One Month

It sure was tough to bid my ladies goodbye a few weeks back when I had to return to work.  Time has flown since then…  Lilia continues to be a champion sleeper, regularly giving us five or six hour stints without a peep from her crib.  You’ll note I say crib instead of basinet: she outgrew her basinet within three weeks, quickly figuring out how to move around even when tightly swaddled so we decided it’d be better for her to have room to move.  She’s now in a full-sized crib, her eyesight has improved dramatically which I think is one of the reasons she‘s taken a liking to her new bed.  The crib has slatted sides so she can lie in there and keep an eye on the action in her doorway.  We often walk past to see her big blues blinking at us, quite content to lie there and monitor the situation in the living room.

Feeding – originally something to which Lisa took to like a duck to water – has had its ups and downs.  During the day Lilia will often start chewing her fist in place of a nipple every two hours, leaving Lisa feeling like a milk machine with little time for anything else.  Some days – like today – Lilia can’t get enough of a good thing and ends up feasting so much that by the end of the day she’s so uncomfortable that everything ends in screaming and tears.  Lengthy outbursts are fortunately a rare occurrence from the little tyke, but when her tummy’s too full and business can’t get moving out the back end quick enough, air bubbles tend to form in-between and all hell breaks loose!  Poor Lisa’s also had to monitor her food intake a little as there seems to be a few things that don’t sit well with our young one’s digestive tract.  Chocolate and milk are definitely off the menu for Lisa while she’s breastfeeding.  And here we were thinking that postpartum all the food restrictions would be out the window!

The ERGObaby baby carrier continues to get a workout, on any day I’m off work we try to spend at least some of it outside with Lilia on the trails. We’ve become regulars at Tennessee Valley, gradually extending our walks from a quick out-and-back when Lisa was still recovering to now making our way the 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) to the beach and back. Lilia is usually zonked within seconds of me strapping her against my chest in the ERGObaby, she’ll let it be known when she’s hungry but is otherwise happy to bounce around in there all day. Last weekend we tested the limits with an eight mile (13 kilometer) hike out to Tomales Point in Point Reyes National Seashore, Lilia rode along quite comfortably and Lisa had another chance to refine her bush nursing skills.

Visits from friends have become a little less frequent, but fortunately Grandma Carol comes down every Monday and Wednesday to help Lisa around the house.  And Grandpa Greg accompanied Lisa and Lilia on their first trip across the San Francisco Bay yesterday to meet me for lunch in the city and also check out the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market.  It was a beautiful day in the city yesterday, I think Lisa and Greg will be repeating their inaugural Thursday trip until they’ve exhausted all the food choices available at the farmer’s market!

So often when Lisa was pregnant people would tell us about the horrors of having an infant: colic, sleepless nights, disappearance of a social life…  True, there’ve been a lot of changes over the past month but it seems – hopefully I don’t jinx us – that we’ve been blessed with a little one who is generally very easy going and content with the occasional dose of breast milk, plenty of sleep and a chance to play with whichever adult is available when she’s wide awake.  One of the things I’ve noted changing a great deal is the content of our conversations with friends and colleagues: they most definitely now focus on volumes of poop, diaper (nappy) counts and hours of consecutive sleep.  It’s an amazing experience to watch Lilia change so much each day: new facial contortions, increases in alertness, the ability to follow our movements and voices across the room.  And I am pleased to note that her newborn hair is quickly falling out so that I am no longer the one in the house with the least hair on their head!

I put together a video from the past few weeks, sequences of the rare times when she’s awake and content to be in one place for more than a few seconds.  She’s taken quite a fancy to staring at then lens…  For those of you without kids you’ll probably think I’ve turned a little strange passing my time filming an infant doing, well, not much of anything.  If you’re a parent I’m sure you know what it’s like, wanting to chronicle those moments that only happen once and are then lost.