I thought this should be its own post.

I have a space reserved at a daycare starting June 1. That means in two weeks my stint as a SAHM will be over. My feelings about this are really complex.

Spawn is getting to be more fun every day. I've heard repeatedly that maternity leave is all backwards. You're home while your baby is a milk-to-poop machine, then go back to work when they start to become their own person. There's definitely truth to that.

OTOH, being a SAHM has not gone as well for me as I expected it to. I thought I was going into this with a minimum of expectations, but I was convinced that I would take to baby care like a fish to water. Instead I've found it exhausting and stressful, and that's with Spawn sleeping for 10-11 hours at night almost every night since she was ~3 months old, something I understand to be nothing short of miraculous. I'm having a lot of trouble with the lack of schedule. I have a deep-set need to learn "the rules" of my situation. But Spawn is changing every day. Most routines turn upside down in a week or less. Even though I know intellectually that this is normal, emotionally I feel like I keep chasing, grasping, and losing the rhythm of childcare. I never know what to expect from each day. Often the surprises are good ones, like getting to see her roll over for the first time. But just as often they're bad ones, like both the nap strikes and the discovery that I desperately need the breaks I get while she naps to stay sane. Even on days where there are no surprises, I often find that my enthusiasm for caring for her runs about two hours shorter than the time she's awake.

The saddest part, perhaps, is that Spawn is such a sweet-tempered baby that it seems horribly ungrateful to complain at all. We take her to restaurants, have friends over, take her to friends' houses, and bring her to events at the game store without much trouble. If she'd been a more difficult baby (the acid reflux hell month of February now long behind us), I think I might have been committed by now. And that's with two days "off" to work -- and it's amusing that I really do think of my work days as "days off."

This has been a real adjustment of identity for me. In my fantasy life, I'd always taken a year off to care for a baby, and I only reluctantly planned to return to work this early because I love my job so much. I've heard so many stories of women who made aggressive plans to return to work only to end up quitting their jobs when they found themselves unable to part with their babies. I'd barely heard the opposite stories of women who planned to dedicate themselves to baby care and found themselves climbing the walls to get back to work. Now I'm both terribly nervous about handing Spawn over to daycare and guiltily looking forward to it.

I wonder why I was so sure I was made to be a SAHM. I think it's because my mother never stopped talking about how rewarding it was for her. She stayed home for 10 years until my younger brother was in first grade. I've been discovering for the last few years that I have just assumed that the things my mother loved are things that I would love too, at such a deep level that I wasn't aware I was making the assumptions at all.

I know that being a working mom is a totally legitimate life choice, and it doesn't mean I love or delight in my daughter any less. And intellectually I know she'll adjust to daycare just fine, though she'll probably start it off by getting a cold and screwing up her sleep schedule. But I'm definitely turning out to be a different person than I thought I was, and that's been surprisingly hard to accept.

At any rate, in two weeks my and Spawn's lives are going to change a lot. We'll see how that goes.

So, Spawn was fine with the nanny when I got back. She's had cranky periods since then, but nothing like the Mother's Day screaming or Tuesday's four-hour misery. We have another date scheduled for this Sunday, and hopefully things will go more smoothly.

This week, she's discovered her feet with a vengeance and is obsessed with trying to chew on her toes. She doesn't seem to be as flexible as some babies, or she may have a very long torso like I do, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to be as easy for her to get her toes into her mouth as many pictures I've seen of other babies. But she's dedicated. She keeps at it, and sometimes she succeeds. I hope they taste good enough to be worth it.

She's also gaining a lot more manual dexterity. While before she could kick or bat at a toy or sort of hold something with both hands, now her fingers are really starting to find their own. She can grab her peacock toy and flip through the feathers. Her new cognitive game seems to be grabbing whatever I'm trying to put in her mouth and putting it in herself, then taking it out, then putting it back in, etc. etc. This goes for her bottle, her baby food spoon, her pacifier, and any stray finger of mine she happens to grab. Since I'm usually holding whatever it is, she doesn't have to deal with the weight, just the guidance. However, she's managed to take her own bottle and hold it by herself with both hands for a short time, though she can't really do this and eat effectively. On the downside, she now takes her pacifier out of her mouth, and she can't put it back in straight. Since I've usually given it to her because she's fussy, it doesn't take her long to get upset that she can't suck on it. She CAN hold it by the handle for a long time, though, and even transfer it from one hand to the other.

She's rolling over like a pro and starting to scoot herself forward by centimeters. Really need to start thinking seriously about baby-proofing the living room. It's also not clear how much longer she'll be able to sleep in her cradle, and it's going to break our hearts to have to stop using it. The sides are reasonably high, and in theory she could stay in it until she starts trying to pull up on things, but I'm not sure how comfortable we are with letting her sleep in it when she's crawling or even scooting efficiently.

We're transitioning out of swaddling at last. She's solidly outgrown her largest swaddler, and I read someplace that babies learn to self-soothe better when they can get their hands to their mouths to suck on them. When she's going to bed at night in a onesie on a cool night, sometimes I swaddle her from the waist down for warmth. OTOH, since she goes to bed with her pacifier, this has led to some weird sleep fails where she she pulls it out of her mouth and then cries because she doesn't have it.

The big negative for this week is that she's been going on nap strikes. She'll always sleep lying in my lap, but I've been trying hard not to let this happen very often. Over the course of a week or so, her naps in her cradle got shorter and shorter, and then for a couple of days she just wouldn't sleep in the cradle during the day at all. I tried putting her down "drowsy but awake," and she'd jump to alertness. I tried letting her drift off in my lap and putting her down asleep, but she'd wake up immediately. If I tried to let her settle down on her own, she'd start screaming. I really wanted the break, and she was just getting grumpier and grumpier as the day went on until she was highest-maintenance when I had the least energy/patience to deal with it. And I get pretty awful to deal with, even for myself, when I'm out of energy/patience. Those were not good days. I've taken to logging her eating and napping behavior in an attempt to get a better idea when to be more assertive, and that seemed to yield fruit this morning. Not only did I get her to nap in her cradle for a morning nap, but she slept for 1 3/4 hours! (Previously naps have been running a half our or 45 minutes.) Every day is different, and the nanny has her today and tomorrow afternoon, so we'll see how it goes.

So, that's the baby breakdown. It comes out longer than it is in my head :).

Our friend wkiri visited for a few days through Saturday. It was really nice to have the company, and it's nice that people can stay at our place even with all the baby considerations. Wkiri was especially adaptable, since Spawn had a bad night in there and woke us up crying at 4:15, 5:30, and 6. On Saturday, we took a second pass at our first baby-wearing hike on the east side of the Sandias. We attempted this hike last Saturday, and it was a mixed bag because Spawn got uncomfortable in the carrier and started crying. That was the Ergobaby carrier, which she's only just large enough to use without the infant insert -- or maybe not *quite* large enough. We attempted again with the Baby Bjorn, and that went better. She does still seem to get either uncomfortable or just sick of being in the carrier after a while. The hike and the company were very nice, and it feels good to be able to recapture another pastime we've missed from pre-baby days, even if we can't hike very aggressively due to Spawn's attention span and our current shameful out-of-shapeness.

We finally made it to the "new" Greek place near our house, which we've had our eye on for a year, and loved it. It's another place that goes on our list as a good risk for going out to lunch with the baby.

Studentbane has been out of town Sunday through today. Fortunately, knitclub came to my place on Sunday, and I was able to cart Spawn over to ljedi's place yesterday afternoon to watch TV and play video games. That was definitely sanity-preserving.

Woo. I've been trying to post once a week, but I missed last week. I want to keep some kind of log, even a perfunctory one, of Spawn's changes over time.

Last week, she started blowing raspberries and spent three days sticking her tongue out as far as she could. This week she doesn't seem to be much interested in either of these things.

We also bought a high chair and offered her her first solids, baby oatmeal. She seemed to love her first taste and ate it all with a shockingly small degree of mess for a 4-month-old. The next couple of attempts were much less successful. She spit it out, cried, and once gagged and threw up. I later saw that babies gagging while trying to figure out how to eat is pretty common. Since I wasn't sure she was ready, I decided to stop for a few days and tried again on Monday. That was a huge success. She clearly recognized the oatmeal as food and sucked it off the spoon, demanding more. I'm learning that the issue is, not illogically, how hungry she is. If she's filled up on formula too recently, then she doesn't want to eat solids too. If she's hungry enough to demand formula, she considers solids to be too slow and cries for a bottle. The problem is that the sweet spot of hungry but not frantic is not easy to diagnose. I'm settling on offering her solids 1-2 hours after a formula feeding.

For some silly reason, one thing I have really wanted to do since I learned I was pregnant is make baby food. I cooked a sweet potato in the slow cooker and pureed it, and she seems to like it. It's turning out to be as much fun as it was in my head.

This week has been an adventure in good and bad ways. Spawn is now rolling over from back to front and laughing, though it's not always clear what she finds worthy of laughter. The rolling over is a big deal. She's now mobile after a fashion; she can roll sideways. Suddenly, she loves being on her belly and is working hard to push herself forward with her feet. It won't be long before we have to do some serious baby-proofing. She also seems to be obsessed with rolling over right now. She woke us up several times in the night by rolling in her cradle and cramming her face uncomfortably into the corner while half asleep. Not sure what to do about that; we're going to try putting some bumpers into the sides of her cradle. She already has a bumper at the head of her cradle from a couple of nights where she scooted on her back until she banged her head.

On the down side, she caused a serious Mother's Day date fail. The nanny agreed to watch Spawn for Sunday afternoon so that SB and I could have our first non-baby date since she was born. We decided to go a play and got dressed up. Then when I handed Spawn to the nanny, she started to scream. Not just fuss, but scream like she did in the acid reflux days. We were flabbergasted. We got her calmed down just barely and left for the play. The play itself turned out to be funny in a bad way and shorter than we expected. I called to be sure Spawn was OK afterward, and it turned out she'd been screaming for a lot of the time we'd been gone. And the nanny wasn't exaggerating -- I could hear Spawn screaming in the background. So we rushed home instead of going to dinner. SB started looking for a pediatric urgent care that was open, and we called the pediatrician helpline to try to get some advice on how bad this might be. Spawn cried herself into an exhausted sleep in my arms, and I sent the nanny home. Then, about the time the pediatrician called back, Spawn opened her eyes blearily and smiled at me. She was happy and comfortable for the rest of the evening. WTF? I realize that babies cry, but wow.

Then she was fine on Monday, but on Tuesday (yesterday) spent several hours either crying or sleeping in the nanny's arms after being fine with me in the morning. She cheered up about 1.5 hours before the nanny left and stayed cheerful through the evening. Again today she started screaming within a half hour of me handing her off to the nanny after being fine until noon. The poor nanny is a little unnerved, as am I. As far as I know, Spawn should be too young for separation anxiety, and the nanny is someone she's known since she was 2.5 months old. It seems like the timing has to be mostly coincidence, though it's possible that I have mommy power and can calm Spawn more easily when she gets fussy. I recall that she was a bit of a handful on Monday afternoon, and maybe she'd have really started crying if I wasn't there to calm her.

At any rate, I'm at the office for meetings today. When I left Spawn and the nanny, Spawn was recently up from a nap but seemed stable. When I get back, I'll find out how it went. I hope Spawn didn't make the nanny's life hell.

At the end of this month, Spawn goes into daycare, and I go back to work full-time. I still have mixed feelings about that.

In baby-unrelated news, we went to an all-ages performance of Treasure Island at the Aux Dog theater for our first date night. It turned out to be terrible, but at least in an amusing way. We were surprised. The last performance we went to at Aux Dog was in November, and we really enjoyed it. In this case, the script was a lot of fun, and the sets and props were really well-designed for the style of the show. But almost everyone's acting went clunk, particularly young Jim's, which was kind of necessary to make the performance work. It opened and closed with a song, which was a BIG MISTAKE, since apparently nobody could sing, or at least not together with other people. The collection of rhythms and keys was painful to hear. At least it was bad in a funny way, and we were able to laugh at it. But I think we're going to postpone say that this Mother's Day date night was a trial run and do it again in two weeks, at which point hopefully we can find a better play.

Spawn had her four month well baby appointment on Friday. She's now exactly average in weight and length for her age, which means she bounced back from being underweight during the height of the acid reflux trouble. She's also in the 75th percentile in head circumference. Clearly she needs a lot of skull to hold that amazing brain. It is kind of amusing to really look at how large her head is when compared to the rest of her body. Big heads and eyes are part of what makes babies cute.

Her vaccines made her miserable for about half a day, then prone to sudden bouts of crying or screaming through yesterday morning. That was pretty upsetting to watch. It makes me understand how many people can talk themselves out of going through with all their kids' vaccinations. You take your kid in for a well baby appointment, and she goes in cheerful and comes out miserable, at least for a while. But it's important to stay resolute. This stuff is important.

Her reflux has improved amazingly. A month ago, she was throwing up 1 to 2 times a day. Now, other than Friday night after her vaccinations, which seemed to upset her stomach, she hasn't thrown up in weeks. She still drools out small amounts of formula, but that sort of spitting up seems pretty normal. This weekend we removed the wedge from her cradle mattress, so she's now sleeping flat. She adjusted very fast.

She's grabbing her feet now and reaching for things with her hands, though she hasn't quite figured out how to make her fingers grasp.

We went to a game demo Saturday afternoon at the new Active Imagination location and had a great time. SB is talking about running an open-invitation VHorror one shot there in hopes that we'll be able to find some fresh blood for the game. We weren't terribly impressed by the people who were gaming there on Saturday, though. Most of them seemed like they'd been pulled from a book of gamer stereotypes in all their social and hygiene impaired glory. The new Active location is impressive, though. They now have a kitchen that serves a full restaurant menu, a theater with tiered seating, and a nice amount of gaming space. Of course, you have to drive to the back of a strip mall, enter through a barely-marked door, and walk down through a tunnel into the mall basement to get there. Kind of a gamer's dungeon. A game store can do a lot with word of mouth, but I hope the obscurity of the location doesn't hurt them.

I was also amused by how much attention Spawn didn't receive there. It was kind of funny compared to how much random cooing a 4mo baby gets in, say, the grocery store.

Spawn has been solidly sleeping through the night, 10+ hours a night, for a week. Well, except last night, when she woke up at 3:45 and refused to go back to sleep. She chugged a bunch of formula and seemed sleepy, but then woke back up. In the end, I gave her a pacifier and rocked her on the exercise ball in the living room in the dark and sang to her until she dropped off. She was awake at approximately the same time this morning and ate about the same as she usually does. I think the whole thing was about an hour, which wasn't so unusual for many of her feedings when she was feeding at night, but it was still plenty disruptive. I hope it's not going to be a common occurrence because she's been such an angel about night sleep.

This weekend, we took on more stuff than we've usually be willing to attempt since she was born. We installed track lighting to replace the 1970s spotlights over our wet bar. This was something we could do while Spawn was awake, so long as we had half a person to entertain her. I think they are an improvement, but that space is really hard to light in a comfortable way. What we really need to do is lighten up the ceiling, but that's a much bigger project.

While she was napping, we did something even wilder -- we did woodworking. We cut to width and planed the boards we're using for the prototype of our library bookshelves. Spawn was pretty generous with her naps and gave us about two that were ~2 hours long over the weekend and a couple of hour long ones, which was enough to get the planing done and clean up the piles of sawdust that generates. We also sat down and came up with a mostly-final design. The next step is to do some testing with the router, since we have a rather ambitious vision for the uprights, and I'm not sure it's really going to be practical. I hope so, though, because it would look awesome.

I would truly love to be moving forward on our library bookcase project so that the books can be unpacked from the boxes we put them in for sabbatical. Spawn will be going into daycare in June when I go back to work full time, and since I work primarily out of the home, SB and I have hopes that we'll be able to eek out some hours in the woodshop while she's at the center.

Spawn is grabbing with more intentionality, but she still doesn't seem to see the potential of her hands. Though she hasn't figured out she can grab a toy she's looking at, she has discovered she can kick one that I dangle in front of her.

Her vomiting has declined dramatically in the last few weeks, and I'm starting to lay her down flat more often. When her vomiting and acid reflux was worst, I got paranoid about ever letting her head be flat with her stomach, so I put wedges underneath her changing boards as well as 30-degree wedge under her cradle mattress. When I put her down, I mostly did it in her baby chair, which would let her play while keeping her upright. Now I'm letting her play on the floor and have set her changing boards down flat. We haven't removed the wedge in her cradle yet. I think we may experiment with that this week. I don't know that she really needs to sleep at a 30-degree angle, but I'm wary of changing the sleep arrangement she's used to.

I'm pretty much always letting her fall asleep in my arms after a meal, nap time and bedtime, and then putting her down in her cradle. I'm reading Happy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child and pondering how much long I should continue to do that.

Oh, yeah, and I washed my phone. It was kind of a perfect storm. I came in from the woodshop covered in sawdust that I really didn't want Spawn to inhale. SB picked her up from her nap and discovered that she had generated a diaper escaping toxic waste poop event. I shimmied out of my pants and ran to help him, then dumped her clothes, swaddler, and my jeans into the wash. Ahem. Should have paid more attention, clearly. It was a 1.75yo phone and one of the flagship Android products back in the day, and it was running so slowly on the current updates that I was about ready to throw in the towel and buy a new phone anyway. Still, I'd probably have sucked it up a little longer. Sigh. You win some, you lose some.

Spawn's advances in the last week:

- Grabbing her foot (the start of a long and rewarding relationship, I suspect)
- Rolling over from front to back
- First diaper rash.

joyouschild pointed out that if we went this long without a diaper rash, we were pretty lucky.

I stopped swaddling her last week when we moved her to her own room because she seemed to be sleeping well without it. However, her naps dropped to about half an hour long around that time. As I watched her sleep, I noticed that she seemed to be flinching awake, so I went back to swaddling again. She's almost too big for the swaddlers, so I'll need to find a better solution if we're going to keep it up. I think there are larger-size swaddlers than the ones we have. At any rate, She's had three naps of ~2 hours each. Last night she went down to sleep at 8:30pm and made it all the way to 7am without needing to be fed. She did start crying around 4:30, but by the time I'd gotten up and put on my robe, she'd gone back to sleep. I actually woke up before her at 6:30 and took a shower before she woke up. She seems to be inching toward sleeping through the night for real, and if so we're really blessed.

On the advice of friends here and elsewhere, we at least turned down the baby monitor so that I can't hear her breathing anymore. I don't know if it's practical to turn it off entirely. If she really wails, we'll have no trouble hearing her. But her hungry fretting isn't quite so loud, and it might not wake us up. I'm sleeping better, though a lot of that is just adjusting to the new status quo.

Studentbane is at a conference right now, and I'm a single parent for four nights. Despite the fact that there's nothing in the baby care I haven't done before, it's still intimidating to be on my own. Friend have come over to keep me company and make dinner for the last two nights, and that has made a really huge difference.

Maybe I jinxed myself by saying that Spawn's move to her own room had been such a sleep success. Last night was definitely a sleep fail, for her and by extension me. She went to sleep at 7pm, then was up at midnight and 4:30am. Worse, she slept fitfully most of the night, which led me to lie awake listening to her intermittent fretting on the baby monitor.

I think she might be going through a growth spurt. She seems to be eating extra yesterday, and the offshoot of the extra night feeding is that she has eaten about 2/3 between midnight and noon as she usually eats in an entire day. If that's the case, then I have good reason to expect her sleep to improve tonight or tomorrow night. Meanwhile, I'm doing all right at the moment with the injection of a little caffeine.

I tend to count how many ounces she eats, and she never seems to eat quite as much as the amount recommended for her weight. She also started in a bit of a hole because the GERD led her to have slow weight gain early on. I started taking her to a Wednesday morning new mother's group, in large part because they had a baby scale, and I could keep an eye on her weight gain. The last couple of weeks, the scale has been broken, which is annoying. They think they'll have it fixed next week.

OTOH, I'm getting lots of spontaneous remarks on how much she's grown. Today, I looked at her in SB's arms and realized how silly it was for me to be concerned about her weight gain. My little girl has grown a lot. It's just hard for me to see it when I'm looking at her every day.

If I place toys, especially big ones, on her lap, she can grab them and pull them toward (or into) her mouth. She doesn't seem to have made the connection that she can reach out and touch something that is dangled in front of her.

We moved Spawn into her own room on Sunday. It felt strangely momentous, like we were helping her take her first, teeny tiny step away from us.

So far, after three nights, it's been a stunning success. She's sleeping longer and, it seems, more soundly. So are we. The first night, I spent a lot of time lying awake, listening to her breathe on the baby monitor. Night before last, I adjusted better, and I got the best sleep I think I've had since before she was born. Unfortunately, my brain overdid it, and I spent yesterday tired and groggy. But I'm feeling pretty chipper today.

Spawn has been pretty precocious about sleep, and don't think I'm not grateful. She started sleeping "through the night," i.e. 5-6 hours at a stretch, at about 6 weeks, and when there hasn't been a disruption she's almost always been willing to go back to sleep until the next feeding, giving us a fairly reliable 6-8 hours of sleep a night, depending on how long she was up for the feeding. She's taunted us with 7 and 8 hour stretches of sleep for single, nonrepeatable nights. On the first night we put her in her own room, she fell asleep for what we thought was a late nap at 6:30pm, slept through to 2am, ate, and then slept again until 7am. The next night, it was 7 to 7 with a short, no-nonsense 1am feeding. Last night, it was down at 8, up at *5:30*, down at 6:30, and up again at 7:30. That last hour might not have been long, but it was nice anyway.

( Spawn's first three months of life were more stressful than they should have been )

The dust has mostly cleared as we roll into April. I am beginning to realize that my daughter is a happy, healthy, comparatively easy baby. She has beautiful smiles and is eager to try to communicate. For a while, I was resentful of all the stress the GERD ordeal caused us, especially on the heels of the lesser lactation drama. Now I'm getting over that too. I still worry, but maybe that's just the cross most mothers have to bear.

At any rate, I'm working two days a week now with an in-home nanny looking after Spawn during those days. I want to try to chronicle, if briefly, some of the changes she is going through every week.

Spawn is 15 weeks tomorrow. In the last few weeks, she has really started focusing on faces and trying to communicate. Right now, her only real means of communicating is one-bit: smile, see if I (or someone else) smile back, and repeat. This has got to be one of the cutest things you have ever witnessed, and it makes her so happy and excited that it warms the heart.

She focuses on toys, and she grabs whatever her hands fall on, but she hasn't quite figured out that she can reach up and grab something she's looking at. Yesterday, she seemed to be kicking the toy I dangled in front of her with at least partial intentionality.

That's what I can think of for the moment.

Woo. It's been a while since I posted. It's been a while since I READ. My most recent excuse has been that my parents were here for a week, and all of the routines of my life were dropped. But the real reason is the baby cave. I've had precious little time at the keyboard since she was born, and I've been using it to barely maintain a few business and personal correspondences. I've taken to sending chats and emails from my phone a lot because I can do that comfortably one-handed, even if it does take comparatively forever.

Woo. Spawn, who I haven't taken the time to give a new online name, is eight weeks old on Thursday. This has been the longest almost eight weeks of my life. That's true, but it sounds wrong. I don't mean that the time is long because it has been grueling and miserable. I mean it's been long because time literally seems to have dilated. SB and I have routinely referred to to things we thought happened over a week ago that turn out to have happened yesterday or the day before.

Dealing with a newborn is hard. It's taxing. It's pretty much everything I was warned it would be, but the knowing doesn't give you a way to prepare for the reality. And it turns out that it's not the particulars that make it so draining. For example, I was warned about sleep deprivation and nighttime feedings, I was braced for them, and they are exactly as advertised. And I won't say that dragging yourself awake to deal with a whimpering or screaming baby at 4am is a picnic, but the truth is that I don't really mind it most of the time.

What makes dealing with a newborn so hard, I think, is also what makes the time seem so dilated. It's the constant state of flux. Spawn is almost literally changing and developing every day. Every skill we learn or coping mechanism we develop lasts a few days until her behavior changes.

For a couple of weeks, I couldn't get her to sleep during the day anytime but when she was touching me. If I put her down, even when she was in a deep sleep, she would be awake and crying in ten minutes. I got incredibly run down. Then, abruptly last week, after a particularly draining day while my parents were here, she decided she loved the electric infant swing that was a hand-me-down from a friend. Now she'll sleep in it pretty much any time I put her down there. That's given me a lot of chance to recharge, but there's no telling how long it will work.

This week, she's also started sleeping more fitfully at night, sometimes waking up every 20 minutes or so to whimper for a while and go back to sleep. We used to be able to get her to go down after her 7/8am feeding to sleep until her next feeding (feedings are still spaced approximately 3 hours apart). That meant that, since I'm home on dedicated maternity leave, I could get about 8 hours of sleep over about 12 hours with nighttime feedings. Since last week, she's started refusing to go back to sleep, or she'll sleep so fitfully that we can't get any sleep anyway. Last night, she finally dropped the bomb I've been waiting for -- she decided to have an active cycle between her 4am and 7am feedings. Sometimes I dread the night because this might be the time she decides not to let us sleep at all.

But those are the struggles. They're evenly balanced by the joys, which makes for a lot of crazy up-and-down emotion, especially for me because I'm already hopped up on hormones. She's started focusing on my face, and she clearly recognizes my voice. She's awake more often and working hard on being able to raise her head and roll over. When I feed her, her little hands find mine where they touch her, and she grabs on to my finger. When I pick her up and she's distressed, she curls up immediately against my chest and quiets.

This week, she's started grinning when she's awake. (Newborns have a smile that triggers randomly in REM sleep, but it's not the same thing.) I don't know what that expression means to her at this stage, but it melts your heart to see it. She's also learned that when she's alert and lying on the mat, she can turn her head around to look to either side rather than just looking in the direction her head is pointing. She seems to be starting to resolve objects with her eyes, but she doesn't know what they mean or which ones are important. She's also started wearing 0-3 month clothes at last, and I think by next week she won't be able to wear her newborn clothes at all.

Sometimes I'm crying from stress. Sometimes I'm crying from wonder. I look at her and am lost in the possibilities of who she might become. She's a little ball of potential right now. It will be a little while yet before she even figures out there are entities in the world other than herself and that Mommy and Daddy are distinct. Part of me is charged with anticipation to see her enter each new phase. Part of me is afraid to lose what she is now because it shines for such a brief moment and is then lost forever. It seems like this is the special secret time that parents get to see, the time that Spawn herself won't remember, when she is still building herself into a person.

I want to start compiling bits of notes, memories, and tidbits I wrote in private mail to try to chronicle these early weeks before they become too hazy in my sleep-deprived memory. If she continues to sleep in her swing, I'll have more keyboard time to try.

I have a lot of thoughts I want to post about new parenthood. I haven't been writing here because time with both hands at a keyboard is at a premium. This stage is just as draining as advertised, but also more wonderful than I expected. But I need to post about something else today.

The Ebon Menace is going in to be put down in a little over an hour. This is something we knew was likely when we started trying to get pregnant, though it was always something we hoped to avoid. A cat with his violent psychological problems is just not a good bet with a small baby. But he's also sick, and he's been wasting away before our eyes all year. SB and I both rather hoped he'd be able to live out his life naturally and as comfortably as possible.

When we brought Spawn home, the first few days were touch and go, but Menace seemed to stabilize after that. He seemed to decide that while the baby was a curiosity, she was not actually human and therefore no threat. But Studentbane and I were behaving differently, and that started taking its toll. The Menace has followed us across the ocean with a minimum of adjustment stress because he placed his sense of security wholly in SB and myself. It didn't matter the physical location because we were home. But now our routines and behaviors are irrevocably changed, and that is hitting him in a way that physical location never has. He's been losing weight again and throwing up more often. His fur is in terrible shape. And the worst thing is that he has started being aggressive toward the household members. First, just the Eternal Kitten, who he always has tended to beat up on when he's in a bad mood. But more recently, it's been Studentbane. This week he took a swipe at me.

Two days ago he jumped on Spawn's head on the way to the back of the sofa. I was holding her in my lap, and it nearly gave me a heart attack. Though his claws very nearly scratched her cheek, she wasn't hurt, which means he didn't intend for her to be hurt. However, he knew she was there, and it was a deliberate gesture. He's always been prone to dominance displays like that when he perceives a threat. He knows that we are behaving differently because of her, and that makes her a threat again.

I really didn't want his last experience to be the fear and rage of going to the vet, so when I called them this week to make arrangements, I pushed for some way to sedate him at home. We picked up a strong sedative in pill form that we ground up and mixed in his gooshy food. So he should have a familiar treat and a nice nap. The vet did point out that his health and quality of life were in serious decline, and his behavior problems prevented us from doing anything to make them better. I won't pretend we're doing him a favor, but we are sparing him from more inevitable discomfort.

He's sitting with me right now, and I'm giving him as much affection as he'll take as the sedative takes hold. He's been a good friend, and I'm going to miss him a lot. I wish there were another way, but I think this is the right decision for him and us.

Farewell, good friend. And good night.