Hey You With the Pretty Face, Welcome to the Human Race

I had every intention of posting this yesterday, but I wanted to take the time to wish my Little G a happy one-month birthday. The one-month mark is a tumultuous time in a child's life. Her body is going through a lot of changes. She's periodically cranky for no discernible reason. She occasionally lashes out physically. And she has facial acne that she can't control. It's a lot like being a teenager, oddly enough.

I wish I could say that a lot has happened in the last month, but it mostly feels like more of the same. Regular feedings, irregular naps, a bath every other day. We're stumbling into routines, most of which seem to be working. Oh, here's something new! She has hated every bath we've ever given her, until last night, when she just giggled and burbled her way through the whole process. It's only one time so far, but I hope it bodes well for the future of baths.

One thing I have been doing over the last week or so. When Hollie showers in the evening, and it's just me and the baby for a little while, I've cranked up iTunes and bounced her and sang along with whatever I've felt like listening to. The first time was last week, when we listened to The Beatles for about 40 minutes before her bath. I kept it upbeat, with songs like Octopus's Garden, Yellow Submarine, Penny Lane, When I'm Sixty-Four, Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, and Your Mother Should Know. (One of my personal favs, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, is upbeat, but more than a little creepy, so we'll save that for later). This was a lot of fun, especially When I'm Sixty-Four and Your Mother Should Know.

The vibration of my voice coupled with the bouncing must be pretty soothing, because she was out like a light after the first 30 minutes. She was so knocked out, we were able to trim her fingernails well for the first time. It's a lot easier when she's not squirming.

The next day, I loaded up a mixed up list of songs that I like to sing really loudly when I'm home by myself. Higher and Higher by Jackie Wilson, Mr. Blue Sky by ELO, Down on the Corner by CCR, and Kick Drum Heart by the Avett Brothers, among others. I didn't belt 'em out the way I usually do, and she didn't drop to sleep like she did the previous night, but it was still a good time.

Less successful lists? The Beach Boys and Michael Bublé . I think I bounce too fast to surf rock. And either she did not at all care for the smooth retro sounds of Michael Bublé , or she had a bad case of gas, because such squirming I have not seen before. Of course, she followed that up with the excellent bath, so maybe she was just grooving her way to contentment.

In closing, in lieu of smiles, which she hasn't quite figured out yet, this is my favorite expression.
Happy Birthday, Little G!

Milestones around my neck

I told myself early on that I wouldn't compare my daughter with others. That somehow, I would manage to avoid the pitfall of hearing folks say "Well, my kid was doing this at this age" and taking it too much to heart. But let's face it: if I'm the kind of guy who charts his daughter's weight in utero or looks at average U.S. infant size statistics, I'm probably going to continue to compare my daughter to other kids. And if I'm being honest, I probably assumed that any comparison I did wouldn't matter, because of course my kid would be better, faster, and farther along that any other child ever. Which is pretty silly.

All that said, it means when things don't progress in the way you've been told is normal, you get worried unnecessarily. For instance, it's perfectly normal--we've been told by nurses, doctors, and the Internet--for infants to lose 10% of their birth weight the day or two after they're born. In practical terms, most of this weight loss is accounted for by the expulsion of dense waste accumulated in the GI tract during gestation, with an ounce or two maybe due to moving around more or getting used to ingesting food rather than getting nutrition via the umbilical cord (Science!). On average, though, infants will get back up to their birth weight 10-14 days after they're born.

Cue my concern and the topic of this post. As you'll recall, Little G weighed 7 lbs 12 oz at birth. She left the hospital weighing 7 lbs 1 oz, (just under 9% loss). We went to the pediatrician's office for a weight check on Sept. 24, 12 days after she was born. And she weighed in at 7 lbs 6 oz. Practically speaking, this is nothing to worry about. Little G gets plenty to eat, she has more messy diapers than I can reliably keep track of, and is doing just fine. But those numbers nag at you. We didn't hit the average! Oh no! Is something wrong? Guilt, pain, concern! AUGH!

No. Nothing is wrong. She is happy. She is healthy. And I am just a nervous parent who's still getting used to the notion of caring for a living, breathing human life. Concern and worry are normal. Breathe, man, breathe. For the record, she had another weight check today, and she's at 7 lbs 13 oz. Good girl. Only took two to three days longer than average. (Dad can't help clinging to his statistics.)

In happier milestone news, Little G lost her umbilical cord yesterday. Look! A real belly button!
Average time to lose the umbilical stump: 10 to 21 days. Little G: 16 days. Way to split the numbers, little bean.

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.