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4/28/05

When Ev came back from the doctor's yesterday she found me frustrated and stressed out. I was busy changing Cara into her third full outfit of the day (darn diapers! I used to be able to put them on right...). She decided that I needed to go out for some "me" time. She suggested that I go swimming at the gym, something I hadn't done in quite a while. Not having any of my own opinions on the matter at the time, I went ahead and did exactly what she said. I did some laps in the gym pool. I guess I'll never be an endurance swimmer. I like going back and forth across the pool, but I can only really do one length at a time, with rests in between. Other people there just get in the pool and seem to go back and forth without stopping for a half an hour. But I can go one length of the pool very quickly.

After my swim it was off to Babies R Us to buy a second base for the infant car seat. This is so that Evie can put the car seat in her car as well. Fortunately I had lots of credit on my Babies R Us card. When I got home I found that Evie had planted the bulb garden I got for her in my absence. It was the daffodils and tulips I'd gotten from 1800flowers.com while she was at the hospital. The whole family went out, in fact: Ev brought Cara out in the car seat and she even let the cats out (!). They explored the back yard and she was able to get them back inside when the time came. After that Ev took the baby for a walk in the stroller. When I returned she made dinner--and cleaned up. The baby was getting uppity again in the evening, so we took her out for a quick walk again to get her sleepy. It was 8 pm or so and it was quite dark by the time we walked back to the house--a lot of people on the block have outside lights that are on sensors, and they kept flipping on as we strolled past. In Ev's earlier walk she had gone down a side street further away from our house and passed a couple of yards with large barking dogs--she realized we were lucky not to have such noisemakers nearby. However, since the house next door to us is under contract, there's always a chance we'll get a barker one of these days... We got home and Ev ended up on the bed with Buster the cat, and they had a nice nap for a while until Buster decided to walk off. Meanwhile I dug up some old Nintendo games and was playing them on the computer--I realized that I'm very rusty at video games. One game in particular, "Contra," is a shoot-em-up where you have to destroy all these alien soldiers and monsters and such; Jim and I got so good at it when we were younger that we would run through the whole game at least once a night for a while there. There's a code that gives you thirty men, which you'd think would have made it a cake-walk for me--but in fact I had to continue several times, each time getting a new bunch of thirty men, and I never did get to the end. Ha! Well, it will be easy for me to let Cara win when we start playing games together.

When it came to be serious night time, Evie was once again very nice to me and took the entire night shift to herself. I slept late into the morning; Ev had some long sessions with Cara, but she did get some sleep in between, and they both got some sleep from around 8-9 am. Aunt Claire was supposed to visit today and we were planning on taking Cara out with us to a restaurant for the first time (an Indian restaurant, because it probably won't be as crowded!); but work things have come up and we're not sure now whether Claire will make it today. There's always another day; and anyway, Cara seems to have continued in the somewhat needy mood she was in yesterday. Ev has already fed her multiple times this morning (as I write this, it is 10:30 am), and in between Cara has cried for no discernible reason. Yesterday while Ev was gone she started going and I couldn't make her stop--whether I picked her up, put her in her bouncer, gave her a pacifier, nothing worked. Probably it was because she was just hungry.

Right now, Cara is sleeping--kind of--and Ev is in the shower. Evie seems much more chipper lately, notwithstanding her interesting drinking problem from the other day. Perhaps she is just trying to take over more things because she thinks I'm getting frustrated. And there goes Cara again... and now she's quieted down. Sometimes when she's sleeping she'll start making all these sounds like she's about to start wailing, but then she just subsides and goes back to sleep. Well, it's tough when she's crying and you can't seem to do anything about it, but I think we can handle pretty much anything Cara can dish out.

Shelby the cat has gotten into the habit of meowing a lot and bringing one of her little foam balls into the living room, I suppose in the hopes that I will play with her (Buster used to be the one who would do this). She bats it around a bit herself, to show me how it's done. Evie is much better at getting the cats into the basement at night, because she lures them downstairs with a treat, whereas I just pick them up and put them downstairs when they won't come. We have lots of living creatures to take care of!

Later: Claire did come, and we did go out! It was nice, and baby Cara slept through the whole thing--though near the end Claire tried putting her pacifier in a couple of times and she knocked it out. Cara is getting very good at inadvertantly knocking her pacifier out, usually with a flap of her arm. Yesterday she had hiccups (as she is wont to have, three or four times a day) and was positioned in such a way that when she hiccuped, her pacifier popped right out. Evie put it back in--hic!--it popped out again. It was pretty funny.

Before Claire came, Ev prepared thoroughly for our outing by feeding the baby a lot and then taking her for a stroller walk. Before that we put some more plants from inside the house out in the backyard and moved the grill to its springtime position. I had found lately that whenever it rained, the two legs of the grill sank deeply into the soft ground, so now we've set up some patio type bricks under it. We'll see how that goes. While we were out, baby sat nearby in her car seat and the cats had another exciting outing. Buster really likes being out--she battles insects and gets very excited whenever a gust of wind comes by and ruffles the plants. Shelby is ok with it but likes to know where we are and was soon giving the impression that she was ready to go back inside. I'm very worried that Buster will run off if we don't watch her carefully, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to dealing with outside cats.

Now we're back at the house. Claire has taken off because she has an art opening at the college where she works to supervise (and, she hopes, she will get some cookies out of it). Baby is still sleeping. Let's hope nothing else happens today, because this entry is way too long.

4/29/05

Today Cara is over three weeks old, but it also happens to be her due date. Weird, eh? 4/29 was the due date we got after an extensive ultrasound several months into the pregnancy (the original due date was 5/4!). On this day, I went off to work again for the first time in weeks. There was another guy in the production department whose wife was pregnant, and it turns out she gave birth I think yesterday--there were pictures of his daughter right below the pictures of Cara in the lunch room. This guy came by my cube and was talking about how people were saying the two PPG babies looked really alike, but we both agreed that babies pretty much look alike when they're first born. I think the other baby was a bit wider.

I came home with some work to do, and Ev went off to shop--a fair trade-off of the baby. While I was gone, the parents had visited long enough to take some more cute pictures of the baby. They took baby for a walk and Dad pushed. Dad talks to Cara a lot--almost nonstop. I like talking to her too, but Dad does a very thorough job. On Evie's later shopping trip, she got a bottle warmer, some beer for me (yay!), and a nice lap pillow thing on which the baby is currently sleeping. While she was gone, Cara made some nice music for me--loud, wailing music. Ev's mom called and got to hear some of it. Last night I had discovered that I could burn CDs while holding the baby, but today I was writing emails, for which the baby had to go in her bouncer, and she really didn't like it. If I carry her, she's usually ok. Evie feels guilty when she hears me talk about how loud the baby was when she was out, but she shouldn't, since she has no control over the baby. She fed Cara before she left, and she should certainly be able to leave the house if she wants! And also she's just cooked dinner, so I have to go and eat it.

That was a good dinner! Last night baby and I were present for every aching minute of the double-overtime loss by the Nets of their third playoff game. The people at TNT helpfully pointed out that no NBA team has ever come back from being down 0-3 in a playoff series. Meanwhile, baby was pretty good. I was up with her until 1 am (with a little bit of sleepiness), then Ev came down and fed her and put her on her lap and they slept together till 3. It was fine after that--because I was asleep.

So Ev and I talked about what would happen to the journal after I start going back to work full time--my original vision had been to write some notes for the previous day at lunch break, then email them to myself and write up an entry at night. My journal material would have consisted mainly of what Ev told me had happened while I was gone plus what I experienced with Cara at night. However, Evie pointed out a much better idea: she can write the journal!

Earlier while Cara was noisy I put on The Cars Greatest Hits and that really seemed to calm her down. If music does it for her I have plenty of albums I can put on...

4/30/05

Last night Evie fed the baby a bottle of formula--she chugged the whole thing and was subsequently knocked out for several hours. We think that in the future we may use the bottle feeding as a "weapon" to get her to sleep--breast feeding seems much more traumatic for Cara and she often stops to cry during it. We're very glad that Cara seems to have no problems with the formula and has gone back to being nursed with no problem. Cara was in her crib for quite a while yesterday and we tried the aquatic thingie on her. We set it to play music and do a little light show. It may have helped. We tried to both go to sleep in the bed like normal people, but the baby kept getting annoyed, so Evie took her downstairs. I got some sleep in the bed but eventually around 5:30 or so I tried to take over. Then at some point we ended up with Ev on the couch with Cara in her lap sleeping, and I also tried sleeping on the couch, but we really didn't all fit. I crammed myself onto the loveseat for a while, then decided this was not good for my neck and went back up to bed.

Today we've been hanging out with Cara and doing some chores in between. In the morning we gave Cara her first real tub bath in her tub--she hated it! Oh, boy, did she hate it. But maybe she'll get used to it and we'll try warmer water next time... Evie went out to do some stuff earlier and the baby was perfectly quiet and sleepy during her whole outing, which was nice for all of us. Then we had lunch and now Ev's parents are here, so I'll sign off for now.

5/1/05

Cara's grandparents had a nice time last night with the baby--her grandmother also very kindly and very efficiently cleaned our bathroom up. She brought paint chips for our plan to eventually repaint the walls of the bathroom (I'm talking about the upstairs one, here). Also we now have a very pretty growth chart or measuring stick with flowers and Carolyn's name painted on it, from her great-grandmother Emily (part of the mural, the tower painted by Claire in the Wonderland section, also functions as a measuring chart--but it's nice to have two!). Everyone held the baby (there's a picture of George holding the baby in my photos section), Evie with a bit of help made a nice dinner, and we watched some Saturday Night Live stuff on DVD. Cara's grandma brought her a nice book and cassette tape of stories about Uncle Wiggily, a nice old gentleman rabbit whose original tales were apparently printed in newspapers near the beginning of the twentieth century. I actually read one to Cara this morning--mostly for my own edification, being unfamiliar with the trials and tribulations of Uncle Wiggily and friends--and found it very pleasant, with helpful values and morals to impart (though the advice to seek a policeman when lost, because "they know where everyone lives," may be a bit dated!). Uncle Wiggily is a charming and kindly rabbit who does the right thing (man, I sound so fluffy and wussy right now) and for some reason carries around a crutch which he seems to have converted from a barber pole (it occurs to me that I'll probably have to explain to Cara what a "barber pole" is, and I don't know the origin of the thing--anyone?).

Cara was pretty good while the grandparents were present, but as soon as they left she began screaming like a banshee. But that's all right, we had a whole plan for her. We managed to calm her down for the short term with a pacifier--it's becoming more and more difficult to get pacifiers into her mouth lately, as she swipes at them and knocks them out, or just spits them out, or gets mad when they even touch her lips, though usually once she's had a good suck on them she realizes it's nice and calms down--and in the evening (on 4/29 we watched the movie Spiderman on TV; last night, we watched the first Harry Potter movie), I stayed with Cara downstairs for a bit after Evie went to bed, until Cara woke up for the first time, around 11:30. We gave her a bottle of formula which put her out until around 3 am (ha ha!), then Ev fed her and got her back to sleep in about an hour, and at 6:30 am it was time for another session of that (with me changing the baby before every feeding). It was actually a kind of routine, that thing we're supposed to develop with Cara for when it's sleepy-time, and it seemed to work rather smoothly--no big screams, and she kept a pretty consistent three hour interval between feedings (Cara got hungry again this morning at around 9:30). It's interesting that the formula or possibly anything from the bottle seems to really put her out. This should be good for Tuesday, because Ev will be recovering from anaesthesia and will be unable to breastfeed (wondering why? one word: colonoscopy. nuff said.)! So it will be lots of bottle feeding for Cara, and Cara seems very happy with that.

This morning Ev and I took turns in the shower and then I went off to fetch us some takeout lunch (sushi again for Ev; Wendy's for me). Evie performed useful household chores and while I was out I photocopied my driver's license as part of the paperwork needed to get Cara's birth certificate! (I also needed to get a money order, which I did yesterday--I don't get money orders very often and I think they're kind of annoying, but we do have a post office right around the corner.) That will be a cool thing to get in the mail--they day we get the certificate, I'll certainly mention it in the journal.

After lunch we messed with the baby a bit--first some tummy time on her jungle gym mat (which she absolutely hated! such screams!), then we got her in the crib and stimulated her in a much more pleasant manner. We tried waving the wash cloth at her again, then I jingled her stuffed giraffe rattle at her and was inordinately pleased to see her track the giraffe with her eyes as I shook it back and forth across her field of vision ("What a smart baby!" I cried again and again). Then I used my Winnie the Pooh hand puppet on her, which she paid a bit of attention to, and also used our aquatic wonders toy with the bubbles and swimming fish and light show. Then she got mad, or hungry, or a combination of both, and now Ev has fed her and she's sleeping on Evie's chest very nicely. I thought I was detecting a bit of green lately in Cara's eyes, which are a very dark and indeterminate slate color right now. We still don't know what color they'll end up being. I myself have very very dark brown eyes, but Evie has a very interesting greenish-bluish shade which I'm hoping will be passed on to Cara in some form or other. I don't know how the genes work for those colors, so I don't know our chances.

By the way, I should mention that after Cara's cord fell off, there was a kind of scab left behind, and that has now also fallen off. What is left is not exactly a normal belly button, but it's close. I think a bit more healing has to happen. She appears to be an innie, for the record.

5/2/05

So I almost got through a day without a journal entry, but I decided I couldn't do it. Yesterday we took baby for a walk in her stroller, bolstered her with most of a bottle of formula, and then we all went out to Famous Dave's for dinner. Baby did not fit in the booth seat (we got a nice big booth instead of one of those tiny two-person ones; ha!), so we put her on top of the table. She slept very nicely through the whole thing and the waitress enjoyed looking at her. On the way out a pair of people in one of those tiny two-person booths guessed that she was a newborn because she was so tiny. Later that night we tried the formula on Cara again to try to get her to go off to sleep; I get worried that she's eating too much by taking a whole four ounces of that stuff, so I think maybe I pull the bottle away before she's really done. But then again, she doesn't seem interested in it when I try it on her again. Eventually Cara got to sleep and neither of us really remember how the evening went, so it must have been ok. Around midnight, Evie had a last hurrah with some crackers and cheese, before her 24 hours of pure liquid diet.

Today, it being Monday, I tried to commence really working from home. I made some attempts to get a piece of software I need, eventually got some files I was missing, and looked into starting work on some stuff. I realized that working from home is not my favorite thing to do; I'd tried to do it a bit earlier when I was still kind of working for my first boss, Jim Feld, and had found it very difficult. I find that I work better in a "work" environment, and am very easily distracted by the home. Also, crying babies and all. I was sitting there with piles of applications open on my computer, flipping back and forth, and suddenly my computer started acting up. My work was forgotten as I did multiple restarts of the computer and attempted several fixes--eventually I had to reinstall my operating system, and by that time Daddy was in no mood for work (see: talk about myself as "daddy"). So, I went out to the first place that Evelyn suggested, Barnes and Noble, and ended up coming back with the movie The Incredibles, which I'm currently watching while Ev feeds the baby. It's pretty late in the evening for us, but it's been a fairly lazy day of television watching and reading (and attempting to work without getting much done). I really love these Pixar animated movies, they are all fantastic. I think I'll get back to really watching this one.

5/3/05

Let's see, last night... I can't remember all that well, but I think it was fairly typical, involving me changing the baby a few times, Ev feeding and once or twice changing the baby, and in between Ev and I trying to sleep in the bed. I think it's coming back to me that the baby had a very long sleeping period last night of maybe even four hours, which is good for her. Then this morning we got up pretty early and showered so that we could go off and get Evie to her gastroenterologist. Meanwhile, George was good enough to stay at the house for a few hours and watch the baby. Evie bottled a lot of breast milk for the occasion, none of which have we yet used since there was also plenty of formula. Fortunately the type of anaesthesia used on Ev meant she only had to pump out and discard one "batch" of milk, as it were. But before that Ev and I both had to go through the torture of listening to several morning talk shows on the waiting room television before she mercifully was pulled away for her colonoscopy--while I, poor soul, was trapped in the waiting room for the remainder of the Tony Danza show and (I shudder to remember it) "The View." Ironically, I had overheard an episode of "The View" with Jeff Goldblum at a hospital where Evie was waiting for a shot; at the waiting room this morning, Tony Danza featured Jeff Goldblum as a guest. Jeff is apparently making the rounds to plug his latest acting endeavor (a play called "The Pillowman," I think), and I got to see two of his wonderful appearances!

Anyways, after that we went right off to the IHOP so that Evelyn could break her fast in style (she was fine--no bad effects, and no bad results), and we returned home to find that George had had no major problems. Unfortunately, I returned home to find that the same problem my computer had been having yesterday had returned. Over the rest of the afternoon I have tried several attempts to repair it, so far to no avail. At first I thought re-installing my operating system had worked, but not for long! I discovered that I have no ability to get free phone help from Apple, so I've been trying for the past few hours to get this new copy of anti-virus software that I bought at the mall today to work. It keeps freezing up in the middle of scanning (but never on the same file, mind you!), so I keep having to force quit and start over again, and every time it has almost 500,000 files to scan. Naturally, this isn't exactly jumpstarting my whole "working from home" project. In fact, if my computer needs major repairs (and it's starting to look that way), this may mean the end of the journal for at least a few days (!!), while the computer is sent off to the Apple store to be tinkered with. I'm not even sure I will be able to upload this current entry with success, but I will try to keep everyone updated if I possibly can.

Oh, and the baby...is fine. She cried for fifteen minutes before getting the nipple on her bottle to work this morning, and this evening she was very angry and refused to nurse, but we think that this was most likely because she wasn't hungry. She was very sleepy in the afternoon, but not too long ago I propped her up on her Boppy pillow because she was awake, and this gave her some very nice "tummy" time. The way she was set up on the pillow, she was basically lying on her chest, but her head was not smushed against any surface, so she wasn't uncomfortable at all. She moved her head around and lifted it quite well, and even made a nice jerking motion at one point which a very optimistic parent might interpret as the beginnings of a crawl (or "creep," as Dr. Spock delineates it). I tried to make her turn her head around to look at a squeaking ducky toy, but she seemed to attempt to turn it around the wrong way, around the back, so it didn't work. But she was a cutie. She was definitely comfortable, because eventually she fell asleep on the pillow, and has now been moved to the old play yard.

Cara is still spitting up from time to time, but no barfing, and (as I think I've said earlier) not as much eye gunk. Also lately her bodily functions seem to have become more natural; at first, it was almost all solid stuff (by which I mean "poopy," but I think that's a silly word, and I refuse to use it in a fine work of literature), but now she has many entirely wet diapers punctuated at long intervals by major soiled diapers. This is good, not only because it seems to mimic a normal grown person's pattern, but because it means she has totally stopped peeing on the changing table.

All right, I'm going to try to get this up on the web now...if you can read this, it worked!

By the way, I was able to get this up, so it does work. Yay! I'd just like to add that Evie is now bravely trying to feed the baby vitamins every once in a while. She's tried a couple of times from a dropper that comes with the bottle, but Cara has cleverly drooled most of it back out again, so we may have to start try mixing it in bottles. We'll see.

Oh and one other addition: when Evie called her dad after she'd come out of the doctor's office, George pointed the phone at Cara and let Evie try to speak to her. Apparently Cara turned her head towards the phone and made a noise, all without waking up. I have high hopes that Cara is actually starting to recognize us--our bodies, faces and voices.

5/4/05

Today is Cara's original due date! In actual time, it marks the end of her fourth week--Cara is nearly one month old now. Last night was another pretty good night. We think Cara may be sleeping longer in the night time now. Today my parents came over for what we had intended to be a picnic lunch at our nearby park. Instead, we ended up vacuuming and mowing the lawn. I got to see an expanded DVD of all of the footage on Cara, including some good bits with her on her jungle gym mat. Perhaps I have a bit of sadism in me, as I enjoyed watching my parents try different methods to quiet an upset Cara (this was not on the DVD, you understand--she was upset today for a bit). I also find it funny that they can come over and just stare at the baby, remarking at nearly every noise and move she makes. "She does that all the time!" I felt like saying, but obviously other people aren't around her all the time to see these things. After the parents left, I tried to buckle down and get some work done, which only lasted for a couple of hours. My computer is, I believe, operational again. I scanned it for viruses and found none, but was able to fix my problem late last night (or early this morning, depending on how you look at it) by a silly little action which I should have thought of much earlier in my troubleshooting. Today I did some more software updating, but discovered that my printer doesn't seem to work the same way it used to, and because I kind of forced the ink cartridge out, it doesn't print very well either. Blah. Also it froze just now when I was resizing some photos of the baby. But my journaling can continue in safety for the time being.

Anyways, in the late afternoon Sarah and Jim arrived for a visit before going to see a dance performance at a nearby theater, and we ventured out again with the baby, this time to the Thai restaurant. Baby sat in her car seat, which was sitting on a chair, and the car seat was wedged nicely between the chair back and the table, and baby slept through the whole meal while I sat next to her. It went so well that we even carried the baby over to an ice cream parlor. Now, however, baby is being fussy for some reason we have yet to pinpoint. I am being particularly unhelpful, since I'm working on the web journal! So maybe I will go now. It's been a busy day, but I think I covered pretty much everything.

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