Today was the first time that Anna was tired enough to sleep on my shoulder. She fell asleep while waiting for me to make her a bottle. Normally she’d only sleep when I’m holding her hammock style, but tonight her little head gave out while vertical. I had Leigha take a picture but the lighting wasn’t great since I didn’t want to wake her up. She was so tired that she slept a whole 10 minutes before waking up and remembering she was hungry.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that infants are not more sapient than they let on, and for our current purposes, to ill effect. When she’s doing something cute, I’ll go get the video camera. In these cases, she’ll stop doing whatever adorable thing she was doing and just stare at the camera intently (I have a lot of footage of Anna just staring at the camera). It will be around the first of the month, when we do Anna’s monthly picture. She might be in a perfectly cheerful mood but as soon as I get the camera set up she’s Miss Cranky Pants.
One of our tricks when we’re trying to take these pictures and she’s being uncooperative is to let her suck on the binky, hit the timer on the camera, and just at the last second, pull the binky out. This generally leads to amusing photos where she has this “What the hell is going on?” look on her face. Since we don’t have time to review them as we go, we usually take a couple dozen pictures and hope one of them is usable, or at least, not completely awful. This leads to a lot of trade-offs. “Anna look cutes but I blurry.” “Anna is blurry but I like my smile better.” If I look stupid/blurry/ridiculous in any of the pictures, it’s because I lost the argument over which picture we should publish.
I just uploaded four pictures from Anna’s fourth month extravaganza to the gallery. Enjoy.
Some people have been asking how to get hard copies of the pictures we upload. The easiest way is when you are looking at a picture, in the upper left hand corner there is a link that says “Process this photo with shutterfly”. If you click on that link it will add the picture to a shopping cart on shutterfly.com. You can then proceed to pay (the purple “Next” button at the upper right), or you can return to the gallery to find more pictures (with the “Add more pictures” button, underneath the “Next” button). You willl want to print as many pictures in a single order as you can. The cost is about $.19 per (4×6) print + $1.79 shipping.
Almost all of the pictures we upload are printable in fairly large sizes, but the largest we’ve ever printed is 11×14. If you print something larger let us know how it turns out.
Recently Anna started grabbing onto the bottle while we feed her, and very recently she has been able to hang on to it after the feeder lets go. Last night was the first time I put her in her crib mostly awake (but tired) and she was able to put herself to sleep. At this rate I fully expect that within a year or two she will have gotten a job and either gotten her own place or started paying rent.
I was pretty pleased with my “pun”. It’s the Fourth of July and Anna’s fourth month living with us (outside the womb anyway). We took our traditional photos today and I’ll be uploading them as soon as Leigha and I have a chance to go through them. In the process, Leigha noted that we hadn’t taken any pictures of Anna since the three-month milestone. It puzzled me too until I realized that we take a lot more video than we do pictures. It’s a tricky business because video is more expressive, you get a lot more of Anna’s personality, but in terms of being able to please the audience it takes a lot more work on our part (as opposed to just uploading some pictures).
I’m going to try to take more pictures during this month, but no promises. Also we have already started noodling out the next video and hopefully I can have that done around mid-month.
But enough about us, what about Anna? Well, at the risk of jinxing ourselves, she has been sleeping really good the last several nights. We invested in a light-blocking shade and that seems to let her sleep well past sunrise. She has been eating a lot more too. For the last several weeks she’s been getting an 8 oz bottle before bed and she rarely has trouble finishing it.
She’s been giggling up a storm lately when Leigha and I play with her. She seems to really like when you loudly blow into her tummy or “gnaw” on her hands. She liked being bounced up and down while landing on her feet as well. Lately Anna has been making efforts to sit up, but she’s still a little too wobbly to sit up unassisted. We installed her door jumper earlier this month but she definately didn’t have the stamina to even just stand there. It more or less turned into a swing.
That’s the news for now, I’ll post again once the pictures are uploaded.