Tag: thoughts

My mother keeps suggesting that Olga and I should start teaching Maxim the clock. One of the ways to feed the baby regularly is by creating basically a time table and sticking to it. This means that the baby will always eat at the same time. Hours between feeds can be flexible though and don’t always have to be 3 hours. One can stick to a schedule where breaks between feedings during the night are four hours and during the day two hours, or something like that. The point is just to stick to the predetermined scheduled, so that the baby learns the clock.

We are not rushing into the fixed time table though. Most of the pediators we read and talked to suggest that the baby knows better when it is time for food. We tend to agree so far.

Since we are keeping the baby chart for the last few days we have made few observations. Firstly, Maxim is not sticking to a strict time table. There are similarities in the chart that last for up to 2 or 3 days. After that he slightly changes his habbits for the next 2 or 3 days. The number of feedings stays rock solid at 8 though.

We decided that we’ll give Maxim some more time (at least a couple of weeks). Maybe during this time he will work out a better controlled schedule. Or maybe we will get some more ideas with statistics that we are gathering.

In the mean time, his reflectory smiles are appearing more often and he can alsmost hold his head straight. Exciting times are ahead of us I guess…

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.

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…