Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Today I started with all the paperwork that needs to be done for the baby and Olga’s medical expenses.

In order to get the birth certificate, I have to bring some papers from the clinic, passports, and pink slips for both me and Olga to the Limassol district office. I came there today, but they had some technical problems and asked to try tomorrow.

I also went to see our caretaker to pay her some money and fill in the insurance claim. I had some fun imagining how I look sitting in the queue to the gynaecologist. No other man was sitting there alone.

Social insurance is nice. They are kind enough to pay about 200 CYP annualy for the baby, plus they are giving about 200 CYP once for the delivery of the baby. I will have all the needed forms by tomorrow to get these money.

The only guy who I missed taking care of today was our pediatrician. I’ll leave him for tomorrow…

My mother, now a happy grandmother, came today from Moscow for one month. She’ll be helping with Max and all the home work that we’ll have now. I just hope that one month will be enough for us to get used to the baby in the house and all the work that comes with it.

Continuing the line of welcoming posts, I would like to welcome Max home. We left the clinic today and went on to our stressful journey. I never thought that I would be so scared to drive the car. I was watching everyone and everything much more attentively than usual. I was using extra smooth accelerating and decelerating. I was driving around even the smallest holes in the round, while trying to keep the car steady. While doing all of the above, I was also trying to keep the proper conditions inside the car.

Something smart that I did before the journey was practicing the seat belt saga on the relax seat. Provided documentation showed only once side of the picture. It took two adult engineers about 30 minutes to figure out how to fix it rock solid. If you are about too take drive a baby in the new seat and you never did so before, take my advice – practice the fixing thing.

The rush of the first few days is over now and we are taking control back to our hands. Today we decided that breastfeeding is the best option for Max. Switching from the milk in the bottle is tough even after a couple of days. It is like switching from free high speed unlimited Internet connection to a crappy and expensive dial-up. But what needs to be done has to be done.

Max knowledge of easily available food from the bottle is not the only problem at this moment. Probably a bigger problem is Olga’s and mine total lack of experience with breastfeeding (except for being a baby, which doesn’t count). It turns out that for the milk to come, baby has to suck the breast for clear the milk channels. Sucking the tit is hard. Sucking the tit without milk is a total no-fun.

Less slip, less food, hard work, and stress all over the place – now this sounds pretty much like a real world. Welcome Max! ;)

It’s a good thing that kids grow slowly. Their needs and habbits change gradually (even if that’s one or two days). Parents are given time to learn new stuff. Olga and I are trying our very best at this very moment. Luckily, Maxim doesn’t need too much.

Olga changed his diper once today. Then she fed him. I changed his dipers twice so far. And than I bathed him. I wanted to take slightly more time to learn these things, but there weren’t any. At least I was given those few minutes and a couple of instructions…

Alex and Katia Georgiades are helping us a lot. For some reason all medical personnel is not talking too much. That includes our pediatritian, Dr. Simos Kitiris. When you ask anyone of them a question, they wil answer. But they are not telling anything by themselves. The whole parenting thing and baby needs area are still very new to us, so we rarely have any specific questions yet. Alex and Katia just tell us all sorts of things. And showing us also. And I am not talking about the FAQ entries – real stuff! Of course, it’s still our choice wheather to follow the advice or not, but at least we are getting the knowledge. Thanks a bunch, guys!

My next few ‘Picture of the day’ will probably be very boring. Children in general, and my son Maxim in particular are new subjects for me and I don’t yet know how to handle them. Practice is the best medicine for all photography problems as far as I am concerned, so I will be photographing a lot of kids. Training the photo eye, ai!

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-02-26_POTD

Watched the DVD of “I Heart Huckabees“.

IMDB rating: 7.2
My rating: 7.5
Celebrity highlights: Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Isabelle Huppert, Mark Wahlberg, and few others.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

The complexity of nature is amazing. But every time I see defense mechanism implanted in beings by nature I am really stunned. What is even more interesting is that humans have so many defense mechanism that they don’t even know many of them exist until it is time to use one.

A couple of examples from the recent parenting theme.

Firstly, when a woman gets pregnant and baby starts growing inside of her, the amount of blood in her body increases dramatically. Note, that the I am talking about the blood in woman’s body, not baby’s body. All this blood is used to grow a healthy life. But it is all lost during the delivery of the baby. Nice, eh? Balance strikes.

Secondly, during the last few months of the pregnancy, women don’t sleep very well. There are many factors here. Breathing is difficult. Getting into comfortable position varies from very difficult to impossible. Often need for urinating. Baby kicking. Etc. But such periodic sleep of few minutes to few hours at a time has also a positive sideeffect. It prepares the woman for being a mother. Infants wake up very often and expect to be feeded. Rapid change from good long comfortable sleep to the life style of a young mother is very stressful. Such changes can lead to all sorts of problems from presense and quality of milk to serious nervous breakdowns. Instead, nature takes care of this problem. It pushes the pregnant woman more and more with every day of the pregnancy. It helps the woman to change the values of sleep, food, and rest.

I find it amazing!

Drawing parallels between the skills and development models of a human baby suggests that humans are more similar to predatory animals rather than herbivorous.

Many herbivorous animals can use their legs few minutes or hours after the birth. They can stand on their feet, see, hear, and walk by their mothers. Predatory animals on the other hand, need a lot of time to get to that stage. They are born blind and deaf, can barely crawl and totally depend on their parents to feed and take care of them.

Taking time to get to adulthood is apparently worth a while. Predatory animals seem to possess more skills. Strategic and tactical skills accompany hunting. Food stocking is vital for many. Using herbs and other natural resources for self-medication is common.

Disclaimer: Looking at Maxim all day long, feeding him, watching him being changed and bathed all makes me think a lot. I also talk to Olga a lot. Sometimes we are getting interesting thoughts, which I value enough to blog. So if you will read here something extremely wise, don’t immediatly assume that it’s from my head – it might have been Olga. :) (both past and future posts included).

It is interesting how similar infant is to a computer system booted in safe mode (or rescue mode if you will). Theoretically, human is capable of a whole bunch of actions – talking, walking, running, etc. But you don’t get all of these in with the infant. Instead, you get a system which has extremely limited capabilities – just a few reflexes and virtually no communication. You than, as a parent, must build upon these capabilities to develop new ones, which in turn will help you to develop new ones, and than slowly slowly you will reach that day when you will realize that your small infant is not so small and infant anymore, but instead a full-blown human being with much more functionality than you can find use for.

Another similarity between the two is absolute lack of manuals…