Stuff

Hey all. This is a quick update; as usual, I could write and write and write and . . . but I won't. :)

Maia ate green peas today for the first time. She definitely seemed more interested in playing with her food instead of eating it, but we did manage to get one ice cube-sized serving down and into her tummy over the course of about 30 minutes. I think that we're learning that Maia is much more fond of vegetable-y flavors rather than sweet, fruity ones. Good news for us and for her nutrition! :)

Then I learned that Maia isn't all that crazy about the sippy cup. I wanted to make sure she had some water to wash down her peas, but she just didn't seem interested in figuring out how the sippy cup works. So, I unscrewed the top and let her figure out how to use the cup like you or I would. It worked like a charm! :) Granted, she got a ton of water down the front of her shirt, but who wouldn't expect that?

Finally, I team-taught my first session of childbirth ed. last night. We had an unusually large group for a condensed class (which is over two weeks rather than the usual six), so my boss asked if I could help out with the teaching and with facilitating the smaller-group discussions. Trying to condense six weeks' worth of material into two weeks is quite a challenge, so it was an excellent thing for me to see and be a part of. It was a blast! I got to do much of the teaching about Stage Two of labor (pushing), medications and interventions, and the birth video discussion. Last night's experience has me really charged-up and ready to get started with my own six week series. I start on August 14th. Yay!!

Emilia and baby food

Estacio and Regina (Tio Lu's parents) recently mailed Maia this fantastic doll, who is a heroine of traditional children's stories in Brazil. Maia really loves to look at the bright colors in Emilia's dress, and she also is good at grabbing bunches of her hair in her hands. At the end of this post, check out the photo of Maia, Tia Jo, and Emilia the doll!

It's about 7:45 PM right now, and Maia has been asleep for about twenty minutes. Brian and I are preparing for a baby-food-making assembly line this evening: we're making apricots, pluots, peas, and avocado. Yummy yum yum!

From July 07

Home again.

Hello everyone. We returned from our trip to Rainey Lake yesterday, picked up our dogs in East Lansing, and then got back to the house here in Ann Arbor at about 6:00 PM. I think it's safe to say that all three of us had a fantastic time . . . each for different reasons.

1) Brian learned to sail! Using an 18-foot sailboat with no motor, he spent a couple of learning sessions out on the lake with my Dad, and shortly thereafter was able to go out on the lake on his own. I know that he got an enormous kick out of learning to do this, and the wind gradually increased throughout the week, so he also was able to increase his challenge level day by day.

2) I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I will not even come close to writing down any spoilers here, but I will say that both my sister Joanna and I were wrong when we made our little wager on the ending. :)

3) Maia's first two teeth appeared! We know that she's been very drooly and intent on chewing everything for several weeks now, but we couldn't actually see or feel teeth. Well, they're here now. She's got both incisors on her bottom jaw; you can see just a little bit of the white now, but only if she's crying or if she cooperates by moving her tongue out of the way. Because she only cried twice in this last week and also doesn't seem thrilled with us peeking into her mouth, I've only had one good look at her teeth. I certainly can feel them, though, both when I'm touching her gums with my finger and when we're nursing. Ouch!

4) Maia has really started to do the classic baby "babble." She's repeating syllables in a much more staccato way; it's the "ba-ba-ba" or "ga-ga-ga" pattern that's that standard, familiar pattern of baby speech. She'll even do a "bla-bla" from time to time, which is really funny. (We've started calling her Bob Loblaw when she does that. Any Arrested Development fans out there??) She was very talkative during the course of the week, which seems to indicate that she was very comfortable hanging out with everyone there. When she's unsure of a situation or is meeting unfamiliar people, she'll go into what I call "submarine mode," meaning that she goes silent for a while and just assesses the situation from a distance. Perhaps she's a bit of an introvert, like me--I do that type of thing, too.

5) She really gets a kick out of playing under a sheet. It's really hilarious to see her sitting up, covered in a sheet, with all four of her limbs flailing around in excitement. It makes for a great game of "Peek-a-Boo" as well.

6) Finally, her sleep was just fine. We had a couple more fretful nights than normal, but we just have no idea if that's due to the new environment or the teeth. We'll never know. She slept for 10.5 hours last night, and I actually had to wake her up for the sake of my own physical comfort. So, clearly, we're doing just fine with the sleeping! I'm officially taking that particular topic off the table unless something changes!! :)

That's all for now. Please check our usual photo website for pictures of vacation.

From Rainy Lake --...

Up North

Tomorrow we're going to a cottage on a small lake somewhere in the northern Lower Peninsula. The vagueness is part of the kick of this trip; we really don't know where exactly we're going. My parents do, however, so we'll be following them! We'll be up there through next Friday or Saturday. All in all, I'd say we're a little bit apprehensive about the trip only because this is Maia's first real trip away from home for any length of time. Her sleep is so reliable and is going so well in general, and we know that it's very likely that this trip might be a pretty big disruption. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of people there to lend a hand if the expected disruption does come to fruition, so that's a big plus.

Before we go, I'm going to go to our nearby Barnes & Noble at midnight tonight to get my copy of the last Harry Potter book. That will be my vacation reading, along with Bill Buford's Heat. I just went there with Maia to get my fancy-schmancy paper bracelet that will earn me an early spot in the line, and hopefully I'll have my book by 1:00 AM. I am so massively excited about reading it! :) It's a bummer that this is the last in the series. Movie fans out there might be able to relate: remember how you felt when the credits began to roll on The Return of the King? That's the exact same feeling I have about this.

Maia is taking her first nap of the day right now, so I'm going to take some time to pack up my and Brian's clothes. I also need to make sure I have some work-related books with me, so I'd best go pack those now before it slips my mind. Bye for now!

(Just so I know, if you're still out there reading this blog, could you just leave a quick "I'm still reading!" comment or something like that on this post? I'd just like to get an idea of the size of our loyal, awesome readership!)

Blue Steel

If you haven't seen "Zoolander," just disregard this title. If you have, then you'll know what I mean when I say that Maia is beginning to develop her repertoire of ridiculously cute facial expressions with which to disarm all of her grown-up family and friends. Just in the last couple of days, she developed the look that we're calling "Blue Steel": it's a fake cough combined with a blink and a squeal that is just so excruciatingly adorable. She's knocked her Tia Jo off her feet with that one! :)

Tia Jo has been visiting since Friday, and Auntie Kathleen was here as well for the last couple of days. Nana and Papa Hecker were also here to babysit while Brian, Jo and I went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which is the first movie that Brian and I have seen in over six months. It seems that Maia's really gotten a kick out of having other people in the house whom she can stun with her cuteness. She's started to vocalize almost constantly while she's awake, and we were hearing some consonant sounds today that were quite cool (the g- and the b- sounds). She's also starting to show some mastery of a pincer grasp, which is when you hold something between just your thumb and index finger. Finally, she's very skillfully and steadily sitting up on her own, which has changed the nature of our playtime sessions.

And in other Maia news, she's now frequently sleeping between nine and ten hours straight at night. Wow. Last night, for example, she went to bed at around 8:30, and she didn't wake up until 6:12 AM. We know that this is somewhat unusual for a breastfed baby, and we also know very well that it's most likely to disappear soon when she begins teething in earnest. She nurses a lot during the day--every three hours at the longest, often at my suggestion rather than hers. I want to make sure that my milk supply doesn't dwindle, and I also want to be certain that she gets all of those wonderful calories during the day that she's now not getting throughout the night. In the midst of those every-three-hours daytime nursing sessions, she also had a bowl of avocado, which she's really enjoying, it seems. She wasn't too thrilled with the sweet potato, so our plan is to bring that one out again in a couple of weeks and try again. The good thing is that the addition of solid foods in the mid-afternoon hasn't seemed to diminish her milk consumption at all, which is just what I was hoping for. It's still really important to me that the overwhelming majority of her nutrition and calories come from milk.

You might be surprised to learn, though, that I'm not totally overjoyed at this new development in her sleep patterns. I miss our middle-of-the-night nursings, and I'm not bummed or irritated when she does make her little hungry noises at 3 AM instead of 6 AM. This period of babyhood is quite remarkable, and I'm trying to grab hold of and cherish every moment. As I've mentioned before, Maia was a really cool baby when she was a few weeks old, or a couple of months . . . but this six-month stage is just a blast! One thing that I know for sure, of course, is that our sleep schedule will change drastically again soon. It always does. So ask me then how I feel about nine straight hours of sleep. I'll probably sing a different tune! :)

I'm going to sign-off now to get back to work on my job stuff; my training is going well, and these last couple weeks of class observations have been very interesting and challenging (we're in the midst of the classes on pain medications, labor induction/augmentation, and cesareans). I hope that everyone is doing well!

Weekly update.

Maia is taking her first nap of the day right now (it almost always is first-nap-time about one hour after when she wakes up), and so I'll take the opportunity to write a bit about how we're doing. We've been fortunate to have seen many of our family members over the last week, so many of you have had time to hold and hang out with Maia recently.

She's been eating her avocado meals eagerly, and each one becomes a bit quicker and less messy. She ate her avocado for dinner with Brian yesterday, and he says that she really seems eager for each spoonful and to have the new taste in her mouth. So, today, we're going to try sweet potato! Brian steamed the sweet potato yesterday evening, blended it with a bit of milk, and froze cubes of it in our baby food cube trays (like ice cube trays, but with a special cover, and a bit smaller). So she'll have sweet potato once a day this week, and then we'll probably move on to banana or pears or something like that.

We've learned that, not surprisingly, there are wildly divergent theories on how to start babies on solid foods. Some people say at three months, some at four (we've ignored them, obviously). Many people agree that six months seems like a good age, although you'll hear from others who say seven, or nine, or twelve! Most say start on rice cereal, but there are some very strong and distinct voices out there who say "No way!" to that. In the last six months, I'd say that this might be the most confusing topic in terms of how vastly different the "experts" opinions can be. So, last night, Brian and I finally said, "We're going to choose one authoritative voice whom we will listen to, for the most part. We're going to pretty much ignore what the others say." That choice felt really good to me (for what it's worth, we decided to stick with the La Leche League/William Sears approach to solids).

We haven't tended to adhere to one "expert" voice thus far, so I'm wondering why it feels good to do so in this case. Perhaps it's because, when it comes to food, you can ask what seems like a simple question--such as how runny the first solid food should be--and get answers that are completely opposite from each other. The responses are so driven by philosophy that it's necessary that we know what our philosophy is before we decide which answer seems most reasonable to us. Because of the reading we've done, we've been able to assess which books and websites and modes of thinking seem most in-tune with the type of parents we hope to be. Then it's possible to figure out why the "experts" are saying what they're saying. (I keep putting "expert" in quotes not because I don't think they deserve the title, but more because I think that title should always be viewed with a skeptical mind and critical eye . . . particularly when it comes to parenting advice.) Believe it or not, one of the bestselling books on parenting has earned a warning from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Would you ever know that from the book itself? Of course not. And it's still on the bookshelf right next to the others.

So anyway . . . on to sweet potatoes! :)

Update-a-palooza

From July 07

Hey everyone! First, some administrative stuff: we've decided to make this blog "public" again, so you won't need to log-on with a Google account to read it. We decided that the private thing was a bit more of a pain than necessary, and we know that people were experiencing some challenges with accessing it sometimes. So, we're back to the way it was.

Also, we've posted a big bunch of photos from the 3rd and 4th of July. Included are: Tia Jo and Tio Lu's visit, a bottle with Nana Dawn, our new Mei Tai baby carrier in use, and Maia's first solid food adventure!

Visit the usual site at www.genisio.org to see the album.

Later.

Solid Food (kind of)

Maia had her first meal of "solid" food yesterday. The quotation marks are there to signify that her first little meal with a spoon was so diluted with milk that it barely qualifies as solids. More significant, however, is the fact that she ate the meal in her high chair, with a spoon!

We decided not to go the standard route of feeding her rice cereal to begin with. Perhaps it's the more "foodie" side of us, but we thought it would be fun to start her out on a ripe, whole, real food like an avocado. So that's what we picked. Brian mashed the bright green avocado into a nice pulp and then mixed it with milk to the point that it was just a touch thicker than what she's used to. I'll post a few photos rather than try to describe her reaction, because, fortunately, Auntie Jo is visiting from Toronto and was right there taking a bunch of beautiful photos! We don't have them uploaded to the website yet; when we do, I'll let you know.

So, the plan is for Maia to have a bit of her avocado/breastmilk "smoothie" once a day for the next few days. Then, perhaps we'll move on to a sweet potato smoothie! I think that Brian and I have relatively wide palates, and we both really hope that Maia grows up with the same (although I think we're both realistic enough to know that toddler/preschooler rebellion might mess this up for a while). We know that we're her role models with this, which is why we see our trips to the Farmer's Market every week for veggies and fruit to be more than just a grocery shopping trip. It's also some serious modeling that might help Maia develop eating habits that will be easier to deal with (for us) and healthier (for her).

In other news, the pace of my training for my new job is really picking up. I'm in the middle of a six-week Childbirth Preparation series right now (in which I'm observing my mentor teach). I begin my student teaching session on August 14, and then I start teaching on my own on September 10. It's such a pleasure to observe the class, because my mentor is truly a phenomenal instructor. She's a birth doula as well as a childbirth educator, which means she has so much experience with real-life childbirth. She's very up-to-date on current research on childbirth in the U.S., and I've learned so much from her already. I feel very lucky indeed.

Maia, version 2.0

The Maia that we knew was replaced today with a warp-speed, wired version of her previous self. The little baby who usually takes about 3 hours' worth of naps during the day morphed into a non-napping, rolling, kicking, laughing, bizarro crazy woman. She was in a great mood all day, mind you (well, except for the times that we tried to have her nap), but she was just so . . . busy. She napped for--maybe--1.5 hours.

Maia is sitting up on her own now for pretty long periods of time, and she's getting a big kick of out it! A couple of times today while she was practicing sitting on the floor with Brian, she seemed to laugh for the sheer enjoyment of being able to see the world from this brand new vantage point. She's blowing raspberries with her copious amounts of drool, which is quite adorable indeed. The drool probably signifies the for-real beginning of teething, although we don't see any actual teeth yet.

As I was writing the first two paragraphs of this entry, Brian was giving Maia her evening bottle. She fell asleep as she was drinking and didn't quite finish the full 7.75 ounces. I just carried her upstairs and put her quietly in bed, and five seconds after her head hit the mattress she rolled over onto her side and crashed. In the last week we've seen two nights of 10 straight hours of sleep, so, who knows? Perhaps this will be another one. Maia is one exhausted little person.

She's six months old tomorrow, and I could certainly take up a paragraph or two writing about the incredibly quick passage of time. While that is definitely a thought that's floating around in my mind these days, the more remarkable thing is how much of an individual Maia has become. She's got a big personality, full of attitude and humor and definite likes and dislikes. She spends her days taking in her surroundings with her wide blue eyes, her grabby hands, and her drooly mouth. :) Occasionally, she's starting to become a little bit "iffy" about being held by people other than Brian and me. In her comfortable spot in her baby carrier against my chest, however, she's totally confident; she rides around Ann Arbor and smiles at strangers as we wait at the cross-lights along Main Street.

I remember, several months ago, there was a bit of a controversy in celebrity-gossip-land about the fact that Angelina Jolie referred to her newborn daughter as a "blob." I must say that I know where she's coming from. Looking back on Maia's newborn days and early weeks of life, she was distinctly blob-like compared to the big kid that lives in our house now. It's amazing to recall that tiny 8 lb. baby who used to nap anywhere, struggled with bouts of baby gas during the night, and kept her little arms and legs curled tightly to her body. My goodness! This morning, our big girl was kicking the edge of our table at Cafe Felix so hard that she almost knocked over my coffee!

She was a treasure then, in her newborn stage, but the feeling I have now when I interact with her is so different. Then, it was one of awe. I felt such awe at the fact that this little person was inside me and was now out in the world. Newborn babies are such strange, tiny versions of ourselves. Now, it's a feeling of pure joy, really, at having the opportunity to spend every day with her and watch her change and grow at this ridiculously rapid pace. I felt joy then, but it was different because of the strangeness of it all. My smiles and laughter flow more freely now because I can see how much Maia loves being a part of this big, wide open world.

Happy half birthday, Maia! :) My greatest wish for you is that you grow up always knowing how deeply and profoundly you are loved.