Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 0 No. 2

2003-11-18 01:00 The party's wound down. My parents were happy with their various presents. Everyone got to hold Jamie. My aunts Nobuko and Tomoko got to meet Jamie, and were mightily impressed with Jennifer's diaper-wrangling ability. Jennifer's likely going home to Ottawa on Thursday or Friday, and we'll miss her a lot.

Jamie's third bath tonight, and he enjoyed it as much as the first two. Even more so perhaps, as he was wide out and really blissed out at the sensation of floating in the water. I can easily imagine him with the same expression on his face floating in amniotic fluid.

Jamie laughs in his sleep. It's a tee-hee-hee giggle, but recognizably a laugh. So what's he dreaming about that's so funny, when all day long he's staring at everything in serious, rapt attention? I wish I knew. He's starting to smile at people too. Mostly Jennifer.

He loves being sung to. Really loves it, about as much as eating when he's hungry, or staring at people and interesting objects. I have to learn a lot more songs, and improve my voice.

As Kristen's milk gets richer, he's been nursing longer but taking longer between feedings#, which is just fine with us.

2003-11-18 11:00 Jamie's feeding times last night? 01:00, 05:00 and 09:00, going for forty-five minutes a stretch. That allows for almost a full adult REM cycle between feedings, whee!

Today was a quiet day all round. Kristen spent the day catching up on movie watching, letting her body heal. I catnapped in between doing housework, yardwork, cooking and catching up on my e-mail. Highlight of my day was my first completely fuss-free diaper change. My trick: start singing Jamie's favorite song (Summertime) before the change and No Matter What Happanes don't stop until everything's done.

Received cards from Craig Rowland, Bronwyn Miller and Mardi Noble today, and the e-mail keeps flooding in. Thank you, all!

2003-11-19 06:45 Funny how 23:00, 02:00, 05:00 feels so much different from 01:00, 05:00, 09:00. Well, maybe funny's not the right word.

2003-11-19 16:15 Quiet day at home for everyone today. I'm off to the Scrabble club tonight to take advantage of one last night of Jennifer's stay by leaving Kristen and Jamie in her care. I'll bring pictures!

2003-11-19 22:15 Trevor and Antoinette Sealy gave us a baby kit that includes Jamie's first actual rubber duckie! It makes me wonder whether in years to come he'll muse over which came first, the ritual singing of "Rubber Duckie", or his bath toy? (My godson Daniel just noticed that the laser printer he grew up with has the same name as the stuffed tiger in Bill Watterson's cartoon, and asked if it was coincidental!)

2003-11-20 13:25 Midwives Ren and Chris came by for a checkup this morning. Jamie's put on eight ounces in six days, and now weighs 7 lbs. 6 oz. (about 3350 g). That's no surprise, as he's nursing regularly every 3.5-4 hours for a good half hour or so, and he's starting to look chubbier all over. Kristen on the other hand is delighted because she got dressed this morning (day 9) into pre-pregnancy "normal person's" clothes. That's probably my fault for not feeding her often enough, but I'm working on it.

Received a card this morning from Suzanne Rancourt (thanks!), also notice from the Mount Sinai Cord Blood programme saying that the harvest volume wasn't big enough to use (not surprising, given that the shift-change nurses forgot to tell the surgeon we wanted to keep it). The 7 mL that was harvested gets donated with our permission to research, and our $500 fee will be returned to us.

Off to the bus depot to send Jennifer back to Ottawa soon. We'll miss her a lot. She's been fantastic, looking after Jamie, doing all the housework, and lending us the wisdom of her three children's worth of mothering experience. We're buying her a return ticket though, so we hope she'll be back soon.

2003-11-20 13:45 Just as I updated the web site the doorbell rang. It's like a birthday or Christmas every day here. Heather, David and Rissa sent us some body lotion for Kristen and two videotapes, Baby Einstein: Language Nursery and Baby Galileo: Discovering the Sky. We're building up a good Baby Einstein library, and we're glad they chose ones we didn't already have. Susi and Ron Tiekert sent us a huge package of books. (Yay! How did they know?) A Hallmark baby diary (which will go nicely with the Japanese one that I bought in a fit of mush last April at Sasuga Books in Boston), Sesame Street's the Monster at the end of this Book, and a slew of Dr. Seuss classics: One fish two fish red fish blue fish, Dr. Seuss' ABC, an omnibus with And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton Hatches the Egg, Yertle the Turtle, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Lorax, and the prize: a copy of Hop on Pop ("STOP You must not hop on Pop!"). Kristen was especially delighted with Hop on Pop because it was her own very first book, and she has pictures of her with this prize possession.

2003-11-20 15:00 Craig Rowland came by for a half-hour visit, half of which was taken up by the now 200-photo uncut full-resolution version of Jamie's well-documented first days, and the other half of which he spent happily sitting on the couch with a baby in his lap.

2003-11-20 15:30 We all bundled into the car to take Jennifer down to the bus depot so she could head home to her own kids in Ottawa (Becky (10), Anna (8) and Owen (5)). I dropped Kristen and Jennifer off at the main entrance on Bay Street, then found street parking three blocks west, Jamie still peacefully asleep in his car-seat. Popped the trunk, lifted the Zooper Buddy (stroller) out and unfolded it one-handed, though it did take both hands to remount the quick-release front wheel. Jamie still asleep. Found the Missing Blanket and Missing Baby Hat in the stroller, reserved for later use. Unbuckled the car seat. Jamie still asleep. Remove blankets from car seat, let fall into gutter. Pick up, shake, brush off dead leaves, look around guiltily to see if any mothers are watching, put in stroller. Pick up Jamie, lost in his Maggie Simpson snowsuit, make sure that I have a firm grip and an awareness of where his limbs are, and transfer him to the stroller. Jamie still asleep. Close the car quietly. Jamie still asleep. Find both sides of stroller's five-point harness, which seems to want to act as a three-point harness, either because Jamie's a newborn, or because he's sitting the wrong way in the stroller. Cellphone rings (Kristen has bought Jennifer's ticket, tells me not to rush as the bus doesn't leave for half an hour). Jamie still asleep. Pull hard on harness to get enough of it to buckle Jamie in with. Jamie still asleep. Snap harness buckle shut on a significant portion of my right index finger. Say "Mmph!" Jamie stirs, eyes flutter, lips smack. I stick my head in the stroller and quietly sing "Summertime" to him. During the bridge, I notice that blood is flowing freely from my finger, so I take it out of the carriage and hold it over the gutter. Then I take the blankets that I dropped and push them down to the bottom of the stroller. Jamie's back asleep, and I walk to the bus depot and say goodbye to Jennifer.

So now, someone who hasn't had abdominal surgery last week to give me the most beautiful son a man could ever want has to do three loads of laundry, prepare three meals and keep the house clean each day, and the available labour pool has shrunk from Jennifer and me to, um, me. I shouldn't pretend that Jennifer and I were splitting the work 50-50 either. It was more like 80-20. Better get some sleep while I can. That's it for now.

2003-11-21 15:00 My aunts Nobuko and Tomoko asked us to spend $200 on Jamie at William Ashley China, so I checked to make sure Ayami would be around in case Kristen needed a hand, and zoomed to the store. Jamie is now the proud owner of Peter Rabbit^TM by Wedgwood "Boxed Composition A" (mug, 18 cm plate, oatmeal bowl), and Georg Jensen's "Julius" child's cutlery set (stainless steel spoon, fork and knife with engraved teddy bears). Kristen chose the Peter Rabbit (over the phone), as traditional on her side of the family. I chose the cutlery, which also reminded me of a set from when I was little.

It looks like I'm going to keep this blog going for a while, so I've reformatted the older entries so that they're a little less monolithic and a little more sustainable.

I'd write more, but there's laundry to fold and put away and a meal to prepare. Jamie and Kristen are fine, and still sticking pretty well to a 3.5-4 hour feeding schedule. Jamie's surface-to-mass ratio has decreased to the point where two receiving blankets (as recommended for neonates) makes him uncomfortably warm, and he looks like he's still gaining at least an ounce (30 g) a day.

2003-11-21 17:00 Had a great photo shoot with Jamie this afternoon. You might think from looking at his photos that he spends all day long wearing his big-eyed look of angelic bliss, but of course most of the time he's sleeping or nursing. Because he's been feeding enough and putting on enough weight, we've been trying to encourage him to interact toward the end of each 3.5-4 hour feeding cycle, instead of feeding him at the 3-hour mark when he starts to think about food.

His favorite form of interaction so far is listening to people sing, and there's been a gap in the upper registers of his concert programme since Jennifer went home. When Kristen started singing to him this afternoon, to try to distract him from nursing for another half hour, his eyes went as wide as they ever do, and he was rapt. It probably helped that his friend the camera was there to make soothing clicking and beeping sounds.

2003-11-21 21:00 My parents brought over takeout Indian from the Sher-E-Punjab on the Danforth, so dinner was eaten and the kitchen tidied in record time. To prepare for a midnight snack, I bundled Jamie into the sling and walked with Kristen to the corner store to buy ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream. He fell asleep on the way, looking up at the night sky.

I experimented today to see how well Jamie knows the rules of his environment. I figured he must know them pretty well by now, as he's been staring unblinking at the world around him for ten days. On the change table, when he squawked at me, I squawked right back, and you could see the wheels start spinning in his neural network. "I recognize this sound... This sound is usually internally generated... This time, it comes from an external source... This is an unusual event and requires further observation..." at which point he spat up, and lost his train of thought.

Later, while he was "pruning" my pinkie, I started wiggling my other three fingers. If he had been getting any fluid out of my pinkie (and I think he will, any day now), he would have choked with astonishment. I must think of more experiments.

2003-11-22 00:45 Jamie sure loves his baths. He goes from squawking with naked indignation to mellow bliss in the split second of immersion, and when I unswaddled him on the half-towel to investigate a suspicious burbling, he flashed me a grin that was pure Anne Geddes. (I was reminded to retroactively add a log entry at 2003-11-19 22:45 mentioning that Trevor and Antoinette Sealy gave Jamie his first rubber duckie.)

2003-11-22 17:15 Cook, eat, change, feed, burp, sing, rest, repeat. Still trying to squeeze "work" into the loop. More when I have the time and energy.

2003-11-22 18:00 There. I can almost see the top of my desk now. Found a large pile of mail which one of the tenants must have brought up for me while we were at the hospital, including what appears like it was the very first congratulations card we received, from Nobby Sagara. Postmarked on the 12th, it probably arrived on the 13th. Thanks, Nobby!

2003-11-22 22:45 I've been fascinated with Jamie's aural development. Looking at him, the most striking thing about him when he's awake and alert are his big baby blue eyes, but you can tell that his visual processing is still at a newborn level: he can recognize shapes, likes high-contrast simple geometric shapes, and is staring at things fixedly to get his visual cortex ready for fancier things. His listening skills though are well beyond that. He knows several songs well enough to be interested or annoyed by mistakes, and is fascinated (as opposed to soothed or mildly interested) when someone sings an unfamiliar song. Getting him ready for the bath today, Kristen tried reciting him some poetry. The verdict: Eliot has novelty interest, but he thinks Coleridge is awesome. After the bath, I got him to stop crying by catching his eye and then rhythmically repeating the five Japanese vowel sounds, which held his unwavering attention for about twenty repetitions, spending about a second on each vowel.

2003-11-23 23:00 Visits today from Lisa Deift, who went wild at Oink! Oink! and elsewhere, bringing "Le petit marseillais" bath oils, an outfit that Jamie will grow into before we know it, a beautiful baby photo album, and Jamie's current favorite, the Earlyears Sea Tales Book & Puppet, which as advertised attracts his attention on the change table; from Christine Miller, who came heavily laden with a large bunch of tulips (some of the original batch of flowers are now almost two weeks old, just like Jamie, and need replacing), a huge fruit basket (nursing mothers can never get enough food) and a copy of a perennial favorite, Good Night, Gorilla; and from my parents, who brought over a very welcome sashimi dinner.

Jamie has been (possibly as a result) a little overstimulated today, which led to him crying for a few minutes (gasp!) while he was being dressed after his bath today. I think he was actually protesting his removal from the bath, which is just shockingly rambunctious behaviour for him. He's also been nursing and pooing much more copiously even than usual today, and I wouldn't be surprised if he gained two ounces instead of the usual 1-1.5. Must find a sensitive scale to weigh him on.

2003-11-24 11:00 Jamie nursed on and off and stayed awake from 18:00 to 22:30 last night, then slept from 23:00 to 05:00 with only a brief interruption at 03:00, when he asked for one layer of covers to be removed. He then nursed, and went back to sleep for another four hours. We'll try to make this a habit.

2003-11-24 22:30 I've been running around today trying to get the plans for the Canadian SCRABBLE Championship back on track, but keep running into baby gifts! When I went to borrow my parents' car, I found a beautiful teddy bear (photo to follow) from their longtime (now sadly ex-) neighbours Marilyn and Matthew. And when I got home, I found cards in the mail from Steven Alexander (and Camela and Zeno), Kristiina Overton, and Kristen's dad and stepmom. Thank you very much, everyone. At this rate, we won't be able to tell when Christmas comes!

2003-11-24 25:00 Kristen and I are bone tired, and it's probably not even Jamie's fault today. Just a lot to do and not quite enough energy to do it all. Soon though, we'll put Jamie to work editing web pages, and life will be easy again.

Back to Vol. 0 No. 1, or up to Jamie Chew's Web Log Archive. or forward to Vol. 0 No. 3.