was fine once I picked him up and murmured to him a bit.

We're waiting until 6 months for any solid food, so most things are continuing as is. We do need to get him some more tummy time, though. His neck strength is really good, but the rest of his upper body is apparently a bit flabby. (He gets that from me.) And he shows no interest at all in rolling over. Dr. K predicted that he'll be sitting up before he rolls over, and I agree -- he loves the vantage point of sitting, but he's in no hurry to go anywhere or reach for anything that would require rolling.

We're home now (yep, I'm keeping him home with me again today, partially because of the shots, partially because of the cold, partially because of the crappy daycare situation... how many excuses do I need?) and he's fussy and clingy and whiny, but still gives me brave little smiles when I coax him enough. He's fitfully napping right now, which is good, because he was up constantly last night. He usually only eats once during the night, but last night he got up three times to nurse, which isn't exactly helping me to get over my cold, either.

On a more fun topic: one of my friends was trying to figure out what kind of music her baby prefers. She scanned slowly through the FM dial, looking for what stations made the baby happiest. It sounded like a fun experiment, so I gave it a try. What do you suppose I can read into the fact that LL is happiest when listening to NPR? (I tested the hypothesis that he just likes voices by switching to conservative talk radio, and he screamed his little head off.) Our little liberal politico baby is instantly calmed by almost anything NPR, and loves providing his own answers during interviews. S and I are happy to indulge him in his left-wing leanings, so we're both staying home tomorrow morning to watch the inauguration with him. Our friends predict that someday he'll be the first Japanese Jewish president. (Not a whole lot of Jewish Japanese-Americans out there, so really, who's gonna beat him to it?) You read it here first. LL for President in 2044!

The Boy Who Cried Poop

Weeks Fifteen and Sixteen Milestones:

LL is now reaching for toys! He did this once, over Thanksgiving, but hadn't done it since then. But while we were in Wisconsin, he learned this one for real, by watching his cousin, LiLi, who is three months older than him. We laid them down next to each other under a play gym. While LiLi immediately started reaching for the toys, LL just stared at LiLi. Then he reached out and started stroking her shoulder. Then he played with her ear. (She's ticklish, so she kept giggling, which gave him positive feedback to play with her ear some more.) When LiLi had had enough, she grabbed his hand and started munching on it, which confused him, because he's used to his fingers being wet only when he's munching on them himself. Eventually, LiLi went back to her toys, and after watching her a while longer, it was like something clicked in LL's little mind. He suddenly understood that his hands could do the same things that her hands could do, so he reached for the toys himself. It's a whole new world for him now. His very favorite toy is this bizarre thing, which he can grab with both hands and chew on, no matter how it's oriented.

LL loves books! You can hold books above him and he'll stare at the pictures, and he loves listening to people read. His current favorite book is "Barnyard Dance" by Sandra Boynton, which has really bright pictures and great sing-songy rhymes. If I just hold the book up in front of him, he gets excited and wiggles all over the place in anticipation. "Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaur" is a close second.

He has also become a This Little Piggy junky. He mainly tolerates the first several piggies, for the wonderful payoff of the final little piggy going wee wee wee all the way home. He can't get enough of the wee wee wee. Read into that what you will.

The only real problem that we're dealing with right now is the continuation of our pooping problem. As I previously mentioned, starting in late December, LL decided that he doesn't like pooping. When he was a newborn, he pooped constantly. Several times a day. Every single diaper had some poop. Then he slowed down a bit, which is totally normal. Once a day. Then, he settled into a solid pattern of once every other day. Which was fine with us, because let's be honest: changing a wet diaper is really easy, but changing a really messy one is a bit of a pain in the butt. (Get it? Butt? Hee hee.)

Then he went 6 days without pooping, several times in a row. Breastfed babies can go a week or more without it being a problem, but by day 4 or so, LL always starts looking uncomfortable. He fusses constantly while eating, arching his back and crying while also rooting. He seems hungry, but also seems to be out of space to put it, if you know what I mean. So, on day 3, we start giving him pear juice to get things going. We met this week with the lactation consultant one more time, who verified that he's eating enough food (and he's gotten much faster, which is good news for me!) and suggested that we try gripe water to relax him a bit. We'll see how it goes.

The funny part of this whole thing is that, while he's not pooping, LL still has amazing gas. He toots all day long, and they smell, really bad. I'll come in to pick LL up after a nap, and as I lean over his crib, I'll be hit with a tremendous odor. And I'll think, "Wow, that is incredibly smelly! He must have pooped!" But then I check his diaper and no, it's just farts. Amazing. (We have joked that the gas scare at my parents' house over Chanukah was entirely LL's fault.) I fall for it every time. Surely he can't be producing that much stink without having a really messy diaper to go along with it?! But he always does.

We call him The Boy Who Cried Poop.

If you're more into history than literature, try this one out: "I have not yet begun to poop." Suggestions for additional mottos are more than welcome.

Baby Personalities

All caught up! Woo hoo! My Week Fourteen update can happen in real time!

In my New Mom's Group, it's been fun to see how different the babies are, even though they're all within a few weeks of each other in age. The Biggest. The Smallest. The Calmest. The Sleepiest. The Most Physically Advanced (eg, rolling over). LL has always had the distinction of being Most Expressive. When all the babies are lying on blankets on the floor, LL is always the one smiling and giggling and making eyes at all the mothers. The other women want to sit near us so that they can watch him, because it really is very entertaining. (Most of the other babies kick their legs and give an occasional smile, but nothing like the facial expressions and eye contact and giggles that LL does.) When the women are talking, LL is the one babbling continuously to try to join the conversation.

Being Most Expressive also has a dark side: when all the babies are crying, everyone in the room agrees that LL is the loudest. I had heard that a baby's cries always sound louder to its mother than to anyone else, so when LL's cries sounded really loud and his "I'm really pissed off now!" shriek sounded particularly shattering, I assumed it was just me. Then I noticed that in a room of a dozen crying infants, everyone was looking at us. And when the other women want to explain that their babies were upset, they say things like, "My baby was crying really loudly... I mean, like LL loud!" So I asked, and apparently, it's not just me -- his cries are objectively louder and shriller than everyone else's.

That's my LL. I use the word "expressive." Or "passionate." When he's in a playful mood, he's totally captivating. This kid can "talk" to me for 30 minutes at a time, babbling and cooing and giggling non-stop and being awfully cute. But you wouldn't like him when he's angry. There's a famous poem that my mom used to recite about me, with the line "When she was good, she was very very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid." (I really did have a curl right in the middle of my forehead, so it was particularly apt.) LL is the same way. He doesn't cry very often, and he doesn't cry very long, but when he does cry, he wants the entire world to know about it.

Among our friends, there are a lot of babies these days. They cover the full spectrum of baby personalities. At one end is Cranky-Baby, who is never ever happy. This kid is over a year old now, and never really got over his colicky start. He still cries at the slightest thing, and looks worried and mopey the rest of the time. At the other end of the spectrum is Robo-Baby. The calmest kid I've ever seen. We spend a lot of time with him, and I've only heard him cry once, and it only lasted 30 seconds. At first we thought he was just very content, but now that he's over a year old, I find it kind of creepy. The kid doesn't emote. He giggles occasionally when tickled, but mainly he just stares and soaks in the world around him.

Before LL was born, S and I said little prayers to not have a baby as miserable as Cranky-Baby. At the same time, we agreed that having a Robo-Baby would get kind of boring. LL is perfect for us -- he's overall a very happy kid, on the Robo-Baby end of the scale, but with a giant personality to go along with it. And now that LL is over three months old, his crying time has dramatically decreased, and his giggly playful time lasts even longer. He still has his moments, usually when he's over-tired, when I think that my eardrums will pop after just one or two torturous shrieks. But most of my day is now spent playing with him instead of soothing him, and we're having a grand ole time.

We're leaving tomorrow for a week-long visit with my family in the frigid Midwest. Reports on LL's second big vacation, and his first interaction with snow, when we return.

Week Thirteen (December 19)

Week Thirteen was just last week -- we're almost caught up!

LL is three months old! Thus, more professional photos. We also visited my tech start-up company, since there were still several of my coworkers that LL hadn't met. While there, LL posed for pictures with one of the robots, earning him a spot on the company's web page. There were some university visitors touring the company that day, and LL was introduced to them as a young intern. He's growing up so fast!

Week Thirteen was when we really started to get the whole nighttime sleep thing figured out. S responded to most of the nighttime crying, usually requiring only a minute or two of soothing. LL only needs to eat now once each night, and those are the only times I get out of bed. Finally, some decent sleep!

With sleep patterns coming together, we suddenly faced a different problem: poop. I'd read that breastfed babies can sometimes go up to a week without pooping. The previous week, I'd started to get concerned when LL didn't poop for 6 days, and I was all set to call the pediatrician the next morning, when suddenly the dam broke, so to speak. Four huge poops all in a row. LL had never looked uncomfortable or anything, so we assumed he was fine. This week, though, he again went several days without pooping, and by day 4, he was acting uncomfortable. Twisting his body, very fussy, reluctant to eat. The advice nurse gave us a progressive list of things to try, culminating in a glycerin suppository. The suppository finally worked that night, but he only pooped a little, and still didn't want to eat. Then the urine on his diaper started to appear bright yellow (it's usually colorless). These all seemed like bad signs to me. Also, I had taken LL to be weighed the previous week, after his growth spurt, because I was curious about how much he'd gained. When he wasn't eating this week, I took him to be weighed again, since I had the convenient baseline from the previous week. Infants this age are still supposed to be gaining an ounce a day, LL often gains slightly less, so I expected a 5-6 ounce change from the previous week. Instead, he'd only gained half an ounce. (And that included all the extra poop he was holding in!)

I called Dr. K, who had us start giving him bottles of diluted pear juice to try to get things moving. By Friday, he'd pooped one more time, but was still fussy and not wanting to eat. Poor guy! Dr. K was most concerned about his weight. At his two month appointment, LL had been right at the 50th percentile. We were told that the percentile itself isn't important; what matters is that babies are supposed to stay at approximately the same percentile from visit to visit. Unfortunately, LL's current weight drops him from 50th percentile to 30th, a huge drop in just one month.

I thought that maybe the weight loss was because of his increased sleep at night, but Dr. K assured me that it wasn't. So, we were under orders to keep an eye on him, encourage him to eat and poop as much as he can, and bring him in to be weighed again next week. Purely hypothetical question for the peanut gallery: do you know how to encourage a 3-month-old to poop? It's not pleasant for anyone involved.

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 Eleven (December 5)

Week Eleven was all about recovering from Thanksgiving. As expected, LL was very clingy and needy this week, insisting on being carried around the majority of the time. His butt barely touched the floor during Week Ten, and he was reluctant to have it touch the floor this week as well, but without eight million relatives around, he only had me to carry him around. Also, after a week of not napping, he didn't really see the point in napping this week, either. I had to bring out the big guns -- my trusty sling -- to soothe him to sleep for every single nap this week.

Also related to sleep: this week, LL moved from the bassinet in our room to the crib in his nursery! We had planned to transition him next week, after he'd had some time to recover from Thanksgiving, so it was a total accident when it happened. I was soothing him to sleep one night, and he was yelling a lot about how he didn't want to sleep. After pacing around his nursery trying to get him calm, my back was hurting and I needed a moment to stretch. We had been using his crib as a kind of staging area for weeks, a safe place to put him down for a moment. So I put him down in the crib so that I could stretch my back a bit before picking him up again. I put him down... I stretched... and then I noticed that there was silence. And there he was, sound asleep in the crib. I slowly tip-toed out of the room, and that was it -- transition complete. He has slept in his crib every night since.

LL finished this week with his first ever one-wake-up night (as opposed to the 2-3 wake-ups he'd become accustomed to). I credit Charlie, one of the other little boys in my New Mom's Group. Charlie had been sleeping through the night since he was five weeks old (!), so on Thursday, I held LL up to Charlie and asked Charlie to explain to LL how it's done. That night, he only woke up once. Since then, every infant in our group who has had a "conversation" with Charlie has started sleeping better within a week. Charlie has magical powers!

Finally, one more milestone this week: LL adopted his first "transitional object" -- something he clings to when he wants to be soothed. His object of choice is a handmade burp cloth from one of my MIL's friends, white with blue stars and a hand-crocheted edging. He loves it, and no other burp cloth will do.

Week Ten (November 28)

LL's first Thanksgiving! The sucky parts of Week Ten are already covered here, so for this Week Ten update, I'll focus on the good parts:

• First College Football Game: Not just any game, this was The Game. The big college rivalry game. We brought LL to a local sports bar to watch The Game, so I guess this was also Baby's First Pub. And our team won! Woo hoo! Guess the football jinx only applies to NFL games.


• First Airplane Flight: And thanks to a layover, this was quickly followed by airplane flight number two. (And to get home, flights three and four.) I was really nervous about flying with LL, but he handled it beautifully. He ate and slept and ate and slept and ate. Not so much as a peep out of him all afternoon. We had been advised to either sit in the very front row of the plane (extra leg room, useful for changing diapers) or the very back of the plane (near the bathrooms, space to stand and bounce the baby if needed). Instead, we sat in the very middle, right over the wing. This placement put us as close to the engines as possible, and the loud white noise was irresistible for LL. The dishwasher puts him to sleep at home; a jet engine is a nice substitute while traveling.


• First Reach for a Toy: LL had been watching and tracking toys before, but he hadn't tried to reach for one himself until this week. His target: a very cute and very soft blue puppy with easy-to-grab big floppy ears.