Sleep, baby (cont'd)

Henry is eight weeks old today. Thanks mainly to his sweet temperament and perhaps partly to our efforts (and the massive help we are receiving from all sides), he has begun to put himself on something like a schedule. We're combining two approaches: an ultra-scheduled attitude toward feeding and a "catch it and hold it" attitude toward sleep. He eats four times a day, at roughly 8, 12, 4, and 8; he seems to like this and doesn't demand snacks between meals. He eats two to three times a night, at about 11, 2, and 6 or at 1 and 5. He goes back to sleep pretty quickly after night feedings -- I'm up for an hour at most, including the feeding, and sometimes as little as 25 minutes. He takes about four naps a day, swaddled up, in various places.

Yesterday the first nap was on a mat on the living room floor, the second was in his stroller in the woods (no swaddle obviously), the third on the front lawn (for several hours, so that he had to be woken for his 4pm feeding), and the last in his bassinet with the air conditioner running. Then he was woken up for his bedtime ritual: a bath, supper (usually he and I manage to eat simultaneously), and then an hour or so of talking and smiling, quiet jiggling, and slow dancing. This time we put Eric Clapton on, but he seems to respond well to pop music of any kind. By 9:30 he was ready to sleep. No crying at all, and an easy night -- he actually slept through the 11pm feeding.

Today was a different day, more excitement (a trip to the lake with our friends Andrei, Galya and Katya) and a less regular nap schedule. But he went to bed easily at 9. So we'll see what he does tonight.

Approaching him as a puzzle makes it fun. Since I have absolutely nothing else to focus on (because classes haven't started yet, because all the housework is done by my parents, because valiant Ken is down in DC packing up our apartment and getting ready for the movers all by himself, etc.), it's easy to spot when Henry is getting sleepy and wants to be swaddled up and put down. Usually it's about an hour and a half after his last feeding, and he's sitting in my lap or in his chair or lying on the lawn looking at the trees and leaves and stuff. He gets all soft and cuddly, starts pulling on his ear (one of the books we got suggested he might do this, and it's true!), and his eyes seem to lose focus. If he's in the chair he might start to kick his legs signaling that he wants to be taken out, which is different from the way he kicks when he's excited about a brightly colored toy or when his belly is being tickled. If you wait too long to change and swaddle him, he starts to fuss. If you don't, he doesn't. He just closes his eyes sweetly, chomps on his pacifier, and lets himself drift quietly off to sleep. Lucky guy. With his temperament he'd probably be a good eater and sleeper no matter what methods I tried or didn't.

Just two months and already there is a sense to the kid. It's funny to think back on the first days and weeks home from the hospital, when every cry provoked a fit of more or less random troubleshooting: is he hungry? wet? too hot? burpy? just fussy? etc., and when sleep just seemed to come on its own, also at random. I'm glad he'll have no memory of those days or he would lose all respect for his bewildered and inconsistent parents.

Plus, wasn't he tiny? By now he almost touches both ends of his bassinet, both because he's a lot taller and because he sleeps in a less frog-like position. Soon it will be time to graduate to the big crib.

But speaking of sleep...

Noticing things

Henry is getting better at being with people and better at being by himself, both at once. He now seems to recognize all of us -- Ken and my parents as well as me. And he is noticeably more interested in toys, colorful dangly things, sounds, and music.



One of the presents he received on Sunday is a bouncy chair with toys. To our surprise, he can sit in it, watching us eat breakfast or write email or just amusing himself, for over an hour! (But he doesn't bat at the toys yet, at least not on purpose.) With the disappearance of the baby who needs to be held all the time, I have no further excuse for not getting anything done.

 

Great-Grandpa visits

Henry got a chance to meet a lot of his maternal cousins and great-uncles and -aunts at a picnic on Sunday. (Photos to come.) It was so much fun to introduce him to everyone. For the most part he behaved himself and took all the attention in stride.



Here he is with my grandpa Evsey, my mom's father. Henry's his first great-grandchild. First of many, we hope -- it would be great for Henry to have lots of cousins, too.

Soothing techniques

Six to eight weeks is supposed to be about the peak of baby fussiness. We are blessed with a pretty peaceful baby, relatively to what seems to be out there. Still, we've spent some time developing a repertoire of ways to calm and sleepify Baby Henry. Things that seem to work:

• Swaddling. We use half of a twin-sized bedsheet, because he is so tall and his legs are so strong that he kicks himself out of anything smaller. Still, he is a little Houdini and always manages to get his arms free, which defeats the purpose.
• Jiggling back and forth in the arms of a grandma. Grandma Ann discovered a squeaky spot in the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator that works especially well for this. It also helps to put on some music and slow dance with him.
• Being swung pendulum-style or lifted bicep-curl style in his car seat. This takes serious arm muscles -- I'm encouraging Ken to write an illustrated guide to exercise for new daddies.

• Singing. Dreary old songs with lots of verses ("Where have all the flowers gone?") seem to work best. Though sometimes it just annoys him and it's better to whisper into his ear: "Shoo... shoo... shoo."

• My favorite: being bounced up and down by someone sitting on an exercise ball. Way cheaper than one of those mechanical swings, and never fails to work. The more upset he is, the harder you bounce. Within minutes he's asleep. Since it seems like every pregnant woman buys one of these things as a "birthing ball," I'm sure someone else has discovered this method already.
  
  

Turtle tummy time

Henry is seven weeks old today. His back muscles are getting stronger all the time, making tummy time more fun. He can lift his head and turn it, and it's evident that he's becoming more aware of his body and what he can do. It looks like he already wants to crawl but hasn't figured out how - his legs go faster than his arms so mostly he ends up pivoting around his own elbow. Yesterday he again rolled over from his tummy to his back. He started experimenting with different arm positions; because it was after lunch and he had a big round belly, all he had to do was lift up his feet and move his arm forward a little, and over he went.



(Ken's mom has a really cute picture of him in a very similar pose with a stuffed turtle of his own. Maybe we'll scan that in and post it too.)

One word: plastics

Cousin Meghan kindly lent me her breast pump, and we've been practicing in anticipation of school starting in September. Some baby books make a big deal about offering a bottle for the first time; they suggest Mom should leave the room, or even the house, lest the baby smell her presence and refuse to take ersatz goods in the presence of the real thing.

Fortunately (sniff...) my Baby Henry has no such scruples. As soon as Ken offered the new plastic breast, Henry jumped on it and started gulping away like a little piglet.


He put away four and a half ounces in no time and let out a huge satisfied belch afterwards, with the usual post-feeding expression of drunken bliss on his face. Interesting to finally get some estimate (other than by the number of his double chins) of how much the little guy has been eating.

Mini-milestones

Yesterday Baby Henry celebrated his six-week anniversary by rolling over from his stomach to his back. I didn't see it but we have eyewitness accounts from two grandmas and a grandpa and Ken. Apparently it was completely effortless -- even unintentional. He looked rather surprised.
In other news he's started to react to sound. A rattle, a drum... but he can't yet localize where a sudden loud noise (like a hand-clap) is coming from.
And he's started to hold up his head, so when he's feeling alert he rides face-forward in the Baby Bjorn. Very cute - we'll post a picture soon.

Hi, Grandma!

Sleep, baby

Sleep is to baby parenting books, web sites, and magazines what sex is to Cosmo. If you don't have a complex about it yet, the industry will give you one.

As Baby Henry approaches the six-week mark, Ken and I have decided it's time to start putting him on some kind of schedule. We'd like him to be a nice baby by the time school starts in the fall. And six weeks seems to be some kind of magic moment, where babies become both highly teachable (because socially aware) and maximally colicky. Today I went to the library and picked up some baby sleep books. The leading ones are unreadable: so-called experts asserting their own expertise and droning on for 400+ pages (Zzzzzz). They do contain a few sentences of advice; the shorter and simpler these sentences ("Always put your baby to sleep on his back" ... "Gradually increase the time between feedings to four hours" ... "A baby should always nap in his own crib"), the more difficult they are to actualize. So far, in our experience, the only thing that reliably makes Henry drowsy is the walk in the Bjorn to the library! It promises to be an exciting couple of weeks.

More bathing fun

Bathtime has become even more fun since Henry acquired a hooded towel shaped like a baby giraffe -- complete with those funny little horns on top. Ken also discovered that when you tickle Henry's belly in the bath, he reacts just like a little puppy. You know how puppies have that funny reflex where they start to twitch their back leg when you tickle them? It's pretty cute, and he seems to enjoy it. (Until now, the few times Ken tried to tickle him, he just looked annoyed.)

 

Diaper innovation

Sometimes he's content to lie on the changing pad and look around at stuff. But most of the time being put on his back, especially if you do it too abruptly, still gives Baby Henry vertigo. (Dr. Harvey Karp, the Happiest Baby on the Block guy, says being on their back makes babies feel like they're falling.) Henry starts flailing his arms and screaming like a stuck pig, and everyone in the house runs to see what's the matter. Then I'm stuck explaining that it's just the diaper yowl again. So I've taken to putting him on his tummy for some of his diaper changes. Advantages: no vertigo, I can see what I'm wiping, and he can't pee on me. We'll see if this is workable in the long run.

Stereo vision?

Little Henry is growing and developing fast. He stays awake longer after feedings, sometimes for a couple of hours. It's no longer true that if it's been fifteen minutes and he's not eating or sleeping then he's probably crying.

One reason for the longer attention span is that his sense of sight is developing. On walks he sometimes stays awake in the stroller or Bjorn, looking around quietly at the leaves and trees. In the house we find him staring at windows or light fixtures. And it's clear that he can focus his eyes and even turn his head to follow objects. Metallic or glass objects are the best. My dad thinks Henry could already be developing stereoscopic vision (which creates depth perception). Here he is showing him the shiny side of a moving CD:


(This doesn't work at all with sounds yet, incidentally. He won't move his eyes to follow a rattle or shaking keys.)

Social milestones come hand in hand with the physical ones. Whereas before we were happy to imagine that he was making eye contact ("See, he knows we exist! Really!"), now it's unambiguous. His cries often seem less random and more communicative, as if he's consciously trying to alert us to something. When he's hungry and screaming he can calm down at just the prospect of the breast (the sight or smell of it, or being put on the nursing pillow) before any milk actually hits his mouth. And when he's in the mood, he can return a smile. All this makes him more pleasant to be around, of course. But it's also fun just to watch him sitting there quietly alert looking at things and to wonder what they look like from his point of view, and what kind of sense he's making of everything.

July 4

We spent a quiet Fourth of July in Andover. No fireworks - wouldn't have been good for the baby, and I've never gotten into fireworks much anyway. Not to be morbid, but they always just remind me of war sounds. (Bombs bursting in air, rockets' red glare, etc.) Why can't people find a less flammable and dangerous way to celebrate, like dancing in the street with copies of the Declaration of Independence or something?

Or how about a quiet afternoon with friends?



Here are Ken and Henry with our friends Sean and Gretchen. Sleeping in the stroller is their delightful one-year-old baby, Veronica.



You can't see her here, but Veronica is super poised and charming. She smiles and waves at everyone. Hard to imagine that in just 12 months Henry will be so much more mature, bigger, and more sociable. Although usually boys lag behind girls in developing social skills: smiling, comfort with strangers, etc. Girls just jump right in. 

Great-grandpa

I went to the lake the other day with all my menfolk: my grandpa, my father, my husband, and my son. What a joy to have these four generations together! Only my brother was missing to complete the set.

Henry is lucky to have three great-grandfathers. He has already met two of them, and we hope he can travel to meet the third later this summer. He missed his fourth great-Grampa by just a few months.

Here he is with my paternal grandpa, Valentin. They got along very well together.

Family nap at the lake

  

Water baby

Here's another bath. He was just delighted!
It's not surprising that Henry is a water baby. I swam a couple of times a week throughout the pregnancy, and spent most of my labor in a hot bath (at home) or shower (in the hospital). And of course the kid recently spent 40 weeks stewing in amnio fluid, probably about the same temperature as this bath water. The amazing thing is that babies don't come out shriveled like prunes!

Four weeks old

The days here are flying by in a blur of meals, walks, naps, and half-finished conversations. Hard to believe Baby Henry will be a month old tomorrow. Like most babies he seems to enjoy everything having to do with the outdoors and fresh air.

He's still a little small for his stroller, but we take lots of walks in the campus Bird Sanctuary (where Ken and I got married) and in the town's forest preserve.

We're also trying to institute a bedtime routine: bathe, feed, change, put to bed in his bassinet. At least he's excited about the bathing part!

Here is his first tub bath ever: