The Trixie Update

Sometime yesterday, or maybe the night before, Trixie finally cut her first teeth. The good news is that there’s been an improvement in her crankiness level and her sleep patterns are (mostly) back to normal. The bad news is that these new slivers of enamel are sharper than X-ACTO blades. More accurately described, it’s like there’s a piece of broken ceramic embedded in her gums with a razor’s edge just barely breaking the surface. I’m keeping my fingers far away lest I lose one. Notwithstanding the danger, these teeth were hard fought for, and deserve recognition. The first I christen Chopper, the second Excelsior.

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In case anyone was wondering, it was a changing table accident.

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As Telemetry watchers have noticed, Trixie’s diaper count brought us into the 20th century this past weekend. This did not pass unnoticed here at TTU. Starting with Trixie’s 1,946th diaper, and the watershed year of 1946, we’ll be looking at each year up to 2004 as the invention of the disposable diaper changes infant waste management forever.

We’ll celebrate what was at first simply the liberation of housewives from the endless chore of diaper washing, then a stunning advance for chemical engineering technology and later one of the bitterest ecological battles of the 1980’s and 90’s. Today, whether we like it or not, approximately 95% of U.S. parents use disposable diapers. Find out how we got here.

Based on current estimates, diaper number 1,946 should be changed sometime early afternoon this coming Sunday, and this feature should run about nine days. But don’t worry if you miss a change, you’ll be able to look at the history up to the current diaper number.

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At the time of publication we are currently enjoying the longest stretch of uninterrupted, leak-free diaper usage in the history of Trixie’s life — 318 hours, approximately 13 days. It’s taken us a long time to get here and the road has not been a dry one.

As new parents quickly discover, new babies go through a lot of diapers. They can use up to 15 a day in the first couple of weeks. In Trixie’s case, we came home from the hospital on Saturday morning, and I was at the store buying our second 40-pack on Sunday afternoon. In that first month we went through 383 diapers. It’s a large number, but that’s not the shocking part. The real issue is the number of those diapers that leaked. And for that month it was 160. Put another way, two out of every five diapers leaked on us. Or in the bed. Or on the couch. Or the crib…

Sometimes leaks cannot be avoided. No matter how well you try to fit the diaper, it’s not going work optimally until your baby gets some booty. That’s right, new babies are very bony (editor’s note: upon reading the comments, it seems that this might only apply to some babies.) Without a butt to hold the diaper in place, the pee is free to shoot anywhere and everywhere. And it did.

Fortunately, after about a month or so, the baby fat gets distributed to the right places and diapers start to fit much better. We believe this single factor accounts for the 50% decrease in leaks during the second month. We also got much better at anticipating, intercepting and changing once we had a couple hundred changes under our belt. Further working to our advantage was the rapid decrease in the daily number of diapers from an average of over 12 a day in the first month to about 6 a day currently.

So we had experience, the daily diaper counts had decreased and Trixie had a butt. Why did we still have a 20%-plus leak rate through the third month? Well, there are 2 kinds of leaks: those that occur while the baby is wearing the diaper and accidents that happen on the changing table. Our problem had shifted to the latter.

I can really only blame myself for this. Early on I had read about the horrors of diaper rash. Babies scream enough as it is; I certainly didn’t want to get her any more ammunition. As a result, I always (even now) let Trixie air out during changes in order to stave off any rashes. Was this necessary? I don’t really know. Trixie has never had any, but who can say if it’s because of the diligent air-drying. So if you see a leak spring up on the accident record, you are probably seeing a breakdown in my reflexes. It’s Trixie taking advantage of my diaper-rash-o-phobia and her love of peeing “al fresco.”

But why have the Leak Record at all? It’s fun and it gives us something to shoot for. It’s like a real addictive video game and we’re always trying to get a new high score.

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There won’t be anything new up this weekend besides the TPODs, but next week should be interesting. Trixie’s erratic and grumpy sleep cycles are definitely the result of teething. The knobby, little bulges have been swelling under her gums for the past few days. Even though a toothed baby is easily 5 times as dangerous as a toothless one, we are all looking forward to Trixie rounding this corner.

Additionally, we have a brand new set of charts coming up Monday as we look at the history of our Diaper Leak Record. On a related note, only 11 more hours until we set a new record - keep your fingers (or in Trixie’s case, legs) crossed.

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I’m excited to let our readers know that there is a great piece by Pamela O’Connell about the Trixie Update in today’s New York Times Circuits section. Here’s the article (free registration required). Don’t miss the accompanying illustration!

Now, I love the piece for it’s hard-science angle, but does it make me come across too maniacal or the right amount of maniacal? Some of my quotes seem harsher in print than I realized they would — especially considering that many of our readers do run their own baby blogs.

“Mr. MacNeill has been accused by some of treating Trixie as if she were a science project. He counters that ‘the world didn’t need another baby Web site.’ “

I didn’t mean to sound so arrogant here. The science project criticism had more to do with the style of objective writing than the actual collection of data. In fact, one reader had objected to my description of Trixie as a “human baby” rather than properly referring to her as “my loving daughter.” My point is that everyone knows that babies are cute and the world doesn’t need another web site just to tell us that.

“Everybody loves their baby - that’s not interesting,”

I’m not trying to dismiss any parent’s love for their kid or anyone who wants to blog about it. When I started the Trixie site, I didn’t want to write about how much I love my daughter because that’s a given. My goal has been to make the Trixie Update into a site that would have been interesting to me before I happened to have my own kid.

I like writing about Trixie as a human baby because it lets me take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I like the details, patterns and behavior that we’ve discovered as Trixie is developing. I like how Trixie is simply one of the newest representatives of the human species and how we get to see everything unfold again just like it has 6 billion other times for 12 billion other parents. And I feel it’s important to keep a sense of humor about these things in the process. Simply put, writing about how much I love Trixie wouldn’t be as interesting to me. Instead, I like to let the charts, graphs, and gory details speak for themselves.

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Yesterday morning Trixie balanced in the standing position without assistance for about 5-10 seconds. I was excited by this development, but for her it was completely unintentional and very unwelcome.

I was helping her stand up when I noticed that her body language seemed slightly different and more responsive. So I pried my hands free from her steely claws and backed away. Much to Trixie’s distress, her stabilizer muscles and balance kicked in automatically. She was not happy about this new behavior her body was exhibiting. Not at all. She was like, “LEGS!, you’re pissing me off!! STOP STANDING!! Put me DOWN!” Of course, her legs were not about to give up their newfound freedom and she had to manually override them by doing a controlled collapse onto the floor.

I picked her right back up into the standing position and she automatically balanced again - even more upset this time. “I said STOP IT! YOU STUPID LEGS!! GET DOWN!” After two more times, she refused to straighten her legs at all, and the exercise became as futile as trying to push a piece of rope.

I’m hoping she’ll get the hang of it eventually. Right now, however, her legs and I are on Trixie’s shit list.

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Do you really like TPODs, or are you just saying you like TPODs? In the spirit of migrating everything to the new site, I cleaned up a batch of early photos that were put up before the Trixie Picture of the Day existed. They’ve always been available on the site, but now they’ve assumed their rightful place as some of the earliest Trixie pics — and I even threw in captions on a few of them. They are available in the August 2003 TPOD Archive.

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When do you want to find out whether it’s XX or XY? Go vote in 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(14);
?>

*Platypus angle explained in the comments from yesterday’s ‘XX’ post

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It was about this time last year when we found out that the thing that kept kicking Jennifer from the inside out was going to be a female life-form. I have to admit that I was at a loss the day that we discovered this fact. For me, the issue was that I had no idea what I would do with a little girl. The irony here is that you pretty much raise boys and girls the same until maybe the last year of high school, so it was a stupid thing to get hung up on.

Still, I was pretty convinced that we had a boy on the way, and we already had a good tough name picked out for him. Yes, Baby Strong-O was going to be the kid that other kids would always be nice to on the playground for fear of a good beating. But it was not to be. The day we found out I immediately called Schaff and we proceeded to start drinking heavily at the good old Odessa on the Lower East Side.

After a couple of hours, having a girl didn’t seem like such a bad idea anymore. It turned out that girls are better than boys, but I think most of us realize this at some point in our lives. It’s just something that you have to relearn time and again. I came to appreciate that my baby girl will be strong like bear and easily as tough.

But you can’t forget that there is a softer side to having a baby girl. I spent the next couple of months torturing Jennifer by playing Enya songs over and over again while providing a voiceover: Jennifer’s pregnant … she’s having a baby …. a tiny little baby …. she’s having a little girl… she’s pregnant… it’s special…

In retrospect this was a dangerous game to play with a pregnant woman. All those extra hormones gave her the strength of 10 pregnant women, and I was just lucky that she was more interested in grilled-cheese sandwiches than chasing me down.

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