Day 18

major acne break out.
according to books (baby 411, what to expect...) this is normal, and worst around 2-3 weeks, will go away by 8th wk the latest. nothing needs to be done. baby just looks bad, apparently it doesn"t bother them...

could also be the formula, since these acne suddenly showed up the same day when we introduced formula to Noah's diet after coming back from the 2 week checkup.

mom told me to take some VC, maybe it will help him to fight this "allergic reaction".

7/31/2010 update: 3rd day since acne broke out, yesterday seems to be the worst looking, today seemed a little better. good thing that Noah indeed doesn't seem to be bothered by it, he doesn't scratch it at all. so he probably doesn't feel a thing.

Day 13

last night was the first night noah went through regular timed interval feeding:
finish feeding at 12:53am, woke up at 2am for next
then finish at 3ish, woke up a little past 4
then 6am
8am

so i got to sleep at least an hour in between feedings!! amazing!

lets see if we can repeat this progressive style tonight!

another highlight ive been waiting for,  mad men season 4 began tonight!!!

we all sat down and watched science of babies last night after dinner too. some kind of normalcy of our lives, however little of it, is still good to have...

Day 11

Dealing with a screaming infant is like trying to debug an entire programming class inside one try and catch block. No matter what went wrong inside the try-catch, the exception is always the same-a screaming baby.

So we have to start with trial and error approach. So far we have figured out the potential errors such as: dirty diaper, gas passing( or unable to), hunger, tired but can't sleep frustration, or a combination of the above and baby can't remember the priority. There is another possible error lingers in the background, but so far turned to be always a negative, I e. sickness. There is another possible conclusion which during real life debugging would come to mind but always turned tone false too. That is "baby is crying for no reason" (this error is impossible to fix") and equally in both case I will be proved wrong. Baby always cry for a reason, just like any computer program is always logical, so all errors are fixable. At least it is the case for infant. His neurological circuit is not yet fully functional, So he is incapable of manipulation, ie not spoilable.

Day 8

Noah was born a week ago. Now this 7-days-old runs my life without mercy.

Late last year when my mom learned that I was expecting, she was so worried. "How could Jean be a mother? she is so impatient." Here i am, 9 months later, an infant lying besides me, going in and out of sleep. Every facial expression of his controls what i could and couldn't do the next second. Just now he was making a grunt face and farted, i froze, and waited for a screaming that would last and demand a feeding; or as it turned out, he went back to sleep and even smiled in his dream. Then i relax and continue typing this post...

I feel so undeserving to be given such a perfect angel. I wonder if this is the primary reason that so many parents enjoy parenthood despite all the work.  Babies are magical creatures. They took over your lives and reduced you to baby-talk simpletons and sleep-deprived zoombies, yet you loved them more for such torture, and you wish you could do better to serve him, to match his perfection.

Noah

July 15, 2010

It is 1:44am, i’m writing a blog entry in my PJ, wide awake even though i haven’t really slept for more than 3 hours in the past 24. Living on something a little more than adrenaline: we now have a new member in the household! 

Tonight was the first night this week any of us has slept at home.

I plan on start a new blog for all Noah related writings so i can keep my current blog(s) still about me.  But setting up a new blog will take a little more time than i could spare at the moment. And a few of you out there has been wondering what has happened.

So here is a quick intro, and hopefully “Jean’s Weblog” will resume its usual random program when life becomes more sane.

It has been a roller coaster week. I had no idea how we had managed to pull through all these so quickly. Luckily we did and things are looking up (at least at the moment, i’m in the optimistic cycle of the mood swing).

Noah has been a model baby. Even nurses in the hospital were telling us how calm and pilot Noah has been. He rarely makes a fuss about anything and the only thing really bothers him has been hunger, even that he protests in a very restrained way.

He has this amazing highly choreographed facial expression plus elaborate hand gesture reflex that totally blew us away.  80% of his time since being born has spent with an IV tube taped to his left hand. So we always thought he only had a single hand gesture routine, which often mimic either a passionate speaker or a symphony maestro. What he couldn’t talk, he made up using his facial muscle and intricate finger language. I often said he had an obama routine where you could imagine an Obama speech was given.

But since last night when his left hand was also freed from the iv, we realized it was really a double hands gesture routine that he was excelling at. definitely a maestro.

Tonight i discovered something else, he can pull a super vivid and accurate marlon brando Godfather routine with his facial expression and his hands and shoulder. And he only does that when he was pooping.  It was hilarious.

Unfortunate Noah has been a complete night owl, to witness any of these performance, you have to be present around 2am.

July 18, 2010
There are so much i wanted to write, only if there is some kind of thoughts->words program so i can dump everything in my mind in words without actual sitting down and typing them out…
Since Thursday night, i’ve been struggling between co-oping with Noah’s feeding schedule and keeping my own sanity by sneaking in as many naps as possible. I’ve realized that if i wait till i have enough time to make a proper introduction and recording all the little things i want to say about Noah since his birth a little over 6 days ago, i would have to wait for a long long time.
so here are some vital stats:

Noah Tian-Yi Zhou (周天翼）
Born on July 12th, 2010, 15:05
Weight: 3.895Kg (8lb, 9.39 oz)
Height: 54.6cm (1′9.5″, i.e 21 and 1/2 “)
APGAR (okay, i know this is too “typical asian parent” to include such stats, but just for the fun of it. I will try not to do it again):
one min: 7
five min: 9

Since Thursday night, he has been doing better at waking up occasionally during the day too. So to give Grandma Aiqi a glimpse of what he looks like when he is happy and awake!

Holding Noah in my hands, i am still awed by this reality, it still feels like a miracle. Surreal.