The Loch Ness in Technicolor

Here is the grin ~ Enjoy!

The elusive Loch Ness

I think we finally got a shot of her smiling - kind of:

Here's Jocelyn preparing to root on the Patriots to victory tonight. She's thinking about the crush she's going to have on Tom Brady in a few years.

Once again, I am struck by how darn cute my daughter is. Thank God she gets her photogenic qualities from Mom and not Dad.

I've been going through the reams of pictures we've taken the past few weeks, and I have to say that there are surprisingly few that are blog-worthy (even if they do make us smile). Here's another of our favorites. She's wearing a hat just given to her by her aunt Jenn (thank you!). She wore this while walking around town today with Mom and Dad. She had a ball!

Sleepless in Arlington

Change is afoot in our household. About two days ago, The Peanut decided she would no longer eat her normal 6-8 oz. at each feeding during the day. As a result (we think, or maybe this is unrelated), she no longer sleeps for extended periods during the day, instead napping for anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. By the end of the day, she is overtired, extremely fussy and has trouble going down for the night, so we spend the hours between 8:00 and 10:00 trying to get her to stop crying and off to sleep.

The mind-boggling thing about it is that NOTHING has changed to cause this change in her behavior. We don't know whether she is transitioning to a stage where she just needs to eat less (maybe she just finished a growth spurt?) or sleep less during the day, whether there is something wrong with her physically, or whether she just decided that she had had enough of the old routine. I realize that trying to employ logic to analyze a baby's behavior can be a fruitless exercise, and maybe I should just realize this is part of the overall child-rearing experience. My Mom said she thinks this is just Jocelyn demonstrating her developing personality. If that's the case, it's OK with me, even if it does test our patience a bit and make things a little tense around the house at times. I would just like to know definitively that she's OK and will continue to be.

A couple of milestones

Two big events today. The first is that Peanut is a month old! (It's hard to believe a month has passed already.) In honor of her "birthday," here's a pic of her in her birthday suit.

This is tubby time, part of our nightly ritual when I come home from work and give her a bath, get her dressed for bed, and either read to her or feed her, whichever she prefers. It's hard to say whether she or I looks forward to tubby time more each day. As I've said before, she's pretty good company. And yes, I realize that at some point I am going to figure out how to unwind myself from around her finger. But not for a while. :)

The second milestone is that Mom and I think we saw her first smile this morning! There have been plenty of false alarms before (usually brought on by gas), but this seemed to be an actual response to a pleasurable stimulus. We shook a rattle for her while she sat in her new chair (given to us this past weekend by Uncle Tim and Aunt Marie) and she seemed to love it. We had her going for a little bit.

Of course, as soon as we tried to get a picture of it to share with you all, the smile went away. Here are a couple of shots we took afterward where she had kind of a little smirk going. You'll just have to take our word for it that her actual smiles were much better than these - and no, we're not going to tell you we saw the Loch Ness monster today too.


Happy Birthday Peanut!

Popeye The Sailor Man

Jocelyn always looks and acts a bit like Popeye when she knows she's about to be fed. She's got the whole one eye open and one side of mouth upturned thing going. All she needs is a pipe. Toot-toot!

Adjectives I would use to describe my daughter

In an earlier entry I commented that I couldn't wait to get to know her. Here are some words that come to mind to describe her at nearly 4 weeks old (besides beautiful, cute, adorable, etc.):

Observant. She doesn't seem to miss a trick. While being fed, she spends the entire time watching me intently and can tell immediately if anything is different. The other day I happened to have a Sox hat on for the first time while feeding her. It was as if my skin had suddenly turned green. She gave me this look that said, "what is that thing?"

Auditory. Singing to her is one of the only effective ways I know of to soothe her - except for my pinkie, nothing else will calm her once she's worked up. I think she will love music.

Noxious. This one is self-explanatory. Her business is... wait for it... legendary. Not sure whether she takes after Mom or Dad in this department. Actually I am sure but will not say in the interest of marital harmony.

Insatiable. Oh, she can eat. She might give Kobayashi a run for his money if she could digest hot dogs right about now. One of her little personality quirks is that she likes to eat herself to sleep. At bedtime she insists on a bottle and closes her eyes, and then I basically wait for it to stop moving, burp her and put her down.

Distended. Her little pot belly is fantastic. She is just as much Homer Simpson as Maggie Simpson. And her cheeks are catching up to the belly quick.

Content. She never fusses for the sake of fussing. When she cries, we basically walk down the checklist... hungry? (nope) dirty diaper? (nope) gassy? (yep, there it is.) And as soon as we deal with the problem, back to sleep she goes. We are very lucky in this regard.

Self-sufficient. She doesn't seem to be one of those babies who needs to be close to the action. When she's tired, she wants to go to bed, and doesn't care what's going on around her when that happens. Again, we feel very lucky that she is this way.

Jocelyn's First Snow Angel

Jocelyn could not have been less excited about her first encounter with snow ~ maybe it was the snow suit mom had dressed her in??? I bought this snow suit back in September and have been dying for the opportunity to dress Jocelyn in it ~ She was not dying for the opportunity...She lasted about 10 minutes in it!