Into the 2nd Month

Well its been a long time since I've posted and for all of you itching to see more cute pictures of Claire I am sorry. In fact it has been so long since I've posted that Claire is talking now. She says things like "goo" and "kai". In addition she seems to be laughing in her sleep as well. Sarah and I like to speculate about what the contents of her dreams. We figure that as a 1 month old she could be dreaming about milk. In her dream she is likely sitting next to a pool of warm milk, wearing a onesie and drinking a warm glass of the white stuff with a little yellow umbrella. The other thing she tends to do in her sleep is grunt. Not sure why she does that, but believe me it sounds more like a 80 year old man than a baby. Anyway, last week we took her in for her 1 month checkup. This was very exciting because not only did Claire tip the scales at a whopping 10lbs 5oz but the doctor also told us we were some of the most mellow parents that he has seen. This seems to be happening a lot to us lately. Friends have commented that we look very comfortable around the baby and strangers have mistooken us for having another child already. The doctor thinks this is a good thing because he believes that mellow parents yield mellow babies. I can't quite place why we come off as so mellow. We definately don't have too many questions for the doctors, but it might also be that as such big time planners (remember this baby was planned 5 years in advance) we are well read on subjects ranging from the dudu (down-up-down-up) swaddle to the differences in a babies stool as she ages. I wonder what the non-mellow parents look like. Do they come in to the office with frazzled hair and shaky hands holding the baby upside down because they don't think the baby is getting enough blood in its head? ... wait strike that, I'm remembering back to the baby classes that and the parents fell into three distinct categories: Comedians, Happy-go-lucky, and just plain Idiots. The comedians, consisting of about 5% of the couples, would made jokes about all the different gizmos used to extract stuck babies from the mommies. I'm guessing most of these couples were outwardly laid back but inwardly scared to bits about having a baby. Another 5%, and the category into which we fell, were the happy-go-lucky parents who just sort of absorbed the material, made light conversation with the others and quietly left the class at the end. Of course, I do admit that while we were practing breathing techniques I couldn't stop laughing and I think at one point the teacher looked at me and wondered if I was actually a 5 year old girl. Anyway, the vast majority of the parents, about 90%, fell into the my IQ can't be higher than my age category. These parents just didn't seem to get simply concepts like passing items around for everyone to see. Remember when you were in Kindergarden and the teacher would bring in something special to show everyone.... If you were in the front row and the teacher handed you the gadget of the day, did you look at it and then simply set it on your desk? Of course not. Somehow you get two adults together, insert a baby into one of them and they forget the basic principles they learned in school. Another concept these parents seemed to lack was the ability to think their questions through before asking them. One parent was so fixated on the fact that newborns are supposed to get a screening test 12 hours after they are born that she actually asked the teacher if the 12 hour clock starts from the time the baby is born or from the time they cut the umbilical cord. For you non-parents out there, the time difference between these two events is somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 seconds.