idonotlikepeas, posts by tag: work - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Been a while since I posted. I'll try to summarize events.

Willow has been learning to see and move her arms and so on. This is a fascinating process to watch. Also, it's incredibly cute. We're experiencing the stereotypical baby things: crying, diaper changing, and feeding.

Theoretically, there are four possible things that can cause crying in infants: hunger, discomfort, fear, and need for attention. What we've discovered is that, about 95% of the time, it's hunger. It didn't take long to figure out which of her screams meant what, either, so there's not very much guessing right now. The hunger one sounds like a foghorn; it rises and falls and is very regular. It goes "Wah! Wah! Wah! ". The fear cry is a single shrill wail that tends to have no preamble and no postscript. (Once, I sneezed near her while she was asleep. She woke up, screamed once, then immediately went back to sleep.) The attention cries sound like she asking a question, and tend to be more variable in duration than the hunger cries. (So: "Weeeh? Waah? Weeeeeeh! Waaah?") I'm a bit less clear on the distinguishing features of the discomfort crying, because the main cause of that is dirty diapers and so far we've generally managed to change her before it became uncomfortable enough to make her cry. There's also a sort of ur-cry, which she falls back on if any of the above situations are left alone too long. This one involves a continuous output of shrieking with no pauses and always causes her head to turn bright red. It would be funny if it weren't so frightening.

Diaper changing isn't bad. I can honestly say I don't notice any smell, and I've gotten crap all over my hands with no stronger reaction than "Well, nuts." In fact, the first time we changed her diaper, she crapped all over the changing table, and my first thought was "that was so cute!" I have to assume that there are some kind of scary brain-chemicals being released to surpress our normal reactions here.

Feeding is a bit problematic just now. She always seems to be hungry, which may have something to do with the fact that she spits up a lot. (And also that she should be going through a growth spurt right now, but it's been going on long enough to make me think it's not a growth spurt.) Google informs me that the spitup is normal and there's probably nothing we can or ought to do about it. We'll probably be talking about it with the Ped when we go see her Friday.

Aside from that stuff, and the anxiety about the upcoming hearing check, everything is going well with the baby. She's growing constantly, and seems to be a healthy color, and is curious about things. Plus she hauls her way up my chest by grabbing onto my chest hair and pulling it out.

In the non-baby areas: Got the results of my yearly evaluation - they gave me a raise! This is good. Also, we bought Star Wars Galaxies and I've spent some time pretending to be a fish-guy. So we have that going on.

Current Mood: okay

Current Music: The Thing That Should Not Let it Be (Beatallica)