Getting Used to Us

I think Elise is finally getting used to her mom and dad, for the most part. Waking up isn't such a tragic event anymore, and being awake isn't so horrible as it used to be. She's getting more or less acclimated to being uncovered in order to wake her, and when she's awake, I think she's finally starting to prefer it. Nat tells me that babies like being bundled up tight because it reminds them of being in the womb, which is what they're used to. But she's getting used to flailing her arms and legs about now, so long as she isn't tired. When she thinks it's time to sleep, she happily draws up her legs for me to wrap her up in her blankets. Then she realizes that her legs aren't free to move about anymore, and starts to whine until we toss her binky in her mouth. That usually keeps her happy until she falls asleep and it falls out of her mouth.

The story of the binky. About a week before Elise was born, Nat and I went into Babies 'R' Us and picked up a baby tub and a set of pacifiers that came with a handy little clip to help keep from losing them. We had those with us at the hospital, and shortly after she was born, we gave her one of them to suck on. She wasn't incredibly interested in it, but she hung onto it anyway as we took her off to the nursery for another set of tests and her first bath. While she screamed bloody murder at being bathed, and was only slightly less unhappy at getting her first shots, her binky was set aside and promptly forgotten. When we tried to find it a few hours later, we realized that it must still be in the nursery, so I headed on over to ask the nurses about it.

They all remembered seeing it, and after several minutes of searching found it in a dirty laundry basket. The nurse that gave Elise her bath felt so bad that she washed and sanitized it three times in a row, and then gave me a couple of new binkies to make up for it. One matched the clippy set, and even accepted the clip as the other ones did. The other was a standard-looking hospital binky that, due to the powers of pareidolia, looked like it was smiling. This would end up being the binky that Elise prefers, and now she won't even consider the clippy ones, of which we now have many.

She's finally learning to smile, though I still question whether she knows that's what she's doing. She mostly does it either when she's waking up or going back to sleep. I've also noticed that she seems to have an anime mouth. It's small and dainty when it's closed, almost not there at all. But when she yawns, it seems to take up half her face.

This whole keeping her up during the day thing seems to be paying off still. She fell asleep right after bathtime and her 10pm feeding, only to wake up an hour later thinking it was time to play, or at the very least scream at her mom and dad. Her mom fielded this one and once she finally fell asleep, seemed content to stay that way for the rest of the night. Outside of the projectile poop incident that Nat spoke of, the night was pretty much uneventful, and Nat thinks that if it wasn't for feeding times, Elise might have been content to just sleep the night away.