Maia Week #2 Battle Report

Learning to understand Maia has been a lot like the level progression in a well-designed video game -- new challenges are introduced as we master the old ones, but not so quickly that we uninstall the game. We stopped the extra 20 minutes of syringe feeding at the end of week #1, which was immediately replaced by 20 minutes of post-feeding fussiness that we had to deal with, not unlike that friend that always orders the extra cheese fries then spends the end of dinner complaining about how much gym purgatory said cheese fries will require.

Once we'd gotten the handle on the fussiness, she switched to "cluster feeding", which sounds like a distributed way to feed her with four computers in parallel over the Internet, but is actual just a fancy way to say that she stays up for four hours and eats every hour on the hour. We passed this challenge as well and have allocated our level-up experience points in "playing Overwatch with a baby on your chest", "finally getting to watch TV again at least once per day" (currently watching: season one of Goliath and GLOW), and "blasting Palestrina during afternoon naps". Just yesterday, she fell asleep to Elevator by Flo Rida (and when she woke up, she asked why Elevator was in my MP3 collection and why I still have an MP3 collection).

Maia passed her two week pediatrician visit with flying colours. Her height remains unchanged, but she's gained 9 ounces over her birth weight and is in the 64% percentile for babies with big heads. Eventually her height, weight, and head size should normalize -- if not, she will probably look like a female Danny DeVito for a little while, which is not a bad thing because look what that man has accomplished.

Being a data-driven dad, I've been keeping track of my sleep time and was surprised to find that (other than the first night in the hospital) it never slipped under 7 hours in a day, albeit in tiny chunks of 1 - 3 hours at a time. We are also diligently tracking the hours slept, poops made, and other minutia as you are supposed to do as a new parent. Look for exciting brown-coloured charts some day when sufficient data exists for the purposes of science!