Sleep with one eye open

OK, I give up. Since I've been home now for nearly 10 weeks with BabyT, I really don't have much of a non-baby-related life to write about. So excuse my descent into "all baby, all the time" posting. Sigh. I didn't want to become *that* person. I'll try not to be that annoying in person. At least with the blog, you can choose not to read it.

T is a pretty mellow baby (and I knock on wood every time I say this!), and we've been grateful. Around 4 weeks, she started the Period of Evening Wretchedness, which started around 7 and ended at 9 or 10 when she'd go to sleep. This is pretty common, it seems, and is known as the newborn "witching hour". Fortunately, she'd only get this way about 50% of evenings or less, so I did think it might be something we were doing/not doing to cause this.

Having been trained as scientists and engineers, TJ and I naturally look for cause/effect and solutions. I'm thinking this doesn't always work with babies - they seem to have their own reasons for doing thing, not all of which are easily discernible or predictable.

Anyway, the Evening Wretchedness was supposed to peak around 6-8 weeks and get better after that. I sort of noticed that she seemed to be fussy on days where she didn't sleep much during the day, but wasn't really tracking sleep vs. wretchedness.

Until last week, when we had a particularly awful day where BabyT napped for 1 hour the entire day, had a long period of Evening Wretchedness and then woke up twice at night. Except for her first 2 weeks at home, she *never* woke up more than once to eat at night. That was a bad night for us, and a bad next day for me. (I do not handle limited sleep very well.)

So I put out a request to my "Caltech alumni parents" mailing list to find out what other people did regarding naps and tiny babies since all the "expert advice" seems to say not to do anything with a schedule for 3-4 months.

I got some good information back, most notably, that if I get her to sleep more during the day, she'll sleep more at night and that if we put her to bed earlier she'd probably sleep longer at night as well. The biggest thing was to look for her "tired signs" like eye-rubbing, baby zombie eye, and yawning and then try to put her in the crib.

So for the past 4-5 days, I've been tracking her sleep on my handy iPod, using the awesome TotalBaby application, to see if there are any patterns. We've also been trying to get her to sleep before 9:30pm, and during the day, I try to get her to nap if she's been awake for 3 hours.

And OMG. I thought our girl was sleeping great already - 7 hours of sleep a night, plus another nap of 2-3 hours in the morning is pretty awesome at 9 weeks, and she's been doing that for a few weeks now, waking up to eat once about 50% of the nights. We thought we had won the baby lottery. (I'm sure that we have.) So I was skeptical that we could really make things better, though I was really hoping to avoid tired Evening Wretchedness.

Guess what, for the past four nights, she slept 10-11 hours and didn't wake up to eat(!!!) Of course, babies are unpredictable and things will change, but this is amazing. She also takes about 3-ish naps during the day, for 45 min to 2 hours. And there has been no Wretchedness.

But of course, this is a work in progress. Today she and I went out to Redmond Town Center, an outdoor mall, that also has a nice walking trail behind it. We started our walk on the trail and then walked for a while in the mall portion. She napped on and off in the stroller, but I think that threw off her sleeping chi.

Once we got home, she alternated eating and sleeping for the next couple of hours, and it has been pretty difficult to get her to sleep. Here we are around 10pm, and I think she just fell asleep. So it remains to be seen what happens tonight. I've got my fingers crossed that it'll be an uneventful night, and that she might even get 10 hours of sleep, but who knows? These babies, so unpredictable!

And of course, another cute baby picture. Baby Eeyore is sometimes happy!



We got this outfit in the giant bag of baby clothes I bought from someone on Craigslist. I wish I had remembered it at Halloween, but with a baby, it's never too late to play dress-up!

And then she'll surprise you

There are days where I wake up and my previous life seems completely foreign to me. You mean I used to have hours of uninterrupted time to work on my own projects? I used to go to work and attend meetings with other people? I could just dash out to the store or make plans for lunch based on just *my* schedule?

So, 9 weeks into my maternity leave, I'm fully immersed in the "stay-home mama" life. The most surprising thing? I am enjoying it. I feel so much more calm and zen than when I was working, and had tons of appointments/errands/projects going on at the same time.

That doesn't work now because BabyT runs my schedule. When she's hungry, she gets to eat. And sometimes it's every hour. Sometimes she naps for 4 hours between feedings. But the thing is, I never know how long it's going to be, so I always have to be ready to drop what I'm doing to attend to her.

At first this was hard for me. Especially at 3am. But once I stopped *worrying* about when the next feeding would be, it got so much better. I just take it as it comes. We have a webcam pointed at the crib so I can be somewhere else in the house and see if she's still asleep. Maybe I'll have 2 hours, maybe only 45 min. And that's ok.

I've started making a short list of items I want to get done in a given day. If I can get those things done, then I'm doing well. My expectations are so much lower than when I was working. If I can get a load of laundry done and put away, and get a shower, and maybe answer some email, that's a great day for me. Again, it took some getting used to. But now, I love it. I feel calm like I never did before.

With some trepidation, I reopened my Etsy and 1000 Markets shops to custom orders a few weeks ago. Of course it took a while to get orders again after being closed for a few months. But now I have several open orders - yay! I get to be crafty again, which is great. But I have to segment my work into the times between feedings, when BabyT is napping. That's teaching me to be more efficient and waste less time.

And with that, I leave you with a calming picture of Peaceful Sleeping Baby:

It's only natural

Happy Daylight Savings Time! Unfortunately babies don't know about clocks so we were up at 6am today. Which isn't entirely a bad thing since the Chublet went to bed last night around 9 and didn't get up to eat in the middle of the night. This has been going on for 3 nights in a row now so I feel like a normal person who gets to sleep at night. Woo hoo!

And speaking of eating, I am proud to say I have made it to 6 weeks of breastfeeding the Chublet. My first goal was a month. Well, actually, it was a week, then a month. My next goal is to make it to 2 months. (When I think about the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of a year, it makes me want to crawl into bed and not come out.)

Even though the Great Breastfeeding Propaganda Machine doesn't ever mention the sheer suckitude of it, I had enough honest friends to know that it was going to be rough. And fortunately, for us it wasn't as bad as other people have had it. But it still sucked (pun intended). And honestly, I still don't love it.

It's not that beautiful soft-focus bonding moment between baby and mama. It's boring. It takes a long time, several times a day (and sometimes at night). At first, I was spending 4 hours a day feeding her. Now we're down to 2-2.5 hours. And I know this because I keep track. So I know whether I have time to shower/eat/nap before the next time Angry Chublet demands food.

Chublet usually has her eyes closed so it's not like I can gaze lovingly at her while she eats. Plus, did I mention it's boring? On the bright side, my Internet-connected iPod Touch has saved me. I am up to date on everyone on Facebook, I can Tweet, and I have the complete New York Times electronically. So I'm more or less up on current events. That NYT app is phenomenal. And free. I've watched the first 2 seasons of The West Wing on DVD. And the first season of Gilmore Girls (I know, guilty pleasure.)

I guess what annoys me most is the major propaganda. Starting when I was pregnant, complete strangers would ask if I planned to breastfeed. As if it was their business. If you read any of the "helpful" websites, which admittedly I have consulted with questions, they all beat you over the head about how amazing it is, and how it is the BEST way. And that pacifiers are the devil and will screw everything up. As will feeding from a bottle, even if it is breast milk. And of course, formula is like poison. And the answer to nearly every question is "nurse more often". Which doesn't always work, especially in the early weeks when you JUST CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE and your baby is doing that horrific screaming that just rips your heart out.

Reading all that has a nice way of making sleep-deprived new mamas a little crazy and a lot guilty for doing any of the above to maintain peace/sanity/baby weight in their house. I HATE this. Nearly as much as I hate the sites/books that tell you that it's bad for your baby if you opt for drugs during childbirth. As per my previous post on baby care/parenting books, is it really so hard to provide information without being preachy?? And if I hear the phrase "nature's perfect food" again, I'm going to slap that person too.

I am happy to say I no longer dread feeding time. Chublet has obviously figured out how to make it work for her, since she gained 3 lbs in her first month. And it doesn't hurt anymore, mostly. But it's still weird, having to chop my day into 2.5-3 hour intervals. And figuring out what I can wear to easily feed her in the middle of said fragmented day. And don't even ask about the weirdness involved in using the pump to store milk for bottle feedings. Though convenient, it's just strange.

I know, I'm a horrible mother for not loving this. And when she's 16 and we're waiting up for her to come home from an evening out, I'll look back fondly at the time when my baby was with me 24/7.

Of course, when my baby wins a Nobel Prize, I'll be glad, because of course, it was the breastfeeding that was responsible for that. *snicker*

What's my name?

A few weeks ago someone suggested I post a Baby FAQ to answer the question of how we came up with Trillian's name.

The short answer is a kickass female character in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. But though we both like the books (I confess I haven't read all of them yet, only the first 2), we aren't major obsessive fans or anything.

The long answer is that it took us nearly 9 months to decide on a name for sure. TJ and I had wildly different opinions on what sorts of names we liked. And of course, one of the more fun things to do to get ready for a baby is to go through the name possibilities. So we started early with a spreadsheet. of course. We'd each add names to it when we came across something we liked. There was a column for each of us to make comments.

Oddly enough, we had 2 boys' names we liked pretty quickly though we each had a different one as our top pick. Actually, my top pick was relegated to #3 but I liked my #2 enough to give up #3. I suppose we will never have a child named Xavier. Then he really would be BabyX, right??

In all honesty, after last night's awake-fest by Trillian at 3am, I am not at all inclined to consider having any more babies. Heh.

Once we found out we were having a girl, we got a little more serious about the names, though being a planner, I was glad we had backup boys' names as well. One of my fears was that the ultrasounds were wrong and she really was a boy.

There are a zillion baby naming websites, and my mother brought me a hefty book of Indian names so we had plenty of resources.

But of course, it wasn't that easy. Everything I liked, TJ hated. He didn't care for names with "too many vowels" or that sounded too "girly". That rules out quite a lot. (Never mind we were trying to name a GIRL.) We also both agreed on not wanting to choose a name that had obvious nicknames.

I had some notion of trying to find a name that was both an Indian and American name, or at least easily/obviously pronounceable from the spelling, but all of the Indian "crossover" names were just way too popular, in my opinion, and several of those names belong to people (or dogs!) I know, so that would have just been weird.

So we were kind of stuck for a while with some choices that we both felt "bleh" about and nothing that really felt right. I was waiting for that "hell yeah, that's it!!" moment when we came across a name. And in my ideal world, it would have some sort of meaning that resonated with us, or some kind of relevance to our lives. A tall order for a name, and for two opinionated people to agree on.

So a few months went by, and I spent hours poring over lists of names. I added some to the spreadsheet. One day, TJ suggested a name that nearly knocked me off my chair. I had always liked it but somehow hadn't thought of it, or come across it in my search. That ended up being our #2 choice though I waffled for a long time between that one and Trillian.

Trillian came up because TJ was rereading "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which had been on his bedside table for months. One day he just said "What do you think about Trillian?" And that was IT - the name I had been waiting for.

I liked the names Lillian and Jillian, neither of which he particularly liked, so Trillian was perfect, because it is also much less common than those two, which are rapidly climbing the lists of popular names. It also doesn't have an automatic nickname like the other two, so bonus points for that. And no, you can't call her Trilly. Really, I mean it.

The other thing that's cool is that there's a cut of diamond called "trillian", kind of a cool triangle shape. Technically I think it's supposed to be "trilliant" but a lot of places refer to it as "trillian". Since I am a jewelry-making addict, this was another layer of coolness to this name.

Also, the general geekiness of it as a sci-fi reference was kind of neat to me, but also concerned me a little. We're not the kind of people that go to Star Trek conventions or quote movie lines from Star Wars so I didn't want to inflict that on my kid. But I think the reference is obscure enough that not everyone will know where it comes from - judging from the number of people that ask me how we came up with it, I think that's pretty accurate.

Oh, and another layer of complexity - there's an Instant Messenger client called Trillian. Which wouldn't matter, except that TJ works on IM technology. So we thought some people might think that was odd. So far no one has said anything about that, so I think we're in the clear.

Her middle name was a little easier to narrow down once we got the first names down to just 2. We had to eliminate any names where the initials would spell something odd, and eliminated anything that was too "rhymy" or just sounded awkward with Trillian on one end and Creath on the other. I had a bunch of 2 syllable Indian girls' names from my mom and some websites, but my favorite for a long time has been Mira. Most Indians spell it with 2 e's (Meera) but I like it better with an I, because I'm contrary like that.

Also, I think in some European languages (including Russian), the root word is "mir" which means peace. And I dig that too. Plus it meets the criteria of easy to pronounce and not confusing when you see how it's spelled. And as it turns out, there's a science geeky angle to Mira as well, though that was not a consideration for us.

My friend Jasmine pointed out another really neat thing about her name, one that neither TJ nor I picked up on. Within "Trillian Mira" are the letters for Raman, my maiden name. Pretty cool, huh?

So there you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about how we named Baby Raptor. Oh, and in case you're wondering about the nickname, it's because she makes some crazy noises that sound just like the baby raptors in the Jurassic Park movie - squeaking and honking. I had no idea babies were that noisy. (Apart from the crying, of course.)

In the desert of my dreams I saw you there

OK, so I'll try not to turn this into a "mommy blog" because I know no one wants to read tons of posts about the mundane details about somebody else's kid, but of course I can't avoid the subject entirely, being completely taken over by this new person in our house.

So on Friday Sept 18, on a bright sunny afternoon in Bellevue, Trillian Mira made her debut to the outside world. I honestly *could not* have asked for a better experience.

We had a choice to make a few days before that, about whether we wanted to induce labor, or schedule a C section, since her fluid levels were fluctuating, and it was safer for her to be delivered than stay in. I was not at all attached to the idea of a natural childbirth, and in fact, spent a good deal of my pregnancy being terrified of what was going to happen at the end. I wanted quick, painless, and preferably to not have to be there at all :)

So when my fabulous doctor said she definitely saw medical reasons to do a scheduled C-section, I jumped on board right away. I'm a planner, and oftentimes the anticipation of something bad is worse than the actual event. So we set up our appointment for Friday and went on our merry way. Well, I did. TJ stressed out about it for the 2.5 days, enough for both of us.

We had to get to the hospital a couple of hours early and of course we were a bit late because I couldn't sleep much the night before. After getting shuffled around between buildings due to the various remodeling projects we ended up in the pre-op prep room. At about that time, I decided I didn't like it at the hospital, and wondered if we could just go home. Side note: I've never been in the hospital for *anything*, except to visit other people, so being the patient was weird. TJ, having injured himself many times, was a big help in keeping me calm.

So they did the usual stuff - got the IV hooked up (yuck), took lots of blood pressure readings and blood samples, and the anesthesiologist and my doc and the assisting doc all came by to talk to us before the procedure. Of course, at this point I was internally freaking out, but time has a way of moving along so it was time to go into the OR.

And let me say, that the OR was nothing like Grey's Anatomy. It was *very* brightly lit, unlike at Seattle Grace, where I'm amazed any of the surgeons can see enough to get things done. And there was a ton of stuff in there - coolers with meds, chairs, stools, tables with instruments. It almost looked like a very clean storage room for tons of medical stuff just lying around in random places. I'm sure there was an order to it, of course.

I won't go into the gory details here, mostly because I didn't have any idea what was going on myself. TJ and I specifically asked all of the doctors *not* to give us the play-by-play of what they were doing because we're both horribly squeamish. Oh, and I should back up, for those who don't know, they do a standard C-section delivery with a spinal block, meaning I was numb from about the chest down. Which means I was awake during the whole thing. I tried not to dwell on that before the surgery, hence our request to *not* have the play by play analysis.

The doctors were amazing. The anesthesiologist was about our age, and 36 weeks pregnant, and she was friendly, and gentle, and calm and patient even when I couldn't get relaxed enough for her to do her job easily. That was the roughest part - for her to get the anesthetic in the right spot.

During the procedure, TJ sat next to me and we talked. About what, I don't really remember, but it was a nice distraction. The doctors were working behind a curtain and talking amongst themselves about random stuff, which oddly, made me feel much better because it seemed like this was a normal, routine, procedure. I really did not feel anything, which was GREAT.

And then my doctor announced they were ready to get the baby out (woo hoo!) and we heard that first cry. You always see this moment on TV and everyone gets weepy, and I'm cynical and not particularly sentimental, so I figured it would be no big deal. But I took one look at TJ and got all weepy. In fact I'm a little weepy now just thinking about it (of course, that might be the hormones, too.) They did confirm she was a girl, and I gave silent thanks that we would not have to buy a whole new wardrobe or repaint her room.

At this point I need to give a shout out to the delivery nurses as well - it was brilliant to watch the efficient, practied, expert way they handled my baby, got her cleaned up, and made sure she was healthy in those first few minutes. One of them even took all the early pictures for us, for which we are really grateful.

And the cool thing is that they do all the baby prep (is it like dealer prep when you buy a new car??) so that TJ and I could watch it, which is a nice distraction again from the rest of the surgery. I think the second half was actually longer, but we barely noticed because we were just watching our baby get ready for the world.

My doctor informed me that I had "abs of steel", which I guess I should be pleased about if I can ever get that nice flabby cushion out of the way for anyone to see them ;)


We hung out in the recovery room for a while with our new baby while various people came in and checked on both her and me, and eventually were taken to our "real" room for the rest of the weekend. Again, I was really impressed and thankful for all of the amazing nurses who took care of us. Clearly they love babies, and were so patient with our dumb questions, and spent lots of time educating us on how to feed and take care of this new little person, and how I could speed up my recovery. I am sure that we would not have gotten such a good start without all of these amazing women around to help us out. It was very tiring to be woken up every hour or two for vital sign checks, pills, and feedings, but I definitely think it's the reason I feel so good now.

So here we are, new parents for 5 days. We're pretty lucky because Trillian sleeps for 2-3 hours at a stretch, and has only had a few loooong crying episodes, both of which were fabulously handled by her daddy who seems to have the secret baby juju. He's also a much better baby burrito-maker than I am.

So there it is. More later once Princess SnuffleFlower has eaten and gone back to sleep. Everything gets done in tiny blocks of time around here.