Oy with the poodles already!

I know it gets repetitive for me to announce what a moose Sawyer is, but this time it's for real! We just got back from her four-month appointment at the pediatrician: she gained 2 pounds 5 ounces in one month! She now weighs 12 pounds 14 ounces -- a whopping 40th percentile! (This after she was 16th percentile last month.) Moosey moosey moosey MOOOOOOOSE!

We've got all kinds of great new pictures of her Moosiness doing all sorts of new things. Here she is doing her best to fit as many fingers into her mouth as possible:



And here she is with one of her new parlor tricks: grabbing her feet.



But her most exciting new feat is . . . Sawyer can roll over! It's less of a roll, actually, than a lateral launch -- she kind of winds up and flings herself to one side, propelling herself from tummy to back. You'll recall that she did this once about a month ago, more or less accidentally. This time it's definitely intentional. We, of course, whipped out the video camera to capture the event, but she refused to repeat it for the paparazzi.

The Hold Me/Put Me Down Dance

Today was Sawyer's nanny's first day. (She was supposed to start on Monday, but got marooned in Trinidad due to the blackout.) Everything went swimmingly -- she's very lovely, and she and Sawyer got along like gangbusters. Sawyer seems to have been on extra-special good behavior, though. So we'll see what happens when we get to her first meltdown!

Speaking of meltdowns, there have been an awful lot of them lately. Sawyer's been big into a routine that goes something like this: "Hold me! Hold me! Hold me! No, not like that! No, not that either, try the other way again! No, I was right the first time, I still don't like being held that way. Put me down! Put me down! No, hold me! Hold me! Hold me!" Repeat ad infinitum.

Something that seems to divert her attention from the Hold Me/Put Me Down dance is shaking my hair in her face. She opens her mouth real wide, as though to try to catch my hair in her mouth. Revise that: she actually is trying to catch my hair in her mouth.

She's also really getting into a couple of toys, which is good, as she has largely lost interest in her mobile. Her horse seems to be the big winner so far. This, of course, is simply the precursor to the day when she will ask for a pony. Here she is chatting with the horse:



Usually she tries to stick the horse's whole face into her mouth. Occasionally a hoof or two.

And here she is with, well, Paul's underwear on her head:

The Moose has new clothes!

Sawyer has recently crossed the 12 pound barrier, and thus is officially into her 3-6 month garb. You always hear about how you shouldn't buy too much of the 0-3 month stuff, because babies really only wear that stuff for a couple of weeks before they need to get into the 3-6 month wardrobe. Not this peanut! Her 0-3 month couture (it's all couture, according to Carson Kressley) lasted the full three months and then some. But now we have a whole new array of clothing in which to sumptuously attire Mademoiselle Sawyer!

More on the hands: they pretty much haven't left her mouth in about a week. Slurp slurp slurp. One finger, two fingers, three fingers, four, the whole fist, left hand, right hand -- no combination is too outlandish. My favorite is the sucking of the middle and ring fingers, so that she looks like she's giving us all the sign of the devil.

Unfortunately, she hasn't quite made the all-important pacifier/fingers connection -- the one that would enable her parents to stop having to wake up every fifteen minutes between 3 and 5 AM to put her pacifier back in her mouth. I have a feeling (ok, it's more a hope than a feeling) that one of these days, she'll realize that fingereating is a fabulous soothing mechanism and not just a daytime parlor trick, and that'll be it for the late night pacifier demands. A girl can dream, right?

Fingers in the mouth or no fingers in the mouth, she's still pretty darned cute.



(Keen eyed observers will note that this outfit has appeared in prior photographs. Yes, this was taken before the wardrobe switch!)

Blackout

After 20 hours in the non-air conditioned dark, we're back from the Great Blackout of 2003. (The media added the "great" sometime in the middle of the night. When I went to sleep, it was the Blackout of 2003. When I woke up, it had become the Great Blackout of 2003.)

Without a baby, blackouts are adventures. With a baby, not so much. Try finding a way to clean bottles without water or electricity. And Sawyer and I slept on a sheet on the floor of her room. Fneh.

In the blackout's defense, however, it was really cool to walk around a pitch black New York City at 11 o'clock at night.

I'm off to enjoy some air conditioning for a while before I start throwing out the contents of the fridge.

The Princess and the Pea

You're all familiar, I trust, with the story of the Princess and the Pea? Basically, to prove that the princess was indeed a princess, a pea was secretly placed underneath the huge pile of mattresses and bedding on which the princess would sleep that night, the theory being that if she were really a princess, the addition of a single pea to the pile would disturb her sleep. Indeed, the next morning, the princess was sleepy and cranky due to the pea's disturbance of her beauty sleep. And thus, the princess's princessliness was revealed to the world.

It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that Sawyer is a princess.

We tried out some new bottles on her during the Philadelphia excursion last week -- Dr. Brown's Natural Flow Baby Bottles. Although I don't completely understand how they work, Sawyer apparently thinks they're the greatest thing since hands. While she hasn't completely sworn off all of her other bottles (yet), she now dines from them grudgingly and only under great duress.

Another day, another adventure with her royal highness, Princess Sawyer!

Mad Moosey Skillz

Wow.

We got back from Philadelphia today and promptly popped Sawyer onto the scale. At the pediatrician for her three-month checkup, she weighed in at 10 pounds, 9 ounces. Today, a mere eight days later, she weighs 11 pounds, 7 ounces.

That's 14 ounces in eight days. Wow. Quelle Moose!

And not only is she batting at things, but she's flat out grabbing them. Her clothes, blankets, burp cloths, every toy we hang from the gymini -- the speed of hand skill acquisition is unbelievable.

Wow.

What We Did on Our Summer Vacation

No posts until now because Sawyer and I have been spending the week with Sawyer's Grandma, Bubbie, and Popsie at Sawyer's bucolic country home (otherwise known as Bubbie and Popsie's house) in Bucks County, Pennsylvania! So much Sawyer adulation in just six short days -- I don't know how she'll handle it when she's back to receiving only two parents' worth of affection on a daily basis. And the Sawyer fan club here in Pennsylvania is not limited to relatives -- Sawyer also met and was appropriately cooed over by one of her Bubbie's lifelong friends, Ruthi!

Sawyer spent her first four days here eating her way through the growth spurt to end all growth spurts. She had been eating about 6 times a day, but for the past four days, she's been back to an 8-10 meals a day pace -- the likes of which we haven't seen since she was maybe a week or two old! Every two hours, she howwwwwwwled like we hadn't fed her in days, then slurped down a gargantuan bottle in no time flat. Then two hours later, more howwwwwwwwwling, and the cycle begins again. I don't have her scale here, but am dying to see how much she weighs when we get home. Her face is visibly fuller than it was when we arrived. Such a moose, my daughter!

Meanwhile, Sawyer met a new friend yesterday -- Lucy Jane Bonin, who was born six days after Sawyer. Lucy's parents are our friends Adam and Jen, who blog here and here, respectively. Generally, when Lucy was in a peachy mood, Sawyer was howling, and vice versa, but we did manage to find a half hour of dual-baby spontaneous happiness, during which they blissfully whacked away at each other on the gymini, each girl seemingly unaware of the other's presence. Tres cute.

I TAKE TWO STEPS FORWARD, I TAKE TWO STEPS BACK: I referred in my last post to a couple of new developments: hands and bottles. Let's start with hands.

It's pretty amazing how quickly Sawyer picks up new interests. All of a sudden, one day, she just couldn't get enough of looking at her hands. "Wow! Mommy! Look at these! Who knew??" She looks at them reallyreallyclose to her face, too, so she spends much of the day looking somewhat cross-eyed as she peers down her nose at her hands. She also likes to gnaw on them.

Yesterday, about a day after she noticed her hands, she started whacking at things with them. It's not really consistent yet, but she did two things for the first time: she hit some of the little animals hanging from her gymini, and she batted at the toys on her swing. Interestingly, she never enjoyed the swing before -- she was always more of a bouncy seat kind of gal. But now she's not really into the bouncy seat anymore -- "Yeah, yeah, Mommy, I know how to do this nonsense with the feet. Give me something new to work on!" -- so I plopped her into the swing, where she happily chomped on her hands and smacked around the little plastic dog and cat hanging from the top of the swing. Presumably she'll get bored of the swing right around the time she's ready for the Exersaucer. I can see why childrearing is expensive.

(By the way, while I'm on the subject of expense: for those of you who would like a good giggle, it's worth pointing out that Paul was convinced that we'd actually save money by having a kid, since we wouldn't be eating out, going to the theatre, etc. as often. He's right that we go out less, but come out ahead overall? Ha.)

Moving on to bottles. All this nursing strike stuff I've been writing about for the last couple of weeks seems to have been a smokescreen for the real issue: Sawyer doesn't want to nurse anymore. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with the milk itself -- she's perfectly happy to guzzle that stuff till the cows come home. No, no, my daughter is simply lazy. It is a statement of fact that eating from a bottle is easier than eating from a mommy, even when one uses those "babies can't tell the difference!" bottles. Sawyer wants the milk to be poured down her throat. None of this "working at it" business. And she's not only lazy, but she's stubborn, too: she'd rather go without than actually sit there and suck until she gets the milk. (I have no idea where she could possibly have inherited her stubbornness from. Nope, no idea at all.)

So we had a standoff. I figured that she'd eventually get hungry enough to eat from the one available source. She figured that if she refused to eat and screamed bloody murder, I'd give her a darned bottle already. I caved. We're pumping and bottling from now on. Frankly, we're both a lot happier. I was getting pretty sick of having a fight every time she needed to eat, and I'm sure she wasn't exactly thrilled with the situation either. I hope to continue offering Sawyer exactly one menu item -- mommymilk and nothing but mommymilk -- for at least the next three months, and maybe longer if I can manage it.

All this being said, I continue to heartily advocate nursing for the gonna-be-a-new-mom-someday crowd, who seem to make up a disproportionately large share of my readership. Even setting aside the whole medical benefits of mommymilk thing (although the Nursing Nazi literature makes one wonder how the human race didn't wither away and die with the advent of formula), I don't regret one minute of it, and would continue for as long as possible but for my loss in the Great Nursing Standoff of 2003. There's no reason in the world not to give it a try for at least a month -- the worst that can happen is that you either become a pump-and-bottler or you switch to formula. (Why a month? I think it takes that long for both mommies and babies to figure out what the heck they're doing.)

Meanwhile, here's a new picture: Sawyer's first bubblebath!

Sawyer has been named! Everything went as well as we could possibly have hoped. Many thanks to everyone who was able to make it! Paul and I had a great time, and Sawyer seems to have made it through the experience without too much anxiety. (Plus it was a lot of fun to have some of our friends meet some of our other friends -- given that most of our friends don't know each other.) A lot of you also mentioned to me that they've been enjoying reading Sawyer's World, which was rather gratifying to hear.

I don't have a good picture yet of Sawyer all dolled up in her naming outfit, but suffice to say for the time being that she was a vision in pink and lace! She was quite well behaved, all things considered -- spent most of the ceremony sleeping over my shoulder, and most of the party sleeping over one or the other of her grandmothers' shoulders.



Through the transitive property of blessing, Sawyer received good wishes from her parents and grandparents:



Earlier in the weekend, she met the one great-grandparent she hadn't met yet -- Paul's grandfather, Poco Irv:



So now, everything is pretty much back to normal -- we have returned to our customary routine, complete with Sawyer's ongoing infatuation with her mobile, recent realization that she might actually have hands, and ongoing nursing crises. Let's face it -- the kid likes mommymilk, but all things considered, would rather have it served to her in a bottle.

Sorry that blogging has been so light this week, but we've been preparing for Sawyer's naming celebration this weekend. (To give you a sense of the general level of activity, we have not yet repaired or replaced the soundless TV!) I'll post more next week, but in the meantime, here's a little Sawyer du Jour:

Paul has pointed out that I have neglected to use this blog to sing the praises of TiVo: Savior of the New Mother's Sanity.

It should be clear to all of our readers by now that I spend a lot of time feeding Sawyer. Not a lot that one can do to amuse oneself while nursing a baby. Reading is challenging (although I pulled it off while reading the new Harry Potter because the book was heavy enough to hold itself open while perched on a pillow next to me). Talking on the phone is okay, except that there's a fairly small population of people around for me to talk to at 2 pm on a Tuesday or at 4 am on any night. Plus I need to put whoever I'm talking to on hold whenever Sawyer requires my attention. Checking my email, while it has enabled me to keep in touch with all sorts of people during this sequestered time in my life, clearly doesn't work so well -- although I will confess that I have managed to do a little surfing once or twice while Sawyer has been dining. (Don't ask me how I pulled that off.)

But there's nothing like TiVo. Non-TiVo television has all sorts of problems:

1. There is very, very little on TV at 4 in the morning. Most of our umpteen digital cable channels are nothing but infomercials from 1 am until 7 am. Even stations that are perfect for late night viewing -- Animal Planet, E!, etc. -- go off the air.
2. There is very, very little on TV from 11 am until 4 in the afternoon, unless you want to watch one of the 20-odd knockoffs of Trading Spaces, or a Wedding/Makeover/Baby Story, or Days of Our Lives, or reruns of Press Your Luck (no whammies, no whammies, no whammies -- stop!).
3. Most importantly, I rarely have an uninterrupted half hour, much less an hour, to sit and watch TV.

TiVo has changed my life. I can pause live TV, so I don't miss a moment of Amazing Race while Sawyer decides that she wants something other than milk for dinner. I can pick entire series (serieses?) that I've never watched before and watch every single episode, even though I have no idea when the shows are actually on TV (Gilmore Girls, Without a Trace, Coupling). I can tape every talk show that has an interview with Jennifer Garner (even though I don't have time to figure out which ones she's appearing on that week), watch just the interview and delete the rest. I can watch the fifteen relevant minutes of Paradise Hotel and For Love or Money 2 and skip the 45 minutes of filler. And all this without having to figure out which videotape each show is recorded on, or how far I need to fast forward to skip two Law and Orders and find the Mad About You where Paul and Jamie met for the first time. (It also keeps me from falling asleep while feeding Sawyer, then waking up 45 minutes later with no idea whether she ate for 5 minutes or the whole 45, which is pretty cool in and of itself!)

Actually, this is something of a TiVo eulogy, as the sound on our living room TV died yesterday. So until we get it fixed or (more likely) Paul races out and buys an HDTV-ready TV, I have two choices: watch TiVo with closed captioning or watch infomercials in Sawyer's room at 4 am.

Well, the rolling over incident hasn't been repeated yet -- but it looked so deliberate! -- but Sawyer is definitely making progress on the "things I can do on my tummy" front. Because putting her on her tummy is something that we do only with close supervision, I've really been able to watch her progress. She's gone from (a) immediately falling asleep to (b) staying awake and staring off into space with her head in whatever position it started out to (c) wiggling her head around a bit to see everything on one side to (d) turning her head from one side to another to (e) raising her head a bit to see what's going on in front of her to (f) what we have now, involving serious neck strength and some arm involvement as well:



Pretty impressive, no? (And I just noticed that Sawyer looks a lot like Paul in this picture. Hm.)

And then some more from the "this baby is going to get us for this one somewhere along the line" files:



When I was still pregnant and Paul and I were referring to Sawyer as the Rabbit (but not "Rabbit" as a proper name, which drove me nuts . . . ), we would joke around that this baby was going to be born and be extremely confused as to why she didn't have big floppy ears, given that she was a rabbit. So now she's got her ears.

I feel like we're entering the part of our lives where Sawyer's going to do something new every day.

Yesterday she rolled over for the first time. On a totally level surface, from her tummy to her back. She just kinda lifted her head off the floor, leaned to her left, and slowly rolled over onto her back. I was in shock. She was rather fussy the rest of the day, so I haven't tried to get her to do it again yet. As my mother put it, we're not sure whether the roll was intentional or accidental. But it was pretty cool regardless.

She also now has sufficient control over her neck muscles that she can ride in the Baby Bjorn facing forwards! She really seems to love it, and gazes all over the place watching the world go by. This little Manhattan baby can now watch Manhattan going on around her!



Her vocabulary is increasing as well. It now includes all kinds of little coos and squeaks and various other monosyllabic utterances. One of them sounds exactly like the word "hi." So every once in a while she says "hi!" -- which, understandably, surprises the heck out of Paul and me.

Sawyer went to her first big Ziev family event today -- Kimberly's Aunt Libbie and Uncle Abe's 50th anniversary party. (I should be clear -- in my parents' household, the "Ziev family" refers to my dad's relatives, while my mom's family is the Horowitz family. But in Sawyer's world, the Zievs are everyone who isn't related by blood to her daddy, who from this point forward are all Niehauses rather than Niehauses and Stiefermans. And how dopey is it that it's Niehauses and Stiefermans rather than Niehomes and Stiefermen?? But I digress.) She met all sorts of new (to her, anyway) cousins, which was a lot of fun. We also had our first family-of-three portrait taken since the ones taken while we were all still in the hospital:

A couple of days ago, I put her into her "coming home from the hospital" outfit, which she had been positively swimming in at the time she came home. I was amazed to see that it now fits her perfectly.



(Followup: July 16, 2003, 11:17 am -- I currently have this picture as the wallpaper on our computer -- I just love the sweet little smile.)

Sometimes Sawyer is all smiles, all the time.







(Clearly the Ziev eyes come into play during these great big smiles! Equally clear is the fact that this particular wave of joy was brought on by the wearing of her brand new "I Love Mommy" bib.)

And sometimes she's more of a small serious girl.



We're currently dealing with -- and, knock on wood, overcoming -- Sawyer's first nursing strike. Yeah, that's been fun. Dr. Sears suggests trying to figure out what's bothering the baby. Thanks for the help, pal. So, Sawyer, what seems to be the problem here? Is our menu not to your liking today? Is your seat uncomfortable? Are you developing a sense of ennui regarding this whole dining process?

When she first started being difficult about eating a day or two ago, it was very, very traumatic. One really doesn't want one's baby to decide to wean herself at the ripe old age of two months. I have to say, though, that once one of my mommy friends showed me the section referring to "nursing strikes" in the Sears book, non-helpful though the advice was, the mere fact that the situation was common enough to warrant its own nickname made me feel infinitely better. Just call me Mommy the Union Buster.

We have discovered that hiring a nanny in New York is remarkably similar to finding an apartment in New York: they're both arduous processes of extremely brief duration. Ten days after beginning the process, we have ourselves a nanny! (That is, unless the family she currently works for manages to talk her out of leaving, which would surprise me greatly, given that her reason for leaving is that they live in a fifth floor walk-up and their daughter continues to get bigger and less portable up and down five flights of stairs.) With all the requisite knocking on wood that such a statement requires, we're very excited about her and think she's really wonderful. And I am thrilled to be done striking up conversations with a neverending sea of potential candidates!

Note the new "Sawyer's Growth Chart" feature on the left-hand side of the page just above the archives. This will be updated monthly!

Sawyer and Sydney met each other this afternoon for the first time. Sawyer spent the visit filling Sydney in on all the neat stuff she's learned so far during her eight weeks on the planet.



Have two babies ever looked less alike?

Sawyer had her two-month appointment at the pediatrician on Thursday. (No, she won't actually be two months old until July 4, but who stands on ceremony for these things?) She weighed in at a whopping 9 lbs., 5 oz. -- moving her all the way up to 23rd percentile! Frankly, she can stay at 23% for as long as she likes -- tiny mommies are perfectly comfortable with 23rd percentile offspring. Her height is up to 21 1/2" (30th percentile), and her head circumference is 38 cm (40th percentile!). This, of course, gives me visions of Chandler Bing being tortured by the little voice in his mind saying "big head, big head, big head." So we officially no longer have any concerns about Sawyer's size. We actually haven't been troubled for some time, as she always looks appropriately healthy, pink, and cuddly.



Of course, the two-month appointment also included Sawyer's first batch of -- gulp -- shots! Paul held her arms and I cuddled her head as mean nasty Dr. Kerpsack gave her three needles in the thighs. She howwwwwwwwled or maybe three or four minutes accompanied by the howling of her mommy and daddy, and then cheered up nicely. She spent the next day or two alternating between fussy and sleepy, but on the whole, she behaved magnificently. She was even feeling good enough to give me this grin 24 hours after the shots.

So the nanny interviewing process has begun. At some point I will post what I'm sure will be a long discussion of the process, but for the time being, it should suffice to say that we're slated to see at least one candidate a day for about the next two weeks. Of course, if anyone has a wonderful person for us, by all means let us know. In the meantime, a new photo: