Maya got all dressed in green for St Pat’s day and probably got pinched anyway (it’s the cheeks).

Maya’s First St Pats – 4 months old

Last night, we took Maya to a game night that friends of our host on a monthly basis. We tried this out a couple months ago, and essentially she either cried or slept the entire time. What a difference two months makes (go figure). She was downright charming this time, looking around, smiling, letting people hold her. We’ll have to get her out of the house more. We don’t want her to be an antisocial hermit like her parents.

The important thing about this game night though is that we made the Smitten Kitchen Irish Car Bomb cupcakes. This was a special request from Sean, and he doesn’t make too many, so I spent a couple of my precious hours making cupcakes for him. The cake part of these cupcakes is Chocolate Stout Cake made with Guinness. They’re filled with irish whiskey-laced ganache and topped with Baileys buttercream frosting. I don’t care too much about the ganache or the frosting, but that cake, oh my gawd. It was so moist, and the chocolate had a pleasant bitter edge from the beer. I’m already thinking about baking a cake, and we haven’t even worked our way through all the cupcakes yet.

Maya on the changing pad – 4 months old

Completely unrelated to St Pat’s … I know this is odd, but one of Maya’s favorite places to be is on her changing pad which is currently located on a bathroom counter where she can look in the mirror. She spends a lot of time grinning at and talking to the baby in the mirror. Add to that the joy of being footloose and pants-free, and you have a very happy baby.

Wow, it’s been nearly two months since we’ve last posted. A lot has happened in that time.

Maya in stripes – 3 1/2 months old

I started back to work on February 11th. I feel very fortunate that I was able to take twelve weeks off with Maya. I think the time was good for both of us, and I was able to learn a few things. The first of these is that taking care of a baby, while intensely rewarding, is hard. For instance, I learned that my decision-making ability plummets with diminished sleep. I also discovered that I have a hard time processing things rationally when she’s crying. Sean will be talking to me, and the words are in no way sticking in my head because my baby is crying and my brain has short-circuited to fix it-fix it-fix it. I also re-learned that I do like having my engineering job – that taking care of Maya full-time is not the path for me.

Instead, since I work from home and Sean often works from home as well, we’ve hired a nanny. A nice lady named Anna comes to the house every weekday to watch Maya. It’s great because Anna obviously adores children, and she shows up rested and ready to play and work with Maya on things like tummy time, napping, and sitting up in her Bumbo chair. If I need to during the day, I can have a five or ten minute visit with the baby to get my fix and then get back to work. So far, it seems to be working out well.

Maya’s learned a few new tricks, naturally. She is very consistently rolling from her tummy to her back (though to her intense frustration, she hasn’t figured out how to go from her back to her tummy yet). She’s been talking her own little baby language complete with great big squeaks and gasps for a while now. Her smiles are now given freely and often. And just this week, she’s finally discovered that she has hands and is batting at and grabbing things a bit.

One of her best new tricks has been sleeping in her crib in her own room.

For the first few months, we had her sleeping in a pack-and-play at the foot of our bed. It was nice for us to be able to monitor her, and it made dealing with night-time feedings easier.

The transition started around mid- to late February when she decided she was all done being swaddled, a development that resulted in several nights of really bad sleep for all of us as her free arms and legs startled her awake over and over again. She eventually figured out how to calm herself down and would sleep a little more consistently, but every little grunt and thump she made would wake me up.

Anna had been working to get her sleeping in her crib during daytime naps. On March 1st, we put her in her crib for bedtime, and she tolerated it pretty well. She’s been sleeping in her own room ever since. More often than not, she still wakes up a few times a night, but we’re making forward progress. She hasn’t had more than a few night feedings since early February. We’ve had a couple nights here and there where she slept all night. And we have had a few nights where waiting five or ten minutes resulted in her putting herself back to sleep. She’s figuring things out, and while I think we have a ways to go, she’s doing really well.

It turns out that while I’m pretty ambivalent about buying clothes for myself, I really enjoy buying things for Maya. Sean has been the primary baby-stuff buyer so far, but I’m starting to participate more. We got her a very cute little Valentine’s day outfit, and we did have it on her on the actual holiday. These pictures were all taken on March 3rd though.

There’s also a cute knit outfit that she’s essentially grown out of now that we wanted to get pictures of. A word to prospective parents or those buying gifts for them – avoid outfits with a ton of buttons for little babies. They don’t really have the patience for having seven tiny buttons buttoned at every diaper change.