Dylan's first Hanukkah

Yesterday was the last night of Hannukah. Dylan was suitably impressed by the full array of lit candles.

Here he is playing with his first toy, a gift from Grandma and Grandpa.

Dylan's namesake

Dylan's middle name is Rigel, which is the brightest star in the constellation Orion, which first rises in October.

Due to our schedules and light pollution and objects obscuring the horizon, we hadn't actually managed to see Rigel until now. Lorien was leaving the house to run an errand earlier this hour and pointed out that Orion was visible in the sky. Including Rigel. We took Dylan out to show him.

No pictures -- I really don't have suitable equipment for astronomy photography, even if we lived out in the boonies.

He smiles!

Well, he has for a little while now, but we finally caught a bit of it on camera.

Showering Dylan

Alice and Alicia hosted a baby shower for Dylan today, at Matt and Alice's house. Thank you to everyone who came out to meet Dylan, for the lovely food spread (especially featuring not-safe-for-pregnancy items), and for the wonderful gifts.

Anjali's Birthday

We went with Dylan last Sunday to the 1st birthday party of Anjali, who is Arnab and Alicia's daughter. There were lots of kids there, although none quite as young and tiny as Dylan. As we were getting ready to leave, Anjali took a bit of an interest in Dylan (and vice-versa).

We're hoping she'll be up for babysitting in a few months. ;)

Big Head Dylan

Dylan had his "1 month" doctor's appointment today, although it was actually on the 5 week anniversary of his birth. As we suspected, our previous concerns about weight gain are no longer an issue. Dylan has zoomed way past his birth weight and now tops the scales at 8lb. 8oz. Apparently his birth weight was only in the 7th percentile (which seems a bit surprising to me -- I thought the high 6's was fairly typical, and it's what both Lorien and I were), but now he's up to the 14th percentile. His length is somewhere in the low 30s percentile. But his head size is right around the 50th percentile. So basically we have a skinny, somewhat short baby, with an otherwise big head.

One month birthday

Saturday was Dylan's one month birthday.  We had a busy day in celebration.  We took him to the Kinetic Steamworks open house, which he pretty much slept through.  Here he is with Rich in a snail, and with me on a steam powered tricycle.

Then we headed over to Alice and Matt's place for indian food.  They just got two kittens, Ramekin and Juneau.  Here's Ramekin investigating the little human kitten.

Happy Places

Changing Dylan’s diaper was a struggle until we set up the super plush microfibre changing pad with a space heater to blow warm air over him. Now he relaxes as soon as we put him down. Here he is relaxing after a bath.

 Here's Dylan in his living room bassinet being watched over by the elephant sent to him by Grandma Dorothy and Grandpa Eli.

Dose of Dylan

Sorry, we’ve gotten behind on blogging. Here’s a pic to whet your appetite from week 3. No worries, we don’t cosleep, but it’s nice to bring Dylan into the grown up bed for morning cuddles. Selena is a fan.

Little monkey

The heat arrived, and Dylan developed a little case of baby acne.  The heat has subsided, and the acne seems to be diminishing as well.  Or maybe it's all just hormonal; I hear that's a possibility.

Here's Dylan in a little monkey suit.  Well, not really a full blown monkey suit, although we do have one of those too.  It seems that monkeys are "in" -- an unusually high percentage of the clothing we have seems to have some sort of monkey theme.  I guess that's okay, I don't have a problem with monkeys.  I can think of worse things to be "in".

Trying the newer editor in blogger. I wouldn't say it's necessarily that much better than the older editor, just that it sucks in different ways. Oh well.

Happy Halloween!

Since Dylan is an October baby, Halloween was his first holiday.

Our Halloween pumpkins this year reflected our newly expanded family, with Daddy, Mommy, and baby pumpkins. (As opposed to the ridiculously old Halloween pumpkin family pics still up at http://richandlorien.org/ -- we ought to change that...)

The Daddy pumpkin was big enough (30#) and Dylan is small enough (~7#), that we were able to subject Dylan to the minor indignity of some in-pumpkin photography. He took it in stride. (Better than the passport photo sessions.) We got some nice ones out of it, and the cute pumpkin hat helped.

At night, after lighting our pumpkins, we dressed Dylan in his pumpkin shirt (thanks Alice and Matt!) and took him out for a tiny bit of trick or treating. Mostly it was just showing him off to the nearby neighbors. In light of Lorien's central role for Dylan's food supply, she got to keep the candy collected.

Your papers, please

So we'd like to take Dylan this winter to see both sets of grandparents. Which means traveling to Canada. Which means getting him a passport.

You wouldn't think that this should be so hard. Dealing with some bureaucracy, paying some absurd fees, maybe waiting in some lines, and waiting some time, but it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

The problem is that they want passport photos. For an infant. Which will be completely meaningless in that he won't look anything like what he does in the photos by the time he travels, let alone by the time the passport expires.

The State Department has some pretty stringent requirements about what constitutes an acceptable passport photo. Mind you, these requirements aren't that difficult for an adult. But they're pretty ridiculous (and hard to meet) for an infant.

We decided to just do things the "easy" way and pay some money to have them take the photos at the post office, where we had to go anyway to apply for the passport. The problem is that whomever I spoke with on the phone basically totally lied to me about what they were and were not willing to do with respect to infant passport photos. So after some unsuccessful attempts there, we gave up, left, and went home.

We've had a few photo sessions over the last few days when Dylan seems to be in an agreeable mood, trying to get a usable picture. We're still not 100% there, but close. But in the meantime, I thought I'd post a few of my favorite outtakes, while ranting against the State Department.

More Dylan

Life continues.

Dylan is still cute.

My Mom continues to help us out.

Dylan recently discovered sucking his thumb.

And we discovered just how happy Dylan is with the pacifier we bought him today.

Babies and cats

They're getting along just fine.

and Dylan and Grandma

Photo ibid.

Dylan and Grandmama

Picture taken by Grandpa(pa?)

Avraham Naor Fromm

Thursday was the 8th day of Dylan's life. Jhos, the rabbi who officiated our wedding, officiated his Bris at our home. We gave him two names -- Avraham, which means the father of compassion, after Lorien's maternal grandfather; and Naor, which means light (both illumination and enlightenment), after Rich's maternal grandmother.

Out for a walk

We finally got a chance to try out the Moby wrap today -- we took Dylan on a short walk to the Edible Schoolyard at the nearby middle school, before the deluge of the first winter storm arrived (sympathy going out to our friends Heather and Ed for the wet weather on their wedding day). I think it may have taken us longer to get out of the house than it did to actually go on the walk. Dylan seemed to enjoy the walk to the extent that he can enjoy things as a 10 day old -- he basically slept through most of it.

Just to make sure that we had the hang of it and didn't drop the baby, we first tried the Moby out with Snoopy. Snoopy seemed to enjoy it too. :)

Lorien's parents depart for Toronto tomorrow morning. Rich's Mom is staying to help out for about another week and a half.

More cuteness

Ok, this is out of order timewise (this was taken last week when we were still in the hospital), but we finally had a chance to sit down and look at all of the pictures taken so far, and this one strikes me as pretty adorable, and somehow I overlooked it before.

Settling in at home

We're settling into a routine at home. Feed. Change. Sleep. Repeat. The total amount of sleep we're getting in every 24 hour period isn't actually that bad, and it's much more than I was expecting. It's just not one single continuous sleep period. Lorien's parents and Rich's Mom are all in town, and they're helping out, which is making things easier. We've also been blessed with a pretty mellow baby -- Chillin' Dylan as I like to call him.

Our biggest concern so far has been his weight. Having both Dylan and Lorien spend time in their respective ICUs made it a bit more difficult to get feeding going. All babies lose weight after birth (something I hadn't realized before), but the doctors get a bit concerned if the loss is more than 10%. In Dylan's case, for a 6 lb. 14 oz. birth weight, that threshold was 6 lb. 3 oz. He bottomed out at 6 lb. 0.1 oz., but before we left the hospital he was up to 6 lb. 4.5 oz. We just got back from a visit to the pediatrician, and now he's up to 6 lb. 8 oz. So we're halfway back to regaining birth weight. Yay Dylan!

We just took him on his first walk with the stroller, wandering around North Berkeley on some errands. It seemed to go well, in that he slept through the entire time.