Poo

Still haven't gotten used to using the word "poo" or "poop". I prefer "feces", "shit", "caca", and sometimes..."ass foam."

Four AM

Yeah, Sofi woke me up at three-something with a little fussing and now I'm wide awake for whatever reason.

Hey, where is everybody? I tell you, I stop blogging for a couple weeks and now that I'm back not a single comment? I went back to work, people, I can't spend all my time blogging for you anymore.

Random anecdotes:

After Sofi was born, my chess rating dropped 150 points. What that means is the pre-Sofi Jamie would beat me at chess something like 7 out of 8 games. Mark Nau warned me that babies make you stupid. Here's empirical proof.

A couple weekends ago I decided it was time for Sofi to quit sleeping in our room and make a nursery. I moved the crib halfway, realized it wouldn't fit through the door of the future nursery to be, moved it back to the bedroom and spent the rest of the day watching Babylon 5...constantly interrupted by baby needs, of course. Maybe I'll try again next month.

Funny

Michael Vance AKA "m to the vizzah" AKA "m" is a friend and coworker. He has one daughter, Rebecca, and one wife, Judith. Judith's blog is funnier than mine.

Eight Weeks

Sofi's eight weeks old as of yesterday, and, new record: she went from eleven to seven between feedings last night! Woo!
On the other hand, lately she's been not happy about sleeping in the crib. I read in *Sleeping Through The Night* that co-sleeping can lead to sleep problems later but right now it seems to help her sleep longer.
Let's see, other milestones: we've heard her laugh, we think; she can sort of rub her eyes, sometimes (not sure if she's doing it on purpose or not).
The formula trick, by the way, did seem to help; she started going four-five hours between feedings after a tanking up of formula. BUT...last night we didn't give her any...so we've failed to reject the null hypothesis. (I'm not sure I ever noticed until now that phrase I learned in statistics class is actually a triple negative. Awesome.)

Something Else The Breast Nazis Don't Tell You

Formula makes babies sleep longer. Discovered this reading *Sleeping Through The Night*. And anecdotally, we gave Sofi 4 oz of formula around noon yesterday; at 5 she was in a near-coma. Going to try an experiment, where we give her the formula later, so the coma happens at night. Maybe we'll get a good four hours of straight sleep! I'll let you know how it goes.

Recant

What I said about Ferber a week ago: I've relented. I was weak. I only did it for one morning and then stopped. Cathy never did approve. We're back to being baby slaves, jumping at the first sound of distress. Last night, it felt like it was practically hourly. And I wasn't technically a Ferber baby, either: although mom and dad started skipping my midnight feed after I was just a month old, they did try (although they failed) to soothe me while I cried for the lost meal. They didn't just leave me to cry it out on my own.

So there it is: I'm a bad person, I neglected my baby, and possibly caused her brain damage if you believe what some of the websites say about crying babies.

Oh yeah, and those products I didn't like in my first post? Now we actually use the boppy and the bouncer. (We don't typically use the 'bounce' feature of the bouncer, it's really just a convenient chair, but still.) Shows what I know.

Breast Nazis

I wanted our baby to be breastmilk only, mostly because of second hand, possibly apocryphal things I had heard long ago about the Nestle company killing babies with free samples of formula. The idea is formula is like crack: once a baby tries it, she'll never go back to the boring old breast. The way I heard the story about Nestle was that they'd have a free sample of formula and then never eat from the breast again. (Googling around for it just now I came across this, which makes it sound like the Nestle company is not as evil as I was led to believe.)
So, when we were starving our baby with breastfeeding, I came off high and mighty. "We'd really rather not use any formula," I said. (BTW, I hadn't done the math right and didn't realize just how much weight our baby had lost - I thought it was under 10% but really it was over 15. If we were metric I wouldn't have made the mistake...) Our pediatrician ignored me and gave Sofi some right then and there, and gave us instructions to supplement and to figure out how to actually breastfeed so the baby gets some.
In order to solve our problem we had to pump breast milk. Pumping breast milk is one of the strangest things I've ever seen, like something out of some kind of science fiction S&M movie directed by David Cronenberg. There's nothing natural about it, and it's bizarre how we have to go through this unnatural act in order to finally accomplish something that's supposedly natural. Breastfeeding is cheaper than formula but after what we've spent on pumps and cushions and consultants we may give formula a run for its money.
We also had to use formula. And guess what? Our baby did not take to it like crack. In fact, the first time we tried to give her formula, we couldn't get her to figure out how to drink from the bottle. (Side product-endorsement note: Playtex nipples worked better for our baby than Avent.) When we finally did get her to drink from the bottle, we had no problem getting her to go back to the breast. Right now, we bottle feed her a couple times a day, usually from pumped breast milk but not always, and the rest of the time its breast feeding. I figure she gets about six ounces from the bottle and the remaining eighteen or so from the breast each day.
Which means, thanks to our pediatrician, and despite breast nazis like Dr. Spock and crowd, we've accidentally stumbled on a best-of-both-worlds scenario. Sofi's getting all the nutritional and health advantages of breastfeeding, plus I get to feed Sofi too, plus when Cathy doesn't feel like breastfeeding she doesn't have to, plus we can have babysitters, plus Cathy isn't chained to the baby.

Parenting Class

We went to a parenting class last night, for babies 0 - 6 months. The class was about two minutes of instruction and an hour of singing to our babies. I found the whole thing kind of freaky and disturbing and lame. I think one of two things are going on here:
* I've always wanted to be "cool", too-cool-for-school, the kind of guy who cultivates an "I'm bored with everything" attitude. Campfire songs are lame, organized social events are lame, everything's lame. Now that I'm a father, maybe this is a part of me I have to kill.
* Maybe it really was lame. I looked around: of the twenty or so babies in the class, maybe one or two seemed to enjoy and respond to being sung to. It's as if even the babies thought it was lame. Hey, who knows? Maybe we become too-cool-for-school as a sort of reaction to all this toucy-feely pap we're fed as children.
What's going on here? I'm some kind of pro-Ferber anti-singing parent? Maybe I should change the name of this blog to fathercurmudgeon.

Gas, Food, Diaper

"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? Maybe, if they screamed all the time for no apparent reason." - Jack Handy

A couple of weeks ago I thought we lucked out and got one of those easy babies. She was sleeping five, six hours at a stretch at night, and seemed happy and content during the day. Alas, it was not to last. Lately she'll wake up in under an hour, for whatever reason: gas, food, diaper, "I just want to be held", and seemingly for no reason at all.

Dr. Spock says that when a baby cries we should attend to her: at this stage in her life she needs to be reassured that the world is a safe place. Dr. Ferber - recently made popular in *Meet the Fockers* - says we should let the baby cry, weather the extinction burst (behaviorism term: increase in a behavior when the reinforcing stimuli is removed), because we have been creating the crying ourselves by reinforcing it. Dr. Karp says calm for the first three months, then the rules change.

I wanted to be a follower of Dr. Spock and Karp, I really did, but it's just too exhausting. Plus, I was a Ferber baby, and if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for Sofi. (Although my dad says he still feels guilty about doing it that way.) She's crying right now. And here I am, writing a blog entry instead of attending to her.

Ah, there, she stopped. Self soothing! Yay Ferber.

Nap When Your Baby Naps?

We woke Sofi up for New Year's so we could get a photo of Sofi's first New Year and after a feeding it seemed like she was going to fall right back asleep but - NO! Three hours later she was ready for her next feeding without managing to drift off once, and I stayed up trying to calm and soothe her. At three I handed her off to her mother (who had been sleeping in the guest room) and managed to get some sleep myself. While she was up, I started reading *Sleeping Through The Night*, a gift from my brother and sister-in-law that says that in the first six weeks you really can't control when your baby is going to sleep or not, and the best thing to do is to nap when your baby naps.
I just can't do it. I've tried several times now. Even though I'm very tired, I lie down and try to nap. This last time, just now, I tried counting prime numbers. I made it into the hundreds and realized I didn't know my over-ten multiplication well enough to go any further. So I started going over my over-ten times tables in my head. I hear the neighbors walking overhead. I start stressing: I better get to sleep soon, or the baby's going to wake up before I drift off. I'm like the overtired child who can't get to sleep because she's upset that she's so tired. Eventually I gave up, got up, and wrote this blog entry.
One thing Cathy and I do that does work is spell each other: every couple nights one of us will let the other sleep in the guest room while they do all the baby-tending. So we manage to get a good night sleep out of every four or five.

Baby Books

I'm a big reader. Any time I need to undertake a new project, be it developing software or cooking a turkey or whatever, I like to read a lot about it and reduce the chance of making easily avoidable mistakes.
But for some reason, when Sofi was on the way, we got eight books on pregnacy and only two books on raising children. I guess we were kind of focused on the pregnacy thing while we were in it, so maybe it's understandable, but in hindsight it's retarded. The ratio should have been reversed; pregnacy is basically a funhouse ride that leaves little room for making a mistake, but dealing with a baby is a real challenge.
While pregnant, it seemed like delivery was the goal we were shooting for, but really it was just the ordeal that marked the beginning of a much longer ordeal.
Making matters worse is those first couple of weeks of baby-dealing-with we didn't have much free time, so even though we got a couple more books on babies we had trouble finding the time to read them.
At this point I've read parts of four different baby books, and I have never seen such contradictions in any other body of work I've read. Software engineers are, in general, an agreeable, consistent lot compared to the authors of baby books. Keep the temperature at 68. Keep the temperature at 72. Dress the baby warmer than you. Dress the baby the same as you. Use a pacifier. Don't use a pacifier. Pick the baby up whenever she cries. Let the baby cry herself to sleep. Feed the baby every three hours. Feed the baby whenever she wants. After the fourth book, Cathy, fed up with the new set of contradictions, said, "That's it. We're not reading any more of these books."
I, on the other hand, want to keep reading more. For one thing, it's comforting to know that there's such a wide range of "right" answers. It seems like no matter what you do it's hard to screw up your baby! Secondly, sometimes the contradictions can be resolved: one book might be talking about babies of one age, while the other book's talking about babies of another age. Sometimes, the contradictions can be explained because they're part of a system. For example, the night before last my mom and I were cooking chicken parmesan and our recipes collided. My recipe called for fresh breadcrumbs, eggs, and flour - her recipe called for store bought, stale breadcrumbs and that was it. We compromised on just the fresh breadcrumbs. Turns out stale breadcrumbs will stay on the chicken by themselves, freshbreadcrumbs require the egg and flour. Neither answer is wrong; it depends on the context. Likewise, it's not wrong to feed your baby on a schedule or on demand, but either choice may conflict with other factors.
Anyway, I'll quickly review the books I've read, and if you have suggestions for ones I should read, let me know:
Dr. Spock: the classic. Very easygoing and permissive. You don't have to warm up your bottles, you don't have to give her a bath every day, you don't have to feed on a schedule. It's half instruction manual, half ego stroking.
The Happiest Baby on the Block: You have to read this one. I don't know if I agree with the theories, but the techniques work. They work so well it's scary. Magic. For us anyway. The only problem is when you stop using the techniques, the baby usually starts crying again. So keeping the baby from crying requires an act of constant maintenance on our part. (Except when we put her in a separate room and crank up the white noise...which we aren't totally crazy about doing because we start feeling like chickenwire parents.)
Those were the two books we had read when the baby was born, and they led to a problem: Dr. Spock is very big on breastfeeding. The Happiest Baby on the Block provides great techniques for making your baby stop crying. The problem was, we were starving our baby. We were breastfeeding her but she wasn't actually getting any. Dr. Spock says that the weight loss is normal, and the Happiest Baby gave us the techniques to get her to stop crying even though she was starving to death. Fortunately, we were required to see the pediatrician a few days after we left the hospital, and she caught that the baby was running on empty, and got us supplementing.
So, time to read more books: at this point, I kind of wanted to read a book that focused on ways you could kill your baby and how to avoid them. I even imagined doing some research and writing one myself: it would be called "One Hundred Ways To Kill Your Baby", and it would go through the most statistically likely ways a baby could die in the United States, starting with auto accidents and SIDS and whatever and working its way down to bladder infections or having refrigerators fall on them. It turned out "What To Expect In Your First Year" was just the sort of alarmist book I was looking for, with strict, Confucian advice on everything. It's a dense, dry work: I've only read up to month two, figuring I'll stay one month ahead of baby and everything will be fine.
Finally, there was "Secrets of the Baby Whisperer" - I'm not sure how good this book is for baby but it's been great for us. With it, we've finally gotten the baby on a routine where we have some free time to ourselves. On the surface, it seems to conflict philosophically with the Happiest Baby book: this book says, "Don't just calm your baby; try to figure out what's bothering her first" - but looking deeper they seem compatible, with this book being the first line of defense against an unhappy baby and "Happiest Baby" being more of a last-resort arsenal.
So...what should I read next?

Nothing to do with Religion

Normally I write about videogame development, but since these last few weeks I've been on paternity leave for my new daughter, my thoughts haven't really been there. But I do feel like writing still. So here it is, a blog that will no doubt have a much smaller readership, possibly limited to my wife and family. Or maybe even smaller.

The obvious blognames are already taken: dadblog, dad, father, blah, blah, blah. After many seconds of thought, I chose fatherjamie, although that does have some unfortunate religious connotations.

I'll start things off with a bang, by writing down an actual useful thought, that I wish somebody had told me before I became a new father, and that actual useful thought is: you don't need to buy all of these baby products!

Something I realized at Babies'R'Us was that they had us over a barrel: we had no idea which items we needed and which we didn't, and out of fear we went crazy and bought everything. (Or registered for everything for shower gifts, anyhow.) One example: they sell cloth in about a hundred different shapes and sizes, and each different cloth has its own name (washcloth, burp rag, lap pad, something-or-other cover, blah blah blah) - "Honey, do we need a something-or-other cover?" "I'm not sure, better get one just in case."

One of our good friends was no help either, as she gave us a huge list of all this useful stuff we could get. Did we need most of it? No. What we needed was a filter, someone to say to us, "You don't really need that. You don't really need that."

So, now that the baby is born, our house is full of crap we don't need.

In fact, I think the only thing we absolutely *did* need before the baby was born was the infant car seat. We needed diapers, sure, but the hospital gave us a bunch to start out with. They gave us plenty of blankets, and even some clothes.

For example, we didn't need a crib: we co-slept (Co-sleeping means to sleep with the baby in your bed. Very popular in some cultures and circles. Although there was apparently a report in 1999 that 64 infants in the United States that year died from co-sleeping related issues, I'd have to know how that number compares to infant-death-from-car-accident, infant-death-from-sids, etcetera, before I lost any sleep over it.) up until last night. (Sofia was born on the 27th of November, and it's now December 21.) *Now* we need a crib, it's true, so it didn't hurt that we bought one already, but there are some things we don't need that we wish we hadn't gotten.

For example, the glider chair: this is a sort of rocking chair that supposedly allows you to soothe yourself and your infant while breastfeeding. It turns out that breastfeeding is really hard to do. The last thing we needed was to try it in an unstable chair. Our ideal setup turned out to be a dining chair with a footrest in front of it and a carefully placed array of pillows. Not to mention the particular glider we bought squeaks, so the other parent can't sleep.

Speaking of soothing chairs, the "bouncer" is a chair that vibrates and is also supposed to soothe baby. Allow me to paraphrase Dr. Karp, author of *Happiest Baby on the Block* - these chairs are not for soothing but for maintenance. Once you've gotten your baby to stop crying you can, in theory, put them in the chair, and the chair will keep them calm. Dr. Karp recommends playing loud white noise while they're in the chair, as well. Well, our baby will stop crying if we crank up loud white noise - we just have to turn the radio to a staticy FM station and blast it. Pantera, Metallica, and Powerman 5000, all seem to work as well. So what do we need the chair for?

Not to mention, we have a crib mobile that also generates white noise. It is *way too quiet* - and possibly overstimulating. I'm not sure if I'm reading Sofia correctly, but she almost seems fearful of the thing.

And speaking of breastfeeding, the "Boppy" is a horseshoe shaped pillow you can rest the baby on while breastfeeding. It didn't work for us. At all. But the "Kidcozy" did, a different brand of horseshoe shaped pillow, did. We had one sent to us priority mail and threw the boppy out.

All in all, if I had it to do over again, before Sofia came I would have purchased only the products I was *sure* we were going to need: crib, infant seat, diapers, wipes, clothes-for-newborn. And registered for the products that I was *almost sure* we'd need: bottles, nipples, diaper champ. Everything else, like breastfeeding accessories (who knew we'd have to take so many unnatural measures to perform this supposedly natural act?) we'd get on an as-needed basis.

Not the end of the world to have more stuff than we need of course. Better safe than sorry and all that. It just irritates me that we're taken advantage of by the baby product industry. (And it irritates me that our tiny apartment is now dominated by baby paraphenalia.)