wife, mother, ph.d. student, hot stuff.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Discovering/remembering muscle movements




Julian is learning to smile; he is most likely to start grinning first thing in the morning, and in general, after he eats. It's very different from his little gas smiles from previous weeks; these grins open up his mouth, and crunch up his eyes. The first couple of times he smiled like this, we startled him by cheering and shouting at him. Now, he grins at us all the time, and it's SO CUTE.

In the meantime, I am officially allowed to exercise again, and tried to ride my bike the 10 minutes to the Caltrain. It took 15 minutes, and I was nearly dead by the time I got there. I shouldn't have been so surprised... I hadn't even broken into a jog/run since, oh, sometime late July. Of course I am horribly out of shape!

Friday, October 17, 2008

milk issues


First, a hilarious photo of the men in my life. I wonder if Julian will decide to imitate Robin's scorn towards cameras once he has conscious control of his facial expressions.

I am both allergic to milk and lactose intolerant. Thankfully, these conditions are on the mild end; I can still eat cheese and yogurt and ice cream without much consequence. I just can't drink milk straight. As such, I'm not used to the taste of plain milk; I have never liked lactaid, or goat's milk. So when Julian was born, it was very weird to suddenly be a milk spout. I know I know, cow's milk does not equal human breast milk, but it sure looks similar.

Unfortunately, it seems that Julian is sensitive to my breastmilk when I eat dairy products. So I am now abstaining from my daily cheese/yogurt intake. This is not too huge of a deal. However, since becoming pregnant, I have a newfound appreciation for ice cream. The idea of not being able to eat ice cream filled me with angst.

So I decided to take a hint from PETA. I already had plenty of expressed breastmilk in the freezer and fridge, including a bag of milk that was expressed before I stopped eating cheese, and couldn't give to Julian anyways. If this stuff is good for my baby to eat, why can't I eat it? So we made a batch of vanilla ice cream. And it is delicious.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

adjusting



Julian is 3 weeks and 2 days old, and we're all still adjusting. Every few days, as Julian grows, the game keeps changing. I like to think that his extreme activity in utero prepared me for interrupted sleep, but every once in awhile, we have a rough and weird night. The first or second night we were home from the hospital, Robin woke me to feed Julian and I did not even recognize him as my own baby; I groggily asked "why are you giving me Joe Biden?" (I was clearly listening to too much NPR.) Last night, Julian was waking to feed every 1.5-2 hours instead of every 3 hours, as I had gotten used to over the past week, and my body did not like it. At one point, I woke to his crying, and it took me 2 minutes to remember that he needed to be fed. (At least I recognized him as my own son!)

The most interesting side effect of me nesting with Julian is watching the big things happen in the world on as Robin, Julian, and I deal with dirty diapers and midnight feedings. It reminds me of college all over again; what a bubble we are in! Hurricanes, financial meltdowns, political machinations.... There are big adjustments going on in the world, in parallel with the smaller ones affecting my new little family. I hope that it will be a better world for Julian, in the end.