Solid food

Yes, I know, I'm way way behind on writing blogs. Teething issues not withstanding, Max has been pretty well behaved and has mostly slept through the night. We've celebrated by spacing out a lot and sleeping constantly. He's also getting twice a day helpings of solid foods. Here's Max enjoying one of our meals.

Max enjoying an old family recipe: Baby food mixed with rice cereal and water, and heated. We call it "rocket fuel."


All-Righty, then. Even though I'm behind, I'm going to take a major detour and talk about cooking, if only because it's a big side effect of us having a baby. The audience for the blog, actually, is people who don't know how to cook or don't cook much, because, well, I'm with you, man. Those who can cook are free to snicker at my cooking attempts.

It's never been a big deal to me to cook when I have to - every 4 months or so, I'd cook a chicken spaghetti. I got to the point where I could make way too much of it in 45 minutes, including cleanup. Despite my talent, however, and despite the fact that chicken spaghetti is a very nutritionally complete meal that one could repeat every day for years with little adverse health effects, Delia always found someone else to cook our meals during Max's first few months.

With the departure of Adriana, however, I was forced to expand my cooking repertoire. This caused major problems. We have our share of fancy cookbooks with scintillating pictures, but my experience with them (once every 2 years or so) consists of me searching in frustration for Chanterelle mushrooms at Raley's, spending $50 on 15 ingredients or so that will go bad because I didn't use them all, and finally ruining the dish because I, well, had no idea what I was doing, and perhaps used 5 cans of anchovies instead of 5 anchovies. The recipe wasn't specific! On the other side of the spectrum, we have an easy cookbook with recipes like "raisins in Jell-O", which hasn't inspired me either - in fact, it left me wondering, who would want to ruin Jello? Millions of dollars were probably spent creating the perfect combination of food additives in Jello. Why mess around with perfection?

Now, there are some good recipes online (in epicurious.com, for example) but I honestly am not organized enough to take the time to search out a meal out the night before, sort through all the recipes for an easy, healthy and tasty one, print the recipe out, gather the ingredients the next day and somehow know what to do with the leftover ingredients once I finish cooking. If you can, God bless you.

But, I remembered, some of the fitness magazines at the gym had pretty decent-looking recipes in them. So I looked for these magazines online and soon found "Guy Meals Made Easy." You click on a protein (like salmon) and one style (Italian Style) and it gives you a recipe with an easy Italian sauce, and similar stuff for a carbohydrate side dish and vegetable. What becomes apparent pretty quickly, however, is that the recipes repeat - it's exactly the same for "salmon" or "chicken" except for the word "salmon" or "chicken". The cooking didn't matter either - it just tells you to put the meat in a broiler or grill or on a skillet. What a ripoff.

Then I changed my mind. I now think it's brilliant. All you have to do is learn how to grill, for example, and with 5 sauces and 5 different meats, you magically have 25 different meals. And, there's not a slavish devotion to a particular food combination - some of the sauces work fine with any meat or any vegetable, or, for that matter, rice, or potatoes, or bread. Granted, some combos were better than others, but if one is willing to experiment with different combinations (and potentially mess up the meal) you can get some very interesting food. I tried a spicy sesame oil on a yam (sesame oil, peanut oil, green onions), which was fantastic, but even an Italian-style yam (garlic, parsley, olive oil) I made later was surprisingly good, as long as we didn't overdo the sauce. And, the recipes were simple enough that I could begin to understand the effect of different ingredients on the food.

That website kept us going for a while, but I started researching the recipe's author, Mark Bittman. As many of you know already, he's a home cook and food writer for the New York Times, whose passion is basically making good meals as simply and quickly as possible. He also has a book, "How to Cook Everything". Which I bought.

The book is 1046 pages long. It makes a terrifying thump when dropped. And It's "Guy Meals Made Easy" on steroids. It has a recipe for everything, including a boiled egg and for toast. It tells you how to chop an onion, while saying you can be a good cook even if you don't use the accepted chef's techniquie for onion chopping. It tells you what cooking tools you need to buy. Apparently a roasting pan helps when you put stuff in an oven, for example. And it's got zillions of recipes, lots of them pretty quick, with tons of variations. It's organized in a way to make it easy to mix and match different items. Pretty much all our family recipes (and Delia's) are either listed in the book or have a pretty close cousin in there. And the ingredients are generally pretty simple and repeat a lot - if I have some garlic, lemon, olive oil and a couple other spices at home, I can pretty much buy whatever I want at the store and find a recipe I can make with it. So I've been cooking for over a month from it now, almost never repeating a recipe, and the results have ranged from pretty good (even those I screwed up) to fantastic. I have a feeling one could open a pretty good restaurant from some of the better recipes in there. So if you suck at cooking but are forced to do so, try the book. And the website.

OK, I got that off my chest. Max will show up more prominently in the next blogs.

The airplane trip

Self-taken picture, outside Cinnabon, Sacramento Airport.

Max outside Cinnabon, Sacramento Airport. Note Delia's expression.

I've always wanted to go back to Colorado in June, and my brother, sister, and several hundred of my parents' friends are all eager to see Max. With a week-long shutdown at work, Colorado was the obvious vacation choice. Except we will be taking Max on an airplane.

Delia did initial assessments of our upcoming theater of operations, and found (a) babies are most likely to cry because of air pressure changes and need to constantly suck on something, and (b) we could just give the kid a sleeping pill. I was aware, through extensive study of and interaction with Max, that (a) save sleeping, he has no off switch, (b) he never took to pacifiers, and (c) he literally can be bored to tears within minutes. Given we will be holding Max in a confined space for several hours, possibilities exist for problems. However, I waved off the sleeping pills. We decided we are finally going to unleash our revenge for sitting next to legions of crying babies, and, grim-faced and with jaws set, we entered the airport.

With that, I present an approximate running diary of our experience.

3:15 PM: Check-in line. We spot a baby ahead of us in a stroller. I am watching in amazement as she peacefully looks around for several minutes sucking a pacifier, as her parents are quietly talking to the ticket lady, almost ignoring the baby. Max has long since tried to push himself out of the stroller, and is now being held. As I watch the other baby, Max is trying to eat the airport line dividers and grab the shirt of the gentleman in front of him.

3:30 PM: Airport security line. See caption below.

Max in security line. He is arching his back and turning in an attempt to escape.

4:10 PM: Max's first incident.

Max outside "Finish Line" Sports Bar, Sacramento. He is holding a $20 organic giraffe hand-painted in France, which he fails to appreciate.

His crying is largely absorbed by the cavernous, noise-filled airport. Whatever ails Max, feeding usually makes him better, so Delia feeds him. I look around. Turning a corner I see, as if an angel lit up a room, a wonderful fluorescent-filled play area, across Gate A14. The carpet, which was cleaned in 1996, undoubtedly carried traces of cocaine, swine flu, arsenic and rodent scat. However, Max needed exercise, so down he went. We used a blanket that Max mostly was able to stay on.

Max and Delia, in heaven-sent play area across Gate A14.

4:50 PM: We board aircraft. Delia is in a window seat. I am in the middle seat, proudly displaying Max to anyone who would want to sit next to us. Amazingly, someone did. His name was Tim, and he had many sets of kids and grandkids.

5:10 PM: Takeoff. Delia attempts to keep Max sucking to relieve air pressure changes.

5:25 PM: Max gets fed. The airplane gives a constant drone. 5:31 PM: Max sleeps beneath a triumphant Delia.

5:41 PM: Our victory is short-lived.

5:43 PM: Max attempts to creep across the airplane seats to Tim.

5:58 PM: Max cries. Thankfully, it is not a scream, but certainly enough to draw attention. Tim volunteers to give us his seat and give Max some room to crawl around - he just needs to find another aisle/window seat. The flight is full. Good luck, Tim.

6:04 PM: Max is fed for the third time in about 45 minutes. Tim returns. Was he just in the bathroom?

6:08 PM: Passengers opposite us. All is quiet.
6:09 PM: Anything to keep him entertained. Anything...

6:12 PM: As shown in the photo below, Max enjoyed trying to eat a cookie wrapper. He was actually quite adorable. People in the airplane are doing something I never could imagine: point at Max and have a smile on their face, at the same time.

6:18 PM: Max suddenly decomposes and screams a battle cry. All is chaos. It was the first time in my life that 50 people lurched around to look at me. Delia attempts to rock and soothe him, which, while instinctive, also works on Max maybe once in every 5,000 tries. He cries harder. In desperation I grab him and start swinging him around, not really in a child-abuse way, but in a, "Hey, we're playing! Isn't this fun?" manner. He starts smiling! I start singing to him, and Tim is clapping in appreciation.

6:18 PM + 45 seconds: Max explodes into a raging scream. Tim mumbles something about giving up his seat and rushes out, his face a textbook expression of utter panic. However, even in the heat of battle, I remember an airplane trip, seated next to an 8-month old. When the baby started crying, the mom vibrated her finger on the baby's lips, so his crying sounded like a helicopter. The baby was fascinated enough to stop crying.

I do the same thing to Max. He instantly becomes more enraged and screams twice as loud (although sounding like a helicopter while doing it). I swing him around again - when he is above me he lets out a scream that carries to the back of the airplane. I am out of ideas. Delia takes Max from me and attempts to feed him again....

Success! Max will weigh about 450 pounds if we keep feeding him at this rate, but we don't care. 10 minutes later, Max utters the wonderful expression, "Ehhh" (Translation: "I am now happy.") Tim materializes again in the aisle seat.


6:40 PM: The Rocky Mountains are always beautiful from the airplane, but is now even more poignant as we reflect that Max will SOON BE OFF THE PLANE!!

6:47 PM: Max wants to grab stuff. Thankfully, Tim is pretty cool about the whole situation and lets Max grab his shirt. Tim gives me stories about his kids, which I completely blank out because I am trying to keep Max's drool off Tim's khakis.

Max can drool on me.

7:15 PM: Success! The plane lands softly, and we soon carried a quiet, grabby Max off the plane. An elderly lady asks me: "Oh, is that your baby? I was wondering what baby kept popping above the seats." Such a neutral comment. Hmmm... was she referring to Max's crying spell? "Yes, it probably was," I answer back.

Max meets Grandma and Grandpa Kaplan (this phrase freaks me out as I write it. Grandpa Kaplan?) Max is attempting to escape from the car seat and/or eat the side.

So there you have it. We reflected later that handling Max on the plane was kind of like a video game - the goal is keep him from crying for over 2 hours in an airplane. It ended up being more entertaining than reading Spirit Magazine.

Wine tour with actual photos of Mommy

I don't try to select photos of Max and myself, but it's very hard not to. Mom is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that she spends way more time with Max than I do. Why is this? Because she's also the only one taking pictures.

So I took actual photos of Delia last week, and am presenting them here. Let's get started.

Max at Smith Vineyards.

OK, technically this photo is of me. Delia took it. So Nevada County, the area in California where we live, isn't known for a lot of entertainment, but there are events that are extremely cool. The Northern Sierra Wine Trail is one of them. Once a year, the wineries in this area open their doors, bring in musicians, and serve lots of food. Perhaps their serving lots of food is a bit of an exaggeration, but we certainly eat lots of the food they serve... For those of you who have been to other wineries, particularly the behemoths in Napa, these wineries are different. The operations are very small, and one winery even operated literally in the garage of a guy's house in Colfax. You'll often find yourself going through 1-lane dirt roads in the middle of a forest to find them. But the settings can be spectacular and the people are usually quite friendly and informal. The wines generally sell only locally, which means you probably haven't heard of any of them. Smith Vineyards has one of the better food spreads, and had barrel tasting as well.

(Useless sidebar: Wineries are often known by their county - Napa County or Sonoma County - and we live in Nevada County - so why are our wineries known as Northern Sierra or Sierra Foothills wineries, and not Nevada County wineries? You might wonder. More likely, you don't. In any case, here's your answer: It's marketing. One of the oldest cities around here, which starts a short walk from our house, is Nevada City, California. Nevada is Spanish for snow. However it wasn't originally called Nevada City, CA - it was called Nevada, CA. Later, the state of Nevada was founded, stealing the proud name of Nevada and forcing our fair city to have the awkward name of Nevada City, CA. We still live in the confusing area of Nevada County, CA. Now, no one wants to go to Nevada County wineries because people (a) don't want wines from Nevada, which is basically a desert, and (b) people, I am guessing, don't want casinos in the tasting room. So there you are.)

Back to the photos:

Here's Delia! A nice lady volunteered to take this photo for us. I didn't actually take a photo, but there is indisputable evidence of Mommy.

OK, let's try again.

Delia and I at a food/wine pairing line at Lucchesi vineyards.

Delia was with me the whole time. I wanted to highlight the forest in the back by contrasting the green with the red canopies in front and...oh, I didn't take this picture either. OK, here we go:

OK, now here's my wife. I took this photo. As I wine taste, Delia's with her beverage of choice (Sprite) - she generally avoids alcohol until she's done with breastfeeding. Max isn't exactly in this photo, but I believe he's in the area.

Delia reading the wine trail pamphlet with Max.

Success! This is an actual photo of Max and Delia that I took.



Another example of Delia and Max. This photo shows the backdrop of Lucchesi. The vineyards are in the foreground and the Sierras are in the background.

This photo shows us picnicking in Solune Vineyards, which is about halfway between Grass Valley and Colfax (on Highway 80 going to Tahoe, which is about 15 minutes from Auburn...ahh, you don't care.) Solune, if you're ever in the area, makes very tasty wines if you're willing to pay for them.

We made it to three wineries. We have extensive photos of the first two, and the third one, Avanguardia, blends Russian graps into white wines. They can actually taste like reds. Very unusual, actually avant guarde....oh, that's the name. Anyway, it was a good setting but we were basket cases by the time we got there. We missed a turnoff, but our GPS navigator told us to make a different turn off the highway. We could barely find the turnoff - it looked like a small dirt driveway. And that's where GPS, and Nevada County, get very interesting.

I think one of the best ways to find the character of an area is to get lost. And, as we took our Honda Civic through increasingly rutted and narrower dirt roads that cut through 10-feet high thorn bushes, we started to wonder who actually lives here. The answer came when we saw a gentleman in his front lawn (loosely defined), smoking marijuana while wearing a football helmet, near a large boiling pot. I think we saw a leg sticking out. Soon, the GPS told us to take a right, which may have been helpful except it required us to mow a tree over. Luckily, there was a place to turn the car around before the dead end. We ended up finding a road with some sign of long-gone pavement, and eventually made it to the winery. Tracing backward, we found the winery was off a major road, but our GPS navigator evidently has a sense of humor.

The buried thank-you blog

A while back, I wrote a thank-you blog to everyone who came to our house to help us when Max was fresh out of the hospital. Then I forgot to post it. So to both of Max's sets of grandparents, and her great aunt (is that right, Allison?) it's no longer a fresh thank-you, more of a frozen and reheated one, but I hope you like it anyway. To find it, go to the blog archive (left hand side of the blog), click on "January 2009" and scroll down to January 11, 2009.

Taking The Kid shopping

Max has always been an anti-shopping baby. In a T.J. Maxx store, as inevitable as finding endless racks of P. Diddy hip-hop XXXXL sweatpants, we can count on Max to be sobbing in his stroller. Essentially, he's like me with a shorter fuse. Worse, he's like my dad. Clearly Max's future wife will be buying clothes for him while Max plays space golf, or whatever they do in the future.

But, like Dad, Max reacts differently in different stores. And he was a very good baby in REI. Not in his stroller, by any means, but by adopting a few simple rules we could keep him relatively happy:

(Note: These rules don’t all necessarily apply to Dad.)

1) For God's sake, don't leave him in the car seat with nothing to do.

2) Let him stroll around also.

3) Go ahead, let him eat the shoelaces. Isn’t there some sort of product safety thing that protects him?

4) Max needs to try stuff out too (by "try", I mean, grab, drool on, or eat.)

If you’re near a clothes rack, for God sake, throw some shirt sleeves into his crib. You need to see how they feel, he needs to see how they taste.

5) If the shirt’s a medium, don’t waste time trying it - just buy it already.

If you are willing to devote the 300% higher effort necessary to do these things, life is good.

Delia still longs for a more innocent time when she could just aimlessly spend hours browsing through aisle upon aisle of clothes while her husband got furious. I am actually a little grateful to have him along.

Sleep and Evil Western Parenting

So Max up until now has been a pretty good kid overall. Now that he's able to express happiness, he's much easier and more fun to deal with. Then when he's crying he almost always has a good reason - 90% of the time he's hungry or sleepy, with the other 10% consisting of boredom, overstimulation, needing to poop, teething or needing affection. But the kid's been a horrible sleeper.

Let me, if I may, impress upon the childless how much nighttime feedings suck. Here's a typical night for Delia. To convey the tension, I will use the second person, Brian Williams style:

9:30 PM: Max cries for 10 minutes and goes to sleep. You immediately race to the bathroom, brush your teeth, and jump in bed.
9:45: Umm, there are neglected chores you forgot because you were taking care of Max.
10:30 PM: Chores done. You have precious little time left. Jump into bed and force the adrenaline out of your body.
1:45 AM: You are awoken by a fire alarm-level wail which destroys your completely unrefreshing sleep. Max is hungry. Generally, you can feed him and put him back to bed after 20 minutes, but if you're lucky, he pooped all over himself and you have to turn on the lights to replace his diapers, making the kid wide awake.
1:45 -2:05 AM: Your latest attempt to feed Max lying down doesn't work - he's too fussy. You sit in some uncomfortable position and slowly feel the sleepiness drain from your body.
2:05 AM: Max is out. You are wide awake.
4:00 AM: After lying in bed for an hour attempting to get the PTSD-level screaming out of your memory, 30 minutes of Internet surfing, and another 30 minutes of forcing, in your brain, some stupid sheep to jump a fence, you drift back to sleep.
5:45 AM: The second truck-horn level sobbing kills your beautiful dream. You want very badly to ignore him or perhaps throw him out the window, but even in your semi-hallucinatory state, you remember there are laws against that. However, Max leaves no doubt that, as you deliberate in bed, you are starving a helpless baby to death.
6:00 AM: You fed Max. He gives you a big smile. He wants to play! Buh, no. He's back in the crib. Hey, guess what? By the time you get yourself back to sleep, it's time to start work.

We've adapted the best we can - I generally slept in a separate room, because it's better if only one parent can't sleep than two, and given Delia's about to quit working, it's more important I do well at my job. In return, I came home earlier, did the cooking, and took care of Max until bedtime so Delia could sleep or zombie out. It works - more for me than for Delia - but it certainly could be better. We had a plan that I'd feed Max formula once at night, but he can't stand formula now. By the time he's hungry enough to eat it, he's cried enough to wake Delia up anyway. We also tried rice cereal - again, he won't eat enough to make a difference.

So both our parents are telling us Max should be sleeping through the night. Old-school parenting has a pretty clear solution: Don't let him sleep too much in the day, so he'll be good and tired at bedtime. Put the kid in a separate room, let him cry if he wakes up in the middle of the night, and in a couple days he'll pick up the habit of sleeping through the night. In fact, old-school parents would say, Max might be waking up because the parents are snoring. But new-school parenting rejects this idea. Basically, babies need to be around their parents. They have their own sleep cycle, and some babies won't sleep through the night until they are 1 year old. Any attempts to manipulate this cycle can harm the babies' health and/or psyche. Attachment parenting goes further and says many kids can't sleep on their own or self-soothe until they are several years old, and attempting to push this cycle releases the stress hormone cortisol, interfering with babies' brain development.

@#$@ it. We're tired.

We really don't care anymore if the ancient Ulowangi tribe made sure at least two people were simultaneously hugging a baby at all times until the kid was sixteen. We have jobs. And, really, we noticed that Max's cuteness is directly proportional to how much he let us sleep. If Max could adapt, self-soothe, and sleep through the night, he'll be treated better when he's awake.

Our first step was to move Max to a separate room.

Max's new digs.

I assembled the crib in the new room while Max watched, undoubtedly wondering, "Gosh, I know I sleep in the crib, but how's Mommy going to fit in there with me?" Max got agitated. Then we put him to sleep.

It was probably the worst night Max ever had.

It wasn't too easy on us either. Starting at 2:00 AM, Max started sobbing, only to stop and fall asleep when one of us held him. After waiting about 20 minutes, one of us would lay him gently in the crib, only to watch him struggle and begin sobbing again. It was absolutely heartbreaking. Max was probably frightened out of his mind - no parents to soothe him, strange noises at night, wondering if he'll ever be held again - I'm sure Max felt horrible and so did we.

The next day, we didn't know what to do. Max has been a good kid, and we want to keep him that way. But we have heard and read that Max will only get more resistant to a separate room as he gets older. We decided to try it one more night - Max would probably forget the whole thing (Mom - please don't save this blog! Mom???). Delia would soothe him until 3:00 AM and I would take over after that.

So here's how it went:
9:30 PM: We put Max to bed. He cried for about 10 minutes and passed out. This is roughly normal for him.
2:30 AM: Max wakes up and cries. Delia feeds him. Max goes right back to sleep.
6:00 AM: Max wakes up again.

Pretty anticlimatic, and for us, utterly amazing. We checked up on him several times and just saw peaceful sleeping. Where was the cortisol? This kid adapted incredibly fast.

Unfortunately, he was still waking up every 4 hours, hence putting us back at Square 1. Actually, for me, it was worse - he cried loud enough now to wake me up, and I discovered I can't get myself to sleep again. I'm not too hot at self-soothing, apparently. Again, old-school parenting has an answer: Withhold the nighttime feeding, deal with a nightmarish couple of nights, and watch the kid magically adapt. Could we actually do this?

Could we really withhold food from this kid?

Neither one of us were emotionally prepared to try. But I noticed Max was curled up and struggling at 2:00 am, making me wonder if he was too cold. Delia noted Max fed really well at 2:00 am also, which made me think about how to get him to feed well at 10:00 pm. So we tried a couple ideas out: We put Max in slightly warmer clothing so he doesn't get too cold, and have his last feeding in his bedroom in the dark so he can prepare for the night (hopefully leading to a bigger feeding). We couldn't bring ourselves to skip a feeding, but we decided to at least wait for nighttime crying to last 10 minutes, in the hope he can calm himself to sleep. Here's how Max reacted:

10:15: Max went to sleep.
1:00 AM: No peep from Max. Delia checks to see if he's still alive. She was greeted with light snoring.
4:30 AM: I check up on him. The kid's still asleep.
6:00 AM: Max woke up and greeted me with a smile.

Oh. My. God. What just happened?

I hope we don't jinx this whole thing, but Max followed this up with an 8-hour sleep and a 6.5-hour sleep (I heard him make some noise about 2:00 am, but he went back to sleep without crying.) I actually can't believe I'm typing this. There is hope!

(Update, about a week later - he's still sleeping through the night. Delia's functional the whole day, so we can actually spend some time together. Now that she has energy, I've noticed I have much more free time. I've even been able to watch the Denver Nuggets. Unbelievable.)

30 minutes ago: Max's vacation crib in San Jose (where Delia's parents live).

Improper raising of children

Max shopping in Sacramento.

Max playing poker with Great Uncle Peter.

OK, we're back. Delia's almost healed and is exercising again, we're getting breaks thanks to both sets of grandparents, and Max has received several upgrades. Pretend Max is a month younger for this update and you'll be on top of things.

A couple videos: First, here's a video documenting Max's roll to his side.

Max demonstrating side roll.

And here's a video of Max walking.

Max walking.

You may think the above pictures and video are cute, but we are doing irreparable damage. First, Kaiser nurses told us that assisted walking is bad for Max. As we later learned, everything else we currently do for Max will make him a disease-ridden, deformed sociopath. Sit him up on our lap? It will deform his spine. Hold him upright? It will stop him from developing core muscles. Lie him on his back? He'll develop a flat head and not develop normally. Show him lots of love? He'll become overly dependent and whiney. As we learned, his only hope in a normal life relies on us putting him on his tummy until he screams. (On what might be a possibly related note, my parents recently told us we need to relax more. So, basically, you're saying we're not being ideal parents? That stresses us out! How will Max react to the stress? He's going to be anxiety-ridden!)

Some people we know have been inspirational to me. One of them told me to just put spit on a kid's wound to make him think it's better. So, I asked him, won't he'll lose all trust in you? He replied, "By the time he's old enough to know, he's lost all trust in you anyway." I asked, "But what if he still trusts you? He'll keep putting spit on his wound forever!" He replied, "Builds up his immune system." I will be seeking more advice from him.

By contrast, the nurses at Kaiser are slowly losing their grip on us. When Max went back to breastfeeding, he woke up every 2 hours to feed. This drove Delia insane.

Max at 5:00 am. He was fed and diapered. He was also very awake.

Delia's mom told her she was working when Dan was a baby and was also sleep deprived, so eventually she tried to put Dan on a feeding schedule at night - 4 hours between feedings. Dan was horrible for 2 nights and then, like magic, took to the feeding schedule. This story is very similar to the another dad, who had 6 kids, all of whom were put on a schedule, and all of whom adapted fine after a couple days. But when I asked a Kaiser nurse if Max was old enough for a schedule, she responded, very scared, "But he's hungry!!! How would you like someone to take away your food when you're hungry?" Soon, I heard her speed-dial Child Protective Services. I got a similar reaction from the nurse to another time-tested method to get a baby to sleep longer - dissolve cereal in some milk. Max completely lost his taste in formula, which rendered the idea moot anyway. In any case, we are getting a very strong suspicion that these nurses are not following their advice with their own kids.

First attempt at feeding Max rice cereal mixed with formula. He liked it less with each passing day. We didn't know why until we tried it. Our suprising conclusion: Formula tastes nasty - sort of like a Tang version of milk.

Finally, we came up with a solution. We already knew that Max went to bed far easier on his tummy. We put him on his tummy, he cried and flailed around, which just tired him out, and then he finally passed out after around 5-10 minutes - after which we flipped him on his back. But we soon noticed he slept longer on his tummy. Apparently this is very common with babies, so my generation was put to bed on our stomach. So, we kept Max on his tummy through the night. Yes, this increases the risk of SIDS, but really, given his current sleeping pattern, it might be his only path to survival. And it worked - he slept for progressively longer times for 2 weeks.

Max on tummy.

Then disaster struck.

We should have seen it coming earlier. But only now are we beginning to understand what happened. First, we placed Max in the center of the crib (see above photo), but we later picked him up, crying, with his head against a crib corner or his arm sticking through the rails. We never saw it happen in real time. The crib didn't seem to be tilted.

A day later, Max's back was wedged against the crib rails. He was on his side.

"Did you put him there?" I asked.
"Nope." Delia replied.

Then we found him on his back.

Now we realize he was moving around the crib like an inchworm. Unfortunately, he has no reverse gear, but when he hits a barrier, he simply cries. To flip over, he tucked his legs under his tummy and fell over. Soon, he was doing it quickly. And hence, the tragedy. No longer does he flail around anymore - just a neat flip to the side, and he has plenty left in the tank for hours of wailing. Gone are our carefree days when we could guarantee Max could go to sleep whenever he was cranky.