I am a bit under time pressure these days, but I think you’ll forgive me if I will put a bunch of pictures from the recent days into a single submission for the ‘Picture of the day’ project. As you might have guessed, most of these pictures have to deal with Olga and Maxim. Some of these were taken few days ago in the clinic. Others – were taken today in my home. Enjoy!
Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-03_POTD
During the last few days my mother, Olga, and I were trying to figure out Maxim’s trends of sleep. He is not sleeping for 3 hours at a time every time, but he does have his own schedule. It’s just a little bit trickier.
One of the books on parenting that we have, advises parents to use baby charts. Baby chart is basically a time table with marks for everything a baby does. There aren’t that many things a baby can do – sleep, eat, bath, pee and crap. For every day of baby’s life, parents should just mark all appropriate activities on the time table.
We started the baby chart today. It should help us plan and schedule things in the future.
The problem with baby chart is media. The ideal way, of course, is to use a computer. But marking on the computer is not as easy as it may sound. Computer is not always around, not always started, or has the program closed. Paper and pen are better solution, since they are very mobile, small and quiet. On the other hand, paper has organizational problems. It is practically impossible to resize the cell, change the icon, or correct things without messing everything up.
For now we will keep our baby chart on paper. After a few days I will see how it works out and will write (or find on the web) a software solution. I suspect that it will be also a huge deal of fun to see changes in these charts in the long term. By long I mean periods of time that don’t fit on a single piece of paper.
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…
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.
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…