Good: Rijntje is finally sleeping for long stretches. It's not quite "through the night"--he sleeps for 6 hours, now, but it's from 9-3 or thereabouts, so I still end up getting up in the middle of the night.

Bad: It seems as if he's doing another "reset", which means his schedule is all messed up.

One of the things that perpetually fascinates me about Rijntje is how fast he can go from wide awake and cranky to fast asleep. I put him down in his bed, and within quite literally 5 minutes, he's asleep, making little sucking motions as he dreams about nursing. If he's being difficult, he might cry a bit. Sometimes for as long as...10 minutes ( Read more... )

I don't get this. That is, I understand the need to cut back on spending a lot on your kid, but to make a big stinking deal of it? Sorry, I must have missed that memo. I just don't see what's so strange about not spending money on your child. We certainly don't plan to, although it is also true that Rijntje is still too young to want to do ( Read more... )

Last night the little kiddo screamed. You might think this would be par for the course when said kid is 8 weeks old and a bit, but I could tell something was wrong with that scream. Happily, he stopped the moment I put him in the Maxi Cosi, so I knew it was "just" gas--it's been an ongoing problem with him, and recently I've been putting him to ( Read more... )

One of the things that has been gnawing away at the back of my mind ever since I peed on the stick and saw a + is whether our child will be autistic. Given who his parents are--Karel has been diagnosed as having Asperger's, although I kinda think you have to have more than one visit with a shrink to be sure of this sort of thing. I think we're ( Read more... )

While feeding the baby, I usually open up YouTube to watch something. It may be a movie, but it's more often than not a documentary. In this case, HBO's documentary on the obesity epidemic, "The Weight of the Nation". Some thoughts ( Read more... )

Things I'm not going to feel bad about ( Read more... )

Babies aren't really that difficult. They like to be fed, snuggle with you, a clean diaper, and being warm and cozy ( Read more... )

It used to be that I could get a ton of stuff done in the mornings: the cleaning, a load of laundry, unload the dishwasher, maybe get groceries and run errands and stuff like that. Now, I feel triumphant if the baby is fed and asleep before noon.

You wouldn't think that relaxing and recovering would be so time-consuming, but they are. Karel basically took a whole heaping chunk of vacation time, so he'll be off for another two whole weeks, and fussing about the apartment like a worried hen, and not letting me so much as stay up for more than an hour at a time. I'm enjoying the whole being- ( Read more... )