The baby has found her hands.
Five-pronged flying saucers that hover in front of her face.
She gets very still when they come into view, fascinated by these UFOs.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? I'll taste it and find out...
Jennifer Margulis
Mothering Outside the Lines
Leone’s Hands
February 5th, 2010Tags: baby hands, infant, UFOs
[ 4 comments ]
The Baby is Three Months Old Today
February 4th, 2010
Baby Leone is three months old today.
Three months already but it feels like she was just born.
She likes to gurgle, look at her hands, and she has almost found her toes.
She’s social and she smiles a lot but beware the friendly soul who wants to hold her: she almost immediately starts to cry with people she doesn’t know.
I think she can tell by the way that they smell that they’re not me, or her dad, or her siblings.
One of the only times she didn’t cry right away was when the PBS producer, Kate McMahon, held her. Kate is a lactating mom (she has an almost 12-month-old) so she probably smelled familiar to Leone, like breast milk.
The baby is also an expert drooler and an expert spitter-upper.
Only, the spit up, now that she’s so grown-up, no longer happens right after she nurses. Since it’s not fresh, it comes out curdled, like yogurt.
The drool and the spit-up get into the folds of fat around her neck, which smell yeasty, like baking bread. It’s so hard to get to her neck to clean it. The drool keeps it wet and the fat keeps it warm, so some of the skin in there looks red and irritated.
Her belly button is also irritated. At Baby Yoga on Monday I noticed it smelled funny, like fish. We cleaned it and put some golden seal powder on it and it seems to be better.
She’s such a calm, patient baby. Etani and Hesperus were that way too. I know it’s no prediction of her future personality so I have to remind myself to enjoy the quiet and serenity for as long as it lasts.
Happy three month birthday Baby!
Photo by Christopher Briscoe
Tags: drool, infant, infant care, neck fat, spit up, stranger anxiety, three months old
[ 8 comments ]
Misses and Catches
January 28th, 2010
This happy cloth-diapered baby does all of her poop and most of her pee in the potty!
“Catches” are when you catch a baby’s pee or poop in a potty, chamber pot, or toilet.
“Misses” are when you miss the cues your baby is trying to give you and the pee ends up on you or the floor.
Elimination Communication (EC) works two ways: The baby signals that she has to go. She may flail, fidget, vocalize, get still and look away, grunt, or squirm.
At the same time, you teach her to associate a sound with peeing and another with pooping. Every time she hears those sounds she knows to relax her sphincter muscles.
So far it’s been gleefully easy to catch the poops. For three weeks Leone did not soil a single diaper. (Unfortunately, she poops almost every morning between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. I hold her over the chamber pot in a state of bleary eyed exhaustion. She poops and goes back to sleep. I don’t.)
Then the other day she started squirming and grunting at dinner. We had just sat down to eat after an exhausting day of everyone being ten different places. Leone was on my lap–VOLCANIC ERUPTION–and pooped before I could get her diaper off.
It’s harder to catch the pees.
Partly because in the morning she pees three or four times an hour, or maybe even more. Also I find myself less sure when she needs to pee. When I hold her over the pot at the wrong time and she fidgets and protests, I take her off immediately. But then I feel badly for bothering her and after that happens I’m less likely to hold her over when she’s trying to tell me she needs to go.
The big girls didn’t have school today. So Hesperus, Athena, Leone, and I spent the morning at Etani’s kindergarten teaching the kinders how to play card games. Twice I felt Leone needed to pee. Both times I took her to the bathroom and she peed as soon as I held her over the toilet and made the cueing sound (”PSSST”). But she also managed to wet two cloth diapers in the midst of the kinder chaos.
The morning’s tally: Catches: 2; Wet diapers: 2; Misses: 0.
Related posts:
Only One Wet Diaper
Morning Diary of Baby Leone at Two Months
More on Infant Pottying
The Incredible Pooping Baby; or, Leone Uses Her Chamber Pot
Tags: catches, EC, elimination communication, infant, infant care, infant pottying, misses
[ 5 comments ]
Seven Weeks Old Today
December 23rd, 2009
It’s hard to believe that Leone, who is sleeping peacefully on the bed as I write this, is seven weeks old today.
Part of me will never forgive my children for growing up so fast.
Ten-year-old Hesperus’s legs are so long that she can barely sit on my lap. She experiments with rolling her eyes, looks at me and says, “Uh, duh, Mom!”, and sometimes even shrugs off my hugs. Now that she’s 10 going on 14 we have a new way of spending time together. We rent the trashy movies I loved as a kid, musicals like “Footloose,” “Fame,” and “The Turning Point,” to watch secretly together. Hesperus tries to keep the bed from squeaking as she climbs quietly down from the top bunk and sneaks out of the room she shares with Athena and Etani. Then she tiptoes into the living room and we snuggle on the couch. With my oldest daughter, hugs and cuddles are out. John Travolta when he was trim and wearing polyester and his dancing sent a shiver down America’s spine, is in.
Perhaps it’s because Leone is our last baby, but I feel a keen desire for things to slow down. I remember charting every milestone with Hesperus, calling my dad eager for the information he couldn’t remember about when I could lift my head up, when I learned to roll over, when I said my first word. I looked forward to the day when she would talk in full sentences, take herself to the potty, and sleep through the night. But with Leone I’m not interested in reading books about baby development to see how she measures up. I don’t need her to learn to nap outside of my arms. I don’t want her eyes to change to their permanent color.
Yet, like all good children, she defies me. She coos now and likes a good conversation. “A-bu,” she says. “Haya.” These past few days she’s barely been fussing before settling down for nighttime sleep, and she’s outgrown almost all the 0-3 month clothes we have for her. Our size small Bumpkin cloth diapers barely fit. She’s even sprouting new hair.
I went to a La Leche League meeting last Thursday and there was a 2-week-old baby there. That baby was so tiny. Leone looked like a football player beside him.
Happy seven weeks Leone. I love you. But will you please slow down?
Cartoon courtesy of Heather Dowdee-Cushman.
Tags: growing up, infant, milestones, renting musicals, seven weeks old, time passing
[ 8 comments ]
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