Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

Eating is not something you just know how to do – it’s a skill that must be mastered.  This post will show the remarkable progress made so far, starting from our first attempt at spoon feeding with Athena:

Despite the setbacks Athena was ready for a second attempt.

Though we didn’t quite get all the rice cereal in, the second try involved a lot more actual eating and much more enthusiasm for spoons.

Something you might notice in the photos is the way she keeps trying to grab the spoon as Ann feeds her.  This little girl just wants to do everything herself.

The next food on the menu was peas.  Which apparently were delicious:

We make a big deal about it when she eats solid food, look how pleased with herself she looks in this photo:

The peas were so delicious, in fact, that at the end Athena grabbed the bowl and tried to lick it clean.

Here are Ann and Athena hard at work:

I’ve got lots of additional messy feeding time photos up at Flickr.  Finally, here’s a 10-minute video of Athena’s first experience with sweet potatoes.  Enjoy:

By Jason

Athena is now very mobile – we can’t just let her play in her jungle playset, she’ll find her way to the nearest non-baby-toy object and put it in her mouth.

Here’s evidence:

This week Ann gave her some mashed green peas and she absolutely loved them. Next up we’ll post photos of the messy meal, look for that soon.

In other news, last week I got to tour the solar panels up on the roof at Google. Head over to my blog to read more.

Yesterday Athena had solid food for the first time – well, somewhat solid, since it was finely-ground rice cereal mixed with milk. She seemed to do okay with it, so we decided to go for broke today and attempt rice cereal with a spoon.

She seems to have picked up on the whole spoon-goes-into-mouth part:

But not the eating or swallowing concept:

She was trying pretty hard to figure the whole thing out

I have a few more cute pictures in Flickr:

We also wanted to share photos of Athena wearing her denim ladybug dress, so Jeanie could see how cute she looks:

Particularly this photo, the look on her face is priceless:

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.

View Larger Map

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.

By Jason

I’ll write about my trip back home to visit family and see the Sci-Fi Marathon soon, but I wanted to post up these videos now that I have them uploaded.

First, here’s Athena soon after she started smiling to express joy rather than for gastrointestinal reasons.  Sorry it’s a bit dark, we’re still figuring out how best to use the camera and we don’t tend to have a lot of light in her room.

Next, here’s an even better video that’s a bit easier to see. About halfway through we switch over to Athena’s newest passtime, enthusiastic baby jibber-jabber.

We’ll try to post video on a more regular basis from here on out.

By Jason

Ann and I split our New Years Eve between Eastern and Pacific timezones with the power of Skype.  We headed over to Ahan and Julie’s place for the in-person appearance and videoconferenced in to JJs party in Ohio.  It worked out pretty well, though by midnight our time we were pretty exhausted.  Parenthood is not conducive to late nights.

We ended up spending a lot more time with Ahan and Julie than we had originally planned, due to this:

A leaky pipe had caused water to gush through the fire spinkler on the celing, creating water damage and some mold.  Contractors fixed the pipe but the hole is still there – we decided to play it safe and keep Athena away from the mold.  Ahan and Julie just moved back into their place after a big flood, so we got off relatively easy – we had much less water and are not financially responsible for getting it fixed.

Speaking of Athena, here are a whole ton of ridiculously cute Christmas photos.

Smiling in her Christmas dress:

More smiles…  the light from our window is very cool, so the photos don’t always have the best color, but she loves looking out the window so it’s a good spot to hold her and keep up the good mood.

Here I am with Athena, this was actaully at the end of one of our shoots and she was on the verge of melt down.

Ann with Athena.  She was fascinated with the Christmas lights.

Family photo:

You can really see the lights reflected in her eyes:

Athena in her candystriped Xmas PJs:

Mid-yawn:

I’ve been posting larger photos directly in the blog lately, let me know if you’re having problems seeing them in your email or feed reader or anything.  As always you can click on them to see larger versions and we have more photos at Flickr.  There’s a not-so-good photo of me on the Google Webmaster Central blog too.

One thing I don’t have for you, which I was really excited to share, is a video of Athena legitimately smiling at her mobile.  We know it’s not just gas because it’s reproducable – all we have to do is put her in the crib abd turn it on and we get smiles and happiness.  Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting the video off the camera – I’ll probably write a gripy post about Canon products on my blog.

As a side note I recently ran across this account of a bike trip across the eastern U.S. in 1944.  They rode through parts of Ohio that I know pretty well including Cleveland and Delaware, and it’s a fascinating look at an interesting point in U.S. history.  I’m going to have to see if I can get some of Grandma’s journals and maybe transcribe them similarly.  I’m also thinking about revisiting some of the trips Ann and I have taken before we started this blog – years from now someone might look at some of our stories the way I look at that WWII-era bike trip now.