Parenthood: The first week

We have been home with our daughter for one week. All three of us have made some remarkable strides in the last seven days. Little m went from complete silence all the time to spending most of her waking hours talking. By talking, I mean she’s oohing and aahing and making noises like an extinct dinosaur. When we first met her, she couldn’t roll onto her belly, and had no ability to put weight on her legs. Now, she’s rolling so often onto her belly that she wakes herself up in the middle of the night because she can’t roll the other way, onto her back. She loves playing on her activity mat, staring up at the toys dangling there, and has a hard time sleeping during the day. We really have to tire her out a lot to get her to sleep. This morning, I took her for a walk in the Ergo carrier and she looked at Broadway as we walked south, watching the few cars roll by (it was just after 7am and the city was still asleep), and watched the street again as we walked north again back to the apartment. She got smiles and stares from people on the street, from which she shyly turned away. (It’s because she’s so incredibly gorgeous, but I may be biased.) Also on the way back, she fell asleep. It was quite a beautiful sight, to have my daughter fall asleep as she rested her head against my chest.

This experience made me realize something else important: being cooped up inside this apartment for even a day would drive me batty, and I think little M must be going through the same thing. I think this week has been a great bonding experience for us, and I think she’s really getting quite attached to both of us. However, she can’t stay in this apartment all the time. She wants to see the world. When we take her out, her curiosity is piqued, her eyes get wide, she looks at everything around her. The more we expose her to the world, the less shell-shocked she’ll be when she does get outside.

M has promised that I’ll get to take her running when she’s six months old. That’s tomorrow, for those of you keeping count (actually around 6pm New York time when you take into account the time difference in Ethiopia–not that I’m going to be picky or anything) and I plan on getting her out in the early morning no later than Thursday. She’s usually awake by 6 or so anyway.

M an I need to work out schedules better. We’ve always done things together spontaneously. “How about a movie tonight?” we’d ask and off we’d go. “I’m heading out for a twenty mile run, see you in three hours,” I’d tell M on a Sunday morning. Saturday, I mentioned going for a long run on Sunday, and M was having none of it. There was much to do around the house, with one of her friends coming over, and she was still feeling overwhelmed with the baby. I didn’t run; I washed the clothes, shopped for food, cooked a couple of meals for the week. By early afternoon I was relaxing on the couch reading a book while little m played on the activity mat next to me, an I wished I’d gone out for that morning run. But to do so now requires more advanced scheduling notice. I have to plan my runs in advance, and M will have to plan her days, too. So I finally fixed her computer so it syncs with my calendar (and vice versa) and created a separate calendar for little m. Now all we have to do is use it.

Finally, don’t think I’m too much of a geek, but I downloaded a baby monitor app for my iPad. We’ve been keeping track of food and sleep in a little journal I bought in Frankfurt, but I wanted more than just scribbles on paper. I needed graphs!

We’re maxing at 30 ounces in a day, but would like to keep that at 24-26.

Sleep’s been the hardest so far, mostly because she doesn’t sleep through the night yet. She wakes up at least once in the night, from midnight to 3am, for a bottle. These two graphs are closely intertwined, because in order to get her to sleep through the night we have to give her all her formula before she goes to bed, with the last one right before she sleeps. We’ll keep working on that.