Monthly Archives: February 2008

Shea has started this weird new thing where he arches his back, kicks his feet and grunts while I’m changing his clothes. I’m not sure what he’s trying to tell me. “I hate these pajamas?” “I want cloth diapers, not disposables?” “Why do you have to change my clothes just because they’re wet?” Or maybe, “Look, I’ve discovered that I can arch my back and kick my feet and grunt all at the same time! Isn’t that cool?”

I think this sleep training is harder for me than for Shea. First of all, I’m not used to getting up at 7 a.m. and not liking it very much. It’s so hard, after being up every three hours, to get out of bed and feed, change and play with the munchkin, but he’ll be lying there with this big smile on his face all ready to start the day. I’ve been more tired than usual lately because I’ve been doing all the night shifts. There’s something about making him cry himself to sleep that makes me feel so guilty that I feel obligated to do all the feedings myself during the night. I’ll be happy once he no longer cries and I can let Martin get up to feed him again! Tonight he was so overtired that I put him to bed at 6 instead of 7, and he cried for just five minutes. He missed his early nap and, once that happens, he’s tired and fussy all afternoon.

Since I usually only blog when Shea is particularly fussy, I have to take a minute to say some good things about him today. He’s been much easier since he passed his six-week fussy peak. Breast feeding no longer hurts at all, which makes a huge difference, and I’m able to feed him lying in bed, which has helped me get a lot more sleep (Now that I’m sleep training him, I only take him in bed for his last feeding, but it still makes a difference, and last night I was so tired that I took him for most of the night.) And I’m learning a lot about sleep, getting a feel for when he’s fussy because he’s tired, and that helps a lot, as does getting him to sleep at seven instead of midnight like before. He smiles a lot, especially after he wakes up in the morning or after a nap, and he coos a ton, too. This week he’s making this new “razz” sound with his tongue. He doesn’t cry at all when I give him baths or change him anymore. It’s hard to believe that he used to scream bloody murder every time we changed his diaper! Now he just lies there smiling or looking at the blinds. He loves his bouncy chair, too. It has this feature where when he kicks his feet, sounds and lights go off, and he loves that. He’s also starting to grab the dangly things on his play gym and has even stuck them in his mouth a couple times. (What talent!) So, yes, things do get easier, and he’s only two months. Everyone says things get a lot easier at three months. We’ll see.

Man, Shea is not having a good first Valentine’s Day. He got his shots today—four of them—and he has been fussy, fussy, fussy ever since. I finally gave him some baby Tylenol, but he’s so overtired that he’s having trouble falling asleep. We started nearly a week ago to put him to bed earlier—give him a bath at 6 or 6:30, then feed him and put him to bed with the light dimmed all the way down and some lullaby music on, but he just hasn’t been going for it. Every night we’ve given up after two or three hours of his crying (between our trips in to soothe him) and lain down with him, but we know that to make it work we have to just let him cry. Tonight I’m willing to do that because it’s Valentine’s Day and because he’s tired enough that if we don’t let him cry, he’ll be extremely fussy all evening. Poor guy.

In other news, he’s getting big! He’s 11 lbs 10 oz now, which means he has risen from 30th percentile to 50th percentile in weight for his age. He’s doing great, the doctor said at his two-month checkup today. And he’s “not the easiest baby,” she observed after he screamed, then smiled and cooed, then screamed, then smiled again, all over the course of two minutes.

We had our fourth annual wine party Saturday night, and I’ll upload a picture when I get around to it. We always have a difficult time coming up with a “theme” for the wine tasting. Someone suggested we do all Pinots this year—all different kinds or from all different regions—but not everyone likes Pinots. It’s difficult to choose a theme that is narrow enough to compare wines but broad enough that everyone will find something they like. Last year we had some whites, but it wasn’t much of a comparison with one of every varietal (of red and white). This year, we had all French reds under $20, and because you can’t get a Bordeaux or a Burgundy for under $20 (at least not at Kermit Lynch), we had five Grenache/Syrah blends, one Beaujolais, one Cabernet Franc and one “Tannat,” which I’d never heard of, and one Muscat. That way the blends could be compared, but there were still a few others to taste as well. And yet I wasn’t totally satisfied. I want to do a tasting where EVERY wine is amazing—where they’re all different, but all good, and I didn’t like the Beaujolais or Cab Franc at all. My favorite was number 3, a grenche/syrah from Vaucluse called Pigeoulet en Provence. My second favorite was number 7 (thanks Jon), Podio Alto, and my third was the $2.50 Searidge Syrah Martin stuck in as a spoiler. I really think next year we should do a “high/low” tasting and get a relatively expensive ($25-$30) and inexpensive (under $10) bottle of each varietal and just do four varietals. I think we should rate the cheeses, too. This was the first year I stood in line at Cheeseboard for 30 minutes and got some really yummy cheese—one goat, one sheep, one cow and one blue. The blue was the most popular, a Montagnolo from Germany, but they were all delicious. God, I love cheese. Too bad I’m avoiding it on my Weight Watchers diet (which I completely blew on Saturday, by the way. I lost seven pounds the first three weeks, then lost and regained another pound this week.)