alexist

Aliza had her bottle at just before 23:00 last night. She didn't fall asleep till about 01:30, judging from the noises she was making (and the amount of pacifier sucking). She didn't wake me up again until nearly 09:00--and even then she didn't start shrieking; I just heard her start to make these grizzly kind of noises and I knew what was coming. So I got her up and fed her, then went to change her diaper (I could smell it). It was literally full--I couldn't believe how much was in there. I had to give her an impromptu sponge bath after cleaning her up. What amazed me even more was that she slept through it. Babies will sleep through wet diapers (at least with disposables--I think they feel it more with cloth) but they generally start crying when they feel poo.

She's made up for last night by going back to sleep after the bottle, then waking up, taking about 125ml, and falling asleep on the bottle. I'm going to wake her up in a bit to go to the newsagent... think I'll try just taking her in the sling since it's just up the road. (I'm not such a devoted babywearer that I shun a pram totally. I know mothers who do. But walking a mile and a half with the baby in a ring sling doesn't work for me, especially since her preferred carry just doesn't feel totally secure to me--she doesn't like too much material in front of her. She's never fallen out but I always worry that she will.)

it was much easier just popping her into the sling (stuck money + keys in the sling tail pocket) and walking up the road than having to fold and unfold the pram (and remember, we live upstairs, so it's bring baby up, go back down, undo pram, bring it upstairs). The funny thing is, from the top she doesn't look very secure but if you see your reflection, it looks right--just like the picture of the semi-upright carry. That is, until she decides she can hold her head up, and sticks it out. (She's ahead of her age when it comes to head control, but she's not THAT good, so within a minute she flops forward and cries.

I don't think I could do a much longer walk yet though--my back hurts! And she only weighs 5.5 kg. Should have done this a decade ago when my back and shoulder muscles were toughened from carrying everything in a backpack ;) (And in high school, only dorks used both straps. It would have been perfect practice for a sling. Yes, we were idiot teenagers, especially since carrying a heavy backpack by one strap meant that one side got all the wear [you invariably developed a preference for one side] and eventually would break, so you had to replace your backpack twice as often. Forget waist straps, people didn't even know why they were on there.)

Let's see how I do:

Fiction:
1.Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre - I did stop in the middle, then picked it up again several weeks later and finished it.
2 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling - Read it
3 Ulysses, James Joyce - Read it, but it was for a Uni course on Joyce (the prof didn't require Finnegans Wake, thankfully--he said it was unfair to force it on undergraduates)
4 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres - never appealed to me
5 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell - ditto
6 The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie - I started it MANY years ago, never finished it
7 The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho - looked like a load of garbage
8 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy - No desire to read it
9 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy - read it several times, it's fantastic
10 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky - should get round to this one

Non-fiction:
1 The Blunkett Tapes, David Blunkett
2 My Life, Bill Clinton
3 My Side, David Beckham
4 Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss
5 Wild Swans, Jung Chang
6 Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking
7 The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher
8 I Can Make You Thin, Paul McKenna
9 Jade: My Autobiography, Jade Goody
10 Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, Mick O'Hare

Easy list, this, I've had no desire to read almost all of them! ;-) I was reading Wild Swans when I was in the hospital having Aliza, but put it down and haven't gotten back to it yet. Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze was our toilet reading, so I've read most of it.

Just measured Aliza, and assuming it's accurate, she's a little over 58cm. This puts her at nearly the 75th percentile for height and confirms what I thought--she's relatively long and thin, as her weight percentile is only 60-something (hard to see--it's a little below the 75 line). She's remained on the curve for both (i.e. percentile has remained the same so the rate of growth is correct) so it's all fine--I just wanted to know if my impressions (based on how her clothes fit) were right.

I think her 0-3 sleepsuits will all be retired within a week or so--some of them have been, some are on the verge of going, and a few will last the week. Then it will all be 3-6s :)

More worrying is that her eyebrows seem to be coming in red. We may have a ginger child *sobs melodramatically* But it might be an odd shade of blonde or brown. Hard to tell at the moment--we have to wait for the fuzz on her head to turn into hair :-)