Day 240 (4 Mar 2006): It's hard to not keep apologizing for how long it has been since the last Lilah update. So here it goes: um. sorry. Something about 8 (!) month olds plus a couple of jobs a bit a travel and a new house (!!) makes it tough to keep updating Lilah's website. But I checked, and Lilah forgives me. Phew. But there is much big news to relate. So here it is:

Lilah crawls! Last I wrote she was in the almost-crawling state and I was wondering when crawling-proper would commence. I think the official record keeping will have to say 7.5 months of age. A few weeks before that she was moving -- if you sat her down and let her go in a few minutes she would be in a different space -- but you couldn't really call it crawling exactly. All of the individual limbs were doing their jobs, but not with any coordination. Now, though, she is a crawling machine. She loves to crawl. She loves to explore. She loves to try to get to the cat food. We have, like most parents, been anticipating and also dreading this moment, but I have to admit that I think it is a significant plus. She is really able to entertain herself with exploration of the house in ways that she couldn't do when stationary. We have to watch a bit more closely, but so far not ridiculously so. Maybe when she finds the vasts of bubbling poisons that we keep in the cabinents below the sink (conventiently close to the cat food to which she is continusouly drawn) we will start to become a bit more frantic. But so far so good.
The best day of her little life, for me, came last weekened. We were kicked out of our house for Sunday because there was an open house there so that we could sell it since we sort of accidentally bought a new house, so we were hanging out in Diane's father's condo. D. and I were both exhausted so we were collapsed on the floor with Lilah between us. She was thrilled. She is not quite to the "pulling up" stage where she can go to some object, grab it, and pull her self up to standing, but she is definitely in what now call the "pushing up" stage, where she will go to some object (usually a prone leg), crawl up on it, and then push her legs up so they are straight to the ground while her opper body is still perpendicular to the ground. It seems likely that it will only be days before she then looks up, grabs something higher, and is truly pulling up to a standing position. But for now pushing up is all the rage. That Sunday afternoon at Diane's father's Lilah spent most of an hour crawling over to Diane, pushing up to her perpendicular position, looking at mom and dad to make sure they were looking at her, immediately then being fascinated by dad two yards away, crawling over to him, pushing up to semi-standing, looking around, noticing mom two yards away, crawling over, pushing up, noticing dad, crawling over, pushing up, ad nauseaum. I am pretty sure she would have done this until bed time. It was the most crawling she had ever done and she was sweating up a storm. By the end of the day she was perhaps the most exhausted we had seen her.
As you can see from the Lilah sleep logs (well, if I ever take the time to post the data...) Lilah had been on quite a roll of sleeping and sticking to her dad-imposed schedule until a few weeks ago when she suddenly began waking up in the night and waking up early in the morning crying like she hadn't before. Why, Lilah, why? Sadly, I think the blame can be rested squarely on her parents. Lilah was fine until the day that her parents decided, all of the sudden, to put a bid in on a new house. D. and I had been talking for a while of the need for a bigger house to accomodate Lilah and her currently-hypothetical sibling, but I was resistant to the idea. I had bought our current house six years earlier and I had declared several times since then that I never ever ever wanted to move. The house was small but I absolutely loved it. Deep down inside, though, I knew that we would someday have to move, and I dreaded it. We had looked at a few houses in the past, all of which were larger and cost ridiculous amounts of money, and none of which I would trade for our nice little house. But on February 10th we looked at a house ("just for fun" we said. "to stay in practice" we said. "to get a feel for what is out there" we said.) and fell in love with that one, too. It truly was the first time I would trade my house for another and be happy. We joked about it over the weekend, thinking we couldn't actually really seriously honestly put in a bid for such a fabulous place but then we somehow, against all reason, did. On Valentine's day the owner accepted our offer and suddenly we were thrown into a frenzy. We needed to finalze everything with the new house, sell the (now) old house (though nice, it was not really in selling-shape just yet) and think about moving. All instantly. Lilah noticed. The real stress started on Valentine's day and continued through now (the old house is sold now, so I think (hope?) the stress level will decline for a few weeks until we have to move) and Lilah's sleep patterns show it. The weeks that the house was for sale Lilah and Amy and Daisy all stayed at Amy's house during the day, which was great, but Lilah was thrown off by that and the stress of her parents when she came home. Sorry Lilah! I think she'll appreciate the new house as she grows up so she will forgive us (she'll definitely love the pool, and there is this cool part of the yard which goes down into a canyon with trails through the oak trees. D. says that this will be a place that Lilah will find completely magical to play in between ages 7 and 13 and that when Lilah is a teenager she will find it a great place to hide from her parents and smoke pot with her friends.).
So that's the current Lilah excitement. Perhaps someday I will get back to more regular updates. It seems unlikely though, doesn't it? This update is courtesy of a six hour airplane ride from New York.
My last thought is about Lilah nicknames. For reasons lost in time of lack of sleep, the first nickname that we used for Lilah that either of us can remember is "Schmoo". Usually as in "the Schmoo". The little babbling things that she said were "Schmoo-sounds". After a month or two, "Lilah" became "Smiley" since, in fact, she was superbly smiley. So the car with Lilah's seat in it is known, to this day, as the Smiley-mobile. These days the name that has stuck is courtesy of my brother and his wife, Uncle Andy (aka Andy-Bob) and Aunt Kathy (aka Kiffey). All nieces and nephews are named after vegetables. First nephew Thomas is "tater". Sam is "spud". It could be that there was a tuber theme developing. But after much contemplation, Lilah became "Lima Bean", creating, perhaps, the new convention that boys are tubers and girls are legumes. "Lima Bean" has been slighly modified on a day to day basis to "Lilah Bean" and she is now mostly known, for short, as "Bean" or, in the third-person, "the Bean."


I've missed the Bean for the past few days. I'm on my way home from one of the longest trips since her birth. What's she going to be like when I get home? Actually standing? Able to wave bye-bye (we're working on that one now)? Finally relaxing now that mom and dad are more relaxed? Is that first bad case of diaper rash all resolved (we don't really need to talk about that, now, do we?). Can't wait. Can't wait. Can't wait.

Day 195 (18 Jan 2006): Lilah, Lilah, Lilah. We had our six month pediatrician appointment the other day and the doctor asked us to give Lilah a grade for her first six months. I promptly responded "A+" and then tried to defend me grade against the obvious accusation of favoritism. I think I did OK. Lilah really is an A+ these days. Nice. Easy. Adaptable. Perfect. Right?

So what happened? In the span of about a week Lilah suddenly has changed personality entirely. She suddenly has opinions about things. Like the fact the she can't reach a toy after she drops it. So she screams. Or the fact that she is bored sitting in this same place, thank you very much. So she screams. She is also an energetic kid who is always pounding. For example, in the blink of an eye (literally in this case) she will grab my glasses and begin pounding them against my head. Or she will take a spoon and bang bang bang it on my knee (which, incidentally, actually hurts). Apparently she is also not so nice to Amy who she spends the day with. Daisy says that Lilah kicks Amy in the back (Lilah's been riding in the back of the double stroller, which I think will change after today) and pulls her hair. I thought this sort of girl behavior didn't start until middle school! Jeez. I think she just needs to get to the crawling stage so she can release some of the energy on her own, but at the same time her currently level of pounding and grabbing sure makes me worried about the crawling stage. In any case, it will happen within the week, I think. She now has all of the individual movements down to crawl but just hasn't gotten them all put together just yet. But because she desperately wants things out of her reach she also has great incentive. I think very soon it will happen. God save us all.

While the physical changes are amazing to watch, I am fascinated by looking for signs of intellectual development which might be coming soon. For now it seems clear that she shows no recognition whatsoever of any words. Not her name, not mom, dad, daisy, amy, or kitties (the main beings in her life). But it will presumably blossom on her face any time now. She also appears to show no sign of imitaiton: you babble something to her and she babbles back the same thing. Or she babbles, you imitate, and she seems to notice. Perhaps this one is more that I don't quite know what to count as noticing but it sure doesn't appear to me. The babbling is getting more sophisticated but no real words yet (this is way to early for that, though). It also appears that her calculus skills are sadly lacking, which I find particularly disheartening.

The other big change is that Lilah now loves her solid food. Oatmeal, rice, peas, beans, sweet potatoes, peaches, apples, bananas, you name it. She'll eat it. She loves it so much that now she's hard to feed because she wants to grab the spoon and shove it in her mouth but she can't quite get it right (usually hits left cheek with spoon sideways).

No discussion of the milk-to-solid food transition would be complete without mentioning how that transition changes the olfactory qualities of a baby's solid waste. But I won't mention that here. Why not? Because if I don't mention it and don't write it down maybe some day I will forget. Maybe some day I will not have to do that sharp gasp every time I pull the full diaper down these days. Maybe some day it will seem as inconsequential and routine as it did for those first magical six months. Maybe. But I won't mention any of that.

Finally, our mission to get Lilah to bed earlier is going quite well, as you can see (when I update the sleep plots. Soon. Soon. I promise). She is a pretty regular 12-hour sleeper, but there have been some rough patches recently, either connected with the grandparent's visiting and all of the excitement of that or with the scaling back of milk as she has more solid food or something else entirely (teething! why didn't I blame teething!). She has definitely been doing more crying and screaming and even occasional nighttime waking these days that in a long long time. And, the best part is that I consider her waking up at 6:30am early. So I guess really I should stop complaining, shouldn't I.

Day 189 (12 Jan 2006): Just when we have gotten used to how we feed little Lilah things are changing once again. A bit has switched somewhere and now she digs the solid food. Oatmeal? Yummmm. Peas? Good stuff. Green beans (ok, less good). Sweet potatoes? Awesome. Rice cereal (bland and uninteresting). Instead of turning her head away she now leans forward and grabs at the spoon to put the whole thing in her mouth. Now we have a whole new set of issues to worry about. How much solid food does she get and when? How do we start phasing out the formula? Do we start giving her water? Juice? Beer? Tough enough to figure all of this out, but it changes about once a month now for at least the next six months, at which point, if I understand things correctly, she will more or less be snacking off my plate and swilling milk. Too bad. All formula all day was such a easy life for us. It's not that we don't want Lilah to grow up, it's just that we don't want to have to figure out what comes next. Argh.

In other news Lilah is almost on the way to crawling (in fact, Daisy claimed she crawled today, but I could not independently verify this claim). If you put her on her stomach on the floor she randomly moves her way over a ~4 foot area over the course of half an hour, but never in the direction she tries (it's actually somewhat sad to watch: if she really really really wants something right out of her reach she struggles and struggles to get to it and moves herself backwards all the while). If she's on the slick counter top she can definitely spin towards anything that she wants (usually a very startled cat).

Day 180 (3 Jan 2006): Oh hey and did I mention the new sleep regime? In mid-December we decided it was time to instill some discipline on the little beast. She has been having a last feeding around 9:30 and I asked some friends when they transitioned their children to an earlier bed time. They looked at me like I was nuts. Apparently everyone else has problems on the other end. The kids go to sleep early but don't sleep all night. Lilah would stay awake later and sleep all night. We, of course, want it all. So we started trying more of the routine, which now goes something like this: about 8:15, Lilah gets a bath (every other day, really). By 8:30 she gets fed. By 9 she has had some books read to her and she is in bed. The trick turned out to be to put her to bed while she is awake, which we were avoiding before. When she was up until 10pm she would fall asleep at her last feeding. Now she is groggy but awake when we put her down at 8:40-9:00. She sometimes sits and talks to herself and even once or twice (at the begining) cried out, but within about 15 minutes she is sound asleep. We thought we were going to be in for the dreaded let-her-cry-it-out routine, but the only night it was really bad was one night near the begining when we had friends over and a bottle of wine. We figured that was the best solution. Sit and drink and talk to friends and ignore the child. Worked like a charm. And now look how consist her bedtimes are (other than last night.....)

Day 179 (2 Jan 2006): Time for the New Year and an update on this month's Lilah. This months had some good moments, some sad moments, a slew of firsts, and a couple of lasts. In no particular order:

Teething? Lilah is still a genial baby, so we keep fearing that a tooth will finally mess everything up. There was some discussion back around Thanksgiving time about teeth. As of December 31st there were no teeth whatsoever. But as of January 1st everything has changed. No more speculation, no more idle chat. It's a tooth, clear and simple. Now when she bites down with the powerful jaws you are no longer gummed to death. You are gummed-plus-one-tooth to death. A fate to be feared.

Lilah is sitting up, mostly. She can sit for minutes at a time, but all sitting sessions end with some sort of crash (well, not really, because I am always here to catch her when she falls. like a cheesy top 40 song or something. but she WOULD fall without me there). Often it is just a sideways topple, but if there is an object in front of her that she can't quite get to she will instead do a lunge that leaves her with a high speed face plant. Not tragic when on the bed, but do it a few more times on the counter top, Lilah, and that button nose of yours will be permanent. Note to readers: ok, I really don't let her do the face plants. But she would, given the change.

Lilah loves to jump and bounce. She's always been a good stander, but in the past month I was worried that she was somehow losing it. But what really is happening is that as soon as she is standing she wants to bounce up and down and jump, which, when you're holder her, seems much like legs collapsing under her weight, which was what happened back at month 3.

One week ago, Lilah completed her first full sentence. Diane and I went in in the morning to get her out of bed, she rolled over, looked up, smiled her toothless smile, and said "hi dada" to which I instantly responded "hi Lilah" and Diane was agast. Until Lilah then said "bla bla blu da da di da bli bli da da ah ah ooooo eee bleee ac." Approximately. I suspect that that was a full sentence, too, but I couldn't translate that one as quickly.

Lilah is now eating solid food! Or, more precisely, we sneak mush into her mouth when she is not looking and she can't spit it out so she swallows it. On the bad list: rice cereal. green beans. OK list: oatmeal. Possibly good list: peas. The peas were broken out today for the first time and Lilah actually opened her mouth as if she even wanted to eat!

Lilah's great grandmother, Dorothy Winking, of whom you can see pictures from last Thanksgiving, passed way in her sleep 2 weeks ago at age 99. Lilah can be happy if she got those longevity genes passed on (they certainly don't pass through the men in my family). Dorothy had been having a pretty hard time for the past few years and frequently said she was ready to leave. When she found out Lilah was on the way (her first great-granddaughter!) she decided that she at least wanted to stick around to meet her. We made it out there for Thanksgiving, though it was a bit touch-and-go whether or not great grandma would make it until then. The first day we went to visit she was pretty out of it, though we were pretty sure that she knew we were there. On Thanksgiving day, though, things were much better and Lilah held Dorothy's finger and snuggled up against her. Everyone came to visit that day: her only child (my mother), her grandchildren (my brother, me, my sister), and her great-grandchildren (my sister's two boys and Lilah). She passed away in her sleep two weeks later, as she wanted.

Lilah loved her first Christmas. It had all of the best elements: paper everywhere, people to talk to, and many many candles. Next year she might want more than wrapping paper. Maybe boxes will have to do.


Day 145 (29 Nov 2005): I guess it's time to stop moaning about how infrequently I update Lilah's site these days and just accept it. Now that Daisy is working full time and I am working full time when I get home from work I don't seem to have time to actually write anything. Or input data. Or update pictures.

But fear not: even during all of this period the data have been accumulating, the pictures have been obtained. And, finally, a bit of an update.

Highlights?

A flight across the country for Thanksgiving: Lilah slept the whole time and made one small sound. Perfect baby. Flight back? Lilah slept almost none. Fussed instead. I got to carry her all around the airplane wondering when turbulence was going to knock us on our heads.

Lilah got to meet her 99-year old great grandmother. Pictures to follow. GGM is in a nursing home in Alabama and doesn't move or talk much, but she lit up when Lilah came in. Lilah help on to her finger and tried to pull any tubes she could find (not a good idea, Lilah).

Lilah sure does wake up between 4 and 6 a lot these days. Diane and I take turns on who has to get up and feed her. Last night it was Diane's turn and she was somewhat slow to get out of bed, fill a bottle, and get to Lilah's room. By the time she got these Lilah had gone back to sleep. Hmmmm.....

How should I deal with the data when we change time zones? Traveling is SO confusing.

Lilah is taking increasingly longer naps in the daytime. This is a good thing. At least for Daisy.

Lilah spent about 2 weeks not talking ("talking" meaning making little baby sounds such as squealing). As this period approximately corresponded to the point at which autism starts to show up in babies, I became mildly paranoid. Doesn't talk? What else doesn't she do. I did my quick check of everything and found that everything else is ok, but she should be well into consonants by now (mostly she only had vowels figured out). As soon as she got to Alabama for Thanksgiving, though, she started squealing like mad. I don't know if she just needed more interaciton or it is just one of those things, but you would never have known that she spent two weeks not talking. She even has a few consonants now, like the letter "B". Particularly with a whole buzzing sound.

Lilah is now enamored of rolling over. She will spend only seconds on her back before she is on her front. And while before she would complain if we ever tried to put her on her front, she now rolls over and lies there contentedly. Sometimes she bunches up a burp towel to use as a pillow.

Parents blame everything on teething. Wake up at night? Must be teething. Fussy one day? Teething. Slight fever? Must be the teeth. I truly believe, however, that Lilah is indeed teething at this point. Why? (1) My sister, mother of two, said so, based on looking in her mouth and saying "hey look teeth!" (um, ok, if you say so....) (2) Lilah is starting to do this weird tongue chewing thing where she looks like an old man. And everyone knows that old men are always teething (3) We gave Lilah a nice cold chewy teething ring to play with last night and she wouldn't let it go. Not that she doesn't just chew on everything. But still.

Lilah had her first fever! It got up to 102.4 briefly, which seems high to me, so I even called the pediatrician, just to be sure, but he said don't sweat it until she gets to 104. (104? yikes. I'm pretty sure proteins denature at that temperature.) The fever went away pretty quickly and she was fine by the afternoon. Must have been teething.


Day 124 (8 Nov 2005): Happy four month birthday to Lilah! I hate to generically say "gee it all goes by so quickly" except that, gee, it all goes by. So quickly. I was just reexamining Lilah's Thursday pictures a moment ago and I was, indeed, amazed at how fast she changes (which was the point of the Thursday pictures to begin with, right?).

And she has been sleeping so well these last two nights (ok, so I haven't had time to input the data, but take my word for it). It just takes two nights in a row of Lilah sleeping 10 hours to convince me that she is finally back to her long sleeps and she won't wake up in the middle of the night ever again. I'm sure I'm wrong. And when she does it's my turn. But I'm still convinced.

Day 122 (6 Nov 2005): Lilah is getting a bit out of hand. Sure, she's generally a good natured well behaved happy girl, but what is up with the last few nights? At least Diane and I now take explicit turns on who has to get up. That meant that at 3am this morning when Lilah awoke (3am???? when did she last wake up that early? answer: 12 days ago) Diane had to get up. Yesterday when Lilah awoke at 6:40am I was in charge. Hardly seems fair, does it? Just the luck of the draw. So anyway, what is up with these crazy waking timeS?

The promise of all of this record keeping is that perhaps we can actually find patterns. So far it was useful back at the begining for general expectations, it's been great for knowing when she'll need to feed, and it's worked for having some idea of the best ways of getting her to sleep at night. But what about how to sleep through the night?

Here's question one: is there any correlation between how much formula Lilah has during a day and when she wakes up the next morning? If she's waking up because she is hungry perhaps this is why?

AH HA! OK, so I can't answer everything, but the two times she woke up at 3am also correspond to the two smallest daytime feeds, when she only had ~27 ounces of formula. There is no correlation with the 4:30am wakeups, though. They seems to happen no matter if she had 30 or 36 ounces. But it definitely looks like we should be more carefuly and make sure she doesn't have anymore 27 ounce days.

What about a guess that sleeping too much during the day makes her not sleep as long at night? Looking at the red/green plot doesn't make it seem like there could possibly be too much to that. But since being formula fed she has been quite random, with an almost perfect 50/50 split between waking up at ~7am or later and waking up while it is still dark out. What gives???

Day 119 (3 Nov 2005): OK. I lost. Lilah woke up at 4:30am. I thought I was going to just go in, say "hi" and then have her go back to sleep, but as soon as I walked in she suddenly got agitated and made it seem she really really really really wanted to be fed. So I gave in. I don't know if at this point we should not be giving in yet. Probably soon. But so far we have found that if she cries out at night she either goes back to sleep almost immediately, and then so do we, or she starts to get more and more agitated until she has worked herself up into a complete fit and I picture, in my sleepy state, her completely wrapped around her blankets suffocating and choking herself. Not a pretty picture to have in your 4am mind, I tell you. So I get up.

Note, however, that now that Diane and I are both back to work full time we are, in theory, switching off who has to get up at night. We'll see how the theory actually works.

Back to last night, though. Perhaps we should have let Lilah doze for a bit at 8pm and then had her wake up for a final feed at 10pm. I dunno. These days I carefully count how much formula she has per day (hmmmm, I see a new plot coming....) and I think I know when she is all done and doesn't need any more for the night. So when I know that a certain feed will be her last but it is too early should I hold out? Try wake her a little later? Definitely time to begin the experimentation.

Day 118 (2 Nov 2005): Lilah! What a crazy little girl. We are in the process once again of trying to figure everything out from scratch. As of Monday Daisy is now doing full time nanny duty and I am back to work (someday, perhaps, on the difficulties there. Diane cried her first day back to work. I thought of all of those things I wished I had had time to do with Lilah while I was still on leave. I'm still on leave until January, so I tell myself I'll take days off to come do stuff with Lilah, but you should believe it when you read it) and Daisy's Lilah schedule is a very different one from the one I would impose. As of now the best I can say is that she seems to feed her more frequently in the daytime. One very interesting aspect of that for the past few days has been that Lilah is pretty full by the time evening comes around. Last night she fed at 5:05pm and then not again until 9:00pm and then she was out cold until morning. The night before she had a RECORD AGAIN feeding early and then sleeping late. We hope that the trend is for switching her last feed of the night from 9pm-ish to 8pm-ish (of course we do seem to have a hard time actually finishing dinner by then but that is a different matter entirely).

Amy, who shares Daisy with Lilah and is two weeks younger than Lilah, is on a different schedule entirely. Funny to see two girls of almost the same age have almost no characteristics in common. Amy sleeps 3 hours during the day and goes for hours and hours between feeds. But then I think she doesn't sleep so well at night. Just a reminder that Lilah is just a single data point and may bear no relationship whatsoever to any other girl under the sun. Or orbiting the sun.

It's interesting having Daisy take care of Lilah as you also see that Lilah can be a very different girl when someone else imposes her will on her. We still only communicate maybe 30% well with Daisy so it wasn't possible to go into the minute detail of precisely what Lilah likes and dislikes so Daisy had the chance to figure it out herself and -- behold! -- what Lilah likes is different than we thought.

Over the weekend Lilah had a random baby sitter in Palm Springs who we described everything in detail to and even then all behavior was different (including -- gasp -- Lilah figuring out for the first time how to roll from her back to her front. She doesn't yet know what to do once she gets there, since she doesn't much like being on her front, but the rolling happenes nonetheless). Saturday night Lilah got fed at something like 8pm and the babysitter proceeded to make sure she finished her bottle over the course of an hour. We usually just let Lilah figure when she is done and then don't push it. And then? Lilah was exhausted and wouldn't wake up for a latter feeding (we did pay for that one, though, with an early morning Lilah wake up call).

Tonight we have a similar idea. Daisy fed Lilah enough that by her ~8:15 feed she really was not going to need any more for the night. Sure enough, she feel asleep while D. fed her, so we just put her down. But what will happen in the morning? It seems that mostly these days she gets up when she hears someone. Will she stay asleep until 6:30am? (wouldn't even be a record these days), or will she do an ~8 hour stint and wake up at 4am? D. and I just debated who has to get up when Lilah does. I win the prize. Please sleep Lilah, please.


Day 113 (28 Oct 2005): What a crazy Lilah week this has been. First, though, a little celebration. Last night Lilah eeked in another record between feeds: 10 hours 40 minutes! I think we have night time going to sleep figured out a little better, at least. One of the tricks seems to be to go back to the back-to-back feeds that we used to do right before bedtime. Last night she only took a tiny little bottle on the first, and a medium bottle on the second, but she slept well. And most nights she seems to be able to put herself to sleep after a feed, a little reading, and then lights out. She talks for 15-20 minutes and then is out.
The rest, though. Crazy. Sorry to not have time for details (though you can tell by looking at her red/green plot!). We are off for the weekend so I can give a couple of talks about -- you guessed it -- that 10th planet again. Updates again on Sunday.


Day 111 (26 Oct 2005): It worked it worked it worked! Or was it just luck? I don't know, but she had a very nice 9 hour sleep. And she went to sleep very nicely during her 10pm feed (actually even better: she wasn't quite asleep when I put her down and she talked to herself a bit and then went to sleep. Nice!). This is the way we want her nights to be!

Day 110 (25 Oct 2005): See, Mom, I had to feed Lilah again last night! She went to sleep well last night, but then woke up at 3:30am with a cry. Just one. Ignore. 3:35am. Another cry. Try to pretend it's not there. Maybe she'll go back to sleep. Finally after half an hour of this I give up. Get up. Feed. And even then she stays awake for a while since she had worked herself up to quite a frenzy. I think that theoretically I'm supposed to not get up at night to feed her, but she does take a pretty big bottle, so she really is hungry. I think. I give up.

I have examined the data for her past few weeks carefully and realized that one new thing going on is that she is taking substantial evening naps. These have now been outlawed. At least theoretically. Except that after dinner tonight (our dinner, not hers) she could not keep her eyes open. I kept trying to keep her awake, but in the end the eyelids were made of lead. I decided she was allowed a half hour nap. We are then going to go for the 2 hour spaced power feeds like we used to do, so a 8pm feed as soon as she wakes and then a 10pm (or even 9:30pm?) feed.

On a good note, I had her go to sleep without dancing around with her this afternoon. She was clearly really really tired at 9:30am and wanted to be danced to sleep but I sat her down on the bed and talked to her. It took an hour and much fussing and many attempts at getting her to take a pacifier, but eventually she really did go to sleep. And slept well. With Ike. On the bed. I realize the danger there, as Ike still weighs 50% more than her, but he doesn't move much.

OK. So it's 8pm. I'm off to wake her up. It's only 2 hrs since her last feeding (and she ate a lot), but I'm going to try. Wish me luck....

Funny Lilah. She absolutely positively did not want a bottle. She has never resisted one so visciously. She rejected and then cried and cried and cried. She cried so much that the only thing I could think of to comfort her was.... a bottle. Which she drank. Not much, but perhaps enough that now in 2 more hours she can get a last feed and sleep. Please, Lilah, please?

Day 109 (24 Oct 2005): OK, so I'm in trouble now. My mother has found the daily logs and already chided me for making Diane get up to feed Lilah at night when D. is going to work in the morning and I am not. Luckily for me, last night Lilah woke up at 2:30am, and I got up to feed her. Whew. Off the hook. OK, wait, though, let's get back to that one. "Luckily for me"??? When is the last time Lilah woke up at 2:30am? (those who study their graphs carefully would quickly answer "2 months ago!"). So, clearly, we are having issues. Besides just my mother worrying about Diane's sleep (I know, I know, it was bad, but Diane was used to the idea of getting up at night for feeding and I wasn't and it seemed natural to let her keep doing it..... OK. Never mind. I was just being a bad guy). But the issues. I haven't marked Lilah as fussy for a few nights, though if I had a festering pink I might have used that. Basically the issue is that we simply have not figured out night time sleep in the era of the bottle. We were so happy with how well the little beast was going to sleep in the era of mommy-feeding. We knew we were smug. We repeatedly fretted about the curse of being smug. But still. You can't dissuade a curse simply by acknowledging that it might happen. And it happened.

It's not that most of the past 2 weeks she hasn't slept through the night. So, once again, I should probably be worrying about curses here, rather than fretting. But fretting is one of the things that I do best. So here I go.
Lilah does not go down well after a bottle. For a while it was reds. Now it is simply awakes that could perhaps be called reds. One reason that she did so well back in the brest feeding days is that we had the schedule down: Lilah needed a power feed 2 hours before her last feed of the night. Does she still with the bottle? I can't tell yet. Theoretically I should be able to know, since I know that she needs about 30 oz. of formula a day and I track how much she takes so I know how much she needs for her last two feedings. But so far all of the tracking in the world has not yet worked. Plus Daisy (who is fabulous, by the way, sorry Sarah, I think you're out of a job) still does not have all the tracking down quite yet.

I think, though, that we still just need to figure out a nighttime ritual as good as the old one (which was simply "take a long time to eat and go to sleep in the meantime"). We're trying that as I type: Diane has Lilah in her room and fed her after I gave her a bath. Diane is reading to Lilah (I hear some "Goodnight Moon" action happening right now). Lilah, however, is talking back to the books. I hear her squealing in delight, which is about the cutest thing she ever does, except when it is her bedtime, when it is, ok, well, the cutest damned thing in the entire damned world. A bit distracting as I try to write this. Diane is now wondering how she is going to get her to sleep. I have no idea. So far my data are not really quite up to the task upon us.

As fretted frequently in the previous days, we had no business plan for how we would put her to sleep other than feeding and dancing. Dancing still works (Jack Johnson is still a favorite, though she is quite the Ollabelle fan these days, too, if the right song is on. Willie Nelson makes her cry. She'll learn, though). But we need her to go to sleep on her own. [whoops. hi lilah. she just came out to visit. wide awake.] I mean, when she is 90 lbs, will I really be able to pick her up and dance around with her (I certainly hope so, but even now my back is getting a little sore as she surpasses the small kitty [patton] in weight and begins to close in on the fat kitty [ike])?

All of which brings us to last night, which is as good an example as any. She fed at 8pm, but from looking at her total intake I knew she was not done for the night. I figured I could force-feed her again at 10pm and maybe get her to take 3-4 ounces and perhaps sleep. But at 9:30 she started bawling and then fell asleep with a pacifier. At 10pm she was still sound asleep and I didn't know what to do. Wake her to feed her? Let her sleep but figure she'll wake up at 4am? I opted to wake her. At first she would only take an ounce or two and then fall asleep. But over the course of about 30 minutes she finally tooks something like 5 oz. Phew, think I. She'll do her normal sleep until 7:30. So when, at 2:30am, she lets out a cry, I think "no problem, this will go right away." At 2:40am when she is crying a little harder I think "perfect. she'll learn to put herself to sleep at night." At 2:50am she was starting to heave I thought "really it is not fair to make Diane give Lilah middle of the night feedings, since Diane has to work in the morning" so I got up and fed Lilah. She sucked down 6 oz. faster than I've ever seen. I went back to sleep, but not until I remember that I too had to get up to go to work the next morning. So Diane and I are even, Mom.

Tonight? Who knows what will happen. Asleep soon? Sleep all night? Wake up at 4am? (I'm on again if she does, since tomorrow I am actually not going to work). We're convinced, with no evidence to support our theory, that a consistent ritual will make everything work out right. We just haven't figured out what the ritual is. But if you see me start to make sacrifices of small animals on my front porch, at least you'll have some understanding of what I am working towards.

p.s. she did it! Diane put Lilah down. She fussed a bit. She is now asleep. There is hope yet.

Day 104 (19 Oct 2005): New experiment of the day: failure. I tried to feed Lilah her last bottle and then put her to sleep groggy but not asleep. She was awake for half and hour just talking to herself in her room but eventually she started crying. OK, I thought. Time to steel yourself for the "let her cry herself to sleep" trick. I went in a talked to her, but didn't pick her up. The crying intensified. I waited 5 minutes, walked in, talked to her, didn't pick her up. The crying got as bad as I have ever heard. I broke down and picked her up and held her and rocked her and she slowly sobbed in my arms until she was convinced that the world was OK. I rocked her and rocked her and finally put her down when she was asleep. WAAAAAHHHHHHH! OK. Picked her up. Rocked her some more. Put her down: waaaaaahhhhh. The final solution, a half hour later, was, of course, dancing to Jack Johnson. She lasted on 2 songs and the poor exhausted girl was finally down. OK, I know that I am supposed to hold out and let her cry and that is better in the long run, but she sounds so sad. And I so hate it when she sounds sad. I am in deep trouble. But at least, for now, she is asleep.
The daytime Daisy records were better today. I got feed times and sleep times accurately, I think, but not end-of-sleep times, so I made up how long she slept each time. Don't know if it is true. Daisy did report that she had had no solid diapers all day. Luckily, she was just saving it all up for Dad. Thanks, Lilah. Diane's comment when I had her come help with the particularly messy diaper: Holy Shit. Indeed.
And this morning she did she is not supposed to do: a 5:30 am wakeup. Diane and I both considered ignoring her and seeing if she went back to sleep but we didn't have the strength. It is still 8 1/2 hours between feeds, so we shouldn't whine too much, but in some ways getting up to feed at 4am and then going back to sleep is better than getting up at 5:30am and staying awake. I say this theoretically, as I actually don't do the getting up. I guess really I should since I am not going to work and Diane is, huh? Lilah didn't even take all that much to eat this morning. I think she was still just rattled from the previous night. But she's still asleep now and maybe she'll just sleep the rest of the day....

Day 103 (18 Oct 2005): Now that Lilah is a formula-only baby, it is time to assuage some of my formula-related guilt. To that end, an ode to forumla, in prose form.

But first, a rant. It is always said that mother's milk is better for the baby, for reasons of nutrition and immunity and health and etc. and etc. Sadly, however, as a curious scientist, I can't actually find any unbiased studies of what is going on. Most of the people discussing these studies have huge political axes to grind and don't give dispassionate conclusions. And I don't understand the epidemeology literature well enough to be able to independently assess the conclusions that are reached (and, incidentally, I suspect most of the people who comment don't understand it well enough either). Are the advantages of breast milk real? Do they correctly take into account socio-economical differences of the samples? Or all of the rest of the differences? I wish I could find some good real information, but I can't. Perhaps my favorite web site title is from the FDA site about formula, which says "Not the best, but good enough." I'm a big fan of good enough, if it really is, so at first I found the title of this web site encouraging. But, sadly, I don't much trust the FDA these days, either, as it appears that all government organizations can be very influenced by money-making industries. Formula is big-bucks. Is the FDA really uninfluenced by this? I have no idea. Makes me sound a bit like a conspiracy believer, but, in some ways, the influence of money on government IS a conspiracy. And I believe it. But that's an entirely different rant. Nonetheless I find it difficult to get information whose quality I trust and can assess on the true effects of formula vs. breast-milk. I will go on the assumption, however, that the FDA line is approximately correct. Breast is best. Formula is OK. Is this really true? I don't know. Anyone who knows where to get good unbiased information please let me know.

Now, some history. Back when Diane became pregnant (about a year ago, in fact), it was very clear that she was uncomfortable with the idea of breast feeding. I, however, was quite adamant that formula is evil and babies should be breast fed. I was smart enough, however, to not ever open my mouth. Didn't say a word. I am sure that D. knew my opinion, but every time the issue came up I was quite supportive of whatever she wanted to do. Sneaky of me, since I know that D. is one of the few people in the world as stubborn as me and if I fought it she would dig in her heels. Which she would have. But as time went on D. became more and more comfortable with the idea and by the time little Lilah came along she decided to go for it. I was elated. A month or two into the entire thing Diane even sheepishly admitted that she secretly enjoyed feeding the little beast. And, as slavishly detailed on the red/green plots and the journal below, Diane fed and pumped, fed and pumped, I occasionally fed bottles, and Lilah grew from 7 lbs 7 ounces to her current 13 lbs of fat and happy baby girl.

But Lilah's growth of 5 lbs and 9 ounces of fat happiness were not without cost. One major cost was the transformation of Diane from an actual person to a feeding system. At almost any time day or night Diane needed to be precisely aware of when L. was last fed, when she might next need to be fed, where they were going to be at the time, and whether or not there was any time to actually do something else. Lilah was also a slow feeder, so since feeds were about 45 minutes long and Lilah went about 2.5 hours between daytime feeds (still!), Diane has about an hour and 45 minute chunk of time between feeds. Dinner? Try to feed L. while I make dinner, have dinner, hang out for a bit, and feed L. again. Or the other way around where we desperately attempt dinner before D. has to go feed for 45 minutes. We got better at it, but for a while there were many dinners that Diane had to eat cold while I was doing dishes (and holding Lilah). Diane really felt like she was a dairy cow on a short leash. Because, uh, she kinda was.

So there was a cost, but a cost we were willing to pay. Diane overall liked the feeding, Lilah clearly liked it, we believed it was better for everyone involved. Lilah took bottles nicely, so we even had some good flexibility where Diane could go away for a day or afternoon or evening (at the price of pumping, which no one will ever tell you is a pleasant experience). Overall a good setup.

After three months of figuring things out and working pretty well, though, it was time for Diane to go back to work full time two weeks ago. The plan was for D. to pump at work while I fed Lilah daytime bottles. People do it. It works. I have never heard anyone who did it describe it as easy, but it definitely works. But it didn't work for us. The people at Diane's work were supportive, I was supportive, Lilah was supportive. But taking ~25 minutes every 2 or 2 1/2 hours while trying to supervise an office, answer phone calls, have meetings with outside people, etc., turned out to be a bit nuts. Taking 1-2 hours out of the day made it difficult to actually get Diane's work done. On the other end of the day, of course, I wanted Diane to actually come home at night (or, officially, at 3pm, which is when her official day was officially supposed to end, since she was officially only part time for October), both so I could perhaps get a little work done myself and Lilah and I could see Diane now and then.

In the first week it was getting clear that Diane was not getting in the pumping that she had hoped to get in. We had to go to the milk bank (in our freezer) to make sure Lilah got enough. As you can read below, we decided to test out Lilah's formula tolerence just in case. Lilah was fine. The next week was even harder on Diane and I tried out two and then three and then four bottles of formula per day. Lilah is still fine. And now, as detailed last night, we are quite quickly at 100% formula.

And OH FORMULA. Wow. Yes, it is probably not as good. Yes, Lilah will now not have all of those advantages that come from breast milk (except for that 3 months that she got it). In fact, I can tell already that she does not appear to be nearly interested in those Baby Einstein CDs. But: WOW. Imagine this: total feeding time per day goes from something like 45 minutes x 7 times = 5 hours total (interjection: FIVE HOURS OF FEEDING PER DAY!!!!! That was a big chunk of Diane's ~18 waking hours!!!), and now, with formula, it is 10 minutes x 5 times a day. Maybe 6 times a day. That makes one hour. And that one hour can be done by me, by Diane, by Daisy, maybe even eventually by the cats (well, ok, at least Patton. Ike is too fat to be bothered to get up to feed Lilah). That is huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge. Huge. Ok, people, I understand the potential benefits and why there is huge politcal pressure for breast feeding, but this is HUGE. In our now much more complicated lives that we are trying to figure out Diane now has something like 4 more hours per day. Working and feeding Lilah are no longer incompatible. Diane sleeps more. In some ways we almost feel stupid for not having done this before (ok, not really. we're both happy that Lilah got 3 months of breast milk). So while I cannot track down the unbiased scientific evidence about the effect of formula on Lilah's devlopment, I can indeed give you an assessment of the effect of formula on our lives. First: it costs money. My guess is that a $23 can of formula will last about 9 days (I think that's right. I don't have the can with me right now to check). Second: her diapers smell worse. Not as bad as they will when she gets solids, but definitely worse (perhaps an improvement though is that her new higher viscosity loads appear less likely to leak). Third: Soooo much less time involved in feeding. So much. And that is great, predominantly for Diane. So great. Really great. Did I mention great? Fourth: longer times between feeding (see top plot). She averages about 3 1/2 hours between feeds now. Very convenient. Fifth: I can take her out for the day and just carry a couple of loads of powder and not worry about carrying along and defrosting milk. I can carry extra just in case without worrying that I am melting it. Also huge. I could even go away for a night with Lilah if I wanted to. Diane can go off to a conference in Decemeber that she would like to go to. L. and I will be fine. Sixth: Diane's body is now her own again. For a year she has had to limit caffeine and wine, both of which she likes. She can now go hog wild. With formula she could even shoot up heroin if she wanted to (not that I would recommend that approach, but wine, at least, is indeed recommended). Seventh: Diane is really really looking forward to her body parts resuming their normal lives.
So the verdict, as far as I can determine, is this: formula good. I wish I knew enough to say why formula might not be good, but I don't. So now it is time to rant. And here is what I would like to rant about: use of formula can make life for a woman who wants to work infinitely easier. Yes, pumping is possible, but even the strongest proponents (at least the ones who have actually done it) will tell you how hard it is. For those whose lives are significantly eased by formula, as ours were, formula is really the thing that allows a woman to actually work. If Diane had to breast feed because formula didn't exist or we were convinced it was bad stuff, she simply could not do the job she currently does. Diane likes her job, and is happy doing it. Not that she doesn't have some angst about going back to work and leaving Lilah mostly with me and eventually with Daisy, but she likes what she does enough that she would really like to do both. I support that. So here is the rant: much effort is placed into making women feel guilty about not breast feeding. Can we please stop that? If it is true that formula is not as good as breast milk, can we instead use our efforts to put pressure on people to develop formula that IS as good as breast milk (hey, or better)? That way all of those women out there who cannot breast feed or chose not to or can't make it work with work will have an alternative that is not simply "Not the best but good enough" but "Exactly the same". Given that every single one of us was an infant at some point we all have a past stake in this issue. Many of us hope that we perhaps have a future stake, too. Isn't it better to put our efforts there rather than in making parents feel guilty if they don't breast feed until the end of time?

OK. Enough ranting (really? is there ever enough ranting from Lilah's dad?). What about Lilah??? She had her first all-formula day yesterday, and she did just great. Five feedings. Evenly spaced. Nice naps in between. Ahhhh Lilah. And finally, to top it off, she had her first bedtime bottle of formula. I've worried that even though she has been pretty easy going about all of this, when it came down to night time, she would want mom. Mom actually fed her her bottle and hung out with her, but Lilah did a good job of going to sleep after the bottle. I feared that her 3 days in a row of sleeping through the night would dissipate. But they didn't. She slept until 7am just like she should. (OK, well, she did wake up and cry out at around midnight, which is pretty unusual. It lasted about 5 seconds. Diane never even heard it.) Today she gets to spend the day with Daisy (and Daisy's new improved tracking worksheet. with luck I will get a better view of Lilah's day. I'll let you know tomorrow).

Day 102 (17 Oct 2005): Ode to formula:
OK, it's not happening today. No odes. Today is too much. Unbeknownst to me (or Diane or Lilah), yesterday was a momentous day in Lilah's life. D. decided that that last feed, which unexpectedly occured around 10:30pm (and was followed by a bottle), was the last. Ever. Lilah will, from now on, get all of her substenance from other sources. I thought today I was going to write an ode to formula where I railed against the politics of breast feeding and talked about how the purveyors of guilt made it very difficult to come to informed decisions without feeling overwhelmed about potentially doing a bad thing, but it came down to this: (and here I am about to reproduce my ode to formula) Diane could not work and breast feed at the same time. Wasn't gonna happen. Nope. Not possible. Some women can. Perhaps their jobs work out better for them. Perhaps they are a tad more saintly. I just don't know. But a simple fact is that Diane's job and Diane's personality were incompatible with the pain-in-the-ass that is pumping at work. So. That is it. Lilah is going to empty out the freezer, but other than that she is all done and she gets powdered meals.

Ever since we started on breast feeding I always wondered how the very last time would go. Would we say "this is it, last time" or would it just happen? I sort of thought there would be more deliberate ceremony. But today, after last night's feed, and a full day of not pumping, and an emergency pumping session at 6:30pm to relieve D.'s fullness (where D. got some sort of watery substance little resembling the thick fatty milk she used to pump), we had a quick talk and decided: done.

Done! Do you know what that means? D.'s body has basically not been hers for a year now. Everything ingested eventually went to Lilah. No more. Tonight we opened a very nice bottle of wine and, rather than giving her one glass (and, well, OK, usually finishing the rest of the bottle myself), I poured her a second. And topped it off when she was halfway done. Then I made reservations at our favorite restaurant for a wine and food pairing. That's right, everyone, some sort of real life now resumes. We have a baby sitter for Friday night and we might even have to take a cab home from the restaurant. Not that I am yet doing my ode to formula, but I must say that the fact that Diane has approximately 3 hours more per day can't be bad. I approve. I would say it is quite liberating for her.
Nonetheless, all celebration aside. When we finally both realized that was it we were both sad. Diane has liked breast feeding, against all of her expectation. And she missed having Lilah snuggled up next to her for much of the day. And I just get sad at most anything these days. So we both teared up. And then opened that bottle of Zinfandel. Mmmmmmmmmm.
So, perhaps, tomorrow I will do that ode to formula. Which is perhaps the most liberating invention for women ever, but for now let's all take a minute and remember the absolute miracle of the fact that for 102 days everything the Lilah ate or drank came through Diane and the ~5 hours a day that she sat with her, talking to her, singing to her, stroking her, making sure she got the food and the comforting and the life that she needed. Thanks Diane. I wish I could have helped more. You did a great job. Lilah doesn't know that she appreciates it, but I definitely do.


Day 101 (16 Oct 2005): OK, back to the story of last week. We're now to Thursday, which is another Daisy day. And, to everyone's surprise, Lilah sleeps through the night for the first time in two weeks. Where did that come from? She had given no indication whatsoever that she was back to increasing her sleep times, but she went 9:30pm to 7am, which is awfully close to being a record. Why? Dunno. Really I should correlate these things with whether or not Diane had wine with dinner, huh? But I just can't remember that night.

So, anyway, Thursday. We still have Daisy giving her the pumped milk from the freezer rather than the formula. Ostensibly this is so that I can carefully observe to make she Lilah doesn't have any bad reactions. But by this point I am pretty sure there aren't going to be any. So why make Daisy use the frozen milk? The feeling that we >should< use it after Diane spent time pumping it. And also the feeling that we should use it because it is better than the evil formula. And, oh wait, there is one more. Because the frozen breast milk is so much more difficult to deal with I'd rather have someone else do it. OK. I said it. So shoot me.

Thursday night, Friday morning? No late sleep. Last night was a fluke. Lilah is back to her 3am feeding. Why why why?

But then Friday night she sleeps all night. Saturday night she sleeps all night.And now, finally, it is Sunday. What is going to happen? We still haven't quite figured out the right pattern for the night for a formula day. Does she still need the two quick Diane-feedings before she goes to bed? As you can see, we still have mostly done it. And we'll try it again tonight. Balancing the two different food sources with two very different timings is a tough thing.

Tomorrow: an ode to formula.

Day 100 (15 Oct 2005): Happy 100th day of your life Lilah! To celebrate this moment in Lilah's life we have, once again, made the software even better. Best of all, I can now type these comments in the comfort of [wherever I happen to be with my laptop] and then transfer them and update the website with the press of a button. No more fumbling around to actually get on the server or anything. So that's pretty exciting, at least for us here who care about these sorts of things (that would be me. Lilah doesn't seem to be able to tell. Diane continues to think that I am somewhat deranged).

With luck, the new ease of updating will make updating happen more often. I believe I have said those words before, huh? But really I think it is true this time.

The week has been a momentous one in Lilah's 100 day old life. As predicted a week ago, we have given up on Diane as the sole source of food for Lilah. It's amazing how guilty poor Diane feels about this. In pressing for breast feeding so hard, many of the proponents have done a great job of instilling guilt on women who can't exclusively breast feed. We're even wary about telling some of our friends for fear of that look of sadness in their eye (though in reality this is likely completely unfair and everyone has actually been quite understanding). For the record, however, I would like to record that pumping breast milk at work is a tough job. If you have a job that is easily scheduled and you can take regular time out then I could see how it would work (though, still, I think it would be really really hard). If you have a job like Diane's where people are in and out of the office all day long you might find yourself at the end of the day with sore breasts and empty milk bottles. In that first week Lilah consumed about 20 more ounces of milk than Diane pumped, and Diane still felt like she was pumping all of the time! (Luckily, we had some banked in the freezer).

On Sunday, therefore, we made the decision to attempt a bottle of formula and see how Lilah took it. What did Lilah do? gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp. She didn't seem to mind one bit (OH: and the pale blue lines now show formula feeds, while dark blue is still milk-in-a-bottle. see that first one a week ago?). As predicted, Lilah drinks more formula at a time than breast milk and then goes correspondingly longer between feeds. Notice that for the first time since Lilah's birth her daytime average is actually starting to increase! Other big change? Smellier diapers with a different consistency. Approximately the consistency of cornmeal.

On Monday I decided to go for a few rounds of formula to see how Lilah would do. Keeping with the theme that she is the single most easy-going baby constructed, she took it all fine, slept well, and was happy to see Mom.

Tuesday. Big big big big big day. Lilah got to meet Daisy who is going to take care of her full time starting in November. For now she is going to come a few days a week so Lilah can start to get used to her. It turns out that Lilah takes about 10 seconds to get used to people so this part is actually not neccessary, though it will take ME some getting used to to go back to work and leave Lilah at home. It was a sad Tuesday. Even more sad, however, was the damage done to Lilah's data. Daisy didn't really keep quite the records I do. Or even Diane does. So what really happened on Tuesday is a mystery that I tried to reconstruct from guessing Lilah's schedule and trying to get the story from Daisy in half English half Spanish (sure do wish I knew Spanish! With luck Lilah might be able to pick up some, at least). So Tuesday remains unclear.
Wednesday I had her back again. Note the careful recordings of precisely when she was asleep and not. I do really feel like I have gotten the girls patterns figured out some. The big problem, though, is that we have been bad about daytime sleep. Every single sleep she has is caused by something: rocking, strolling, driving, feeding, something. Eventually the girlie needs to be able to figure out these things on her own.
More to come tomorrow....

Day 92 (7 October 2005): Week one of Daddy-daycare has now passed. How did the scheduling go? See for youself. Not bad, if you ask me. I contend that this one week period has been the most consistent of her life. Now Diane would suggest that consistently waking up around 4am is no big cause for celebration, but it is important to celebrate the little victories.

The big news, though, is the new software (yee haa!) which now allows me to track every moment of Lilah's life much more accurately. Change has been slow. At first Lilah could only be either awake or asleep for a whole feed. Then she could be both, but there was no accurate charting of when those happened (all awake times were assumed to be at the end of the feed, all asleep times right before a feed. this led to the weird phenomenon where it looked like she was actually awake at night sometimes when she was actually awake from 8am until 8:30am before a feed. Now she can do whatever she wants. Witness today, for example. She has an awake-asleep-awake, another awake-asleep-awake, and then an asleep-fussy-asleep. Never before could such things be recorded! We here at lilahbrown.com are very excited that Caltech family leave allows Mike time to make such things happen. Oh and now the blue bottle feedings do a better job of showing that these feedings take only about 12 minutes, compared to Diane's 40 minute marathons. Tomorrow we will discuss the dirty secret of pumping at work. For today we will simply say: we survived the first week and only used 1 frozen bottle of milk from the freezer. We have a weekend to catch back up. Now is a good time to take bets on whether or not Lilah will be on formula this time next week.

 Someday we will perhaps fix the other main software oddity, which is the day/night average on the top plot. "Night" officially starts at 8pm. And feed between 8pm and 7am counts as a night feed. So if Lilah feeds at 8:10pm, 10:10pm, 7:40am her nighttime average is 11.5/2=5.75 hours. If, instead, she shifts 20 minutes earlier (7:50pm, 9:50pm, 7:20am) her official nighttime average would be 9.5 hours. Big difference for a 20 minute shift, huh? Back when I wrote that part of the software it didn't occur to me that single sleeps would dominate the nighttime average (editors note: duh), so I didn't consider this problem. Emily suggests that I simply plot the longest feed of the night. Probably this is what I will do because I do anything Emily says.

Day 89 (4 October 2005): What has happened to Lilah? She has completely reverted back to night time feeds. We can see no cause whatsoever for this, unless Lilah figured out that Diane was going back to work [yesterday!] and started punishing her early. I don't get it. Last week's pattern would have been so much nicer for Diane, who is now getting up at 6am to pump some milk and then get to work  It would've been great to have not had to have awoken an hour earlier to feed the little girlie thing. I guess if I were a good dad I would volunteer to take the middle of the night shift, huh? Instead I am going to go for the head-in-the-sand approach and hope Lilah goes back to her fabulousness of last week.

So. At 88 days in her little life Lilah's mom has now gone back to work full time (ok, she claims it is not full time and she will leave work at 3pm everyday. Anyone willing to bet against me that she will not be out of work at 3pm even one day this week? I'll give you a little inside scoop: she got home yesterday at 8pm. OK, it was a special case where she had a dinner event to attend. Nonetheless, do you care to bet against me?). We have a nanny coming full time in November (Lilah and Amy [remember pictures of Amy?]) will share. She will slowly transition in this month, but in the meantime it is me me me all me!

So how did Day 1 of daddy-daycare go? Bad timing. We had a big press annoucnement that day on the moon of the 10th planet, so the phone kept ringing about it. Worse, I had to write a slew of proposals that were due that day. Even worse, I had to finish the paper on said moon. If I had had any operating brain cells I would have asked Diane to start work one day later. But, instead, I delusionally thought I would be able to finish up a few things. Which didn't happen. Luckily, Emily was nice enough to come over to babysit Lilah while I finished up the last proposal, otherwise it would have never gotten finished.

Now, finally, here at Day 2, things seem a little calmer. I'm not trying to pretend to get work done. I'm just hanging out with Lilah and (finally) updating her web site when she is asleep. My main goal for the next month is to transition little Lilah onto some sort of schedule. You will easily be able to see if I am successful or not on her red/green plot. I want her to feed and nap at regular times. Morning feed: 8:30am. Awake for a bit, then a nap before a 11:30am feeding. Perhaps awake until a 2pm feeding and then a full nap until a 5pm feeding from Mom. That is my fantasy schedule. It's a bit of a push, since she still averages something like 2.5 hours between daytime feedings, so I don't know if it will fly. Plus if she reverts back to ~10 hour nighttime sleeps that means she will be getting a ~7am feeding for her first, and my whole schedule goes to hell. Ok. So I guess the idea is crazy. But that's my goal nonetheless.

Day 86 (1 October 2005): Crash! Wow. Two nights in a row of complete back sliding. First was Thursday night, where we thought we would try to put Lilah to sleep at 7:50 PM (crazy, I know). She didn't take, so we tried again around 9:30. She wasn't asleep but we put her to bed anyway. Just like the other night, right? She'll cry a bit and then peter out. There was no petering. Cry cry cry cry cry cry cry (I think I forgot to record that as fussy. look for that time period to become red when I revise history). Cry cry cry. Finally D. went back to feeed her at 10:50pm, which I believe is the latest feeding in FIVE WEEKS. Lilah then slept an entire 5 hours. There was a time in life when we would have been grateful for 5 hours. Thursday night was not one of those times. It was almost unbelievable to hear her crying in the middle of the night. It had been a whole week, which is like a 16 months in parent-years. As I struggled heroically to ignore the sounds Diane got up and fed Lilah. I think. I was asleep through it all. But acording to Diane she was quite tired in the morning. Bad news for Diane's Monday 8am back to work schedule, don't you think.

Then, of course, we had last night. Much better night. She had a bath and a nice 8:45 last feeding and went straight down. But then started crying at 4:45am. Which is only 8 hours. OK. So I feel a bit guilty complaining about "only" 8 hours, but, again, Lilah had been going strong for a week and we just hadn't expected such a crash. Sign.

Tonight? Seems like a good night. She had a last feeding at 9:25. Will she go 10 hours until 7:25? 5 hours until 2:25? Somewhere in between? I used to think I knew. Now Lilah is back to being a girly mystery, as she should.

Day 84 (29 September 2005): Lilah is on a roll! New record! 9pm until 7:25am! (that is 10:25 if the math is too hard for you planetary science types out there). This is going to be so helpful starting on MONDAY when Diane goes back to work fullish time and Lilah is taken care of by.... me. OK, so I am a little terrified by this but I keep up the good bravado when Diane is around so she doesn't worry. I get the whole month of October. Hope I survive. Hope Lilah survives. Hope she sleeps welll.

Given that Lilah is now 12 weeks old, that Diane is going back to work, and that life remains the same crazy thing it always does, I think it is now time to try to get little Lilah to face reality and start on some sort of a schedule. We'd like her to get her last feeding at 8pm (well, OK, not tonight, since it IS the season premiere of Alias and D. and I must find out what happened after the car wreck that ended the last season, of course). And then wake at 8am? Maybe we will eventually slide that back an hour? Diane needs to be at work at 8am (sometimes 7) and is kinda sad to think that she wouldn't see Lilah at all in the morning. So maybe 7am. The weird thing to think is that in November, when we start nanny-sharing, Lilah will probably indeed be sleeping 7-7 more or less, which means that I will see her awake maybe an hour or two a day at most. I think I am going to miss her. That seems incredibly sad.

OK, but enough sadness for now (Lilah is even someday going to grow up and move away), and let's just celebrate that on Day 84 Lilah broke all records again. She really is alien spawn.

Day 82 (27 September 2005): And the answer is..... you should have taken that bet below. Lilah went form 8:45pm until 6:20am. And, remarkably, here at 9:20AM she is still sound asleep, too.  So a 9 1/2 hour sleep followed by 3 hours and counting. Just truly amazing. We do actually have one winner! Sarah bet 5:30, just to sneak in after my 5am time. She wins the Lilah-prize-of-the-day, which is a generous helping of spit-up from Lilah herself delivered directly onto your shoulder. But you have to come visit to collect your prize.

As remarkable as all of this is, a much much more important event in Lilah's sleep life happened yesterday. After Diane fed her at 8:45 she was not asleep. We have generally fallen into the bad habit of putting her to sleep at night while feeding, so if she is not asleep after feeding we assume she will not go to sleep. In contrast, we always hear stories about ~3 month olds who don't sleep well and their parents start down the excruciating path of letting them cry themselves to sleep at night. We have always been happy not to do that. But last night, as it got to be 10PM, I declared that it was Lilah's bed time no matter what. So I put her down wide awake. Not surprisingly, she cried. Not hard crying, just her little "hey this is not so good you know and i'd like to be doing something else" cry. After about 5 minutes I went in a stroked her head for a bit and reminded her that she was sleepy (and I got a nice yawn for my actions). But then she went back to crying. I told Diane to time me and not let me go in for a full 5 minutes again. But before 5 minutes had passed Lilah was sound asleep. So our first attempt at the horrible crying to sleep was about 9 minutes of light fussing and then 9 1/2 hours of sleeping (though we both were quite worried that Lilah would be waking up at midnight or something!). I would like to reiterate what I said a few days back. Lilah is not normal. An alien, perhaps. This is all just too easy. When does the hard part start?

Day 81, encore: A special update for our favorite lilahbrown.com readers. You know who you are (the ones who complain when we don't update frequently enough). Today is a big experiment. Lilah really should have been fed at ~8 and then at ~10 before bed but we stretched her until ~8:20 and then gave her a bath and Diane is feeding her RIGHT NOW in hopes that that is it for the night. She needs to start sleeping earlier, we think.  One week from today Diane goes back to work. Those five words should instill fear in everyone's hearts. Or at least mine. And when Diane goes back to work it is also true that Diane wakes up early in the morning. Which means that Lilah would be better off waking up at ~6:30. So if she is to sleep 10 hours perhaps she should get an 8:30pm feeding for her end-of-night. That's at least the logic for today.

Isn't it amazing, though, that her long-standing habit of a ~4am feeding just sort of disappeared 8 days ago? She has had ~2 relapses, also associated with tough travel days, but other than that she seems to have given up on the idea of waking up at night. At least for now. We'll see what happens tomorrow. She got an 8:45 pm feed. Will she go 10 hours until 6:45? Only 8 hours until 4:45 (only eight? isn't it just amazing that we can even say "only" eight?). Four days ago she even had a seven hour sleep, which would make 3:45. That would definitely count as a middle-of-night feed. My bet is for the 5am feed. What will it be? Place your bets. Any bets received at lilahbrown.com before the data are posted are accepted. Closest to the mark wins the bet.

Technical note: we got a question today about why the mouse-over average plot something seems weird. It is because of how we define daytime and nighttime feedings. Any feeding that occurs between 7am and 8pm is daytime. Otherwise nighttime. So if Lilah gets fed at 8:05pm and 10:pm and 8am, she has an average nighttime time of 5 hours. But if she instead had done it all ten minutes earlier: 7:55, 9:50, 7:50, she would average 10 hours instead. Stupid, I know. At the time I wrote the software we didn't really have these issues so much, since there wasn't one big long sleep to screw with the average. We never anticipated that Lilah's sleep patterns would develop as they did. We thought that her night time sleeps would each get longer, not that there would be one single one that got longer. I must say, for Lilah's sake, that this way really is much better for everyone involved.

Day 81 (26 September 2005):  It's a red letter day! She did it, she did it, she did it, she did it!!!!! Lilah was fed at 9:30pm last night. She woke up at 7:30 am this morning. That equals 10 hours in a row. Look at that plot! Simply amazing! What a good girl we have!  Hurray Lilah! Hurray hurray hurray hurray! Diane actually woke up around 7am, having slept a full night. This is the first night in 81 days when she wasn't first awakened by Lilah.  Did I say hurray yet?

An interesting note, though. We decided yesterday that we wanted to try to move her last feeding earlier. As mentioned a week ago or so, it appears that Lilah takes her cues on bed time from us and the fact that the house quiets down. At least it was clear that when the house was NOT quiet she wouldn't go to sleep. So we thought we would try the other end of the experiement last night. At 8pm we turned out all of the lights and turned off the music and Diane fed her and.... she stayed wide awake. No way she was going to go to sleep. So we hung out for an hour and a half and got her at 9:30pm at which point -- have I mentioned this yet? -- she stayed down for 10 hours. In a row. All at once. Without waking up. Wow.

Days 71-80 (16 - 25 Sep 2005): The long awaited update is here! Questions to be answered: Does Lilah miss me when she is away for a week? Can she sleep as well elsewhere as at home? Will Diane remember to keep records when I am gone? Will she take a Thursday picture for me? Answers to all will now be revealed!

First, of course Lilah missed me. She shows it by the fact that she sleeps so well when I am away. She had record after record after record last week, coming dangerously close to the mythical 10 hour mark. In fact, her increase in sleep time has been a nice linear function since about day 30. I think I can reasonably extrapolate that by Day 120 she will be going 24 hours between feedings. By age 2 1/2 she will go a week between feedings. This is really going to cut down on the food bills, I think.

The single most important sleep-related item, however, is the way Lilah appears to be dropping her middle of the night feeding. She's been getting fed a bit late, but has then stretched this to almost the morning. Last night (finally home) Lilah went from a 10pm feeding until a 7:15am awaking. I think this makes the first night in 80 days that Diane has not had to get up in the middle of the night (actually, add in at least 2 months pre-Lilah when she had to get up every night from all of the extra Lilah-pressure on the bladder, too). A close second is that she had her first series of six-feed days. Six feeds! That makes only about 4 hours a day for Diane. Not even a full time job anymore!

I still find it amazing that her daytime sleep patterns have not changed one whit since birth.

Lilah was apparently also angelic on her first airplane trip. She didn't fuss, didn't cry. She slept the whole way up, and was awake and talkative the whole way back.

Warning to anyone reading this in hopes of learning what babies are like: as far as we can determine, real babies are not like this at all. I believe we have been sent some sort of robotic fake that is designed to lure us into convincing people that babies are easy. From all accounts of other people, this is simply not true. You have been warned.

Days 65 - 70 (10 Sep - 15 Sep 2005): Greetings, Lilah fans. What a way to leave lilahbrown.com hanging for almost a week. I have received desperate emails from people needing their Lilah updates, and I really really apologize for how long it has been, but the week has been crazed. Blame the 10th planet once again. Oh and the Discovery Channel. Details to follow. But back to Lilah, her first road trip, and several important records and milestones (including this, her 10th week Thursday! Pictures to be posted soon, I promise).

So. Saturday Diane, Lilah, and I were to get up and drive to Paso Robles for a little wine tasting, road biking, hot tubbing, hanging out kind of weekend. The drive is a little more than 3 hours so we suspected we might have to stop in the middle to feed her. The plan was to leave after her 10am ish feeding. But packing and entertaining Lilah at the same time turned out to be difficult and in the end we blew past the morning feeding, realized it was about lunch time, gave Lilah another feeding, and finally left. At which point Lilah slept and slept and slept. Isn't it a gift from the gods that babies like cars? Look carefully on Day 65 and you will see her with a record daytime sleep. She woke up screaming-hungry about 10 minutes outside of Paso Robles. Rather than try to get to town and check in to our hotel we stopped at the first winery, Diane fed, and I went in and tasted wine. I felt a little guilty. But I got over it. D&L came in 40 minutes later and I could have them try the particularly good ones.

That night we got to answer one of the questions I posed a few days back: how does L. know it is bed time. Is it an internal clock, or the external clues we give her (turning out lights, turning off music, feeding her tranquilizers...)? That night she got a 9pm feeding, like usual, but we were hanging out with our friends in their room stilll. L stayed wide awake until 10:30 when we got back to our room and turned out the lights. I know this was not a controlled experiement, so perhaps sometime I will design an entire experimental protocol for her to test this. Again, I would like to point out that advantages of the fact that Diane does not, in general, read these musings.

She slept OK in her first new place, but did wake up earlier than usual. Or perhaps we heard her awake earlier than usual since she was in the same room as us. Note to self: next time, ear plugs.

Sunday was a beautiful crisp autumn like day in the foothills and I went off for a long rolling bike ride on oak-covered country roads. D&L got up, had a fine breakfast, and wandered around Paso Robles's downtown park. Ahhhh. A beautiful morning. The afternoon included a trip over to the coast for L's for ocean view (she never actually opened her eyes), and we took a beautiful winding road back. We were so happy that L seemed to sleep so well in the car that we over did it and ended up having to high tail it home when she starting shreaking in hunger 20 minutes outside town. The car is great for having her sleep, but when she does wake up she is really really really really really hungry.

Sunday night we thought we might have dinner with our friends and their 2 year old, Jack, when we suddenly made the realization that having two children is likely an impossible juggling task. Just when we would have been perhaps going to dinner, Lilah needed feeding. By the time she was finally done it was time for Jack to go to bed, so our friends could no longer go out. We went to a restaurant ourselves and barely made it back in time to feed Lilah again. OK, so we could deal with two kids as long as we had four adults around to figure things out. But imagine if the teams were even. Or worse, you were outnumbered. I suspect it simply wouldn't work. My hypothesis appears to be nullified by the observation that many people do, in fact, have more than one child, but, like any good scientist, I am willing to disregard all data which doesn't fit my preconceptions. I will declare it Mike Brown's First Law: It is not possible to survive if you have more than one child, thus all children with living parents are only children.

Monday morning we got up bright and early as I had to get back home to film a commercial for the Discovery Channel. Those who know me even moderately well should try very hard to see this commercial when it comes out if they want a good laugh. First: I am on a golf course [I hate golf]. Second: I am wearing golf clothes [no comment neccessary]. Third: I am shown hitting a golf ball [I had a stand in for the actual swing] Fourth: My first line in the commercial is "I'm good at finding things."  [I can't decide who would find that line funnier, my mother or Diane. When D & I got married my mother made a little speach at the rehearsal dinner saying something to the effect that she couldn't understand how someone who could find planets couldn't find his own shoes and that it was now Diane's job to find my shoes when I couldn't. My mother was, of course, 100% correct]. OK. But back to Lilah. Since we knew that we would not have time to stop and feed Lilah we brought a bottle in the car with us for a freeway feed. But, once again, she slept the whole way (D. fed her in the parking lot of the golf course at Griffith Park while I tried on orange (orange!) golf shirts).

It was nice to get home that day, though. Lilah quickly fell back to her typical sleep patterns including yet another night-time record of 8 hours! It is hard to describe just how fabulous that is. Go Lilah, go. I just absolutely love to look at her plot above and see the slow steady progress towards the day when she will sleep 24 hours.

This week D. is now back at work ~30% time and so I go to the office and we do Lilah trade-offs back and forth during the day (D. works directly across the street from me which is about the coolest thing on the planet, if you must ask). Lilah has many friends who are happy when she comes to visit my office. Mostly Emily and Irma, who can never resist coming by when Lilah is in the room. Lilah does not appear to mind one bit, and is, these days a happy smiley talkative baby who loves being held and interacting with many people in addition to Mom and Dad.

Now it's late and I'm not going to get Lilah's thursday picture posted. Tomorrow, I promise. And then Saturday it is the big trip and there won't be updates for the week. But you are getting used to that now, are you not, Lilah fans?

Day 64 (9 Sep 2005): At the end of Lilah's vaccination day we made the mistake of having scheduled a dinner out with Lilah to be babysat by her aunt and cousins. We initially felt horrible. What if she gets a fever (1 in 4 according to the vaccine info sheet)? What if she screams uncontrollably (also 1 in 4)? Has seizures (1 in many many many)? And here we were going off to have dinner with friends. Clearly we were bad uncaring parents. When we finally picked Lilah up after 9pm she was sound asleep in Brianna's arms and had been fine all night long. We got home, Diane topped her off with a 10pm feeding and she was out almost until 5am.

Tomorrow is another big day for Lilah: her first roadtrip. D. and I decided to join some friends for a weekend up in Paso Robles to drink wine and sit in hot springs and (for me, at least) go on beautiful road bike rides along rolling oak covered country roads. And then drink more wine. We're off on Saturday morning and not back until Monday. So no Lilahbrown updates for a bit! But then a big report on how the little girl did sleeping away from home for the furst time. This is a warm up trip for a week from tomorrow when Lilah and D. fly up to Washington State to visit D.'s mother for a week and I go off to Hawaii to observe that planet thing. There will be no updates for a WEEK. At least no data. Maybe I'll get phone updates from D. and write those down.

Day 63 (8 Sep 2005): Today has been the saddest day in Lilah's short life. She went to the doctor this afternoon and we didn't get the feeding schedule down very well so by the time the doctor came in (1hr after our appointment) poor Lilah was starving and whimpering. Whimpering would have been wailing except that I was bouncing around the exam room for about an hour. But all of this was the build up for one of the worst things that can happen to a two month old: first vaccines. Everyone warned me that they were a horrible thing, but until the day before, when talking to a friend, I never quite got it. I thought "OK, she gets poked with a needle and momentarily hurts, what's the big deal?" And then I realized it was FOUR needles in a row. And I had to hold her and try to convince her everything was OK even though I knew there were three more needles to come and everything was NOT OK. I tried to explain about how it was a short term pain for a long term good, but she was too busy screaming to hear. We then got back to the car and Diane fed her to calm her down while I read the vaccine info sheets they gave us. Even as someone who 100% knows that vaccines are a good thing the info sheets are a little scary with the effects that can happen. I know I know it is one in a million or something and much less than the chance she would get the horrible disease, but there is something difficult about doing something active that has a risk to protect against a passive danger. Even though, again, I know it is the 100% right thing to do. It makes me a bit more amazed that most everybody really does it. The power of societal persuasion is good. Plus the fact they won't let you enroll your kids in school, I guess.

Day 62 (7 Sep 2005): Lilah is celebrating her two month birthday with a brand new record! She went from 9:50pm until 5:35am in one shot, coming dangerously close to the legendary 8 hour mark. When she awoke at 5:35am Diane had a hard time keeping her awake long enough to get a full feed in. The debate of the day is whether or not this is a good thing. D's instinct is to wake her up enough to get a full feeding ("I'm awake, damnit, you be awake, too") and I am wondering if perhaps a light feeding prepares her to skip that feed entirely and hit my 9pm - 7am mark. I know this is perhaps too much to ask, but one can't help but dream big, right?

Her daytimes are still mysterious to me, though. Some days she is mostly awake (yesterday). Some days she is mostly asleep (last Friday). I can find no pattern. Most days she has on long nap before noon (but not always), but her afternoons are unpredictable. She's almost always awake from about 7pm until about 9pm. Except when she is not. Someday I willl figure out what it all means, I am sure.

Day 61 (6 Sep 2005): At the risk of calling down the jinx (and, now, for a minute, I must digress on why it is that I am always worried about the jinx. I think that people who are unusually affected by random events are more superstitious than most. As an astronomer I am at the mercy of the weather ever time I fly of to use a telescope for a few nights, so I develop complex superstition about why one night was clear and the next was cloudy. And you always talk like it is going to be cloudy so as not to be jinxed. I suspect other people affected by weather -- sailors, farmers, house builders -- all have their own mythologies. And probably also true for other areas with highly random components -- the stock market?). OK. To start again. At the risk of calling down the jinx, I would like to declare that today, on September 6th 2005, one day before Lilah's two month birthday, we believe we have her night times down. For two weeks now she has been pretty consistent with even a hint of going towards longer. Compared to back at the begining when we were 2.5 hours relentlessly this current phase is heavenly. Lilah tends to wake up around 7am, more or less, I go over to her crib and talk softly to her, she turns her head and smiles, we walk around the house a bit until she is hungry (which generally happens quickly) then we go visit the still sleeping Diane. Lilah gets very very excited to see Diane and smiles and squirms.

The evenings are equally good. Around 9pm I give her one last change and kiss her goodnight and as Diane begins to feed I go around and turn the lights in the house out. Somehow she knows that this means to sleep for a long time and she does it.

Now, mind you, I am not suggesting that we have the whole thing figured out. In particular I can find no rhyme or reason for Lilah's daytimes. Why was she awake so much yesterday? And asleep most of the a few days back? Shouldn't these differences affect her night times? So far they don't seem to. But so far my whole theory that Lilah is a two-nap-a-day girl is mostly hogwash.

Day 60 (5 Sep 2005): As promised, I turned the red/green plot sideways for Diane. Much nicer now, you think? Now that there is more space, you can see exactly what she did two days ago, which was to have one of her I-don't-really-want-to-be-bottle-fed fits. D. tried to run to the store (for diapers, of course) and left me with an asleep L. and a stop watch. We thought it would work, but Lilah woke up early and couldn't be fooled with a finger to suck on. She wanted the real thing. The bottle calmed her down for about 30 minutes but then her porr face just turned redder and redder and tears rolled down her poor little cheeks until Mom came home and fed her. All the while I continued trying to entice her with the contents of the bottle (of which she only drank 1/3) but she was too busy complaining that mom was not here.

The lack-of-mom led to her longest fussy session in a long time (even after mom came back and fed her) but then, after a 9pm feed, she stayed put until nearly 5am. That is almost 8 hours! Or a full night, in adult hours. I wonder if this is the next pattern that will soon be starting. You can look back over her feed chart and see each jump in her night pattern, from her 5 hour stints starting on day 30, to her 6 hour jump starting around day 40 to her 2 long stints for the night starting around day 50. Maybe the 2 long stints will meld into a single 10 hour stint? Wow. The day that she first gets fed around 9pm and then awakens after 7am then next day will be a day of celebration here at lilahbrown.com.

But it wasn't last night. You can also see that she was out quite late to a party. She finally got home and got fed at 10pm, which is her latest feed in a couple of weeks. And then she stayed asleep until almost 8am (with the requisite 4:15am feeding, of course).

Day 57 (2 Sep 2005): Those of you who are superstitious will be happy to know that as soon as I declared Lilah predictable she began to act up. In fact, she began to act up even as I was typing the words. Her nice long 10 hour pattern mentioned below instantly became an 8 hour pattern (i.e. 5+3=8 instead of 6+4=10). Not sure the cause here. Not sure there IS a cause here, other than just because.

Yesterday Lilah was 8 weeks old and to celebrate I stole her for the day (note all of the bottle feedings!). The day before she had hardly napped so Diane was a bit exhausted and needed a break. So what did Lilah do? Slept all day, including a record or near record daytime 4 hour stint. It would have been a record for certain except that we woke her up worried that she was going to sleep too much during the day and then not at night. We woke her up, fed her, she went right back to sleep. Oh oh. She's been swinging toward earlier start-of-the-night feeds the last few days, which inexorably leads to earlier end-of-the-night feeds. Note the 5:30am start this morning. I don't think Diane is a big fan of that. I think we need to target a 9:30 feeding and see how it goes from there. Which means we need to target a 7:30 feeding. Etc. Etc.

On a final note, check out Lilah's Thursday picture. Do you think she knows I'm taking pictures?

Day 55  (31 Aug 2005): For those that are fascinating by Lilah's sleep patterns (you know who you are. In fact, if you are reading this right now you really know who you are) last night was an interesting one. For several days now Lilah has consistently had a ~6-7 hour stint followed by a ~3 hour stint. So when she cried last night at 2:30am I thought "oh no this is going to mean a 5:30 am waking." Let's be clear that this would mean a 5:30 am waking for Diane, not me, who has become exempted (at least for now) from night time feedings some time in the past 10 days. But, lo, Lilah did not wake at 5:30 or even 6:30. Her feed was 7:30! Meaning she went 5 hours then 5 hours. For those who are fans of the Lilah correlation plot (you know who you are) you will know that she has never ever ever done that before. Some interesting and sophisticated analysis suggests that 7+3=10 AND 5+5=10 meaning that for some reason she chose to go 10 hours with one feed one way or another. Isn't that fascinating?

I know I have been harping on this fact incessently, but I would like everyone to look carefully at the feed time plot above and marvel at the way that a semi-regular pattern has emerged from complete chaos (and, by the way, to brag on Lilah, who is indeed exceptional in all ways, she has not had a fussy spell in DAYS. Actually, since my mother left. Hmmmmm). No don't get me wrong; this semi-regular pattern is not without some prodding by us. Now that we realize that she always has a ~2 hour stint before her long sleep, we try to always feed her between 7 and 8pm so that we can then tank her up between 9 and 10 and she is off to dreamland (a friend of mine answered the obvious question quite well the other day. What do babies dream of? Breasts, of course). She then has been regularly waking up to be fed around 3:30am and then gets her breakfast around 7 am. This pattern has held pretty well for more than a week now, which is like 2 months in dog years or 1/8th of a lifetime in Lilah years.

Friends warn us to not become complacent, that Lilah is simply lulling us into believing that we know something and that soon teething will begin and all sleep patterns will be destoyed in the name of enamel.. We say: bring it on, Lilah. Teethe all you want. We'll graph it, analyze it, run spurious statistical tests, and over interpret it. But for now we will enjoy understanding at least a little how our mornings and evening are likely to play out.

We have a special guest contributor to these comments. Lilah! Here is her first attempt at typing: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnmplojukngt hbgfffffbvg vc vvvvvvvvvcfjhb5riujgl;kbv m,bhkinhtggthy98uij7hy7imjy7hjyug. We completely agree.