Less than Twelve Parsecs

Mara is becoming a better sleeper! On Valentine's day she gave mommy a great gift: a 5h stretch of sleep till after midnight! That is textbook "sleep through the night". It happened after two days of fever, so it's probably the deep healing sleep after you're sick, but we all benefited from it. Happy Mommy Day! Since then, we've been so lucky to get several two-hour cycles every single night! Usually two before midnight, one till around 2-3am and one from 4-6am. The only major feedings are at midnight and 3-4am, the rest of the time she is just trying to figure out sleep. What had changed? Step 1 We had done 3h daytime feedings as per our pediatrician's advice. It didn't do anything at all for over two weeks, other than making a slightly crankier baby. Step 2 Another piece of advice was that she might not be getting enough milk right before bedtime, so we did pumping 1h after every feeding, paired with the nursing tincture from

Still shot ** ACTION SHOT **

A friend from Greg's work told us why his daughters are in love with ponies. They had  Rody horsies . Mommy looked it up and they seemed pretty awesome for later on when Mara grows up. Here they are on Amazon . I did not expect the Rody to be useful at this early age for Mara, she's barely getting the hang of sitting up and doing some mild 7-second action poses of standing on her own. We kindly stop her after a little bit out of fear of her unknowingly locking her knees and hurting herself. But she's getting better every day! It so happened that our little friend Stella has a Rody and yesterday she was so kind to let Mara sit on it for a little bit! Mara loved it instantly: she grabbed his ears with her hands and happily wiggled as daddy held her. We were all scrambling for a camera to capture the 'fleeting' moment, being used to matters of seconds when she does something new. But she stayed on long past the photo session, for definitely longer than 10

It happened, as it was bound to happen sooner or later: Mara got sick. We're very glad it was after 5.5 months, we got extremely lucky to have no real health problems until now. Tuesday night Mara refused to stay asleep without my body right next to her. She would wake every couple of minutes looking for me, and we couldn't explain why. She usually gets her full 1h intervals down at night, which is when I get to cook/eat dinner from 7 to 8pm. That night around 10pm I noticed her head burning up. Poor little baby. We spent the whole night nursing as often as we could, to ensure she stays hydrated. She woke up frequently and fussed, but it wasn't her pain cry, it was just an "I'm so tired, I really want to sleep!" type of fuss. We soothed and rocked her and I held her on me to sleep and it worked. By the way, that whole story of mothers regulating temperature for their babies is totally valid for us: my whole torso was chill to the touch, compensatin

The house we moved in has some very nice skylights. It's so nice to almost always be in natural light. One of the skylights is in the ceiling of the guest bathroom, and I wanted to make use of it by getting a little bathroom plant. There's lots of decorative plants that are suitable for such an environment, but I kept crossing them off because they were either too common, or I just didn't like the look. The casual search took about a week till I found it. The prayer plant . It's so cool, it folds it's leaves at night like little hands in prayer and opens them back up in the morning, hence the name. I couldn't find it locally, so I ordered it online. As you would guess, that's not easy on a plant. It arrived dried up in the most pitiful of states. Yet I trimmed it, watered it and cared for it till it made an awesome recovery. I even managed to split it into two pots and they're both happily thriving, even though one is still in the original tiny plan

This Saturday we went to a music class as a family. It's a research-based program that introduces kids/babies to music very early on. This one is provided through musicalme.com but there's plenty of similar programs in the US and other countries as well. On top of the musical benefits, Mara gets to see lots of babies of different ages move around, laugh and play. Yay social time! After the class we played in a nice little green area with a gorgeous water fountain. Mara got to sit in the grass for the very first time! She was quite intrigued, in spite of the cold weather and damp ground. Then we got to play in the water fountain and she wiggled at it so much that Greg ended up letting her touch the stream. Needless to say how much water we had to wipe off of every part of her body right after. In other news, she is now pushing her upper body up on her hands, started pretty much the day before these photos. She even moved herself a quarter-rotatio