Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Kid-less

Kid-less: That is what I am working on accomplishing, for a few hours at a time.

Since the birth of Emilie, I have been in the company of one kid or the other every waking moment, with the exception of half an hour two weeks ago at grandma's - Sonja was sleeping, and grandma said she can look after Emilie if I want to go out for a stroll. And for a brisk stroll I went. It was great. No weight around the shoulder (Emilie, while not the heaviest, does weigh 10+ pounds, and over the course of a couple hours I can feel that). No one wanting to go "up". Being able to go where no stroller has gone before.

Emilie is breastfed, so in order to go kid-less, she needs to know how to drink from a bottle. We are slowly getting there... I am practicing with her once a day or two. She just needs to learn to trust the bottle, that even if there is no breast there to comfort her, that there is food in the bottle, and even the same kind of food. May be in a few weeks she will know that. It has been challenging to find time to pump - of course the solution to that would be to find some time when neither kid needs attention. Formula would be another answer, but why pay for something that one can get free?

Talking of breastfeeding, there was an interesting tidbit about the apparent increase in IQ for babies who are breastfed in the economist from Nov 8, 2007, in an article called The nature of nurture. "What Dr Caspi and Dr Moffitt found was that the increase in intelligence associated with breastfeeding only happened to people who had inherited at least one copy of the C version of FADS2 [gene]."

Per Juneau request, here is the "after" picture of my hair:

2 comments:

Matt Heavner said...

The haircut looks great! (Way better than mine is looking now...)

Good luck w/ time. Torsten is awesome fun, but he's simultaneously driving us both completely nuts! After dinner I had to surf with him on a meter stick in the living room for a while until I got his bath all ready. Now I have about 25 minutes maybe.. Glad he loves his baths! He actually is going to preschool MWF monrnings and then goes to Kristen and Ava's house MWF afternoons. So we've got nothing to complain about.

Unknown said...

Hi Dana,

We are back in Zurich now - I'll give you a ring sometime soon. We would be happy to help out so you can have a bit of childless time occasionally. I understand how valuable those half hours are! It has been nice to have Ryan off work the past few weeks. I even managed a bit of skiing in Colorado while he looked after Sophie.

We should also arrange an evening when the guys look after the kids so we can go out - maybe see a movie.

See you soon!

Hil