Millie & Zane

Our friend Millie spending some quality time with Zane over at Janet and Paul’s last night. Janet invited us over for dinner and to see Tyler’s new haircut! Zane seems to enjoy the company of others: the more background noise the better, which I suppose we should actively encourage. He’ll have plenty of time to be withdrawn, sullen, and morose when he’s a teenager.

Based on his current behavior he does best in these social situations with a full belly and a clean diaper. Surely there’s a self-help book in the making based on those simple principles!

Speaking of full bellies, I had some time to kill during my morning shift and decided to chart his average daily food consumption since the beginning of June.

We can put that on the dust cover of his self-help book to lend it the air of unnecessary complexity that comforts some of us.

When we brought Zane home they’d suggested we keep track of how often he peed, pooped, his feedings, and even Faith’s pumpings. Silly them, they had no idea what they were starting! I had an old mini sitting around which I hooked to a small LCD and wireless keyboard/mouse. We fill out spreadsheets while feeding or pumping, tracking all the ins and outs of daily baby life. After the first couple weeks we gave up on trying to track the outputs, but are still keeping track of the milk production and consumption to this day.

The computer is also handy for browsing the web while otherwise occupied. His room is really equipped: there’s the computer, a dorm sized fridge for storing milk, a full sized couch, boom box, and of course all of the baby gear. It looks as much like a dorm room as it does a baby room, and both of us crash on the couch regularly.

But back to the useless chart.

Days of the month are shown along the x-axis and milliliters consumed along the y-axis. I was kind of hoping to see it trending up or something. Maybe I need to use a weighted average or something to reject the outlying extremes? (like the 10ml snack he just had between meals)

Maybe if it was plotted against a backdrop of total daily consumption? Hours slept? The inverse derivative of smiles and coos to burps and grunts? I should probably keep better track of when/what he ate (sometimes I enter things like 120ml from 4-7pm) since I know for sure that Faith doesn’t miss or fudge her numbers.

p.s. I realized lately that I did a horrible job of taking photos of Faith’s Sister’s family and parents when they were up helping. For now I plead sleep deprivation, but next time maybe someone can remind me?