Sometimes I feel like I must
be missing something. Almost since the beginning we’ve been
bathing Lex by taking him in the shower with one of us. Seems
to work well. We tried the baby bath once or twice when he was
real small, but the shower is just easier. I tried the bath
again today, because I thought he might have fun splashing
around. He seemed to like it for a bit. But the problem is, how
do you actually get a kid (or anyone, for that matter) clean in
just the bath? As I see it, by the end of the bath he’s sitting
in dirty, soapy bath water. I don’t bath much, but when I do I
like to end with a shower to get all of the soapy water off.
What are you supposed to do with kids??? Like I said, sometimes
I feel like I must be missing something. What I did was turn on
the tap and rinse him under that. He didn’t like that much :) I
think we’ll go back to the shower for now, but I’m gonna have
to figure it out sometime because I don’t think we want to be
showering with him until he’s old enough to shower himself!
Those of you with kids, help me out here…

Lex has the neatest head of hair right
now. He’s loosing his long, silky dark newborn hair and it’s
being replaced by short, light colored baby hair. Except he
didn’t loose it all and then start growing, instead he’s got
new baby hair growing underneath and through his longer, darker
newborn hair… which is slowly coming out. It’s makes for a
neat looking head of hair.

3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days today :)
He’s come such a long way… (I just flipped through his
newborn hospital pictures… aww… so tiny)

I was looking back through old pictures
(someone’s birthday is coming up…) and I realized that Lex is
loosing his hair! :) Actually it’s common with babies. He’s
loosing the dark hair he was born with, but light blond hair is
growing instead. Maybye we’ll have a little blondie for a few
years. Alan and I were both blond as toddlers.

What’s interesting is that they tell you all
sorts of things to expect after birth, but they never really
give you a timeframe – such as the baby loosing his hair (and
me loosing mine!!) I thought that if they didn’t happen within
a few weeks, they probably wouldn’t. Guess not.
Interesting.

We had a really great
weekend. Didn’t do much of anything, but relaxed and enjoyed
it. I paid bills (never fun) then went shopping (which is why
bill are never fun!) for clothes for Lex. He’s busting out of
his 0-3mo clothes so we bought him some 3-6mo and a few 6-9mo
clothes. One of the outfits came with a cute little denim
baseball cap. It fits him perfectly. I’ll try to get a picture
soon. I want to buy a book of kids songs too. I can remember
little bits and pieces from a bunch of kids songs, but can’t
remember enough to actually sing the song. So now I just make
up songs. He doesn’t seem to mind :) Someday he’ll be like “ma,
what the hell are you saying??” That’s why the tell you to
enjoy them while they’re young. :)

I also posted pictures from
our trip to Franklin last month. There are some great ones of
Lex and my dad sitting in the front yard. It was a really nice
day and my parents live in the country so the colors are
great… photos.datdec.com

Speaking of pictures, if we’re not too poor at the time, I
think I’m going to get a family picture/holiday card this year.
Is that too cheesy? We have some JC
Penney’s coupons and I thought it would be fun to get
a professional pic of the family. I think I’m going to go just
before Thanksgiving because Lex will be 6 months old then.
How’s that for early planning. We’ll see how it goes.

Does being a mom now forever doom me to
being the last one to bed at night and the first one up? I
guess techically Lex is the first one awake, but I’m the first
one up. And then he goes back to sleep an hour later and I’m
still up. They don’t tell you this little tidbit in parenting
books.

Speaking of tidbits, I was
reading an article the other day (Parents
magazine) about pregnancy and babies around the
world. It actually wasn’t an article so much as a series of
photos and bullet points. For example, did you know that in
Norway employers are required by law to give new mothers 46
weeks of time off at full pay! Or 52 weeks at 80% pay. This
country requires 12 weeks and no pay. Go US. Also, Norwegian
mothers are allowed 2 hours off each day for breastfeeding.
Here we try to pump real quick in the bathroom before anyone
notices we’re gone for long. One the other side though, are
countries like Mali where 10% of women die from pregnancy or
childbirth and newborns are often fed sugar water, tea, or
urine because these are believed to have medical benefits. And
in parts of India it is believed that drinking a glass of water
that you’re mother-in-law has dipped her big to into will help
progress labor. Anyway, it’s a very interesting article. And it
got me thinking about misconceptions here in this country.

I find it amazing that with all we know
in this country, you still get tons of conflicting information
from various sources (books, parenting magazines,
pediatricians, etc.) It’s no wonder people stress out about
pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Even basic things seem to be
in dispute. For example, most of what I’ve read says that a
babies eye color can change all the way through their toddler
years. Then I read in a magazine the other day that after 9
months the eye color will not change (yes, they said it quite
matter of factly). It seems silly that there would be conflict
about something that basic. Either there are cases of eye color
changing in toddler years or there aren’t. How hard is this.
Makes me question everything else they say too. Anyway, I guess
the secret to good parenting is to read what you can and make
your own decisions. Heck, that’s probably the secret to a good
life :)

Anyway, Lex is awake now and I
have pay some bills so we can go shopping today. Busy, busy
Saturday.

I wonder at what age does a person start
getting influenced by other people’s yawns. I was noticing
today that when Lex yawns, I usually yawn too. But when I yawn
it seems to have no impact on him. I’ve read that contagious
yawning is a social thing and anthropologists believe it helped
tribes of people maintain similar sleep cycles… so you’d
think that the contagious yawn reflex would kick in pretty
early in life. Hmmm…. another FTI project. Remind me to tell
you all about FTI someday…

Even though techically its still a few
days away, fall has definitely arrived in my neck of the woods
(and what pretty woods they are). I get to work from home today
because Alan had to go do some work not from home. He set
things up for me so I can do 90% of everything I do at work,
from home. Yay! I may work from home more often now :) Lex is
sleeping, there’s a nice breeze, life is good…

5:30am no longer looks any different than
3am :( Although I was pleasantly suprised that I didn’t see 3am
today. Lately he’s been waking up to eat 2 or 3 times a night,
usually around midnight-1am and then again around 3am. I end up
exhasted, but he’s seriously eating each time, so he must be
hungry. Last night he woke up at 1ish then not until 5:30am.
Never thought I’d be pleasantly suprised about 5:30am, but I
was :)

We visited Jim and Julie last
weekend. Lex’s first trip to their new house. He got to meet
their bunnies, Snowplow and Fathead. Fathead isn’t too
friendly, so she stayed out of the way, but Snowplow came out
to play. He scampered around for a bit while Lex watched. Then
Lex fell on him. But the party didn’t end until Snowplow
started sniffing Lex, ended up in the diaper area and took off!
:)

Otherwise not much going on. Always
have lots of good thoughts to post, but never have much time.
Work is quite busy, which is good. The days go by quickly.

Lex has his 4 month appointment coming
up at the end of this month and we’re going to talk to the
pediatrician about starting solids. He’s definitely showing
some signs of interest. We’ve been reading up on it and started
eating dinners at the table lately with Lex in his seat nearby.
Now we need to get him a highchair. He doesn’t sit up for very
long on his own, but he’s getting better at it. He also tries
to sit up straight in his bouncy seat and car seat – which ends
up just looking funny :)

Anyway, I have
to go get ready for work now. For some odd reason, after eating
really well at 5:30am he fell back asleep. Usually he’s raring
to go. Guess he must be tired. Must still be recovering from a
weekend of travel.

Just a quick hello. We’ve got
a busy weekend ahead of us (visiting MA) so we need to get off
the computer soon.

Lex is getting good
at sitting up… well, better at it anyway. I guess “good” is
stretching it a bit. He likes to sit on the table between my
arms when I type :) He says:
k
sazxFDXF
ZXDCzZKGTJJREH EJNVGFR HXHJX TR4 4G,UUOVCUDC9 UMML CKINVASGF
VUBG B KIYY7STRTRGFFGFFFVC D9I I

and
then he drooled on my laptop :) We’ll work on the typing skills
later – maybe once he gets the hang of sitting.

(Lex was grinning so big and
laughing sitting on Alan’s shoulders. I took several pictures,
but he kept looking away or losing the smile just as I snapped
the picture. Oh well.)

So much for sleeping through the night. We
were up twice last night (12:30 and 3am) and then again at
5:30. So much for my 6am alarm :)

Lex is
definitely in the early stages of teething. And my nipples are
the first victims! He doesn’t bite yet (no teeth yet), but he
does chomp down on them. I need to start paying better
attention while nursing and stop him when he moves from sucking
to chomping. It’s a subtle difference, but definitely there. If
I’m not careful we’ll end up like the early days – and that’s
no good!