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Pictures News |
2007-02-01:
Niklas had a good time today. Tammy read him a bunch of books, then, when Andrya and I got home,
there was action-packed toy hilarity. I'll post a bunch of pictures tomorrow. Niklas also did some Superman-style
flying, which he finds to be awesome. I grab him by his sides and lift him up so he's parallel to the ground.
He keeps his legs straight out behind him in the traditional Man of Steel fashion. If he starts blasting me with
his heat vision, we're going to have problems. By "we", I mean "me", seeing as how I'm the guy who'll be getting
blasted with heat vision. 2007-02-02: Recently, I've discovered Niklas's tickle spot. It turns out that while his feet and belly are not yet ticklish, his belly and neck are home to a thriving society of Tickles. This is particularly good news for Mr. Tickle, who had been getting frustrated with his inability to torment... uh, interact with Niklas. He'll laugh and giggle for twenty or thirty seconds while I'm tickling him, so that's a lot of fun. There some new pictures up here. All of the January news has been archived here. 2007-02-05: Niklas had a good weekend. He did a lot of playing, Andrya read him several books and we watched two Penguins' games on TV. He had so much fun over the weekend that he slept until 5:00 in the morning today. I never thought I'd think of getting up at 5:00 as sleeping in, but there you go. We bought Niklas a few teething toys over the weekend. He's yet to figure out how to keep them in his mouth, so they're more infuriating than helpful right now. Hopefully, he'll figure it out soon. Who wouldn't want to chomp on a plastic lobster? I bought two for myself. 2007-02-06: Andrya got stuck in weather-related traffic today leaving Niklas and I to fend for ourselves at bedtime. Things started off real well (I sang him some of his favorite Clutch songs), but soon the evening deteriorated into a puke fest the likes of which had not been seen for days... maybe a day and a half. Anyway, if puke were motor oil, Niklas would have been an '84 Dodge Daytona (they're known by me as being leaky with the oil, also with transmission fluid). After the puking, I gave him a bedtime bottle (you know, to make up for all of the milk he had donated to the floor, his sleeper and my pants). That started off ok, then he realized that I wasn't his mommy and the agitation recommenced. Then, he kicked me in the shin*. He went to bed without further incident, presumably to rest up for heretofore unknown amounts of fussing when Andrya is out of town on Thursday. *Not true, but he was a bit irritable. 2007-02-07: I neglected to mention that Niklas's godmother Katie visited him last weekend. She brought him a really cool DVD that will help Andrya give him a broader view of the art world than I would likely provide. Even better, it came with an awesome stuffed frog. Until Niklas tells me otherwise, his name is Claude. As per usual, Niklas was on his best behavior while visitors were in the house. On a related note, anyone who wants to come by on Thursday night/Friday morning should feel free to do so. Andrya's going to be out of town and I'm looking for all the help I can get. 2007-02-08: Well, after five hours of Father/Son Monster Jam '07 everything seems to be going smoothly. Granted, all I've really done is put him to bed and hang out for four hours while he slept, but still, no major crap-ups. I did learn that Niklas is opposed to being held upside down. The following chart illustrates Niklas's moods in relation to how you're holding him up in the air:  No, Niklas did not draw that. Why do you ask? 2007-02-09: Success! Niklas was awesome last night. He slept from about six until 4:30, then he sucked his bottle down in record time. He was a little fussy going back to sleep, but I was still only up for about half and hour. He didn't wake up again until 7:30 which was pretty much the best I could hope for. Thanks, Niklas! 2007-02-12: Last weekend was pretty fusstacular. Niklas was excited to have Andrya back home, so much so that whenever she put him down he would start wailing. This was particularly inconvenient for me on Saturday because Andrya had to go into the office. He also brought the "scream for half and hour or so around five o'clock in the morning" bit back into his repetoire. On the plus side, he's still amused by the itsy-bitsy spider. There are some new pictures up... right here. 2007-02-13: The weather has conspired to keep Andrya in Bloomington for an extra night, so Niklas and I are once again on our own. He's been doing OK so far, but we'll see how he does tomorrow once the milk runs out and he has to suffer the indignity of drinking formula. 2007-02-14: Niklas had a very happy Valentine's Day. The city of Bloomington finally got around to plowing the streets, so Andrya was able to make it home. Niklas was very excited to see his mommy. He was happy to show off how sharp he looked in his Valentine's Day attire. He looked even sharper mere moments before that picture was taken, but he decided to accessorize with some spit up. Speaking of which, the formula went over as well as could be expected. Tammy was prepared for the worst, but he sucked it down (and spit a bit up) just like it was milk. 2007-02-18: Today was a big day for Niklas. He had rice cereal for the first time. I guess you could call it solid food, but then you would be a liar. It's pretty much like I imagine gruel would be. I've had the good fortune never to actually encounter gruel, but I assume it's a thin milky substance with some mashed up rice in it. Anyway, he seemed to enjoy it, though he apparently felt that Andrya and I took too much time between spoonfuls. It's hard to say how much he actually ate (he ended up wearing a lot of it), but I have a pretty good idea of how much he spit up later. That would be a lot. Still, all in all, I would say that the experiment was a success. 2007-02-21: Sorry for the paucity of updates lately. Things came up, mostly car related. Anyway, here's what Niklas has been up to lately:
There are some new pictures up. I'm too lazy to link it here, but you can click on the "Pictures" link to your left. It's also my left, but that really doesn't matter to you, I'm sure. 2007-02-27: Doin's have been a transpirin' of late. As I mentioned before, we've recently started giving Niklas rice cereal. It went really smoothly at first, then, as we started to increase the cereal to milk ratio and give him more of the mixture, he started to poop less. At first, this was awesome. He was going once a day, often when I wasn't even around. I was living the dream (note that the dream used to feature me sitting on the beach with a case of beer, a big screen TV and a monkey butler; fatherhood changes you, that's for sure). Apparently it's normal for a baby's poop cycle to slow down upon the introduction of sold (ish, in the case of the rice cereal) food. He went about 36 hours before pooping on Friday morning. I was around for that one, I had no idea that such a little person could make such a big poop. Unfortunately, that was the last poop we would see for a while (never thought I'd type that). The dream, as it were, was now dead. It seems that constipation makes Niklas a bit cranky. He was OK on Saturday, but by Sunday morning he had become a bit agitated. On top of that, he's taught himself how to make high pitched screams and wails. Niklas has found these to be a great addition to his noise making arsenal and he made ample use of these new tools. As the day wore on, he was yelling more and more and he had lost interest in everything other than eating (and indirectly making things worse, I suppose) and having the occasional nap. He also spent the day farting like it was his job and he liked his job and he didn't mind putting in a bunch of overtime down at the plant or office or wherever it is that you can get a job farting... maybe in a lab or something. Thankfully, the fussiness tired him out to the point that he went to sleep at bed time with little complaint. At this point, it had been about 60 hours since he had pooped. It seemed like it was time to pull out the big guns, so I went to the store and picked him up some prunes. Apparently, baby constipation is a common enough occurrence that the Dominick's was well stocked with the baby food version of this awful, awful fruit. The prunes, it turns out, were unnecessary. Around 7:00 Monday morning, I went to change him. When I picked him up, I got poop on my hand as it had escaped the diaper and soaked though his onsie, sleeper and sleep sack. As I took each layer of clothing off of him, I saw more and more poop. Still, I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I opened up the diaper. It's not an exaggeration to say that the entire interior of his Huggies was covered with about half an inch of poop the consistency of peanut butter. It also smelled horrible, but I was so stunned at the sheer volume that I hardly noticed. Andrya, Waste Management Corporation and the EPA had to help me get him cleaned up. Usually a diaper change takes about two or three minutes, this one took at least ten. Niklas, of course, was ecstatic to have finally pooped, so at least he was in good spirits thoughout the whole thing. We put Niklas on the scale on Saturday. He weighted about eighteen pounds. I'm pretty sure this poop invalidated that measurement. He's probably back down to his birth weight now. In other, unrelated news, we've given him peas in lieu of cereal the last couple of days. He thinks peas are awesome. Sometimes I wonder about him. 2007-02-28: Niklas was apparently feeling rather musical last night. He woke up at 1:30 making some sort of singing/babbling type sounds. That was cute, but somewhat inconvenient seeing as how I was trying to sleep (Andrya was up working unitl 1:00, so Niklas could have busted out the Hiwatt amps and she wouldn't have noticed). Around 1:45, Niklas decided to bring more of an aggressive edge to his sound and the cooing was replaced by screaming. Up all night, sleep all day and all that. After a diaper change, he reverted back to his singer/songwriter style allowing me to go back to sleep. Despite a lack of popular demand, he played a brief encore set after he ate at around 4:30. He's in it for the art, not for the money.  
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