Score One for the Human Race

Emily is 8 weeks old today. She stays awake more now than she used to. She holds her gaze on objects that interest her, and she'll grasp things placed in her open palm, but she can't walk yet, or even stand up! Crazy, huh? She pretty much just lays around. Apparently this is normal for newborn babies. Human babies, that is. Giraffe babies are up and walking within 30 minutes of being born. See for yourself:

I was a bit disappointed when I realized how far behind giraffes Emily is, but then I found out that the gestation period of a giraffe is between 400 and 460 days, compared to around 280* for humans. This means that a giraffe has had 57-65 weeks to develop before it's born, whereas a human has only had 40 weeks. So a 1 day old giraffe has been developing for as long as a 4-6 month old baby. This still puts giraffes way ahead of humans, since I have never heard of a 4 month old baby that could walk, or even stand.

This has me wondering whether a baby that stayed in the womb for 60 weeks would come out with legs strong enough to hold their own weight. While I was mulling this over, it occurred to me how silly this whole debate is to begin with. I'm comparing apples to oranges here! I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but giraffes walk on four legs and people walk on two. The coordination required to balance on two legs has got to be significantly more sophistocated. So to even the race a little, I should be comparing a giraffe baby that can walk to a human baby that can crawl, and from what I can tell, human babies usually learn to crawl somewhere between 6 and 9 months. So if you compare a giraffe that stays in the womb for 65 weeks to a 6 month old baby that has learned to crawl, they're actually at about the same point developmentally. Of course, after that, the human leaves the giraffe in the dust by learning to do things like dance, read, operate cell phones, drive cars, etc. So in the end, I guess we are the more advanced species after all.

*I think this number is actually high, because it represents a period of 40 weeks, which technically includes 2 weeks before conception. It might be a moot point if a similar method is used in calculating animal gestation periods, but I don't know.

Blood Donations

I started donating blood in college when I realized they gave out free t-shirts. I hate needles, but I'm a sucker for freebies. I've got more blood donor shirts than I need, and they never fit anyway, but I've kept giving whenever I have the time and opportunity. My distaste for needles has lessened over time, especially when weighed against the benefit. I suppose I give blood for the same reason I stop for stray dogs...I hope that if my dog were wandering beside the road, someone would stop for her. I realize there isn't a direct correlation between me doing the right thing and someone else doing the right thing for me in the future, but I can hope.

You can't donate blood when you're pregnant, so I haven't given in almost a year. Yesterday I got a card in the mail from the red cross notifying me of an upcoming blood drive in my area. I get these periodically, but the text on this one was amusing enough that I thought I would share. I won't post the whole thing, just a couple of sentences to sum it up:

"You may have struggled with many fears the first time you donated blood. You may still struggle with those fears each time you donate. While you might be afraid of needles, someone else might be afraid of dying."

I guess they needed a nice way of saying, "Hey wuss....SUCK IT UP!!!"

The "Old Lady Paper" Revisited

I cancelled my newspaper subscription yesterday. As you might recall (but probably not), I've written here before that one of my main reasons for subscribing in the first place was to get the weekly tv schedule. Daniel thinks it's funny that I use the printed tv schedule at all and always refers to it as the "old lady paper". I've never quite understood this moniker. Are old women the only ones who want to save time in finding a tv program to watch? Do all young people these days have digital cable and satellite tv, therefor granting them access to on screen programming guides? In any case, I've always thought his depiction of my need for a printed tv guide was unfounded. At least, that's how I felt until last Sunday. That was the day I happened to be at my grandma's house for a family event. I was sitting in the living room when grandma came walking out of the front room* carrying the tv schedule. There is no tv in the front room, so I wondered why she'd bothered to take the schedule back there in the first place. As it turns out, she'd taken it back there because that's where her sewing machine is. What is the connection, you might ask? Well, before I tell you, let me remind you that the newspaper changed the format of the tv paper a while back and it no longer comes stapled together. This adds the weekly annoyance of me having to staple it together myself, which is a small inconvience, but an inconvienence none the less. As it turns out, my grandmother finds this lack of staples equally annoying, so each week, she goes to her sewing machine, and sews a line down the middle of the tv schedule. When I found this out, I enjoyed a moment of blissful validation in knowing that I was not alone in my distaste for what the newspaper was putting me through. However, this moment was quickly followed by the realization that I was sharing this moment with my 90 year old grandmother, which means that perhaps Daniel isn't completely unfounded in his characterization of my printed tv schedule.

*I have never understood why the "front room" was called the "front room" as it is actually located at the very back of the house.

Wanna hear a secret? Being a new mom is hard, ya'll! I can think of other life changing situations that are probably a lot more emotionally draining, but for sheer exhaustion and stress, this has to be up there. Keep in mind that I'm not feeling that at the moment or I probably wouldn't feel like updating this outdated blog, but there have been some rough days the last few weeks. Everyone says parenthood is so rewarding, and I'm sure it will be soon, but for now, it's more like being a personal assistant to someone who's demanding and insists you be on call all hours of the day. Then makes you get up and do things for them all hours of the day. Then forgets your birthday and doesn't even recognize you when they see you in the store. I know the day is fast approaching when that little face will look up at me and smile and it will all change. Even now, at 5 weeks, Emily can hold her focus on things, so during the short spurts when she's awake and active, she'll look with those big eyes and just stare at me for a minute.

For about a week there, Emily wasn't sleeping very well at night. Or at least, she wasn't sleeping in her crib very well. She'd fall asleep with me holding her, but would wake up as soon as I set her down. Now if it takes me more than about 30 minutes to get her to sleep in the middle of the night, I just plop down on the sofa and we sleep there for a few hours until she gets hungry again. The last week or so has been much better though. Last night, she went down at about 10:30, then woke up at 12:30, 4:45, and again at 6. Each time, she ate and went right back to sleep. It's amazing how that four hour stretch makes such a huge difference.

We've at least gotten in enough of a routine that I can get out to run errands to the grocery store or the library. We just head out after she eats and she usually falls asleep in the car then stays asleep in her seat for the duration of the trip.

I'll try to make future posts a bit more riveting, or at least have them include some cute photos. For now, I hear someone calling me....

Pregnant Women are Smug

The funniest blog I know of right now is The Bloggess. The lady who does that blog posted this link via twitter and I thought I would share it with you, because I've watched it about 10 times and it still makes me laugh. (BTW, there are a couple of lines you might not want blaring from your cubicle at work, so be forewarned.)

Pregnant Tootling

Last night while waiting in the check-out line at Walmart, I farted, completely against my will. I wasn't actively trying to stop it because, to be completely honest, I didn't know it was coming. It just hapened. If you have ever been, lived with, or spent a great deal of time with a pregnant lady, this will not completely shock you. If you think pregnancy is all glowing complexion and the beauty of new life, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but there are stinky parts too.

Pregnant or not, if you happen to accidentally fart around people, it's embarrassing. The times that this has happened to me, I play dumb. I act like nothing happened and hope I'm the only one who hear/smelled anything. Sometimes I might be right, other times people might just be polite enough to ignore it and vacate the area. Very few times will people actually call you out on this in public situations. Last night when this happened to me, there wasn't a noise to worry about, and there wasn't a room-clearing stink, but let's just said my fart added a certain aroma to the area around me. I was the last one in line, so I only had to worry about the people directly in front of me, which happened to be a mom and her son. He was about 6 years old and they were sort of joking around and talking about this and that. A few moments after I noticed the smell, the mom leaned over and whispered something to her son. Kids at that age don't always understand that when you whisper something too them, it's because you don't want the people around you to know what you're talking about, so instead of whispering anything back, he replied to whatever she said with "It wasn't me!" The mom motioned for the boy to keep his voice down, then whispered something again, to which the boy replied in the same volume, "Mom, I didn't do it!!" At this point, I could no longer pretend my tootling had gone unnoticed, but I certainly wasn't going to fess up either when I had a perfectly good scapegoat standing right there! This was the end of the mom's conversation with the boy over the topic, so I just minded my own business and pretended nothing happened.

I was telling this story to my mom later that night and we agreed that there is a definite pecking order when it comes to blame for farting. As far as I'm concerned, if a stink is discovered in the room, and someone makes mention of it, the order of blame goes as such: dogs -> young boys -> grown men -> old people -> women. I'm not saying this is the most likely order for finding out who the actual offender is, I'm just saying this is the order in which blame should be assigned. If you were to chart this progression of blame, I'm not sure where pregnant women fall, but I am pretty sure that if you were plotting actual guilt, we're probably pretty close to the top.

Slugs

At night, it's not uncommon to see a slug along one of the baseboards in my kitchen. I don't think I've ever seen more than one, but it's not always the same slug because sometimes I'll see a really little one and sometimes I see a big one. I guess they have a rotation set up. I don't know exactly where they're coming in, or why, but it might have to do with my trash can? I haven't really investigated too thoroughly.

The annoying things about slugs is that I can't kill them like other pests. If I see a spider, I step on it. If I see a wasp, I spray it from as far away as possible. If I see a mouse, I put out a trap. But what do I do with a slug? Sometimes I just throw them outside, which probably does more to frustrate the slug than it does to deter him. (I say "him", but that's not really accurate. Turns out, slugs are either hermaphrodites or females, depending on whether they've ever had their penises gnawed off.) I've heard you can set out a slug trap bated with beer, but when I tried last summer, I caught a grand total of zero slugs. I would try it again out of desperation, but we don't really drink beer, so I'd have to go to a liquor store 8 months pregnant to get a Pabst (I'm assuming slugs aren't beer connoisseurs). Plus, I don't like the idea of leaving beer out in the yard with my dog as I don't know whether she is genetically predisposed to alcoholism.

This morning when I went outside to feed my dog, there was a huge slug on the side of the house, along with two big slugs on the outer rim of my dog's food bowl. I already have an outer pan of water that the dog's food bowl sits in, but the slugs were so long and adhesive, they'd managed to cross the moat. This was the final straw. I used a stick to gather the slugs together, then went looking for the Morten girl. As soon as that salt hit the slugs, they immediately recoiled to about a third of their size. I guess this is the worst thing you can do to a slug. When I got home, they hadn't moved from their original locations, so it looked like some sort of slimy slug death camp right there on my back deck. I left the slugs where they'd died just to serve as an example to the others, but I'm not sure slugs have attained the sort of cognitive abilities required to appreciate the weight of the threat against them. I'll just have to wait and see.