Life with Baby Oliver has settled into a routine in some ways, and entered a period of massive upheaval in others. We've got our childcare schedule and our bedtime routine; our moms' group meetings and our music class; our once-every-three-days solid food introductions, and our increasingly regular naps.
But then again...
Lately we've been spending our weekends cleaning out the closets, painting the hallways, scouring the Times Real Estate section for comps, and generally getting ready to put our apartment on the market. We spent a long weekend in Savannah looking at houses, and then came home to an email from an ad agency asking Greg to bid a job for Miller High Life. And on top of all that, Bill Parcells quit and the Cowboys hired a new head coach whose style of play is far less predictable. It's gonna be an interesting year.
Oliver turned six months old on January 25, and it's like he's a whole new baby. He can sit up on his own for a while now, and reach out and grab things, and then shove them in his mouth. At first he was content to grab nice plastic toy things that we said were his, but that was a short phase. Now he wants to grab pointy things and sharp things and dirty things and hot things and pretty much any thing at all that he sees and that is not, in fact, his. His master plan, as far as we can tell, is to get all of these things into his mouth. He has also been trying this with other babies, and with the cat. Amazingly, Charlie, who is a violent misanthrope, tolerates this with the grace one associates with normal cats.
The solid food thing is going well. I'm making everything from scratch from organic produce and grains and pulses I buy at the Food Co-op. And when I say "from scratch" what I mean is, I literally buy grains of, say, rice, toast them in a cast iron pan in order to fortify them, grind them, simmer them with water for a few minutes (same basic idea as oatmeal), and then puree them.
Vegetables and fruits get steamed and then pureed - which is a bit less involved and therefore generates lesser bragging rights. I spoon tablespoonfuls of the days' mush onto cookie sheets, freeze, and voila, Oliver has something colorful to smush into his face and clothing (see pics).
Generally, the most popular topic of polite conversation that one addresses towards new parents seems to be "Is he sleeping through the night?". I hate this question, and would prefer to discuss the present cold snap, or perhaps our local police shooting. To get it out of the way, so none of you ever need to ask me out about it again - Oliver goes to sleep at 7pm and wakes up for the day sometime between 5:30am and 7am. In between, he needs to be fed once or twice, needs his pacifier two or three times, and may or may not need to be cuddled/relocated to our bed. Every now and then, when there's a gap between two of his winter colds, and he's had a lot to eat, and he's in his own crib, he gets one midnight feeding and otherwise sleeps straight through, and this makes us believe that when he wakes up it's for a good reason, and so we aren't planning to listen to him cry and cry for us in order to teach him to put himself back to sleep. This is controversial in parenting circles. Feel free to debate it with someone else.
The upshot is that we're still bleary and sleep-deprived, but falling more in love with our baby every minute, so it's all pretty much OK. The developing routine is giving us a bit more of a handle on things, and we even went out on a double date last week and had dinner and saw a movie and everything. I think we've accepted that there isn't going to be a magic moment when this all gets easy, and we're still learning how to juggle all our responsibilities, and Get Things Done. And we're still, uh, working on those remaining thank you notes...
Much love,
Michelle and Greg
