Max sings ABC's, Twinkle-Twinkle

Max has been doing this for a while now.  We finally managed to catch it on video.  These aren't his best performances.  But you get the idea.

Technical notes to myself (and other interested nerds)

The original videos produced by our camera were 130MB in MOV format.  I needed to compress them to a reasonable size for upload to blogger.  You'd think this would be easy.  You'd be wrong.

MOV is a proprietary Apple format.  Before anything can be done with it, it must be converted to AVI.  After much painful trial and error, I found Pazera does a good job.

Normally, AutoGK can be used to compress AVI videos very easily.  But sometimes AutoGK chokes on the audio stream.  This happened to me.  When this happens, you must manually "demux" the AVI file -- that is, remove the audio stream to produce a silent video.  Then use AutoGK to compress it.  Then "mux" your audio back in again.  Demuxing and muxing can be done with AVI-Mux GUI.  What a collossal pain.

The Best Big Brother

In spite of some troubles sleeping, Max has started of life as a big brother with great success.  I was concerned that he would  be jealous of Darwyn, but he has always treated her with interest and compassion.  A couple of cute stories and pictures:

   Max has taken to explaining the world to Darwyn.  He rushes into the living room in the morning and starts telling Darwyn about its contents.  "That's a barn, Darwyn,"  he declares, while pointing to his toy barn.  He picks up a toy sheep from the barn and brings it over to her.  "That's a sheep," he informs her.  Darwyn tried to take it all in...but she had trouble focusing her eyes.

Max tells Darwyn toy names

Max kisses Darwyn....she seems unimpressed

Darwyn stares at the new toys

  When Darwyn was first born she was having trouble nursing.  We would try to get her to latch on to the breast and she would just sit there and stare at you with her pursed lips and wide eyes (which is, incidentally, the same expression she gave us when she refused to breath at birth).  If you were really lucky she would latch, but stayed on for only long enough to get the milk started.  Then she would pull off and lick it off my nipple as it squirted all over the place.  All of this would have been only annoying, except she wasn't getting enough food and this lead to a number of frustrating episodes involving much crying on Darwyn's part and near tears on my part.   Max watched these episodes with concern.  He asked why I kept trying to get her to suck on my breast.  We explained that babies eat breast milk and she needed to suck to get it out.  He asked why Darwyn was crying and said "should Darwyn stop crying?" We explained that it was normal for babies to cry and it didn't mean the same thing as when he cried.  And then we tried repeatedly in front of him to get Darwyn to eat while she screamed.  Max observed the whole process and finally decided on the problem.  "Mommy," he said, "Darwyn doesn't like breast milk."  Problem solved.


   Darwyn likes the car seat much better than Max ever did, but all babies must at some point be stuck in a car seat screaming.  It didn't take Darwyn long to find such an opportunity.  Max had the misfortune of being stuck in his car seat next to her.  Again, he regarded her display with concern, continually repeating "Should you (by "you" he means himself) rock Darwyn?"

Max names parts of Darwyn's body... "she has little tiny hands!"

 

Max and Darwyn passed out on our bed after a walk with the dogs.

Already Advanced

Disclaimer:  I posted this post a little after I wrote it.  Darwyn is now more than a month old...not barely 3 weeks old.

Darwyn is barely 3 weeks old and already showing signs of young genius.  Like Max, she is very strong and already often holds her head up on her own.  When awake she stares curiously around her environment.  Her favorite pass time is to lie on her change table and watch the mobile.  She already tracks the bears as they circle above her (a skill she has developed quite early as I understand it) and she loves the soft music that it plays.  When she is fussy she can often be calmed by the mobile.

Darwyn has shown quite an affinity for music in general.  She likes soft soothing songs and will often stop fussing if we play them.  She seems to like music much more than Max did as an infant.   We have a series of lullabies that she will happily listen to in her car seat, as long as you also wiggle the car seat when ever you are stopped at red lights.

I'm also convinced that Darwyn is already starting to smile.  Darwyn stares intently at you when you coo at her.  She will sometimes coo in response and once for me and once for Wendy she did a sort of half smile in response to our smiles and noises.  I know that researchers claim that early smiles are just some sort of reflex....or that stupid thing people always say about them having gas...but I swear she smiled at me.  Wendy even backs me up, so it must be true.  Of course, babies aren't suppose to smile until around 2 months old, but as I said, Darwyn is advanced.

Darwyn smiles....sorry it is blurry

Max had an ear infection. Try sleeping well with that.

On Sunday we braved the gauntlet of bureaucracy and managed to get Max into see the on-call doctor.  I was nervous that nothing would be wrong with Max and that the doctor would be mad at us for calling him in on a Sunday.  Greta insisted, so I acquiesced.  I'm glad she did.  Turns out Max had a raging ear infection.  (He also had a chest cold, but we knew that already.)  He'd had the ear infection for at least a day prior and probably a lot longer than that.  While his sleep problems were already diminishing due to our ruthless Ferberization, things became much easier once we finally got him on antibiotics.

Interesting post-script: Max has been playing with his ears for months now.  We were afraid that his ears had been plugged with wax and that his hearing might suffer because of it.  However, we avoided taking him to the doctor because of the intimidation and bureaucracy mentioned above, opting instead to wait until his annual check-up in one week's time.

Conveniently, however, the on-call doctor was also able to inform us that Max has almost zero wax in his ears.  I recall a certain MD in our family with a malfunctioning otoscope who diagnosed Max with an advanced case of excessive ear wax and thereby scaring the daylight out of us.  I won't mention any names.  But this is the same MD who flushed my ears with a razor sharp syringe while we were stranded deep within some wildlife reserve in Uganda.  I don't know why I go to him.

A not so elegant first bath

Max's first bath was a planned and celebrated affair.  My mother, Gus and I all piled into the bathroom with the camera ready to video tape Max's reaction to his first experience with water.  We captured every coo with the camera and commented on every grunt and kick.

Max's first bath

Darwyn's first bath was not such an elegant event.  Gus and I have endeavour to put Darwyn on air time regularly, which involves placing her in her bouncy chair with a mat underneath her in case she pees and a bare bum.  Darwyn loves her air time and was happily enjoying it next to our Au pair Heather, while Heather ate her lunch on the couch.

Heather: Oh oh.....Darwyn just went to the bathroom.

Greta: That's ok.  We set it up so she can pee on it without a problem.

Heather: Ummm....its not pee.

Darwyn had covered herself, the mat and a large amount of the chair with copious quantities of poo.  Given that she had yet to actually ever poo (besides her first mecconium) this was quite a notable event.  Thus, our first insight into Darwyn's character: when she does a job, she does it thoroughly.  She looked quite satisfied with herself.  Gus and I scrambled to try to clean her up with rags, but the whole thing proved rather impossible.  Every time you got one part clean she would dip it back into some other part that was still covered in poo.  And so we set out on an emergency first bath.  The audience consisted of just me and Gus.  Nobody video taped it...although I'm sure it would have been amusing to watch us try to extricate Darwyn from her self imposed disaster.

Needless to say, Darwyn loved her bath and was similarly thrilled with the second bath, which was a calmer event and involved more picture taking (see below).  I think that the whole event has introduced Gus and I to what it is like to parent the second....disaster prevention parenting.   Good thing we conveniently forgot the video camera!

Darwyn looks at the Camera during her second bath

Darwyn's second bath....also, I'm not covering my crotch with my hand.  I'm stroking Darwyn's hair.

Pictures of Max, Darwyn, and everyone else

Life has been busy since Darwyn was born, leaving us little time to process our pictures and post them to the web.  This post is a catch-up post, showcasing some good pictures of our family and our many visitors during the first two weeks of Darwyn's life.

Regarding Max's recent sleep troubles:  Max had a much better night last night than he did the previous night.  During the precious time after Greta put him to bed at night but before he woke up crying, I read aloud to her from Ferber's famous "cry-it-out" book.  We tried a new approach learned from our reading -- something much more humane than letting your child scream from behind a locked door for three hours.  Thankfully, the method was pretty effective.  Max slept well last night and we all feel much better about ourselves today.  We appreciate the outpouring of concern from family since I published yesterday's post.

Now, on to the pictures!

Max using the pedal to turn the wheel of an upturned bike.

"Would daddy like a fire truck?"

Aunt Sue lounging with her new niece.

Cousin Anne is very curious of Darwyn.

Grampa has never been happier.

The infamous "funny-looking loader" from Leora and Anwyn

Leora reads a book to Max

Anwyn with her new cousin Darwyn

Darwyn's second bath.  (Her first bath was an emergency poo clean-up -- not exactly a photogenic event.  Perhaps we'll post about it in the future.)

Darwyn is disgustingly cute in the tub...

...she's also disgustingly cute in her hat

How can she sleep like that?!

Max falling asleep in the middle of a meal.  This was the first time we ever tried skipping his afternoon nap.  He was firing on all cylinders until dinner time, when he suddenly hit the wall.  I guess it's a little early to be ditching the afternoon nap.

Three hours of "cry it out" with Max

Last night Max awoke crying at 2:30am.  He got out of his bed and cried at the door.  He's been doing this quite a lot recently.  Until today, our tactic when he does this has been to pick him up and put him back to bed with an absolute minimum of conversation.  "Max, it's time to sleep.  Mommy and daddy love you.  But you need to sleep in your bed.  Good night."

After repeating this no-talk tuck-in five or six times last night, Max finally took to opening his door and pacing throughout the pitch black house screaming.  He even tried to get into Leora and Anwyn's room before we caught him.  We dug out the child lock at about 3am and put it on his door.  We instituted an emergency, no-tolerance, cry-it-out policy.

The lock worked insofar as he could not get out of his room.  Instead, he pounded on his bedroom door and screamed for three solid hours until 5:30am.  No one in the house slept.  (Except Heather, who's room is the most insulated from Max's.)  Ironically, Lee and Sandi, who opted to sleep in their car in the driveway, actually got the best sleep of all.

When nap time rolled around today, we figured we were in for an easy time of it.  Max was heavily sleep-deprived by 1pm.  We were all heavily sleep deprived and Greta and I were looking forward to napping while Max napped.

Max did not nap.  Like last night, he stood at his locked bedroom door, screaming and pounding for another three solid hours until 4pm.  We decided that we would let him out of his room and terminate his nonexistant nap at 4:10, exactly three hours after we left him.  He fell asleep at 4pm, ten minutes before our deadline.  There's a line of hard-cover books on the floor emanating from under his door; this was his attempt to convince us to read a book to him on the potty, one of his many excuses to convince us to come into his room.  He's sleeping on the floor at his door.  I can see a little hand under his door.

I guess we'll wake him up at 5pm.  It's not much of a nap, but we do not want him napping this late in the day and we need him to be good and tired for bedtime tonight.

Needless to say, Greta and I are exhausted and heart-broken.  Listening to your 23-month-old child throw every excuse he can think of to get out of bed is a gut-wrenching experience.  ("You have to go pee in the potty!",  "You want mommy to read you a book?",  "Can daddy open the door?",  "You wanna rock on the rocking chair?",  "You wanna go in the house?")

Update [16:32]:  Due to Max's screaming this afternoon, there was nowhere in the house that Greta or I could sleep.  Desperate for a nap, Greta took an air mattress out onto the back deck and slept there for a few minutes before giving up.