Weight

I never understood the big deal with these things until now.

Lyla has a doctor appointment on Friday. I think she's getting bigger, and Julie really hopes she's getting bigger. My main concern about this appointment is that the doctor or nurse will say something condescending like, "Well, do you think you're feeding her enough?" All Julie ever does is feed her, so if Lyla's not at least back up to her birth weight, then Julie's going to feel like it's her fault.

But it'll be fine. She must be gaining weight because she's eating and pooping. End of story. Still, the real peace of mind will come when the doctor confirms normalcy. I keep offering to take Lyla to the grocery store and plop her onto one of those deli scales to see if she's making adequate progress. I could also take her to the post office, but people might get the wrong idea.

Anyway, I've been coaching Lyla on how to respond should anyone ever act snarky toward her mother.

Public

Saturdays have a whole new significance now. Last week was a bit of a slog, trying to get back into the swing of teaching while simultaneously wanting only to be home. I don't like to miss out, although I'm happy that Julie is enjoying her time away from Corporate America and, let's be honest, her daily breaks from me. As for when we're both home, Lyla is becoming more portable now, having spent the past two weeks of flu season ingesting antibodies through her mother's milk. Now we can take her into public without feeling like bad parents.

It's good for Julie, whose first reaction to civilization was to gasp at the low gas prices.

Lyla seems destined to be a socialite. She's got the fashion sense, anyway.


Yesterday we took her to Starbucks, blanket covering the car-seat until we determined there were no mouth-breathers in our vicinity. Later that night we found ourselves at Perkins for pie with a couple friends. Lyla slept through it but commented later that we should patronize fewer chains.

Today I'm planning on sticking around the house. Julie's going shopping with her sister, and I have a stack of movies, two dogs, a bottle of milk, and a baby with miniscule toes to keep me company.

Club

The book is included for size comparison. Lyla is like a large loaf of bread.

I have been inducted, christened if you will, into the prestigious club whose members include new dads and college students with drunken, top-bunk roommates. I have been peed on.

After Lyla's bath last night, I held her lovingly to my chest and dried her with a fluffy towel. She seemed so peaceful, so relaxed. Suddenly a pleasant warmth licked against my stomach. My first thought was, hmm, that feels nice. My second thought was, oh, I am a fire hydrant.

When you were little (okay, 16) and your "friends" dipped your hand in warm water at your birthday sleepover and caused you to whiz in your sleeping bag, the same scientific principles were at work. Warm water causes sphincter relaxation. And when you're holding a warm, wet two-week-old, whose sphincter is lazier than the laziest man in Los Angeles County, you'd better have a raincoat on.

In truth, I'm proud it happened. I didn't find it revolting, and I wasn't even slightly upset or annoyed. You see, Lyla is the one who now belongs to the prestigious club, not me. The club is impossibly elite, and you'll never get in. It's the club of people I love so profoundly that they can piss all over me and I don't even care.

Break

Julie is thrilled to be able to zip her hoodie again. Late in the pregnancy, she could pull it about to where her ribs met her armpits.

I'm going to try to get Julie out of the house for awhile this weekend. Lyla is two weeks old today, and Julie hasn't been anywhere without her since conception. She feels quite the weight of motherly responsibility, I think, what with the whole feeding source thing. If Lyla doesn't make the right weight at next Friday's doctor appointment, Julie will take it personally. It's like she's Lyla's wrestling coach.

That's a lot to take on. Julie started to pump recently, and I actually fed Lyla her first ounces of bottle milk yesterday. Talk about power. I thought to myself, Lyla is eating now, and I am the reason why. I'm sure it's ten times as powerful if your nerps are where the food comes from. Really, dads with bottles are just posers.

But it might do Julie some good to go to the mall for an hour and get away from the immediacy of motherhood. As long as I have a bottle or two, I'll be fine. Domestic or imported, it doesn't matter.

Just kidding, I mean a bottle or two of milk for Lyla. 'Cause I can handle taking care of her by myself. I can. Maybe I'll have my mom over, and Julie can leave for like 45 minutes or 30 minutes or so. Maybe 15 minutes to pick up the pictures at Walgreen's and come right back.

Maybe we can both go out and leave Daisy to babysit.

Pat

Daddy's thumb is Lyla's new favorite toy. Christmas is going to be so easy.

We haven't mastered the whole spitting-up skill yet. After a feeding, Julie or I drape Lyla over a shoulder with a towel underneath and pat her back. She's supposed to barf regurgitated breast milk into the towel, right? Well, generally she just sits there. The barfing comes later when it's less convenient for everyone.

Last night at 2:00 AM, Lyla addressed us from her bassinet. She was so irate that it was impossible to discern what she was saying. I rose to investigate and found her floating in a pool of her own blurp. I hauled Ms. Drippy to the nursery and rooted through the top dresser drawer for a newborn nightie. Why we have the newborn stuff mixed with the three-month stuff is beyond me. It's hard enough to find what you need when it's not the middle of the night.

One nightie, one bassinet sheet, and one swaddled, dry baby later, sleep returned. We're slowly getting Lyla to sleep on our terms; now it's time to get her to spit up on our terms. Maybe when she's a bit older and has more ways to entertain herself beyond holding my thumb, she'll stop saving her blurp for when she's bored and wants some action.

By the way, Julie rejected this as our Christmas photo:

Schedule

I feel bad posting this picture because it's so eat-your-face cute. It's not even fair. See, Lyla is cute all by herself; she doesn't need the help of other cute things like stuffed animals or Goodyear tires.

It's like when a funny sit-com has an unnecessary laugh track. Seinfeld didn't need the laugh track in order to be funny. A show like Friends, now that's a different story. Without the laugh track, America wouldn't have known what was supposed to be funny. Likewise, if Lyla was an aesthetically undeveloped baby, those stuffed animals might be helpful. "Oh, a cute baby!" you'd think, while subconsciously thinking "Stuffed animals are cute!" When you watched Friends it was "Ha ha! Ross is so quirky!" when really you were only laughing along with the laugh track.

Lyla's proximity to stuffed animals just creates a cuteness redundancy. And so far, like Seinfeld, this has been a blog post about nothing. Maybe I should get a laugh track.

We all slept much better last night. I hopped into bed at 8:45, dead from the previous night. Julie and Lyla, relatively rested from sleeping in, stayed up (doing each others' hair, gossiping about boys, etc.) until 2:00ish. We all woke up around 5:00, when Lyla wanted a milk shake. I got ready for school, and the girls went back to sleep until around 8:00 and took naps later. So all in all, it was a much better schedule.

Question is, was last night the start of a routine, or will sleeplessness be the routine with last night as an exception? We'll see. But as of now, morale and energy are high.

Backwards

It's high time that I start adjusting my sleep to Lyla's schedule. Before last night, I figured that with a little practice, Lyla would sleep at night when we did. But Julie has a sneaky recessive gene somewhere that got passed down to Lyla; it's the backwards sleep gene. Day is night, and night is day.

Lyla is a wonderful, beautiful baby, but clearly in this picture you can see the capacity for nighttime evil.


Last night I slept roughly for two hours. And by "roughly" I mean both approximately and not smoothly.

I've learned that in utero babies sleep when the mom is awake and sing show tunes when the mom sleeps. I wish I would've known this earlier. I would've insisted that Julie become nocturnal during the pregnancy so that when the baby popped out she would be normal. But a nocturnal pregnant lady might have been twice as demanding as a normal pregnant lady...however in retrospect perhaps worth the risk.

Both of us are cognizant of the importance of holding and soothing the screaming 11-day-old. Lyla needs to learn to trust humans, and if we go the "Let her cry" route, then we'll turn her into a soulless pyromaniac by age four. But last night we soothed her until about 3:00 AM. She wasn't sick, and she wasn't really hungry. She was just pissy.

But she was happy as can be today. I got home from school, and we practiced tummy time to build her crawling strength. It didn't work so well, as she was much more interested in resting up for tonight's festivities.