The First 100 Days

The American public and the international media recently got a chance to analyze and reflect on President Obama's first 100 days in office. The fact that it's 100 days doesn't really mean anything except that it's a nice round number that everyone can easily remember and it gives the President enough time to either do a bunch of really cool things or to do a number of stupid things that SNL can write skits about. As Claire was born only 10 days after Obama's inaguration that means that we now get the chance to analyze and reflect on her first 100 days.

Coincidentally Claire's century mark was reached the same day as Mother's day so we happened to have a big celebration that she probably thought was for her. How do we assess how good of a baby she is? We don't have much to compare her to. Perhaps the next baby is in trouble as I can't say that I would have dreamed these first 100 days could have been as easy and as rewarding as they've turned out to be. Since I like quantitative things, I'll grade her on several different categories on a 1-5 scale (1 being she's downright terrible and 5 being incredibly amazing... everything else is somewhere in between. Except for 4, If I score her a 4 its like a wildcard in Poker, you can use it as any score you want).

Sleeping: 5 --> I don't think we I could hope for this to have gone any better. 9-12 hours a night with several long naps during the day makes for a happy mother and father.

Eating: 5 --> She's gaining weight like crazy and loves to eat, and once her parents were trained in how to bottle feed her, she did fine with that too.

Communication Skills: 5 --> I know I'm sounding like a broken record, I'll mix it up here soon, but she really is an amazing talker. Aside from all the other parents at daycare commenting on how much she's talking already, an excellent example came on Mother's day. We met up with the Winkler's and Claire and Sophia had another play date. (More on Mother's day later) When the two of them were put face to face, Claire decided she needed to tell Sophia all about the clothe's she's been wearing, about life in San Jose, about her friends at day care, about the trees, Hawaii, and everything else she'd seen. She did this directly into Sophia's face for a good 5 minutes and probably would have continued had we not finally pulled her away. Her voice was getting loud and somewhat angry toned but I think it was mainly because the stunned Sophia was giving her the silent treatment.
Pooping: 4 --> I'll give this the wildcard score as Claire's poops are irregular and unpredicatable. Sometime's she'll go days without pooping only to do it when we least expect it or when it's really inconvenient to change her.

Moving: 1--> It's probably not fair to assess her on this yet, but compared to most other humans, she's very bad at moving. She always stays exactly where you put her and has never crawled or been able to sit up on her own. If we hold her in the standing position and move her legs forward, she sort of emulates walking, but she's definitely never done this on her own.

Patience: 1 --> Another area she definitely needs to work on. In most religious circles, squares, and triangles, Patience is considered a core virtue. But I say patience is all about perspective. Consider if you called up a pizza place and you had to wait 30 minutes for your food to be delivered. Not bad right? Now consider a 1 day old baby. If she had to wait 30 minutes for something, that would be like 1/48th of her life.

I could probably go on all day rating her based on different traits, but patience isn't really a virtue of mine either so I'll wrap up my evaluation by giving her the overall weighted score of 4.8. That's roughly equivalent to an A+.

This weekend was chalk full with action. (Speaking of "chalk full" I just looked up the expression and it turns out I don't even know how to say or spell it. The expression is actually "chock full" and here is its very vague definition from a reputable online etymology dictionary:

chock-full
c.1400, chokkeful, possibly from choke "cheek." Or it may be from O.Fr. choquier "collide, thrust." Chock-a-block is nautical, said of two blocks of tackle run so closely they touch.

But that was clearly a tangent. Mother's day was nice. In addition to a lovely breakfast at the Los Gatos farmer's market (excellent place for Nutella and Strawberry Crepe's on Sunday) we had the aforementioned rendevous with the Winklers and did have a nice lunch at Stait's cafe in the city of redwoods. We also ventured out again to the drive-in and saw the very excellent Star Trek movie. Well done Mr. JJ. Oh, and I also decided that the guest bathroom (where we will soon by bathing Claire) is not up to par with the standards of excellence I demand from things associated with my baby and thus decided to tear out the floor, sink, toilet, walls, lights, tub... well yeah everything. In my copious amounts of spare time I'll be putting it back together and building her a nice little haven where she will undoubtedly refuse to use unless we bribe her with Nerds for being a good little toddler.

FYI: The above picture is what a baby looks like after sticking her finger in an electrical socket.