milestones
Dec. 16th, 2011 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyI feel like LJ is becoming my substitute for a baby book for Gwen. I actually rather like that -- it makes a record of all my thoughts and observations which I'm sure I'll enjoy having in the future, and I really like getting the comments and reactions to what I'm writing. This makes the record even neater.
Wednesday we had a bit of a rough day, we were in a frustrating rotation of eating a bit (but only a bit), sleeping a bit (but only a little bit), and spitting up (unfortunately not only a little bit). Sometimes it was right after eating, sometimes it was while sleeping, sometimes it was after waking up, and she never slept more than about half an hour and was just generally fussy. I was worried about how the night would be if it continued the same, but thankfully she slept throughout the night in her ordinary pattern, waking every 3 hours, eating 100-120ml, and then falling back asleep pretty easily. Thank goodness, because Thursday I went back to Amsterdam for the last meeting of my reading group, and if I'd been up all night long that would not have been pleasant.
Last night was the workshop dinner for a little two-day workshop here in Tilburg (one that I was nominally on the organizing committee for, but essentially all that involved was reading and writing up recommendations on the abstract submissions we received). I missed the actual day of the workshop since I was in Amsterdam, but I went to the dinner because there were quite a few people I wanted to see and talk to (and pleasantly met quite a few more nice/interesting people). I could've brought Gwen with, as I've brought her pretty much everywhere else, but I decided there wasn't really any reason to, I'd be gone only 3-4 hours, and it would just be easier to leave her with Joel. I left around 7:30, said she'd probably be up around 9:30 and be hungry, since she'd been sleeping for about an hour by then, and that if things went horribly awry and he couldn't handle it, to text me and I'd come home. Around 10:00 I get a text, but it was just saying "she's still sleeping. should I let her sleep or wake her and feed her?" and I said "let her sleep". By the time I got home around 11:00 she had woken up and he'd fed her, and she was asleep soon after I got back. And then we had a great night: instead of her usual waking every 3 hours (which she's done like clockwork pretty much since the second week -- I'd always been told that bottle fed babies slept longer at night, but I never noticed any difference when we transitioned from nursing to bottles), she woke up at 2:45 and 6:30 -- 3.75 hours! And since she's usually awake for about half an hour for eating and diaper change, that means instead of me getting sleep in 2.5 hour increments, I got them in 3.25 increments, which was great. I have no idea if this will continue, but I'd love it if it did! (It's a little after 11:00 now and she's drifting off to sleep; we'll see when she's up again next.)
Today she came out to the second day of the conference with me; she was a bit fussy during the first talk I was there for (I missed the first talk of the morning), and so I ended up sitting just outside the lecture hall in the little foyer/entry way which conveniently had a chair and the doors had glass panels in them so I could still see the speaker's slides and hear him, though quietly, but after that she slept through the remaining talk before lunch, slept through most of lunch, ate a bit, and then slept through the afternoon talks. Occasionally she'd make a few cute baby noises, but it never escalated to anything that would be too distracting to the others in the audience -- and it was a small workshop with lots of people favorably disposed to cute little babies, so that was good!
She's really gotten quite noisy over the last two weeks or so. It's strange, because the sounds aren't anything like vocalizations; they come from very deep inside and are, for the most part, involuntary. And some of the other noises she makes affirm my belief that babies are still just proto-humans, not real humans yet. It's like someone has described to her what certain actions are supposed to sound like, but she's never actually heard them made. It's cute. Often after eating she'll cough twice, and it's always "coff, coff". Her sneezes are "at-sew" (where "sew" is pronounced as it looks, not as \so\). And her yawns are very much "yohwn" (that's the best I can represent the vowel, it's tricky). It's like if you had a dog that actually went "bark", as opposed to that being as best an approximation of a non-verbal sound that you can make in writing.
Anent my previous post, in addition to looking forward to seeing who she becomes, I'm looking forward to watching her transition from a proto-human into an actual human.
In other milestones, she's 5 weeks today and I finally put her in a dress:
It was hand-made for her by our friend Sara, her first project with her new sewing machine. It's rather big for her, but that just means she can wear it longer!
Wednesday we had a bit of a rough day, we were in a frustrating rotation of eating a bit (but only a bit), sleeping a bit (but only a little bit), and spitting up (unfortunately not only a little bit). Sometimes it was right after eating, sometimes it was while sleeping, sometimes it was after waking up, and she never slept more than about half an hour and was just generally fussy. I was worried about how the night would be if it continued the same, but thankfully she slept throughout the night in her ordinary pattern, waking every 3 hours, eating 100-120ml, and then falling back asleep pretty easily. Thank goodness, because Thursday I went back to Amsterdam for the last meeting of my reading group, and if I'd been up all night long that would not have been pleasant.
Last night was the workshop dinner for a little two-day workshop here in Tilburg (one that I was nominally on the organizing committee for, but essentially all that involved was reading and writing up recommendations on the abstract submissions we received). I missed the actual day of the workshop since I was in Amsterdam, but I went to the dinner because there were quite a few people I wanted to see and talk to (and pleasantly met quite a few more nice/interesting people). I could've brought Gwen with, as I've brought her pretty much everywhere else, but I decided there wasn't really any reason to, I'd be gone only 3-4 hours, and it would just be easier to leave her with Joel. I left around 7:30, said she'd probably be up around 9:30 and be hungry, since she'd been sleeping for about an hour by then, and that if things went horribly awry and he couldn't handle it, to text me and I'd come home. Around 10:00 I get a text, but it was just saying "she's still sleeping. should I let her sleep or wake her and feed her?" and I said "let her sleep". By the time I got home around 11:00 she had woken up and he'd fed her, and she was asleep soon after I got back. And then we had a great night: instead of her usual waking every 3 hours (which she's done like clockwork pretty much since the second week -- I'd always been told that bottle fed babies slept longer at night, but I never noticed any difference when we transitioned from nursing to bottles), she woke up at 2:45 and 6:30 -- 3.75 hours! And since she's usually awake for about half an hour for eating and diaper change, that means instead of me getting sleep in 2.5 hour increments, I got them in 3.25 increments, which was great. I have no idea if this will continue, but I'd love it if it did! (It's a little after 11:00 now and she's drifting off to sleep; we'll see when she's up again next.)
Today she came out to the second day of the conference with me; she was a bit fussy during the first talk I was there for (I missed the first talk of the morning), and so I ended up sitting just outside the lecture hall in the little foyer/entry way which conveniently had a chair and the doors had glass panels in them so I could still see the speaker's slides and hear him, though quietly, but after that she slept through the remaining talk before lunch, slept through most of lunch, ate a bit, and then slept through the afternoon talks. Occasionally she'd make a few cute baby noises, but it never escalated to anything that would be too distracting to the others in the audience -- and it was a small workshop with lots of people favorably disposed to cute little babies, so that was good!
She's really gotten quite noisy over the last two weeks or so. It's strange, because the sounds aren't anything like vocalizations; they come from very deep inside and are, for the most part, involuntary. And some of the other noises she makes affirm my belief that babies are still just proto-humans, not real humans yet. It's like someone has described to her what certain actions are supposed to sound like, but she's never actually heard them made. It's cute. Often after eating she'll cough twice, and it's always "coff, coff". Her sneezes are "at-sew" (where "sew" is pronounced as it looks, not as \so\). And her yawns are very much "yohwn" (that's the best I can represent the vowel, it's tricky). It's like if you had a dog that actually went "bark", as opposed to that being as best an approximation of a non-verbal sound that you can make in writing.
Anent my previous post, in addition to looking forward to seeing who she becomes, I'm looking forward to watching her transition from a proto-human into an actual human.
In other milestones, she's 5 weeks today and I finally put her in a dress:
It was hand-made for her by our friend Sara, her first project with her new sewing machine. It's rather big for her, but that just means she can wear it longer!
