Whatever works right?

Several of my friends had babies within a month of us... and it seems that right now we are all dealing with a period of newborn development that happens between 2 and 6 weeks called the adaptive stage in which they fuss often, cry loudly, and are hard to put to sleep. The only thing that soothes the child is his mom. So what to do. In our case we have been going through a small library of books and asking friends with older kids for advice. But frustratingly the books (and our friends) have a range of suggestions often contrary to one another. On one end of the spectrum you have those who say that you should stop jumping ever time the baby cries, establish a routine stick to it, and let the baby cry it out; at the other end you have those who say the baby wants what it wants and for now your job is to fulfill those needs as much as possible. Particularly troublesome for us and most of our friends is the child's tendency to snack... ie to have small feeds and fall asleep at the boob only to wake and appear to be hungry 45 minutes later only to have another tiny snack. The snacking seems to leave the baby more gassy than when he has a big spaced out feeds (and of course the gas leads to more crying). This is particularly hard on the wives who barely have a moment for themselves.

These are the general solutions suggested both by friends and in the books:

Method 1: Don't "reward" the baby for crying by running to him each time he gets hysterical. Establish a fairly strict routine of sleep and feeding with at least 3 hours between feeds. Hold and comfort the baby only when he is not crying, and otherwise let him cry it out. Train the baby, don't let him train you.

Method 2: Map your babies habits fairly rigorously and establish a flexible routine based on his needs. Try to space out feedings as much as possible but don't let the boy get to the shrieking level. The baby is probably using the boob for comfort because he is over-stimulated. A good portion of his crying is not because he's hungry, but because he's tired. Try to get him to sleep much more than you are doing by limiting stimuli, putting him in a darkened room with some white noise. Also limit visitors and trips out. Try wrapping him tightly and allowing him to calm down before the crying gets into the crazy phase. Try having him sleep in a bassinet. Also make sure to put him down before he starts fussing and try soothing him to sleep in the crib (as opposed to in your arms rocking and stimulating him). The more he sleeps the less he will cry and more time you will have between feedings.

Method 3. The baby is in the 4th trimester. It's not even really human yet and in survival mode. It's brain is only 20% functional and what you need to do is simulate the womb environment where he is rocked, fed, warm and comfortable all the time. If he wants the boob, give him the boob. If he wants to feed for 10 minutes let him feed for 10 minutes. The child doesn't understand cause and effect yet. Comfort him by simulating the womb with gentle rocking, by swaddling tightly, and by using white noise. Just know that this phase will end in about 6 weeks and then you can start establishing routines.

#1 doesn't work for us. Neither of us has the ability to just let the kid cry. Also from what I understand about newborn development they don't understand causality so any Pavlovian training you might achieve might also leave the kid with a sense that world isn't secure... I understand why this technique might work later but for newborns...well, not for ours.

Method #2 makes the most sense to me, and I do believe newborns are generally overstimulated (all those new nerve endings are firing at once). Jenn tends towards Method #3 and that's generally what we've been doing, but we're being flexible in trying to figure things out. Ultimately #3 does work for us. The baby does calm down when he feeds and does sleep in Jenn's arms. But the burden is all on Jenn. Other than taking the baby out for stroller rides (which put him right to sleep), method 3 is very mom-centric.

In the meantime. I've created this handy chart for tracking sleep/wake/diaper. In the sleep column I just X out the blocks where he's asleep and use a A for agitated. C for crying. Q for quiet. L for Alert. G for hysterical. In the Feed column I draw boobs with numbers in them for the number of minutes on each. You can probably figure out the diaper column on your own. The chart really helps you get a sense of what's going on and where you might be able to tweak things. For example yesterday we realized the baby had gone almost 7 hours without a decent sleep. That's bad news for a newborn.

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Update on the previous post.

Peter's body was not identified, but might have been one of the ones found and quickly buried on Wednesday (there were few foreigners in Kahawa). Peter's wife Alva is apparently on a flight scheduled for later this week and is staying with friends near Colombo. The house was seriously damaged and later looted. Alva is considering leaving Sri Lanka permanently. I have heard all this 2nd hand, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information. The family will probably set up some sort of of charity based fund in Peter's name. I'll admit I've been thinking about this all day...

since I got bad news late last night via email. My friend and fellow traveller Peter Brel was one of the thousands killed in Sri Lanka on the 26th. He was at his home in Kahawa finishing a leisurely breakfast with his young wife Alva when the wave came. Seeing children out on the beach being swept up in the water he ran out to help, was sucked under, and has not been seen again. Alva, safely on the third floor was unhurt but is obviously distraught. She is pregnant with their first child and is currently trying to get back to Holland to be with her family.

How to describe Peter. He was a rascal. A scoundrel of the first order and good friend. The first time I ever met him, he and a lovely Brazilian girl, both naked, were emerging from a sleeping bag on a freezing cold morning. They were camping illegally behind a Mongolian bus station. Even though they had just met the previous day on a bus he had somehow convinced this girl that skin to skin contact was the only way they would generate enough heat to survive the night. Years later, camping in Tibet, I overheard him whispering this technique to an Israeli girl we had met on the road. As we were preparing to sleep I heard them snuggling up, "What about your friend," she asked worried that I would become a human popsicle. "Don't worry about him, I'm trying to save you," he said.

For a few years Peter's base of operations was a horrible Chengdu hotel, The Black Coffee, a renovated 1950's Chinese bomb shelter built to protect against Soviet attack. The door to the street was unmarked and to get in one had to descend many narrow dark stairwells, past solid steel blast doors, and into a maze of low hallways. I would have happily stayed anywhere else but having recently been robbed, it was the cheapest place around and I was holed up waiting for a new passport from the consulate and money from Visa. This was around 1992. Peter cut me a deal on his 50cent per night room. I could have a bed for 20cents per night. Three other down on their luck backpackers had made similar arrangements, but there were no complaints about his profit because the guy was so amusing. Peter was using the hotel as his basecamp taking long trips around Sichuan and knew the area better than any other backpacker. He had bribed officials and had special stamps that gave him virtually unlimited access, unheard of in those days. He could frighten at first sight with his shoulder length hair and wild eyes, but his disheveled appearance masked a European sophisticate-- multilingual (he spoke 9 or 10 languages), incredibly well read, impossibly well travelled, and darned charming. One night he turned the Black Coffee's dark subterranean corridors into makeshift disco and invited 100 of his "good friends from the PSB". He was the guy who always knew the way to get to the place beyond the edge of the map and he always made sure you had a hell of a time getting there. When giving travel advice he would always say something like, "Well you could go that way, but if you want to see something really interesting..." He would never mention that his way might take months and involve several illegal border crossings.

I ran into him several times during my years of backpacking... not only in Mongolia and China but in Vietnam, and in India and we trekked to from Langmusi to Aba on the Tibetan plateau. No matter where I would see him, he would always greet me as if it was not usual to run into someone several thousand miles from where you last departed.

We lost touch as people who meet on the road usually do, but last year another traveller who knew us both gave him my email address and he reappeared in my life In recent years he had put his large family fortune to good use working with a variety of charity organizations around India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. He favored local projects that have real tangible effects--micro-loans, water pumps, etc. His long hair had long been trimmed, and was greyer than mine, but he was otherwise unchanged. I had missed his wedding by four years, but he sent me long emails waxing poetic about Alva, about his collections of Chinese art and Indian illuminated manuscripts, and about the house he had built by the sea. He had given up smoking and drinking and several other bad habits and was, I think, at peace. "Travel and my wife are the only vices I have left" he wrote, "God help me if I lose a taste for either."

After the birth of my son, I sent an email announcing the news. On Christmas he replied, "Jolly good. I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear your good news. You must make me a godfather or compadre or some other honorific. I must be more than simply Uncle Peter. I'm sure we can work something out. Let's pray Alva gives birth to a girl child so I can watch her torture your son. The child is due in March, you know, so you must tell me everything to blaze the path. Be well my friend and lets plan a trip together with the kids. I know a few good places."

...we had just landed in Rome...

exhausted and disheveled from the long flight, but happy as pie...

Over an inch fell last night. This morning we wake to the sound of snow shovels all across the neighborhood...

Our friends Michael and Becky came by to check out the kid and share an impromptu Christmas lunch.

I showed them around the neighborhood...

By the time I returned mother and child were tuckered out.

Then Jenn's brother and sister arrived and it was like Christmas morning all over again.

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random aside: One strange side effect of having a baby-I now look at people and imagine them as infants. So I'll be listening to a waitress or a butcher or my mother-in-law and mentally I'll find them in my arms reduced to a couple of pounds, quite helpless, and trying to shush them. It keeps happening over and over again. I also keep imagining myself in that state. Maybe I'm trying to hard to get into the mind of the baby... to find out what is so fascinating to him about the shadows on the ceiling... or maybe I haven't been getting enough sleep, but sometimes, I feel like I KNOW, in a visceral way, what it's like to be lying there a bundle of Want, half animal, always on the thin divide between delirious comfort and utter agony.

Just the three of us here on a quiet Christmas Eve. All's well. Merry Christmas everyone.

At his two week checkup today we found the boy has grown over an inch and is now 11 pounds and a couple of ounces. While the doctors keep reassuring us that his current size will have nothing to do with his eventual height, they always seem to chuckle a bit when telling us the news. Also when we ask how his size compares to other kids the answer is always "off the charts"... and again that chuckle. So our fear has been that we have bred a giant. Anecdotal tales have not been helpful. For example today I was talking to a woman from Minnesota. "All our babies our big up there", she said, "I had an 11 pounder myself... but then again, he's 6 foot 5 now."

I looked at this picture of the baby on the changing table and realized, "We've become what we hate." We're dressing up the kid in bizarre outfits, just like our parents did to us. Hard to believe the little guy has been on this side of the womb for less than 2 weeks.

Jenn's family is set to descend on our house Christmas day. They will be horrified by our Christmas tree. The older Korean family members are strict artificial tree kind of people. A live tree is considered extravagant, wasteful, perhaps even foolish. Last year I told Jenn's mom I was going to buy a live tree for her house like it or not. The modest tree eventually ended up in grandfather's house. All the aunts came around, took a good look, and concluded that plastic trees were more practical and less messy. This tree was huge they said (it was about 5 feet). They tend to prefer tabletop models. At least their plastic trees are green. My grandparents in Mexico always had a silver tree made of hammered tin. It was lit by a little light in the shape of a fan with a rotating red, green, blue and yellow filter...

It was always hot down in Mexico and we would have to pretend it was cold, wearing sweaters until the sweat made the charade unbearable. My brothers favored Christmas music which they played in agonizing loops not seeming to recognize the dissonance of Johnny Mathis singing about Frosty the Snowman when everyone was in shorts barbecuing carne asada out back. Christmases in Texas were not much better, although at least it was often overcast and rainy (we would turn up the air conditioning and light the fireplace). I always dreamed of Christmases... well, like this. Bracingly cold weather. A nice Vermont pine inside. Warm fire. Perhaps as a consequence of all those Christmases, you will rarely hear me complain about cold weather, and I don't think I've ever said a bad word about snow. I wonder if the boy, who will have "real" winters weaved into his life, will get that small rush when looking out into the night to the sight of snowflakes falling through the pool of a street lamp or if he will grumble about the cold and pass the window without notice.

The first snow of the year just started falling (and is falling hard). All our fireplaces are going. The baby is asleep. Things are good.

The one week mark passed uneventfully...

Please note dear friends that our kid is not a Jr. At least in our family Jrs. are uncommon. Mexicans tend to prefer "itos" (as in Raulito). Also we often have different middle names.

We followed that pattern.

My dad is Raul Mario.
I'm Raul Antonio.
The kid is Raul Andres Min.

Some of you have asked me via email for some more info on why we chose Andres. First of all it's pronounced Ahn (as in Ah-ha) + n (as in nose), dress (as in dress, but a bit softer). It was the name of my grandfather's grandfather and was originally suggested to my mom as my middle name by my great grandfather (lost yet?), but there was a mixup and I got another name. There are no known pictures of my great great grandfather Andres, but he is known to have lived in Paras in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico where his ranch, El Violin, thrived for several generations (my grandmother's people come from a nearby ranch named El Cascabel (the rattlenake)). Andres' son, Jose Dolores was my great grandfather and was spitting image of his dad. This is a picture of Jose taken December 5th , 1895 in Agualeguas, Neuvo Leon:

and here is a picture of the man taken December 6th, 1968 with me on his lap.

Old timers who knew both Jose Dolores and his father Andres marveled at how similarly they resembled each other both physically and emotionally. My own grandfather Rodolfo continued this trend and is virtually indistinguishable from his father in pictures. My brother carries the man's strong chin.

We've been studying Raul Andres for little family signposts. He has agile Yun toes, but the Gutierrez gap between his big toe and the rest. His ears are Paek, the mouth Yun, the chin might be Perez, his early ability to raise one eyebrow is definitely a Gutierrez trait. My guess is everyone does this with their newborns. Nice to do it now while they are in a state of grace free from any insecurity and open to our scrutiny.

Things are finally quieting down around here. The relatives are gone, and we're figuring out a routine. It's just the three of us now. The last week has been intense and things are just now starting to feel normal.

Managing family has been interesting. Jenn's old-school Korean mother for example left a few days ago to return to Philadelphia. Yesterday, I saw her number on caller id.

"Rara," she said, "I have groceries. Are you near 8th Avenue?"

"You're here in New York?" I answered somewhat confused.

"Yeah. No problem. Jenny need meat. So I brought meat. Also she doesn't eat enough soup, so I make her eat seaweed soup. Koreans are weak and must eat lotta soup."

Half an hour later Jenn's mom and 2 aunts showed up, cooked up a storm of Korean dishes, filled our refrigerator to the brim, and then hovered over Jenn watching her eat under pressure. They left as quickly as they came, but I expect they'll be back regularly.

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Tonight was the Geminid meteor shower...with the family asleep downstairs I snuck up un the roof for a bit to catch the show. I got a lucky break in the clouds and was immediately rewarded with several displays over the rooftops of Brooklyn before the obscuring clouds sent me back downstairs. Good stuff. If you are out tonight or tomorrow you should see clusters of shooting stars a few hours before and after midnight. Bundle up, it's cold out there.