I’ve been away from work for almost two weeks now, taking care of Athena full-time. Everyone wants to know how I’m doing, so I thought I would file an official status report.
1. Going for walks
Ann took Athena out in the stroller many, many times while she was on leave but she didn’t have the nerdy desire to record GPS tracks of her trips, like me. Below you’ll see a map of some of my walks with Athena. You can check back later to see the red tracks slowly covering the rest of Mountain View.
2. Sleeping
Ann’s going back to work has altered Athena’s sleep schedule – she’s sleeping long through the night, which is great, but the longer she sleeps the less likely she is to nap during the day. That’s not good, because she gets periods where she’s obviously tired and crabby, but she just won’t nap for any appreciable amount of time. Last night she did almost 11 hours in a row, but then only got in two 20-minute naps during the day.
My mom says that’s how I was when I was a baby, but this is new for Athena and not her regular schedule. We’ll see what happens when she goes to daycare – my guess is she might go right back to wanting to stay up until midnight playing with us like she used to.
3. Eating
Since she kept getting hungry every 3 hours, right on the dot, we though we’d up her intake a bit to see if she’d go longer between meals. We are now up to 5 ounces and she’s still hungry at 3 hours. I think this is related to the sleep thing, too, since she has to make up meals for the large block of time spent sleeping.
She also seems to be in the middle of a growth spurt, she seems longer and heavier every day.
4. Taking photos
It’s actually a lot easier to take photos with Ann around for baby support – Athena is too young to really sit up on her own, so I end up holding her, propping her up, and holding the camera at arm’s length pointed vaguely in the right direction.
Luckily Athena is unbelievably cute and only getting cuter, making it very easy to take cute photos.
You may have seen some of these before, if you follow me on Flickr or Ann on Facebook.
I just grabbed another set of photos off my camera, I’ll upload them tonight or tomorrow.
5. Doing anything else
I’m not really getting anything else done at this point. I’ve checked my work email a few times and feel like I’m falling behind, but Athena deserves (and often demands) my full attention, so don’t expect too much else out of me for another week or so.
We’re not looking forward to starting daycare, Ann and I would both rather have her all to ourselves. But we’re thankful for the time we’ve had – many people don’t have employers that are so understanding.