My funny valentine

Isabel received two Valentine's Day cards this week, one from grandparents, another from great-grandparents. Both of them read "For your 1st Valentine's Day!" Is this child going to be spoiled or what?

I'll let the grandparents spoil her a bit, especially since they were so kind as to babysit for us Tuesday night so the Webhamster and I could enjoy a romantic Valentine's Day evening together, even though we chose to stay at home. For five-and-a-half hours, we were able to cook an elaborate Thai meal, indulge in a bottle of champagne and incredibly delicious raspberry cream cake, and watch two movies without interruption.

Vampire Baby

In 11 hours, Isabel will officially be three weeks old. Webhamster remarked today that it simultaneously seems like much longer and much shorter. For my part, I wonder, "where have three weeks gone?" It's been a blur of diapering, feeding, cleaning up spit-up, and changing clothes (mine and hers).

Webhamster is referring to nights of being up for two or three hours with a baby that doesn't want to sleep and often wants to cluster feed several times in a few short hours. She either wants Dad to walk around holding her (and don't even think about sitting to take a break, or it's all howls, Mister!) or she starts sucking on anything her mouth touches, whether it's Dad's shoulder or neck or just the air. Then, she is brought back to the teat. She's like a little vampire, up half the night with a need to feed. Eventually, she is consoled, lulled into a milk drunk sleep.

Fortunately, those nights are decreasing in frequency. We're down to about every other night or so now.

At only three weeks old, we can't really expect Isabel to be sleeping through the nights, but getting up only once during the night and then going back to sleep within an hour would be nice. We've been getting more and longer periods of uninterrupted sleep. Last night, I went to bed at 10:15. She woke at 4:00 for a clean diaper and feeding. At 5:00, we were back asleep until 7:15. Hooray! Of course, prior to going to bed, she was alert and alternating between crying and cooing for four hours. I'm sure that was a factor. The key is getting an active period before bedtime.

Shaking Dad's Hand

Baby Isabel has developed an amazing talent for shaking Dad's hand. It's not in the traditional sense of two hands shaking each other but more her furiously shaking the hand that is usually cradling her undercarriage. We're suspecting the problem is being exacerbated by mom's vegetarian diet but don't know how to handle a baby that makes noises that would make many fully grown men blush with juvenile pride.

I've been given some suggestions of medicines we can consider and we might have to rethink mom's diet a bit. Until then, our little daughter is constantly making the soundtrack to her own Farrelly Brothers movie. I've already had multiple occasions where people actually thought I was trying to pass the noise off on my newborn daughter.