She says “La!”

I haven’t gotten random in a while and since sleep depravation doesn’t lend itself to writing coherently, here we go. I’m even using bullet points to make formatting this post easier on myself.

• It is amazing at how much you can forget in two short years. Now that we are dealing with an infant again we have had to really rack our brains to remember what we did when our son was first born. My sister-in-law had to remind my wife what we did with our son to help him work on understanding the difference between day and night.
• Despite all of that, things are going very well, which, of course, will now come back to haunt me. Our little girl is eating well and, for the most part, sleeping well. We’ve only had a handful of nights that turned to early morning where one of us got next to no sleep.
• The Miracle Blanket is our friend. We didn’t know about these until our son was about three and a half weeks old and it was a godsend then. Sure, they look a little like a straight jacket for an infant, but they work and we will do anything to preserve our sanity.
• Milk protein allergy redux? At four months old our son was diagnosed with a milk protein allergy and my wife turned her diet upside down to enable her to keep nursing. She made it about 11 months stripping down her intake to nothing but meat and vegetables and forgoing dairy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts and soy (which is ridiculously difficult to avoid, FYI). With our daughter my wife initially took a cautious approach with her intake, but it didn’t take long for us to realize that whenever she had dairy of any kind – even the tiniest bit of cheese – our daughter would spit up after feedings. No dairy, no spit up. As a result, adios dairy once again.
• The fact that our daughter has much less spit up than our son and has only vomited once during her short two weeks in the world leads us to believe we completely blew it with our son. We feel like we missed obvious warning signs that made him unnecessarily uncomfortable until our famous emergency room visit cleared things up.
• I’m not sure if parenting is like riding a bike, but we feel much more comfortable the second time around. We aren’t as stressed about every little noise baby girl makes, and that may be contributing to her sleeping better as well. Also, with our son we were so focused on the pregnancy and labor and delivery that we didn’t do as much due diligence on what do once the baby was here. Sure, we went to the classes and knew that if he cried he was either hungry, needed to be changed, tired or just being a cranky pants, but there were a few times that we kind of felt like “ok, now what?”. Our daughter is definitely benefitting from us being more battle tested.
• Even things like knowing the difference between a baby’s cry has become more apparent to us. With our son we couldn’t always discern the difference between an “I’m wet” cry and an “I’m hungry” cry. However, with our daughter we know exactly when she is hungry, as she quite loudly (and repeatedly) proclaims “La!”.
• Feeding times have definitely been a time of great interest for our son. He is absolutely fascinated by the fact that baby sister gets “Mama milk” and he is very eager to help Mama when she is trying to feed our daughter. Usually this involves him picking up her nursing stool and walking around the room with it, which, contrary to his stated intentions, isn’t very helpful at all.
• One of the funniest things was when he asked for Mama milk as our daughter was finished nursing early on. My wife looked at him and in no uncertain terms explained to him that Mama milk was only for babies without teeth.
• As for me, during nursing time I am provided with an excellent opportunity to train for a position in a NASCAR pit crew. It didn’t take me long to return to Pro Bowl form with the mid feeding diaper change and burping. Unfortunately, my wife has declined to time me so that I can post my impressive stats.

That’s all I got. Now it’s time for my mid day nap