Eight weeks - 56 days

Weight and length progress for this week as of Tuesday - 5050kgs and 58cm. Tuesday was also the last visit from our wonderful midwife. She has been so very helpful and without her I think things would have been a lot harder. She's very down to earth with very relaxed attitude and has been very supportive and giving very good advice. I feel like she almost became a family member. We're really going to miss her.

This week Timmy started grabbing things. Mainly he grabs his favourite toy, which is a wooden ring with a cat head on top. It hangs off his wooden stand thingie. He's been able to push hanging toys for a while, but this week for the first time he's actually managed to grab it. Every time he does it, he gets really really happy by smiling a lot and wiggling his little hands and feet.

One thing that seems to happening regularly these days (probably mainly due to lack of sleep, although two nights ago was the new record of 7.5hrs) is that Jack and Tim take naps during the day, which always makes me smile...

On Thursday we went to the Botanical Gardens. From us it's a direct trip on the bus and took about 40 mins. It was the first time we went there and it was a welcome change to our usual walk around our area. The park is pretty big and very well maintained. Flower beds have various colourful patterns, all plants are marked with Latin names and even the rubbish bins have been jokingly marked in Latin to the tune of "Papyrus Antiqus". One slightly disappointing thing was that we couldn't use our picnic rugs and sit on the grass, because there are apparently 80 different species of grass that are very sensitive to treadling. This fact made us wonder how the grass is mowed and Jack concluded that they must have special helicopter lawn mowers that sort of hover above the grass without touching the ground. So instead we stopped to sit down on one of the numerous shady benches for Tim's lunchtime feed. There we were immediately surrounded by tiny birds, a very friendly squirrel and a shy little mouse all wanting a treat. We couldn't resist and fed them a little bit of bread. Next time we'd like to go to the big glass houses that should have some interesting plants, but it seems that one can't take a pram inside, so we'd have to come slightly less packed.

Some photos from another walk this week...

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In non baby related news, this week I discovered my new favourite shop for summer dresses - Desigual. I can't believe I didn't know about it until now, because it is so me! All clothes are so colourful and with interesting patterns. Trust the Spanish to come up with it.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering how long a closed plastic jar of honey can remain cooking in a microwave prior to exploding, it's exactly 5 minutes :)

Go Julia Gillard!!!

Seven Weeks

This week we lengthened the time between feeds to 3 hours and it has been working very well. Tim sleeps much better during the day now. And two nights ago was the record for the longest sleep at night - 6.5 hours. The dummy really helps as well. It helps him to calm down when he's having tummy troubles or generally being grumpy and also in the pram. Before Timmy would get upset in the fairly often when we were out and he wasn't sleeping, but now he's a lot calmer and actually looks around more and enjoys the walks.

His eyelashes really grew this week. When he was born you could only see one or two tiny little ones and you couldn't really see them when he'd close his eyes. But now they're fairly long, and collect cat hair, just like the rest of us :)

On Thursday we went to our favourite place in Berlin - Chagall. It was warm and sunny for a change (now it's all back down to 17 degrees, cloudy and windy, so we're again losing any hope of a good warm and sunny summer). While there Jack and I tried to find an answer to a question "If we could bring any place from Melbourne to Berlin - which would it be?" and we both agreed that the Lambsgo bar is pretty good. Chagall is definitely something we would take with us back to Melbourne. The photos are red because we were sitting under red umbrellas.

A random snap of a building in Prenzlauerberg on Kastanienallee.

Today Tim also managed to grab one of the wooden rings that hang off his toy. He has been able to push them for a while, but today the grabbing happened. I think it was more of an accident, but that doesn't matter - we were all very excited and Timmy was smiling a lot - being very pleased with himself. Here are some snaps of the facial expressions at play.

And here's some evidence of him taking the bottle.

Finally - my favourite photo of this week :)

고무 젖꼭지

That's dummy/pacifier in Korean. Why Korean? 'cos they scored at least one goal against the Brazilians tonight, unlike the Aussies on Sunday - 0:4... oh the embarrassment!!!

Yesterday was a momentous day for us - Timmy finally took the dummy and we have a video to prove it! He's still not 100% sure about how to use it and sometimes tries to stick his hand additionally into his mouth, which doesn't always work. But all in all he does take it now, which means that he's calming down a lot quicker in the evenings and also when we're walking with him in the pram. Jack was also right - Tim drank from the bottle when I expressed milk with the pump, so we're very happy parents.

Weight gain is at 4740 grams today- woo hoo!!!

Six weeks

On Tuesday this week Timmy has crossed the 4kg mark. He's was 4360 grams, and 57 cm long. This is precisely 1320grams and 6 cm more than six weeks ago. Now that he's _so_ big, some of his body parts are especially so - like his double chin (demonstrated below). It is so big that we're almost worried that it'll overtake his first chin :) He generally has a lot more baby fat on him now - like chubby arms and thighs, and what I especially love are the dimples on the back of his hands.

This week we've been trying to regiment his feeding a little. Prior to this and since his birth I've been feeding him pretty much constantly whenever he'd cry. This on one hand has been good, because it ensured that breastfeeding worked perfectly, but on the other hand meant that I am tied to him almost all the time. So we've been trying to leave 2 hour gaps between feeds and it's been working reasonably well. The only trouble is that because he doesn't take the dummy we have to entertain him whenever he's unhappy and starts crying, and obviously can't use the boob to calm him down. It's been manageable so far and today has been a very good day - he's been going almost 3 hours between feeds and seems very happy and content.

The milk pump arrived yesterday and today I already expressed some milk (whole 40 ml worth!). Thus tonight will be a moment of truth - will Timmy take the bottle? Jack's betting that yes, and I'm leaning more towards a no, given our experience with the dummy. We'll see.

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In other weekly news Jack's laptop and our printer decided to die on the same day this week. The printer we managed to revive with an original HP cartridge - annoyingly cheaper versions don't seem to work, and give a "Cartridge Error" (strangely only some months later). But the laptop does seem to be well and truly dead. So now the two adults in the household (not counting Unix) are forced to share one laptop... which is very novel and somewhat difficult, considering that we're both at home at the moment and spend a lot of our non-baby-related hours (or should I say minutes) on the internet. Because it was also the laptop that we used to hook up to our projector and watch stuff off the internet (my laptop doesn't have the right s-video connection), we're now forced to entertain ourselves with German TV - and we can safely report that all in all TV here is pretty crappy, just like Timmy's nappy. But on the upside we do get to watch the first World Cup match tomorrow - Germany vs. Australia.

Speaking of the World Cup, Germans are all going crazy about it again - just like four years ago. Bakeries are selling doughnuts complete with a whistle shaped like a soccer ball. Cafes and pubs are attracting more customers by advertising matches on their blackboards. Almost every car has a German flag on it, as do many of people's balconies. Jack has just rearranged our Aussie flag on the balcony to be most visible from the street. And not even an hour later we got an "Aussie Aussie Aussie!!!" cheer from below, courtesy of another set of drunken louts on a beer bike who saw it. When I got out onto the balcony they all waved at me, and I waved back - go Aussies!!!

Two photos of nightly Berlin below...

Smiles, smiles and smiles

Some of you (yes, you know who you are!) have asked about Timmy smiling... Well although he has been smiling for a while now, this week he started smiling A LOT more. He smiles many times in one go and also has many different smiles. There's what we call a crooked smile (observe at pic 1), a straight smile (pic 2) and a completely open cute-toothless mouth smile (pic 3). Although smiling does mean that he's happy, his mood can change very quickly. Yesterday I was holding him in front of me right after a feed and he was giving me one smile after another, and then suddenly started bawling without any apparent reason. We also started having what I'd like to call conversations. Basically he started making a lot more sounds this week... like cooing noises. So the other day we were looking at each other and he'd smile and say "Cooo", and I'll reply with another "Coo"... and that went on back and forth a couple of times. Needless to say we were both very pleased with each other. No idea what we said though... may be smth like:

Tim: "Mum - your milk is tasty"
me: "You really think so?"
Tim: "Yep Mum, definitely"
me: "Aww - you're such a sweet little baby boy" ;PPPP

Yesterday wasn't a good day for him though. It was very warm - about 30 degrees and he couldn't fall asleep the whole day. One trouble that he's having a lot is falling asleep on his own, because he keeps hitting his face with his hands, waking himself up. So we normally wrap him Russian style in order to stop him from moving his arms. Babies are supposed to like it anyway, because it makes them feel like how they did in the womb. Usually that helps, but because of the heat it was very warm to wrap him very tightly, and hence we had to play a game to try and help him sleep by wrapping him a little, but trying to make sure that he doesn't overheat.

Another problem is that he's refusing to take a dummy (so far Jack managed to convince him to take it precisely 3 times out of about 250), which means that he only falls asleep if we rock him, or if he gets a boob. Today is also very hot and humid, but he seems to be doing much better. That's him snoozing in his cradle below.

One thing we've been trying to introduce is a nightly bath, which is a start of his "going to bed" ritual. He's been enjoying water a lot, so it's been actually working fairly well. We give him a bath sometime between 8pm and 9pm, and then I feed him lots, which then a) puts him to sleep very well, and b) makes him sleep for at least 4 hours at the first stretch, which is great.

And this week also marks a moment for Timmy discovering that his hands indeed belong to him. He started munching on them - mainly having a preference for the right one. It's pretty funny - when he munches on his hand (or anything else), he makes the funniest little vicious noise... "nom nom nom". Bleah - I feel that is enough babbling about baby cuteness for one post!

Some random pics follow... the rattles that he's wearing below are from Sam D - thank you!!! :)