I need help: can anyone tell me why "Maison du Popcorn" is a funny name for a store that sells popcorn? Is it a pun that I'm too dense to catch? This page (warning, pop-up) says it is.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my mother for painstakingly recording readings of several children's books on tape for J. That tape is the first thing to put the kid to sleep so far today. And I get to hear the stories on the baby monitor.
Thanks, Mom.
J is the biggest kid in his Gymboree class, with the possible exception of one five-month old boy. He is also the youngest, by at least a month in each case. He basically stares around at the other kids, and I truly believe that he is plotting the demise of each of them, and their mothers, and the teacher, and that friggin clown, and the lights on the ceiling, and the parachute thing, and every single twinkly floaty bubble, damn bubbles!
I'm all for homemade, but I'd rather sleep than pay this kind of attention to detail.
J has really started hitting us hard with the smiles this week. He has been smiling in the morning for a while, but now he smiles after almost every nap, and he can hardly control himself when one of us is changing his diaper. I'm not sure if it's because he's gaining more control over his face or if it's due to the increased sleep he's been getting. Either way, I'd much rather have him smiling than screaming in my face.
He has also gotten much better at eye-contact. He spends a lot less time staring into space and a lot more time focused on our faces. He seems to be endlessly fascinated by our eyebrows. (And who wouldn't be? -- he's probably wondering what eyebrow fate will befall him.)
Eye contact seems to lead directly to smiles, which makes me believe he isn't so much smiling, as imitating. Sometimes the smiles are accompanied by a little guhhh sound, or foot-thumping, and I think those are the real happiness smiles. The rest probably lie somewhere between gas and contentedness.
Today these two developments collided in a nearly catastrophic way when I held him up to the bathroom mirror: unbreakable eye contact and an increasingly smiley subject... I think he may have popped another dimple in the process.
I was reading this Ask.Metafilter thread about video games for moms, thinking, I could never get my mom to play video games. Then I realized, wait, I am a mom. And that, of the games mentioned, I've enjoyed all of the games that I've tried. And that they mentioned a couple that I have thought of trying (Wario Ware, Snood for my GBA; Animal Crossing, Super Monkey Ball for the Cube). Yowza, this thread is for J!
Before I had J, I would look at children with pacifiers and think, "not my kid." My father gave us two back in March along with a tube of Desitin and a small bottle of whiskey. "You don't think you'll need these, but you will." I asked him what the whiskey was for and he said, "Pour two fingers worth into a glass. Rub some on the baby's gums when he's teething and keep the rest for yourself."
After J was born, it became immediately apparent that he loved to suck. The doctor calls what he likes "finger juice" -- a (hopefully clean) adult finger placed print-up in the baby's mouth, fingertip on his soft palette. J will greedily suck away, actually lifting his head up with sucking power if you try to pull your finger back. We take hand-washing a lot more seriously these days.
When we got home from the hospital, freshly circumcised baby in hand, we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves. He was obviously in a lot of distress, but it isn't easy to keep a finger in a baby's mouth while you're inevitably drifting off to sleep yourself. So in desperation, Marc broke down first and decided to open the package of pacifiers from my father and boil them (the pacifiers need to be "sterilized" before they can be sucked on and then dropped on the floor repeatedly). He took this picture of boiling binkies to show my parents just how long we were able to hold out.
But much to our dismay, pacifiers are not the magical finger substitutes we hoped they would be. J can usually keep one in his mouth for about thirty seconds, if even that long. When they come out, his weird sucking pattern makes them actually pop out with some velocity -- they aren't just lazily dropping away, unless he's fallen asleep (not likely). We've tried four different brands to date, and nothing seems to do the trick as well as our fingers. (And fingers don't do the trick as well as a boob, but that's another story and would probably help explain the fact that at his one month appointment J weighed in at 13 lb. 3 oz.)
So much for sacrificing my disdain for the binky -- it hurts to give up such high moral ground for nothing, and I get the feeling there are many more humbling parenting lessons to come.
... and then he slept from 1:30 until 5, going 6 hours between meals. Go figure. I think we are still in some kind of transitional phase where nothing will make sense. We're on our way to a routine, though, I hope.
So far this isn't working at all. J has yet to actually cry himself all the way to sleep. This is how the three hour blocks of our lives have been going:
0:00 - 0:15 Eat
0:15 - 0:30 Pooping, basically docile and happy, though grunty
0:30 - 0:45 Pretty much happy and sleepy looking
0:45 Spit up
0:45 - 1:00 Diaper and clothing change and preparation for nap
1:00 - 3:00 Some combination of blood curdling and whimpery crying
3:00 Eat
Luckily, he still manages to tire himself out enough to sleep at night. This is the best part of a sleep-deprived baby -- we get a five- to six-hour chunk of sleep and then two shorter chunks before morning. If it weren't for that sleep, I don't think I'd be able to handle the screamfest.
I am actually writing this now to keep myself from reading about letting your child cry himself to sleep, internet articles that vary from "you are making your child give up on ever getting any love from you and you are a terrible parent!" to "if you don't do this now your child will grow up with sleep issues and will be less happy and healthy in the long run you terrible parent!"
The doctor said it would take him "30-45 minutes, but I'm guessing he'll be in the 45 minute range" to fall asleep, so after 30 or 45 minutes (or 15 or 20, depending on my tolerance for that span of time) I go and make sure he isn't suffocating or puking or chewing his hand off. I know what you're thinking, because I thought it, too, that he realizes that if he cries long enough, I'll come, but that would be a little too advanced for a newborn, I'm afraid. The doctor agrees, so go to hell with your "don't let him see you come in the room" warnings.
That said, I just heard a big wet fart and he is now sleeping, and we are at about 1:45 in the cycle. Well, we're still in the beginning phase of the experiment, so, you know, the data could still be in the anomaly section.
In the time it took me to type that last paragraph, he woke up and went back to sleep and woke up again.
In honor of J's first month as a live human being, may I present
THINGS THAT ARE GREAT ABOUT SOCKS
Another week, another indulgence. Today's trip to the pediatrician revealed that J is overtired and overstimulated. Babies supposedly need around 16 hours of sleep a day, and I estimate J's up to around 12, which is way less in baby time.
We have now initiated what might turn out to be our worst experiment to date, Project Shoot-Me-NOW, wherein we allow the baby to cry himself to sleep. The pediatrician actually spoke these words:
"Put him down, close the door, and turn up the stereo."
And then later:
"If DCF comes to the door, you can refer them to me."
Watch here for updates. In the meantime, you can find what might be the last pictures of the baby looking happy under the heading Week 4 over at the constantly tweaked punkly.com/J.
On a slightly more sappy note, may I also present these
THINGS THAT ARE GREAT ABOUT MY KID
* Long term psychological data not yet available.
Also, today I learned how to make bullets.
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