Month: March 2005

First visit to pediatrician

Maxim went for a rather long journey today – his first visit to pediatrician. The ride is longer than the trip from hospital to home. It was even longer due to me forgetting where exactly pediatrician’s office was. A small tour around Limassol can never hurt anyway…

Examination by the doctor answered many questions that I had for these last few days. Firstly, Maxim’s size (or length) is 51cm. Maybe it is slightly shorter than I was expecting, but very well in normal boundaries.

Secondly, I found out Maxim’s Apgar score. Apgar score is a quick way of measuring how healthy the baby was born. It is not very useful during the life of the person, neither it suggests any medical forecasts for the future of the baby. Apgar score is used to measure the amount of medical attention the baby might need in the furst few hours after the birth. If you need more information, you can check this page. Apgar test is usually done twice – first time after 1 minute of baby’s life, and the second time after 5 minutes. Maxim scored 9 on the first test, and 10 on the second. This is pretty much as good as it gets.

Thirdly, we found out that Maxim lost some weight. He was 3,680 grams when he was born. He weights about 3,350 now. This is totally normal. Most babies lose about 10% of their weight in the first few days after the birth. Imagine the stress they are going through! 10% don’t sound too much when talking about grams. But if applied to the weight of an adult human being – make one draw some really dramatic pictures.

Fourthly, we witnessed some procedures for the first time in our lives. Blood sample was taken from the right heel for tests against several desease. Also, an ultrasound examination of brain has been done, which makes me want to research the subject a bit, since I didn’t understand any of the pictures that I saw.

Fifthly, we’ve learned a bunch of miscleanea about breastfeeding, massage, and mother’s diet, but there was nothing special, so I am not sharing. Pretty much everything was already said and written all over the web, we just confirmed that with our doctor

We’ll be seing Dr.Simos Kitiris in one week to monitor Maxim’s progress in this world…

On time

I find it interesting how our (mine and Olga’s) perseption of time has changed with Maxim’s arrival to our home. Until recently time was either running or crawling. When I was busy or interested with something, time would pass without me noticing it at all. When waiting for something to happen, or sitting through a boring lecture, time would usually go as slow as a snail*.

These days though time feels pretty different. It’s like there are two things called time which are mixed in 50×50 proportion. One time is the period between the feedings. These are usually about 3 hours apart. 3 hours sounds like a lot of time, but it is not. Having a quick rest to recover the strength, taking care of the crap like napkins and pampers, cleaning up and sterilizing bottles and soothers, getting a fast snack, starting up all the baby clothes washing and all sorts of other small tasks can kill multitudes of 3 hours pretty fast. The other time is the period of 24 hours. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. There are 8 (!!!) 3 hour periods in 24 hours. Having the day and night broken into a number of shorter periods makes it seem like an eternity. I can barely remember everything I did today. Yesterday is all blurred out…

Anyway, having a feeling of both fast and slow time during the same period of time feels strange to me. I guess I’ll be getting used to it…

* snails and turtles are used to describe slow motion pretty often. I have seen both and let me tell you that they are not anything alike in speed. Snails are really slow. Turtles, on the other hand, just appear to be. When in need, turtles can move pretty fast. I’ve seen baby turtles hurry towards the sea and they were anything but slow. Snails just can’t do that.