Anna and Alexis

I’ve been meaning to write a post with the different techniques I’ve come up with to deal with Anna. I should start by saying that I didn’t read much of the parenting books Leigha brought home while she was pregnant. Actually, I didn’t read any of them. My motto is: Parent from the gut. Yeah, that’s it. So whenever I made an independent discovery, I’d excitedly tell Leigha and most of the time she’d shrug and told me she knew that already. Every once in a while, I might learn something that was heretofore undiscovered by man, or at the very least, no man who had written a book that Leigha had read.

I’d like to more regularly share these discoveries. Below are a couple that I thought were interesting for the first post.

• No blink reflex - This I discovered a while back but recently confirmed is still the case. My daughter has absolutely no fear of incoming objects, at least when you define fear as blinking. She is not someone with whom you want to play chicken. I’ve tried approaching her eyes at various velocities and angles but she only appears to blink when my finger has already made contact with her eyeball, not a second before. With all the other reflexes she has going on, I’m surprised this isn’t one of them. This leads me too…
• Wind reflex - She’s not afraid of fingers/balls/keys rapidly approaching her face, but if you get some wind moving over her head, she hunkers down like she’s in the middle of a hurricane: closes her eyes, shuts her mouth (even if she’s frantically wailing), puts out her arms… “BRACE FOR IMPACT!!!” her body seems to yell. Leigha shared this with Stephanie and I was shocked to find out my discovery was well known. I already had the patent application written and everything….
• Hypnotism - At least that’s what I call it. It probably isn’t far from the truth. One of my most reliable ways to get her to calm down or fall asleep is to strobe light across her face (at a very low frequeny, about 1-2hz). What  I do is stand with my back to a strong light source, hold her in the hammock position, and rotate my hips so that her face moves in and out of the shadow cast by my torso. This seems to works best with strong directional lighting than with soft diffuse lighting

I have lots more where that came from but I have to go experiment some more now.

It’s been a while since we put some video content up, so last night I decided to whip something together. This is based on the footage we’ve taken since the first “Meet Anna” video, which isn’t a whole lot of footage. There’s some scenes from her first bath and the rest is mostly from us lazing about. It’s about 5 minutes long, and 18mb in size.

View video

Like Lewis Black said:

The great thing about America is that anyone can be president,
and the worst thing about America is that anyone can be president.

That’s not entirely true, since I can’t be President, but the good news is my daughter can. (Click for larger image). She got her social security card too. Only 7 weeks old and she’s already more legal than Vlad. Now let’s see how long it takes before she starts getting credit card offers…