Happy 2005!
Yeah, I know it's a sorry excuse for a blog post, but Maja has not only changed our lives, but also radically changed our scheduling priorities, so there's almost no time for blogging right now, as other, more important things like eating, showering, sleeping, or even reading (when we're lucky) continuously preempt the blogging urge.
Anyway, we wish everyone a happy, healthy 2005, may it be better than 2004 in all respects, private and public.
Who's your daddy?
Sorry for the lack of updates, folks, but there are a few things that daddyhood does to your life, and a complete makeover in how you spend your time is certainly one of them. An important subset of those scheduling changes pertain to your sleeping habits, and so it wasn't - and still isn't - uncommon to find us in a state not too dissimilar to
this.
Maja still doesn't sleep through the nights (that one night a few weeks ago must have been a fluke), and although my lovely wife shoulders most of that burden (after all, she's the one with the milk-giving boobs, and Maja steadfastly refuses to suckle on anything that isn't either one of mommy's nipples or one of either daddy's or mommy's pinkies - pacifiers are right out (yeah!), and so are bottles (boo!)), I'm still short on sleep.
This is more or less normal, or so others have assured us, as are her colics. She's passing more gas in a day than I do in a week, or so it sometimes seems, and since all the trapped air in her belly hurts quite a bit, she also cries a lot. But there is one other thing we have to deal with, which isn't quite so normal, I would think.
Back when Maja was born, the first thing the doctor did when Maja aired her cute but to the world at large was to stick an electric sound into it to more reliably measure her heartbeat. This was all fine, and seemed a sensible if somewhat unnecessary measure at the time, things went rather smoothly after all, but has given us an unexpected amount of grief. The little hole from the sound somehow must have gotten infected, and unnoticed by everyone a small abscess formed in her butt, indicated by nothing but a rather persistent violet spot and a small hole that just wouldn't close.
Then things got ugly. Over the whole area - 1.5 cm wide and 2 cm long - the skin broke up leaving a gaping, seeping wound of raw flesh behind, which is only now finally closing up. As you can imagine, this caused our baby daughter no small amount of pain and made every diaper change of the last six weeks an ordeal that more than once left all three of us crying.
But then, there are moments like
this, which make all this more than worth it.
Apropos of nothing in particular, there are statistics saying that up to one in three or four children are believed to have been fathered by someone other than the then husband of their mother, without said husband having the slightest idea. This sure can't be the case with Maja (not that I have ever had reason to suspect anything in that direction) because one look at her is all anyone has ever needed to firmly establish my fatherhood. She is, in short, the spitting image of her dad at the same age. This is evident when comparing
me with
her, even if she doesn't even particularly look like herself in this picture.
