Katherine was such a fuss yesterday that it really looked like she'd sleep all day. So we decided to be brave and go out on the town. We visited gram, watered dads plants, went to a baby store, stopped by the house, then went to the grocery store, Target, Bed and Bath, and so forth. She did really well.

We are having most of our windows replaced soon. We ordered them in the fall, and they are supposed to be in around now. So I call the place this morning to find out when they'd be out to install them, and the woman who does the scheduling is not in until Monday. And so I'm talking to Kara about this in the car, and I'm saying that I'm a little worried that my inlaws are going to be visiting for a week from Houston, and the house is kindof cold. Some rooms are warmer than others, but the guestroom and the TV room are kinda bad because of the number and condition of the windows. And I'm thinking about playing with the radiators to trick out the thermostats and stuff like that. And Kara says, "it's not that cold." I just laughed. "Not that cold?" I said, "it's 40° outside today. 40°! And you had to think about whether or not to bring a jacket. 40° is 8° above freezing. Now, Houston is like the third hottest city in the country."

It really is funny how you adjust to these things. It really did feel kind of spring like today, but our perspective is definately New England.

The last two days have been kind of strange. Last night, Katherine just took the day off from crying. I mean, she cried, but nothing like the three days before. Today she has behaved very inconsistantly. Kara tells me that during the day, she didn't sleep all that much, and she was very fussy, but not flat out crying. She was like this in the evening too. I had her for most of the evening after dinner, and except for one half-hour period before nursing, I could get her to calm down and sleep lightly. However, she did not sleep deeply. We tried to put her down around 11:30, and it didn't go well. After 45 minutes of nursing, she was up, fussy, and with a big mess in the diapers. So I took her downstairs. She cried on and off, and finally fell asleep about 20 minutes ago. That's long enough (and it's late enough) that I'm going to try now to go and put her to sleep.

We've been using the BabyBjörn quite a bit. It really helps a lot. If you are active, like walking around and doing stuff, she is pretty occupied looking around, and she is held really tightly to the chest, so she feels comforted. It also help activities of daily living, because without it, you are limited to either doing everything one-handed (which you get quite good at, by the way), or putting her down somewhere, which is problematic.

On to lighter topics. Does anyone really believe that there is a change for Carol Burnett and company to make a comeback? I mean, I watched the show when I was a kid, and I thought it was funny and all, but I was really young and it was a family thing. I just don't see it. The recent special was terrible, and now I am seeing them pop back up on TV, on TV Guide, etc. I do not get it, and I'm betting that the majority of people don't either, and it will just fade away. It worked during it's time, and I respect it for that, but it don't work now.

A mixed bad tonight. One the one hand, Katherine seemed to take it easy on us this evening, partially due to well timed nursing and a bath. One the other hand, I am clearly sick. You know, in the middle of the night last night, Kara and I both got really cold. And the thermostat was down for some reason, I'm not sure why. But I had the sensation of a fever - when any waft of air makes your skin almost feel pain, and uncontrolllable shivering. And I tossed and turned all night and woke up a lot. Then, in the morning, I got up feeling strange, but not sick in the normal sense of the word. I don't have any congestion or anything, and the fever was gone. But at work, I just felt off my game.

So a few minutes ago I took my temperature and it's up in the mid-99's, so I have something.

Why do I blog all this? Well, it's because this is a major problem when you have a three and a half week old infant. Because we are new and inexperienced parents, we don't want to expose Katherine to any illness, although it might be kind of hard not to. So I feel like I need to be careful in the way I interact with her. Which is even more of a drag if her colic turns out to be as consistent as we suspect.

We have been talking about establishing a schedule whereby we each get time off a few times a week, and we are able to move comfort time for Katherine back and forth in intervals so we don't get too burned out. I might throw the early stages of this completely off by being sick.

And this is hard for me in a very different way than for Kara, because I am at work all day. Her crying starts up just after dinner. So for most of the time that I am alert and around her, she is crying. It's really a drag, and I can only hope that I find some ways to work through it.

Just got back from the doctor. Katherine is fine, and putting on weight at a staggering pace. She's now 9 pounds, 7 ounces, up 13 ounces in 10 days. We didn't get two sentences into our story about her crying before the doctor said, "colic." The key piece of evidence was the clock-like regularity with which it happens. It's been pretty consistantly between 7or 7:30 and midnight or so. So this is a big freakin drag, because although it is not harmful to Katherine at all, it's been really difficult for Kara and I to try to comfort her while she cries and screams, even, inconsolably.

OK, I gotta go back to work now. More later...

Through Katherine's crying this evening, I saw the Brooks and Dunn performance on the American Music Awards. What is up with them. I counted four or five electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, and at least one pedal steel. You can't possibly tell me they need six to eight guitars to make that sound. It's really ridiculous. With that many backup instruments, it really looks like the guitars B&G are playing are just surrogates for their masculinity, if you know what I mean.

And what was up with Cher? She looked like she was trying to remake herself as a Britney wanna-be, and failed miserably at it.

Things with Katherine continue to be difficult. I was really tired today, because after going to bed really late last night, I was awoken early by some work stuff. I stumbled into the office a bit early, and wove through the day in a fog. I took a nap when I got home with Katherine lying on top of me, stomach to stomach, which was really nice. After dinner, though, she started to cry again, and basically she's been crying since then except when nursing. It's very hard on Kara, because she also had a crying spell this morning for a few hours. It sucks for me because I spend my only quality time with her in the evening, and for the last few days, she's been bawling. We're getting increasingly concerned about colic, and Kara will probably call the doctor tomorrow. We may get chastisted, because we don't sense anything serious wrong. She hasn't had diaper rash, or any falls, or temperature, or anything, but we're a bit worried about her stomach. At any rate, if we really are in for 12 weeks of this, we are both going to be complete wrecks when it is over.

Well, this looks like another really difficult night. We got Katherine to bed early (10:30), and Kara nursed her, and she seemed to settle down, then she got fussy around 11:30 or so, and has been crying ever since. Since Kara got the worst of it last night, I'm getting it tonight. I have to say, I'm pretty down this evening. She's crying harder and longer than I've had to deal with yet.

Oh what a night. Since I had late duty last night, Kara did it tonight, and it sucked pretty bad. By the time we got settled in bed it was almost midnight, and after nursing, Katherine was wide awake, and started crying. So Kara took her downstairs for a few hours so I could sleep. I fell into a deep sleep, but awoke numerous times during the night when Katherine was either nursing or crying. I think Kara ended up not sleeping much of the night so that I could sleep, so it's time for me to pick it up and help her out this evening.

This might have been the worst night since we brought her home in the sense that she was very needy, and fussy. Let's just pray this isn't an early sign of colic.

Today, a tale of snow.

The first real storm of the season was in early December, I believe. I had been holding out on purchasing a snowblower, but finally caved when I saw the weather reports. They were only predicting three or four inches, but the weather here is notoriously hard to predict, and it was a wet pattern, so snow we got would be heavy and slushy. In fact, we got about nine inches in that storm, and I was really, really happy to have the blower even though I had to stay up until, like, 1 AM to get it assembled.

So anyway, I'm halfway through blasting snow off my driveway, and I hear a Ka-CHUNK, the handle of the blower rears up, and then, a delayed thunk against the side of the house. I had run over brick, and sent it flying. After that, there was a really strong rotational vibration, and as I finished up, I thought I was toast. I figured I'd busted my brand-spanking-new, not inexpensive snow thrower.

So it turns out that I seriously bent the metal corkscrew snow scraper thingy. Last night, amidst predictions of four to eight inches, I ran outside just before dark, and pryed it back into shape with a crowbar and some vice grips - just enough so that it didn't scrape the housing. And you can probably guess what happened. No snow. Well, mostly no snow. Even I will give in, and just shovel if it's an inch or two, and that's what it was.

Katherine is fine. She had a bath today, and has been really sleeping a lot. She was definately very up and fussy yesterday, so it might be that she needs to sleep it off for a day or so - that's happened before. But of course she woke up and started complaining just after I got to her after dinner. I got home a bit late, so that was my first chance to really hold her. I had to give her back to Kara for more food.

Oh yeah, one last thing about diapers. You know, when this whole thing started out, changing each diaper was a special, precious thing. We take her to the changing station, clean her lovingly, and carefully put the new diaper in place. Now, the process looks like a pit stop at the Daytona 500. Oh we still clean her well, and we fit the new diaper carefully, but we can also gun through the process about three times faster than when she was born. I shudder to think of how much faster it will get. A baby is supposed to use something like 5,000 diapers until they are toilet trained.

Oh, yeah, so why am I up this late. Well, Kara decided to try to get her into bed early. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. Anyway, Kara figured if she nursed her, Katherine would fall asleep, and she did, but not a deep sleep. She was up a bit later, and when I checked in on them around 11PM, it was going badly. Katherine would only stay quiet when she was literally chewing on Kara. So I took her downstairs, and closed all the doors. Sometimes Katherine just needs a nice cry. And she did cry, but not that long. She settled into sleep, and I decided I would wait until she needed another nursing, and let Kara get a few hours of sleep. When I bring Katherine up, she'll wake up. Even now, she's not in a deep sleep. Then, after she nurses the next time she should stay down until morning.

Katherine is pretty good that way. This is a late night, she usually quiets down between 11 and 12. Then she stays down except for nursing until between 10AM and noon.

You can tell when she's not sleeping heavily in a few ways. First, you can often hear her breathing. Second, she will frequently make periodic noises. You can tell if she is deeply asleep if she passes the, "arm" test, developed by Kara.

In the arm test, you raise one of her sleeping arms and drop it. If it is limp all the way through, and there is no recognition at all that you are actually doing it, she is deeply asleep.

Katherine, Kara and I went to visit gram today. We had a nice visit. Gram is really doing well. She is drinking from a cup again, and although she still has a ground meal, her appetite is much better. Today, she ate her entire dinner plate. There has been such a remarkable change - Dad and I both have the theory that it is because of Katherine. The only reason I think about this, is that gram has really not been doing well for a long time. During that time, her condition has fluctuated from good to bad, but the last few weeks have been more than unusually good. Gram deserves to feel good.

Anyway, I've got Katherine next to me now. She threw a hissy fit this evening while we were watching Batman and Robin on AMC. Don't ask. OK, I'll answer anyway. Katherine tends to get fussy and cry in the evening - she needs to relieve tension, I guess. So if we rent a movie or try to watch anything we're really interested in, it doesn't end up being a quality experience. So we basically have something on, but Katherine is the focus.

Anyway, I think she set the new indoor land-speed record for number of diaper changes today. Every 30 to 45 minutes all day long she had a stinky diaper. Because I have an engineering background, I have managed to convince Kara that we need to rate them on a scale of one to five. She has let out the occassional 5.5 to 6, though. You might think this is all silly stupid newborn parent stuff, but there is an element here that is not silly.

Katherine occassionally has gas, and occassionally gets constipated. Since she can't speak, she can't say, "hey, can I have 3 ml of Mylicon, please?" Instead, she just goes, "waaaaahhhhh, ."

So Kara and I have to have a basic understanding of how well her digestive system is running at any given time during the day, and this is done by comparing notes on defacation and, "toots", or farting. By doing this, we can tell basically when she's gassy, or constipated, or not, and this helping in the black art of "root-cause crying diagnosis."

Today, she was blasting fours all afternoon during the Patriots game, then she settled into a one to two pattern. OK, now you know.