I gave Holden his first haircut earlier this week.  In reality, it was more of a trim than an actual haircut.  His hair was beginning to get long in the front and on the sides.  So I waited until he was up fresh from a nice, long nap (a rare occasion indeed), and I seated him in his booster seat, supplying him with a mountain of Cheerios to keep him busy.  I took a wet washcloth and dampened his hair, and I cut the long ends of his hair above both ears and along his forehead.  He was remarkably cooperative.  And here is the end result…quite a handsome young man, eh?

Holden had his 9-month appointment earlier this week.  His growth has slowed way down.  He’s 21 lbs. 14.5 oz (79th percentile for weight) and 29 inches long (67th percentile for height).  The fluid is almost gone from his ears after persisting for over a month following his ear infection.  No signs of infection this time, though, which is also great news.  He is healthy but we MUST do something about his sleep (or lack thereof).  He does not like to eat during the day for fear of missing something more interesting or more important, so he concentrates his feedings at night.  Additionally, Holden went from feeding every hour or so during the day to only feeding once every 4-5 hours during the day.  This change in his feeding habits happened almost overnight.  The result is that my body hasn’t had a chance to adjust its milk production and I have had two episodes of clogged ducts, while narrowly avoiding many other potential clogs.   Plus, he has been teething like crazy lately, so he is a total crankpot during the day and will often wake up screaming every 1-2 hours throughout the night.  This phase we are going through is WAY worse than when he was first born, which by comparison was a freaking cakewalk.  We’ve tried Motrin, Tylenol, homeopathic teething tablets, frozen/slushy fruit, wet washclothes, cold teething rings, you name it.  Nothing is making him feel better.  We’re still trying to decide how to deal with this latest problem—I’ve always been OK with letting him fuss it out to go to sleep.  But when he is screaming in obvious pain….that’s something that I just can’t ignore.  We need to make some decisions soon.  As for the milk supply, it’s probably time that I stop pumping for donation so that I can get my supply to dwindle.  I know it’s weird to talk about having too much milk, but man, it’s a real problem.  My body had to support an 8 lb. 10 oz newborn growing into a 19 lb. baby by 4 months—-and my body did this through constant, round-the-clock nursing in those early weeks.  And now that Holden is being more reasonable about his feedings, my poor body doesn’t quite know what to do with itself.  I discussed some of this with the lactation consultant when I was at the pediatrician’s office today.  To say that she was unhelpful and rude would be severely understating the case.  She actually said to me “I don’t really know what you expect to be helped with here….”  WTF?!  Lady, I am not sleeping, my boobs keep getting plugged, and I feel like crap…..I want help with THAT!!!  She really had nothing to suggest about the plugged ducts; as for the night wakenings, her only suggestions were to ignore the crying or maybe offer him water instead.  We tried ignoring the crying last night and offering water, but it did not go well.  Neither of us felt OK about it, so we won’t be doing it again.  You know how they say there is so much variability around developmental milestones—-so much variability, in fact, that you can expect certain behaviors to emerge during a temporal window that spans MONTHS?  Why should feeding be any different?  Maybe some babies are able to go long periods of time without eating from a young age and other babies just take a little longer to develop this skill—-I mean, metabolism happens to be a rather individualized process.  To say that ALL babies should be sleeping through the night at 6 months is about as ridiculous as saying that all babies should be crawling by 7 months or talking by 12.  We expect variance with other aspects of development, so why should feeding and sleeping be the exception?  

Stupid doctors.

As for the fun stuff that Holden is doing these days, he gives mini high-fives to us.  We raise our palm and ask for a high-five and Holden responds by steadying our hand with one of his hands and then repeatedly slapping our hand with his free hand.  It’s really cute, but he refuses to perform on video.  Every time we break out the camera to capture him in action, he stops giving high-fives and looks straight at the camera, in preparation to have his picture snapped.  One of these days we will catch him though!  Holden is also gaining some real fluidity with his movements….he goes seamlessly and effortlessly from sitting to crawling and crawling to sitting again.  He is pulling himself up to standing often.  He empties the contents of our bookcase routinely, tossing the likes of Sartre, Hesse, and Vonnegut casually over his shoulder.  He isn’t satisfied unless he is around lots of people, a situation that isn’t always possible for me to conjure up for him.  He eats everything we eat at the table and hasn’t shown any obvious signs of disliking any particular food.  

Yesterday Holden got to spend the day with the nanny and his new little friend, Mallory.  I am pretty sure Mallory “taught” Holden how to crawl.  Once he started socializing with Mallory, his gross motor skills seemed to really take off.  I don’t know if it’s just coincidence, but I would bet that having to keep up with another infant served as motivation for him to adopt a more efficient strategy for getting around.  He really enjoys his time with other babies and I do best to make sure he gets as much exposure as he seems to need.  

I have so much more to say but I am tired and need sleep.  I am still in job purgatory.  No word whatsoever.  So we are determined to enjoy our weekend to get our minds off of things.  We plan on going out for breakfast one morning and also going to one of the sugarhouses for Vermont Maple Open House Weekend.  This will be a welcome distraction.

I know there are some folks out there that would say "oh, lighten up" about something like this but I thought that this was in such incredibly poor taste. With the epidemic of childhood obesity occurring in the United States, these sorts of "cute jokes" are neither cute nor funny. The makers of this bib should be utterly ashamed of themselves. This is way worse than candy cigarettes.

Original on Flickr.

Rob and I are settling into an evening of reading, movies, homemade brownies, and dark beer.  We are celebrating the fact that the week is over, that it is spring, and that Holden will be 9 months old this Sunday.  The babyproofing began in earnest today.  I sequestered all of our plants behind the couch and built a barrier using a tote, the couch, and a crate of records.  Now Holden will not be able to access the plants, or the litter box, which I am convinced he believes is a mysterious cat portal into a faraway cat world to which no humans are granted access.  

I still haven’t heard anything about re-scheduling my interview.  At this point, I am just using this time to decompress and to reflect on how imperfect this particular institution is—a fact that makes me feel better about my own shortcomings.  In addition, it makes me realize that this might not be the perfect fit for me—-if the institution is weighed down with disorganized committees and poor communication, this might not be the right thing for us.  I will know for sure when I actually get there (you know, sometime in the next decade or so!)  I have a feeling that there are a few people who are dragging their feet—those few who insist on being a part of the interview process but aren’t actually ever around to do so.  It makes the job of everyone who *is* on the ball that much tougher.  

That said, most things are looking up.  I found out 2 weeks ago that my manuscript was finally accepted.  And I also met my pumping goal for my milk donation, so that is another weight off my chest (teehee).  I just need to arrange for a cooler to be delivered so I can ship the milk off for processing.  I would feel awesome right now if I were sleeping a bit better.  Holden has been waking up constantly throughout the night…pretty much every 1-2 hours.  He’s not hungry, just in pain from teething.  This has been going on since January.  Today I noticed that he has a fourth tooth poking through, on the opposite side from the last tooth to emerge.  Yes, our son has fangs.  Last night I had my first corneal erosion since November, which means that I am back on the clock for the 3-month healing period.  It’s so frustrating.  Now I am back to using eye ointment nightly.  If I’m still having problems when I am done with the breastfeeding, I may have the debridement procedure repeated.  And I won’t skip the Vicodan this time.

So many updates—I will start by talking about our delightful weekend (now that we’re already halfway through the week!) It’s been in the low 50s, which is warm enough to drive with the sun roof open, and also warm enough to enjoy two consecutive days at Battery Park, just a few steps from our house.  Holden loved using the swings:

After enjoying the swings, Holden delighted in watching the older kids run around the playground from the safety of this little park bench.  I know he can’t wait to join the fun in a few short months:

What a great day!

Holden is also developing new skills in the realm of language.  He has dabbled in language throughout his life, as most babies do, preferring the repetition of ba-ba-ba or ma-ma-ma.  He knows a lot of words already, probably more than I even realize.  When I ask where the kitty is, he scans the room to find Stoli.  When I am reading him a book and ask him to turn the page, he will dutifully turn it.  Over the weekend, when we returned from our walk around town, I hoisted him from his stroller and said “Up.”  He replied “Up-Up.”  And when I repeated the word back to him, he said it again and smiled.  Today we were singing “the big fat duck” song to him (don’t ask) and he responded by saying “duck!”  When he was younger (sometime between 6 and 7 months), there were a couple of occasions where I could have sworn that he said “itty” referring to the cat.  He hasn’t said kitty since then and I’m not sure whether it was coincidence, although both times he was starring directly at the cat.  He seems to go through cycles with language, where he prefers one sound and practices it over and over again and then appears to forget all about it for months.  Holden seems to know the meaning of basic phrases like “Do you want a sip of water?” or “Do you want to nurse?”  He also knows “We’re going to visit Papa.”

Other milestones—Holden started crawling on St. Patrick’s Day.  It’s not an army crawl, it’s the real thing, on his hands and knees.  He’s not especially fast (yet) but he’s much less frustrated with himself now that he is more mobile.  Holden just got his third tooth this week—his canine on the left side.  So now he looks like a lopsided infant Dracula.  I am going to start calling him Nosferatooth.

Today I took Holden to a final visit with the nanny so I could put the finishing touches on my job talk.  I was feeling so overwhelmed this morning, realizing how much I still have to learn.  Over the weekend, I had e-mailed my contact person at the institution where I am interviewing to see if a 20-minute pumping session could be scheduled into the middle of my interview day.  I never got a reply, so today I put out another e-mail to try to firm up plans for Friday.  I was surprised when I was told that they couldn’t confirm the interview for that day because there were people (critical people, apparently), who wouldn’t be able to make it.  I was told that we would have to try to schedule it for next week instead.  So I tactfully replied that I could do that but we would have to make a decision soon so we could make arrangements on this end.  It’s no small task to coordinate everything so that Rob’s work is finished up (at least well enough for him to be out of the office), Holden has sufficient milk pumped, and our bags are packed for several days out of state.  I’m grateful for a few extra days of preparation, but I am also really anxious to have this all behind me.  I applied for this job back in November, and it will be April before I know whether or not I will be hired there.  The good thing about this process is that I have had wonderful support from lots of people to get things done—-from people pitching in to watch Holden, to a gang of friends who convened last night to listen to my talk and give feedback, to a postdoc advisor who gave up 2 hours of his day today to discuss my slides with me, I am just so lucky to have people who care enough to help me get through this.  

As for stupidity, this is something I came across on the PostSecret website.  The idea that a career in science continually makes one feel stupid is an idea that thus far, matches my experiences and resonates with me in ways that are too embarrassing to recount.  This whole process—preparing my talk, developing a research program, making decisions about what scientific questions are important to answer, then changing those questions based on what is affordable—has been humbling and continually reinforces how little I actually know.  I’ve had to prepare myself to answer questions about cardiovascular reflexes, exercise interventions used in children with ADHD, the phylogeny of the cerebellum and its role in helping different species face adaptive challenges, movement disorders, isolating genetic characteristics through successive selective inbreeding, etc.  These topics are vastly different and none are in my area of specialty per se, yet I need to be prepared to discuss any of them.  This is why I always feel stupid—and according to the article referenced above, I am not in the minority here.  Being in science is about embracing your stupidity—and eventually becoming so used to it, that you don’t even notice it anymore.