The Trixie Update

Posting will probably be light this week because Jennifer is on call again, and that generally severely limits the amount of free time available for the Trixie Update. Unfortunately, this is something we’re going to have to deal with every other week for the next six months as she enters a particularly brutal call schedule. Our publishing schedule will more than likely mirror her call with alternating weeks of feast and famine. We will, of course, always try to have a new Picture of the Day.

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In a word, carrots. We are feeding her food twice a day now. A frustrating and humorous proposition that is logistically equivalent to trying to tie your shoe with just one hand. You actually need about five: one to hold the spoon, a couple to keep Trixie’s hands from ‘helping’ with the spoon, another to keep her from suddenly jerking forward or twisting around and one more in waiting to try to catch some of the mush she squishes out of her mouth that then rolls right off the bib. I’m sure we’ll get better at it, but for the time being feeding Trixie is much messier, though not as disgusting, than most of her diaper accidents.

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Trixie has now had her first food: Butternut Squash. I realize we previously awarded Rice Cereal this distinction, but after careful consideration it really is more of an adhesive than a grain, and we are retracting the honor. She seems to like the taste ok, and we’re excited about having a different colored mess to wipe up. Now we just wait to see if there is any adverse reaction.

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More TTU readers prefer Nutrafin Max to Rice Cereal. In addition to tasting better, Nutrafin contains pre-digested plankton and will not cloud the water when used as directed.

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Trixie Telemetry now offers full access to the complete Sleep Log. If you would like to see more than just the last day of her sleep patterns, click on “Full log” in the Telemetry section and select a time span to view.

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This horrible, random mess is a visual representation of the past 45 days of Trixie’s sleep cycle. As in the Sleep Log, yellow depicts awake periods and blue sleep. The format has been vertically compressed with higher contrast colors to emphasize any patterns (or lack thereof) creating a map of her sleep habits.

It’s obvious at a glance that there’s no strong pattern for the majority of this time period. To be fair, small clusters of order do exist representing minor successes, such as the middle left between the hours of about 1:00 am and 5:00 am, but they are simply overwhelmed by the surrounding chaos.

The lines marking 6:00 am and 9:00 pm represent the Blue Zone — the ideal overnight sleep period. In a perfect world, Trixie would be asleep by 9 and let us sleep until at LEAST 6:00 am. As you can see, this zone is regularly violated with impunity. We don’t fare much better outside the Blue Zone either; her morning and afternoon nap periods are maddeningly irregular. The most annoying habit, which she is slowly growing out of, is the 38 minute cat nap. These are the tiny blue dashes interspersed throughout the map. To her credit, she has been taking consistently longer naps over the past 2 weeks, and those tiny dashes appear less frequently.

But even when taking longer naps, there is still no predictable pattern. She should be taking 2-3 multi-hour naps a day, preferably at about the same time, and sleeping through the night. The goal is to slowly move her toward some kind of schedule. This doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, but we’re not seeing much progress. The pattern for the latest week doesn’t seem any less random than the pattern for the earliest one.

So what does the ideal sleep map look like? It actually wouldn’t look much like a map at all. The intricate, irregular geographies would give way to boring, but beautiful, vertical stripes stretching deep into the night.

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There are three variables that must be managed to raise a human child. Energy intake, waste removal and unit recharging. During the course of these past five months the first two have vexed us at the Trixie Update to no end. Longtime readers will recall the saga of Milk Week and all the work that the milk cycle entails. And of course who can forget the excretory nightmare of diaper explosions, leaks and general messiness as the diaper count numbered in the thousands. But these previous conditions pale in comparison to the duress and trauma caused by the third variable — Sleep.

It should have been obvious from the start. Milk and Bottle management? It takes a long time to starve. There’s always time to recover if we messed up a little. And the rest is just a little bit of soapy water and elbow grease. Diapers? Again, humans have lived in filth for centuries before modern times. At least we have the benefit of a washing machine. But sleep, that’s a whole other animal. How long can the human body function without sleep? A day? Maybe two - but what kind of decisions do you make under those conditions? Sleep deprivation takes an incredible toll on the body, and that is why Trixie’s sleep cycle has become the final frontier.

Trixie slept with us the first 3 1/2 months. This was not the ideal sleep situation according to half the parenting books out there, but the other half said it was ok. Our bed presented its own set of problems. A super-soft, pillowtop mattress with lots of pillows, blankets and two giant bodies surrounding Trixie is pretty much the textbook SIDS situation. The only thing that could make it more dangerous would be to throw in a nice big pile of cat hair. Still, she managed to survive and we enjoyed having the little peanut to snuggle with until she started to kick us at all hours of the night. Thus began the transition to the crib.

We let her cry herself to sleep in the crib. It’s painful to listen to at first, but after a couple of days you get used to it and after a week or so, it actually becomes pretty hilarious. All you are doing is gently laying her down in a nice warm baby-sized sleep space and she’s screaming like a cat being butchered. It does get funny. I understand it’s going to be even funnier when language is throw into the mix and she starts screaming “Help ME! Save ME!” in these benign situations.

The biggest problem in the crib transition brings us back to the first variable: food. When she was sleeping with us, Jennifer could feed her at any time during the night with very little effort. Now there’s lots of stumbling around in the dark, and bad decisions are made at 3 in the morning about whether we should put her back in the crib or take her to bed with us.

We are now acting under pediatrician’s orders not to feed Trixie between midnight and 5am. If she wakes up at 3am, we can go say hello and maybe tuck her in again, but no food. This schedule appeared to work pretty well leading up to the holidays and then it all went to hell. We’re still trying to recover but it seems that Trixie is totally regressing. And this is how things stand today. Every night is unpredictable but we continue to slog ahead with our sleep campaign dreaming of victory.

Coming Soon: Sleep Charts!

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Trixie doesn’t get a choice when it comes to dinner — but you do! Weigh in on the latest Trixie poll!

include_once "/home/trixie3/public_html/poll/booth.php";
$php_poll->set_template_set(”plain”);
$php_poll->set_max_bar_length(125);
$php_poll->set_max_bar_height(10);
echo $php_poll->poll_process(8);
?>

 

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There is actually no winner here. Paper mâché and rice cereal are completely interchangeable. Rice cereal is disgusting and much better suited for piñatas than the human digestive system. Paper mâché can also be mixed with breast milk but, unlike rice cereal, is nontoxic. Further confusing the issue is that Trixie’s face is so covered with rice cereal when we’re done feeding her that adding a few strips of newspaper would make a mask. Nonetheless, Trixie is eating like there’s no tomorrow so we figure we can advance to the next stage. We’re going to start on real baby food (in the jar) tomorrow or Wednesday.

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The distinction of first food goes to “rice cereal” — a questionable accolade in my opinion because it looks like mica and smells like fish food. But if people want to call it food, then I guess I’ll go along. Trixie was very interested in seeing how much we would shovel in her mouth before she tried to poke it all back out with her tongue. The main lesson for today? It’s time to get a lot more bibs.

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