Superpowers: Redux

Little G is 11 days old today, and try as I might, I see little evidence of the superpowers that seemed so obvious in one of the earlier ultrasounds. Like many of the X-men, it's possible that we'll just need to wait until puberty for any of those powers to surface.

That said, I have noticed a few slightly more mundane traits that may eventually develop into full-blown superpowers. Hey, I'm a dad now, I can brag in whatever manner I choose. Here they are, from least helpful to most promising.

1. Super Pooper. I can think of no way that this could be beneficial later in life, but our daughter can evacuate her bowels like a champ. (Let me take this moment to apologize to the 13-year-old version of Little G if she ever reads this. Sorry, honey.) From day one, she has exceeded all expectations in this area. The nurses told us we might get one messy diaper and one wet diaper in the first 24 hours. We got three of the first and two of the second. As the days progressed, and the chart we were given settled on three messy diapers and six wet diapers per day, she's pretty much blown those numbers out of the water. At least we know she's eating well, right?

2. Preternatural awareness of a clean diaper. So far, she doesn't seem to mind messy diapers too much. She gets a little fussy now and again if we don't notice the mess, but I think a by product of power #1 is that she's learned to live with the mess a little longer than most babies. But whether she cares about a messy diaper is beside my current point. Awake or asleep, calm or crying, she exhibits an almost psychic awareness of the exact second a clean diaper is secured to her rump. How do I know this? Because 4 times out of 5, as soon as the clean diaper is on, she messes it right back up again. Seconds later. Before I've had a chance to pick her up off the changing table. Like power #1, I have no idea how this is helpful.

3. Abnormal infant strength and dexterity. Here's where it starts to get good. Little G has been rolling over from day one. Watching her do this in the bassinet at the hospital, I thought little of it. The nurses told us to lay her on her back (as is the custom nowadays, apparently), but when we did so, she'd routinely wriggle for a moment or two, then flip herself onto her side. I assumed this was normal, but the nurses were perplexed! Turns out, babies aren't supposed to develop the ability to flip in any direction until 2-3 months, and even then, it's usually front to back. Since we brought her home, we've watched it happen again and again. While she can flip both directions, she does tend to force herself onto her left side most often.

In tandem with this, since one of the precursors to body flipping is head and neck control, Little G is really close to holding her own head up. She regularly lifts her head off my shoulder when I'm burping her and holds it in place for a few seconds before falling back down again. She'll do the same thing when she's on her back, lifting her head up and forward for a few seconds, usually during a particularly intense stretch. According to this site, that's a 1-2 month kind of skill. At this rate, one might expect her to start crawling by two months and walking by six.

All that strength aside, her dexterity is sort of baffling, too. Infants are born with the ability to grasp with their hands. It's mostly instinctual. You put your finger in an open palm, and she'll grab it. She does that, no surprise. But as I mentioned in my last post, her toes regularly do the same thing. Granted, it's still probably instinctual, but when's the last time you saw an infant grab your finger with her foot? While they look sort of big, her feet really aren't all that large (which I'll get to in a minute). But her toes? Crazy long! And they move independently of one another! It's cool, and gives me hope for real super powers one day. Although hopefully with less hairiness.
4. Super averageness! A contradiction in terms? Maybe, but I'm including this so I can throw it in the faces of all those doctors who warned us of the impending arrival of Mega-Baby, even in the face of every test that confirmed she was normal. I'm looking at you two, sloppy ultrasound tech and overly cautious obstetrician. Let's crunch some numbers.

Average U.S. birthweight=7 lbs. 12 oz.
Little G's birthweight=7 lbs. 12 oz.
Average U.S. newborn length= 20 in.
Little G's newborn length=20.5 in. (although the pediatrician measured it 20 in. 5 days later)
Average newborn foot length= 3 in.
Little G's foot length= 3 in.

Seriously. It doesn't get more average than that. I have no idea whether she'll favor me or Hollie, how tall she'll eventually get, or what color her eyes will turn. But for right now, she's perfectly normal and perfectly perfect. And that's just super.

The Geeklet Has Landed

Around 2 pm on Wednesday, Hollie and I brought our daughter home from the hospital. It was a little odd. There's just such a big gap between the concept of a life growing within Hollie and the life we carried into the house. We haven't had much time to contemplate the difference, as most of our time has been spent learning how to keep her happy.

As much as you might think (as I did) that you're ready for parenthood, some things just don't click right away. I've got some of the concrete things down. I can change a diaper like a champ, for one. I'm pretty good at calming her down when she's cranky (how long she'll stay calmed down is something else entirely). And holding her was a completely natural act from the minute the nurse handed her to me.

But some of the abstract things are tougher. I know she's my daughter; intellectually, I understand that. But trying to rationalize the fact that I'm 50% percent in charge of a person that didn't really exist in the real world until a week ago is harder to grasp. I'm a little afraid I might wake up one morning to find that it's all been some hyper realistic dream, and I'm really just the same guy I was last week, not really responsible for anything or anyone but myself.

Another thing Hollie and I are having trouble with is her name.

(An important digression: Chances are that you already know her name, but I'd like to state for the record that I don't plan on using her name here on the blog. I'm not a huge privacy nut, but there's something about tossing around the name of someone who doesn't know it's happening that doesn't sit quite right with me. I asked Hollie's permission before I used her name in the blog, and if this project lasts that long, I'll ask my daughter's permission to use hers. That said, I did share it on Facebook, but I have my privacy settings configured so that only people on my friends list can see that info. Suffice to say, on the blog, she's Little G for now. I ask that if you want to refer to her in the comments that you do the same. Thanks!)

But back to that name. Hollie and I decided on a first name a few months ago, but we never used it when referring to the baby. Whether it was the off chance that she might turn out to be a boy, or just that the whole thing didn't seem real yet, we usually just referred to her as "the baby" or "the kid." I was thrilled when we could announce her name to the world. People responded really well to it, and I think it's beautiful. But when I look at her, I don't see her name. I see "baby." Hollie has said the same thing. Maybe it's because we've only lived with the name for a week. Maybe it's because it's rare to actually say someone's name when you live with them. (Seriously. Hollie and I so rarely use each others' names when we're home talking to one another, it always sounds a little odd when we do.) I do think it's changing, though. When I think about her, the image I conjure is starting merge with her name, rather than sit in two separate compartments in my brain. When it's 3am, and she's been awake for six hours, I try to use her name to quiet her down. It's just something you have to live with for a while, I suppose. I have only been a father for seven days now.

But hey, enough of my yakking. Let's boogie. This is a baby blog, after all, so lets look at the baby!
Hollie and Little G, home from the hospital and exhausted. Can't say I blame them.

It's not the best picture, but my daughter has crazy monkey feet. She can, and has, grabbed things with those toes. Freaked Hollie right out when something grabbed her finger, but Little G's hands were in plain sight and empty.

As promised, we got Chinese food on Wednesday night. This is her first fortune cookie. Daddy ate it. Her fortune? Couldn't be more appropriate.

That seems as good a note to close on as any.

Chinese Traditions that have nothing to do with the New Year

Hollie is big into tradition. And I didn't really think about it before I met her, but I suppose I am, too. Christmas traditions trifle and french onion soup, Easter traditions like a stick of butter shaped like a lamb, decorating the house for Halloween the first weekend in October, and other things that don't necessarily involve holidays or food (who am I kidding? Most of them involve food). But there's a difference between a tradition, something with meaning, and ritual, a repeated act act without much thought behind it.

For instance, it was something of a college ritual for Hollie and I to get Sunday lunch/dinner at this mediocre Chinese buffet in Lewisburg called China King. Considering we didn't usually wake up until close to noon most Sundays, and were likely to fall into a food coma shortly after we ate, it was likely the only meal we had on the days we went.

While the food wasn't spectacular, it was cheap, and it was a nice way to finish off the weekend. It became such a normal, boring event for us, that when I decided to ask her to marry me, I thought the best way to surprise her was to pop the question at one of these meals, rather than at some extravagant outing that would give away the game. So I ordered a few custom fortune cookies and brought them with me on one of my visits back to Bucknell during Hollie's senior year. We went to China King that Sunday, and after a series of surprisingly odd and difficult hurdles (a story for another time) I managed to get the cookies onto the check plate before we left. And the great thing was, she was surprised. She said yes, and the rest is history. But the funny thing is, without really knowing what I was doing, I turned a ritual into a tradition.

Now, when important things happen in our lives, we get Chinese food. We've moved on from buffets to take out, but the idea remains the same. When we moved in together, we got take out from this place on South Street in Philly whose name eludes me at the moment. When we finally got all the furniture moved into our house in Jersey, we ate Chinese food from Good Friend on the Black Horse Pike.

And when Hollie wanted to tell me she was pregnant, she pre-ordered some custom fortune cookies for the occasion and hid them for a few months. When the moment struck back in January, she suggested we get take-out, then she snuck them into the bag when I wasn't looking. I was as surprised then as I hope she was six 1/2 years ago when I proposed.

And you know what? I think I know what we're having for dinner when we bring the baby home.

Of Diapers and the Changing Thereof, part 1 of a likely series

I'm not sure if it's come up on the blog yet, but after some research, Hollie and I have decide to give reusable cloth diapers a shot. There are a couple of reasons why.

1. Cloth diapers mean less waste. We're a generally ecologically minded family. We try to buy local, buy recycled when we can, save our rain water, compost a lot of our vegetative waste, etc. That's not a pat on the back, because I know there are lots of ways in which we aren't terribly green. In my opinion, you do the best you can, try to feel good about it, and if you can afford to make better choices later on, great.

And for us, right now, we're making the choice to reuse cloth diapers rather than throw away a whole lot of disposable diapers, with a caveat. We're not insane. Sometimes it's just going to make a lot more sense to use a disposable diaper. Case in point: when the baby first gets here, she's going to be too small for just about every long-term reusable diaper we've looked at. So until her legs are large enough to comfortably fill out the leg holes in a reusable diaper, we'll be using disposables. Buying a set of one-size, tiny, newborn reusable diapers isn't terribly responsible, since she'll wear them for a really short period of time. And it isn't very economical, which brings me to my next point.

2. Cloth diapering is cheaper. Now you get what you pay for. Disposable diapers are more expensive, but the reason is largely one of convenience. One and done, throw it away, and you never have to deal with that particular mess again. Cloth diapering means we're going to have to clean waste-filled diapers (We looked into a diaper service, and there just aren't any around here). But the positive trade-off here is less cost.

Let's do some quick math. I'm going to have to use some averages here, so keep that in mind. A box of size 2 Pampers diapers (fitting 12-18lb babies) has 152 diapers in it, and costs $40 at Walmart. Smaller diapers have more per box, larger have less, but the price per box stays the same, which means as the kid ages, the diapers get more expensive. Might be able to get it cheaper at Sam's Club or BJs, but this is my example.

Clearly the number of diapers a kid goes through as an infant is higher than number the kid will go through at age 3, but again, we'll make some assumptions. This site claims that the kid will go through about 2800 diapers in the first year, which for our example means about $742 in diapers for the first year.

Even presuming that it will only cost that much per year through age 3, you end up spending, at minimum, $2,226 on diapers for every kid you have. The reality is that those big kid diapers are way more expensive, and the total cost probably tops $3,000. And every kid is different. Ours might poop a lot more. Who knows?

Cloth diapers, on the other hand, are certainly more expensive per diaper. The ones we've stocked up on so far, Bum Genius, are $17 a pop. But we'll need far fewer. For $500, we can get 30 one-size diapers that adjust as the kid grows (the recommended range is 7 to 35lbs). Get 'em on sale, and you can do a lot better than that. At minimum, even factoring in a slightly higher water bill because we'll wash them ourselves, we save $1,500 over three years. More than likely, that savings is closer to $2,300. We've got to do a lot of laundry, but to save two grand and assuage my guilty green conscience, I'll take it. (And if/when we have a second kid, these diapers will still be good. Might need some new elastic on some, but still cheaper to replace a handful of cloth diapers than to go all disposable.)

3. Also, these diapers are really cute. Seriously. They're not even on the kid yet, and just look at them.
Speaking of diapers, I made some progress on that changing table top I've been mentioning every so often. Last weekend, I borrowed some saw time at the in-laws, and cut all the pieces out. We ran into a bit of trouble with the router, but I think the shape of things turned out pretty good.

Here's the base and back:
And here's the whole thing:
Now, I have to actually attach these pieces to each other, paint it, then affix it to the dresser, but that's a project for tomorrow. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Geeking out on a Thursday

We're exactly five weeks from the due date at this point, and while I don't have a whole lot to say on the subject of impending fatherhood, there are a number of geeky things that caught my eye over the last week that I have to share.

1. Many of you know that I make origami jewelry. In fact, I just sold a bunch at the Academy of Natural Sciences Bug Fest this past weekend. Frankly though, it looks like I need to step up my game. Check this out.
That, my friends, is a dress made from 1,000 paper cranes. I'm going to have a daughter... maybe I should start planning a prom dress now.

2. I often lament the smallness of my house. Lately it seems that all the purchases I've made or shower gifts I've gotten in preparing for the new baby are either baby receptacles (crib, car seat, high chair, etc.) or more storage (a small shed, cabinets, under-bed storage, etc.) It's a good house though, and I like it. But I kind of wish I had one of these small houses in Japan. If nothing else, they're great conversation pieces. It's absolutely amazing what architects have managed to do with such tiny spaces. Check out the Lucky Drops house in the slideshow. It's just crazy.

3. I love science fiction, but I'm not a huge astronomy nerd, which probably doesn't present as wide a dichotomy as I like to think. The solar system is interesting (and Pluto IS a Planet!), and I'm curious about what lies beyond our little section of the Milky Way, but finding Orion and the Big Dipper is pretty much the extent of my actual astronomical knowledge. That said, tomorrow marks Neptune's first trip around the sun since its discovery in 1846. I find that pretty amazing. It puts things in perspective, too. These last eight months or so have seemed like forever to Hollie and I, but for Neptune, it's just been the last eight months of a journey it's been on for 164 years. Well, much longer than that, actually, but let's go with the last eight months of its latest trip. Makes you feel a little small. Which is comforting, in a weird way.

Stay-cation Schmay-cation

Time off from work often frustrates me (unless I'm actually going away on vacation, but that almost never happens). Don't get me wrong--not going into the office is a fine thing indeed. It's just that I always have a long list of projects I want to get done and I almost never make a large enough dent in the list to satisfy myself. I've tried to compensate by making smaller lists. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't.

After the first day of vacation this go round, I was feeling pretty crappy. I was tired, and didn't feel like I was going to get a good start on my list of projects. We've decided we want to freeze a lot of food for use during the first few months of baby time, so it's about time to get moving on that front. Over the weekend, we bought a case of tomatoes at the farmers market ($12. Good deal!), and I made it my mission to use as many as I could. So first thing on Monday, I started working in the kitchen. Late on Tuesday, I was finally done with all the cooking I could stand to do.

This is the result.
Left to right, that's tomato soup, pesto, spaghetti sauce, guacamole and salsa. Bearing in mind that the pesto contains no tomato, those containers represent something like 110 tomatoes (and I think I had 30 or so tomatoes leftover). I love cooking, but after working in the kitchen for the better part of two days, I feel like I don't have much to show for it. (There was another container of guacamole, but Hollie and I ate it. Also, I'm not freezing the guac or the salsa, I'm eating them now.)

Now, that's not all I did on Monday and Tuesday, but it sure felt like it. I also added two coats of Alien Green to a wall in the nursery, and started on the cabinets I needed to put up. But in terms of something physical that I could point to and say, "Hey, I got something done!" that food is basically it.

But today? Ooh boy, today felt good. This is what I got done today.
Eight hours ago, that wall was bare. Hollie's dad came over and helped me get these two cabinets up on the wall above the changing table. The wall that I painted again on Monday. After he left, I got the doors up.
We also took a trip to Lowe's so we could use the van to get a small shed I wanted for the side of the house. (Side note: I feel like every major project I've tackled in the last six months has been to add storage of some form or another to my tiny house.)

End result?
There's a vast difference between cooking and construction. I know this. But there's something about a home improvement project that is inherently more satisfying. Maybe it's the physical size of the things I tackled today. Maybe it's the sweat that goes into manual labor. Whatever it is, I felt awful about what I had been able to accomplish by Tuesday afternoon, but 24 hours later, I feel pretty excellent. Let's hope the next two days feel this good.

I suck at blogging! i.e. The last 2 weeks in brief

You have the best of intentions when you start a project like this, but then life gets in the way. Excuses aren't much fun to read, though, so I'll just cover the last couple of weeks in highlight form. Scroll to your favorite bullet point and read what interests you!

1. Baby Showers: Not just for ladies anymore.
Two weekends ago, my parents threw a baby shower for us, and the whole thing was quite nice. (Hollie's parents threw a shower for us a few weeks before that, and I mentioned some of the gifts we received back in this post. It was the local shower, and thus the one all our friends came to.)

Among other things, my mom made us a diaper cake. What is a diaper cake, you ask? It's a lot less gross than it sounds.

Taking a cue from the pattern on the pack-and-play we registered for, my mom decided the theme for the event would be owls. Many, many owls. To paraphrase Zoolander... Owls. So hot right now.

She also wrote a couple of quizzes for attendees: one that matched superheroes to their secret identities (nailed it); one that tested Peanuts knowledge (Hollie cleaned up); another matching baby animal names to their adult counterparts (Hollie and I tied Edit: Hollie got a perfect score; I got three wrong. Oops!); and a final test on celebrity baby names. I did not do well on the last one. My great-Aunt Nancy though? Apparently she either has an eidetic memory or covertly studies US Weekly while sitting at her booth at craft shows.

On top of that event, my coworkers pulled off the amazing feat of surprising me with a baby shower. My boss had been surreptitiously emailing the entire music school to set up what she referred to as a "Man Shower." The inappropriateness of that title notwithstanding, she really did surprise me. I had no idea what was going down, despite the fact that my entire office emptied out around me to prepare for it last Thursday. There was great food, and folks showed up from all six branches of the school. Some former coworkers even made it out. It feels weird to say that I was moved by the entire thing, but it was just such an extraordinarily nice surprise.

2. Diagnosis Mega-Baby: Not so Much
Shifting gears to events not-at-all-that-surprising, our daughter's status as Mega-Baby has been downgraded to Possibly-Long-Limbed-But-Otherwise-Normal-Baby. But that's not as much fun to say. On Thursday, we had what I think was our sixth ultrasound. I'll let that sink in a minute before I continue.

This particular ultrasound took place at the hospital, much like the last one. We didn't get the same awesome tech as last time, but this much-younger tech seemed pretty experienced nonetheless. We were in the waiting room for about 20 minutes, but the ultrasound itself took about five. These results confirmed the prognosis of the last visit. Normal baby, normal fluids, and all is right with the world. You know, aside from the additional three specialist visits and all the accompanying time and cost that entailed. Better safe than sorry, I suppose, but still irritating. If this is the first time you've heard about this visit, the mundane nature of it meant I didn't really give it much thought after it was over, especially given that the office "Man Shower" happened the same day.

The most amusing part of the visit, though, came at the end. Our ultrasound tech was shadowed by a trainee, as noted by her jacket with the words "Jefferson Ultrasound Trainee" emblazoned on the back. (Sidebar: How cool is the word "emblazoned"? I've always loved it.) After she finished, the first tech asked Hollie if it would be okay if the trainee took a few pictures. Hollie agreed, since we had to wait for a doctor's consultation anyway.

After all the ultrasounds we've been through, I'm pretty sure either Hollie or I could have taken better ultrasounds than this trainee. But that's fine, that's why she's training. That aside, I have a word of advice for all medical professionals, in training or otherwise. If you want to instill a basic level of confidence in your patients, maybe it would be a good idea to take all the Silly Bands off your wrist. I'm just saying.

3. Grease was the Muffled, Hard-to-Hear Word
Finally, the day after the ultrasound, we took our niece, Alissa, to see a local production of Grease. We had been planning this for a while, since a friend of ours, Jessica, is playing Frenchy. But in the days leading up to the show, it occurred separately to Hollie and me that Grease is not the most family-friendly of shows.

But we'd already bought tickets, and we figured that a lot of the questionable content would go over Alissa's head. She's 9-and-a-half, and pretty bright, but we hoped that the lights and sound of the experience would be enough to keep her entertained without catching on to the risque nature of the content.

It turns out we didn't need to worry. All of the sung innuendo was swallowed up by poor sound design, canned music that was louder than the singers, and singers who were too distracted by their own voices to bother enunciating. And the spoken profanity was usually crushed by somebody stepping on someone else's line.

I should point out that Alissa really enjoyed the show, and despite the above critique, the whole experience was pretty entertaining for me as well, although probably not in the way the director and actors intended. The choreography was pretty good, and the actors really threw themselves into it, something I know I'd have struggled with had I been on stage.

And Jessica did a really good job as Frenchy. If a show could somehow have been built around Frenchy, Rizzo, Doody and Sonny, I think it would've been pretty successful. Thankfully, I'm not the only one who noticed that Jessica was a standout in the cast. You're in print now, Jess. Is that your first review?

In closing, hopefully I can get my act together and write some more. I have off all next week, and a bunch of projects are in the pipeline before this baby arrives. Here's hoping I remember to tell you about all of it.