I don´t like christmas (yet)

it´s too hot for zoe these days, so she´s been complaining a lot during the day. and no mercy on christmas. wait till she understands presents... apart from her cries and a long party in the back yard we´ve had a pretty quiet christmas day. lots of swimming, though. and the discovery of a new snack: green tahini. happy holidays, everyone.

meet the grandparents

the last couple of days I´ve been firmly in the hands of grandma and grandpa down in jervis bay. pretty exciting, but they haven´t yet managed to completely spoil me.

first party

last saturday we took zoe to her first party. it went well - I carried her around in the baby bjorn and she slept through it all. whenever she stirred, I started rocking her gently so that at the end of the party I felt like a sailor on shore. maybe the beer helped.

cutie

look at me now, all big-eyed and sweet. yep, I can be like this too, believe it or not. unlike my parents, I´m in my best mood early in the mornings, happy, alert and cuddly. and if you´re patient you´ll even get a smile.

nearly 60cm

I´m gonna be a big girl. after four weeks of lots of yummy mummy milk I´m growing at about 1cm per week. and I´m also turning into a little porker, putting on about 300 grams a week. at this rate I´ll be bigger than daddy in less than three years.

nipple confusion

sometime in the late afternoon, the so-called grizzly hours begin. this is the time in the day in which it is for some reason particularly difficult to settle a baby. zoe´s grizzly hours can last anywhere from two to five hours. she doesn´t necessarily cry all the time, she just doesn´t want to sleep. but she can also be quite a pain in the ass. one way to deal with her grizzliness is to stick her in this 5-metre-sling that we got from some very friendly german neighbours and just carry her around in it. she usually dislikes the first couple of minutes, but as soon as I start walking, the body warmth plus the motion plus covering her up and making it dark will put her to sleep quickly. can happen as fast as in one or two minutes, which is quite amazing considering that she´ll have stubbornly refused to sleep before the sling. after a little walk, I can come back home and even work at the computer with her still in the sling. in the first picture she´d just woken up and started sucking my t-shirt. no milk there.