4 months

Yesterday, Gabriel was four months old. It's bizarre - it feels like he has been with us for an incredibly long time, but when you actually count, it hasn't even been 125 days. So it may be true indeed: Babies grow fast. In the last two weeks, Gabriel grew by 0.5 cm to 66.5 cm, and he got heavier by 300 g, so that he weighs now 7.3 kg.
One moment last week that made me realize just how much he has changed was when I looked for a desktop wallpaper for my new laptop (which I recieved after long wait; the University of Montreal is not the most efficient place when it comes to ordering. I was very much reminded of the process by this comic). On my old laptop, I still have the picture of little Gabriel asleep on Michelle's shoulder that I posted a while ago.

For the new laptop, I chose this picture:

It's not only his looks that have changed, but also the way he interacts with the world. Here's a video from when he was one day old:

And here's Gabriel's speech on the occasion of his 4-month "anniversary" (featuring Michelle):

Learning

This week, I've had two more opportunities to try and be only parent for Gabriel. I'm learning quickly. For example, the milk has to be thawed before Gabriel gets really hungry. Once he's been crying for ten minutes or more, he has a very hard time calming down. The milk has to be around 37°C, or Gabriel will keep complaining while he eats. And there are all kinds of fun way to carry a baby (at least in my and Gabriel's opinion) that I best explore when Michelle is somewhere else.

Gabriel is learning, too. He is gradually getting better at interacting with objects: He grabs them with one or both hand and puts them in his mouth. Or at least he tries.

The above is a toy Michelle has borrowed from the Joujouthèque, a "library" that loans toys. What an excellent idea for parents who don't really need heaps of toys all over the place. Below, he is trying to eat one of Michelle's own creations: A rattle made from two sieves that enclose two bells and that are held together by multi-colored yarn. Both Gabriel and I like to play with it a lot.

Another activity Gabriel likes is touching the wall. He can spend several minutes pushing against a wall. That is good because it leaves sufficient time to call Michelle, admire Gabriel's activity, and get the camera to take pictures. He also does that with my face, which is kind of neat, except that I have to clean my glasses afterwards. I believe that he is starting to get a feel for the length of his arms, and for distance in general, rather than to explore the wall. For example, he didn't ever try to touch the light switch. Apparently, it is going to take a moment before he realizes that this is something unusual that can be manipulated.

Feeding the baby

I have been giving Gabriel the bottle almost every evening for the last two weeks. It is wonderful that I am finally able to feed my boy, too. In retrospect it was fairly easy go get Gabriel to drink from a plastic nipple, though I did worry for a while that he would refuse it. Walking around with the crying baby to calm him down, teasing his lips with the nipple, and not giving in finally did the trick.

Now, Gabriel starts making sucking motions when he sees the bottle, which is nice. However, he is tired in the evening which dramatically shortens his attention span and his ability to endure discomfort. Thus, if he's not extremely hungry, he keeps looking around while trying to drink, or he cries because of hunger and tiredness instead of drinking, so that I have to walk around with him to keep him sufficiently calm.
At any rate, feeding Gabriel seems to have quite an effect. At 3.5 months, Gabriel weighs between 6.9 and 7 kilograms and is about 66 cm tall, which puts him into the 75th percentile for weight, and 95th percentile for height (US statistics). I'm glad his weight isn't in the 95th percentile, too.

Wednesday, I have spent my first evening alone with Gabriel, since Michelle went to take a class on autism. I am glad she is able to start making contacts. While having a baby with you tends to make start talking to you, their questions are most often limited to age ("Il n'est pas vieux, non?"), sex, and name, and in a place where parties seem to mostly start around 9pm, it's hard for young parents to hang out. Fortunately, there are also local associations for young parents, where Michelle can meet people other than me and Gabriel.
Wednesday night taught me that I will be able to take care of Gabriel next week, too, when Michelle is going to be absent for two evenings - Gabriel did everything a baby his age can do to make a parent's life difficult except peeing all over me. Not on purpose, though, and when he was lying on the changing table for the second time (he usually poos about once every 2-3 days, not twice on a single evening) with a diaper so full of abysmally stinking poo that it had overflown, soiling his entire back, he was so happy and cute that I couldn't feel bad about the mess. Just a bit tired, maybe.
Michelle told me that I wasn't allowed to share a picture of a full diaper with you. All of you who don't know, or don't remember what it is like, I therefore have to invite to come here and experience the other side of feeding the baby for yourself.

Halloween

For Halloween, Gabriel decided to wear a pumpkin-bib in order to honor North American customs while staying true to his Swiss roots where Halloween is not (yet) widely celebrated.

He could easily go out to scare people. After all, he does a good impression of scary crying baby. Look at how my hair stands out!

One more novelty is that he started to like sticking his tongue out. Michelle wonders whether he's training to be a snake.

Michelle wouldn't like that too much, so she is happy that Gabriel for now rather looks like an angel than a scaly creature.

1/4th birthday!

Gabriel is three months old today.

Much has happened in the meantime. For example, on September 2, Gabriel was baptized in my hometown, Dielsdorf. We were a group of 12 people (+1 baby): The families of Michelle and me, my grandfather, Michelle's cousin Laurence, who is Gabriel's godmother, with her husband, and Peter, my best friend, who happened to be able to visit us from Berlin only on this weekend during the entire summer. He wasn't the one with the longest way home, though: My brother, Gabriel's godfather, came from Boston, where he is currently doing research at the economics department at MIT (click on the link below the photo to see the album).

From Gabriel's Baptism

There were two baptisms at the same time; the other child, Orell von Arx, was already 8 months old, and looked a bit like a teletubby in his whole-body white knitted dress. Gabriel was wearing a somewhat more stylish outfit. We carried him on a pillow on which already my dad got baptized.
After the service, we went for lunch to Regensberg, a pretty medieval town overlooking the Zürcher Unterland. It was a beautiful day.

Since then, Gabriel has been busy, mostly with eating and sleeping, though now he also coos, smiles, drools (unfortunately), fights rabbits, and he even starts trying to grab things. Not with reliable success yet, because he lacks hand-eye coordination, and overall control over the movement of his extremities.
It isn't because Gabriel has been busy that I didn't update, though. Two days after the baptism, I left for Montreal, to start my research at IRIC (which, initially, consisted of trying to figure out how to deal with the administration), and, more importantly, to find a place to live. Finally, I came upon a beautiful apartment that I almost didn't visit because I didn't think we would be able to afford it.

There are four apartments in the house; the upper left one is ours (car not included). It is a three bedroom place, though since we converted what originally was the dining room into Gabriel's room, we have now an office and a dedicated guest room, in case anyone plans a visit to Montreal. September and October were gorgeous, and there were no fires.

Our new address:
Jonas, Michelle & Gabriel Dorn
4966 Rue Jean-Brillant
Montreal, QC H3W 1T7
Canada
+1 514 227 4140

Don't call us on that number right away, it will only be valid starting November 2.

Fortunately, I'm no longer alone. Three weeks ago, I went to Switzerland to pick up Michelle and Gabriel, and on October 2, the three of us flew from Lyons to Montreal with Air Transat, the only company selling affordable one-way tickets.

There is not much to tell about the flight: Gabriel slept a lot, and since Michelle nursed him during take-off and landing, he didn't have any problems with the pressure. Because we reserved seats in the front row of economy, Gabriel had a cot in which he could spend most of the flight. His place was probably more spacious than ours: Air Transat is inexpensive partly because they stuff a lot of people into the planes. Still, we arrived without problems, and even Gabriel hardly felt any jet lag. Within two days, he was back to his schedule of eating about every 2-3 hours during the day, and then sleeping from 10pm till 6am. Good boy!

While I had found an apartment, I wanted to go buy furniture together with Michelle. Thus, we initially had to change Gabriel on a borrowed camping table, that also served as our dinner table (we cleaned it in between, of course).

Now, after a few trips to IKEA, our place is starting to look and feel much more habitable. And we have an actual changing table and a bed for Gabriel. And now that we have put all the furniture together, we finally start to have time to go and see Montreal - or to post on the blog again.

One month checkup

One day after he turned one month old, Gabriel went to the pediatrician for the first time. All went fine, even though Gabriel does not like to be naked at all, so he screamed all the way through the exam.

It turns out that he has grow very well:
Length: 55.5 cm (+4.5 cm)
Weight: 4.605 kg (+1.385 kg)
Head: 38.4 cm (+4.4 cm)

The pediatrician was very nice. She gave us a lot of information, and then patiently answered all our questions. I learned, for example, that vaccination for tuberculosis has been stopped, because it was not providing 100% protection, and made people always test positive for tuberculosis, whether they had it or not. Thus, many people have undergone unnecessary treatment (for example, when you want to get a green card, you are very likely going to have to take tuberculosis medication for 6 months most often simply because you have been vaccinated).

4 weeks

Yesterday, we applied for a passport for Gabriel. After all, in little more than a month he'll be traveling abroad for the first time. We looked at the requirements for passport photos, and we realized that we might have a hard time making pictures with the required characteristics.

None of these would be accepted, for example.

Thus, we drove to Sion and and went to a professional photo studio. We left right after Gabriel had eaten in the morning, because he usually is highly awake for quite a while after that. He was intently looking at everything while we were driving - and he fell asleep right before we parked the car. Ah, happy parents. We spent about ten minutes at the photo studio trying to wake him up so that he would open both eyes at the same time long enough so that a picture could be taken. Finally, we succeeded.

Naturally, he was wide awake by the time we left the store.

We aren't complaining, though. Aside from providing blog-material from time to time, Gabriel is really a very nice kid. And when he's slightly cranky, I am still fairly successful at singing him to sleep. Even when he isn't crying, I like to hold him - he is great entertainment, and he is a cute little oven.

Of course, when he's really hungry, there's not much daddy can do. Except to make sure Michelle is comfortable, especially when she goes through ten feedings of 30-45 minutes as has happened on Wednesday.

3 weeks

It makes quite a difference when you know in advance what your baby is going to do. On Thursday, when Gabriel was three weeks old, Gabriel had eaten normally around eight, for about 30 minutes. Instead of being content and just looking around and listening to us, as he would normally do, he started crying soon after, and it looked like he was already hungry again. That was unusual, because normally during the day, he had been eating every 3-4 hours, taking a break of ~6 hours during the night.

Fortunately, all the midwifes who had talked with Michelle about breastfeeding had told her that after 3, 6, and 12 weeks, the baby was going to have a growth spurt, for which it would need to eat more than usual. So Michelle had him feed again after less than two hours, and he was indeed hungry: He ate for another 30 minutes. Friday and Saturday, he kept up a mostly 2-hour rhythm for the entire day, though fortunately, he kept sleeping during the night. Now we're curious what he's going to do with all that food.

In the meantime, we have started to put him on his belly from time to time. Not during the night (there is too much uncertainty about the sudden infant death syndrome, SIDS), of course. Gabriel, who had almost exclusively lived on his back so far, did not enjoy the first few tries - he was just lying there with his knees pulled up and his face on the floor, totally confused that gravity was pulling in the other direction. Now he has learned that with a lot of effort and concentration he is able to turn his head, although he still gets stuck at times to his frustration.

2 weeks

Yesterday, Gabriel was two weeks old. Comparing pictures, it does look like he has changed a bit:

It's not only the way he looks, though. He is much more awake, has recently started to make noises other than crying, and has added to his repertoire of expressions.

Michelle and Gabriel have figured out breastfeeding very well by now, whether Gabriel is in front of Michelle, on her side, or lying next to her. Only when he's really hungry he sometimes doesn't have the patience to latch on properly.
He also sleeps regularly for 5-6 hours during the night, followed by another 4, so that we are not too tired. The one thing I could do without is the fear of being peed on when I change him, but as I still remember from my cousin who peed over his dad's tie right before we left for the baptism, I know that I have to be patient. At least I've always some tissue at hand, and I'm getting much faster at moving out of the wet zone.
All in all, though, my former coworker was right when he told me that kids get cuter by the day, even when they start off at a very high level.

That picture on the card

By now, many of you who are reading this blog should have received a card with this picture (we didn't send one to all our friends in the US, but sent you the link to the blog instead):

I would like to take the opportunity to credit my brother David for this cute photo. In May, my brother, who is currently doing research at the University of Chicago, was joined by my dad for a tour of Lake Michigan. Among the many sights they visited was the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, with the Au Sable Lighthouse on the southern coast of Lake Superior.

On the way there, they stumbed upon a curious rock

David quickly found two pebbles to turn the stone into a face:

Then, while my dad continued toward the lighthouse, David created the masterwork above. Fortunately for my dad, he was waiting in a magnificent area until the artist had finally caught up with him.

Happy baby - happy parents

On Thursday, Gabriel was one week old. On Saturday, he still looked cute.

Yet, he hasn't changed that much, despite the claims of some that I had to enjoy every minute with Gabriel because he would change every day. Granted, there are gradual changes, but those would actually be much more obvious if I didn't spend so much time close to him. I'm not complaining, though, to have the privilege of working an arm's length away from Gabriel.

Gabriel still spends most of his time eating and sleeping, though he is awake for longer, and he does open his eyes much more than before. He is crying when he's hungry, uncomfortable (e.g. cold), and very tired. Fortunately, it's quite easy to figure out when he's hungry: That's when he tries to suck on anything that comes close to his mouth: My finger, my shirt and the nose of people who aren't careful when they're giving him a kiss (or who don't get away from me fast enough when I'm holding a hungry baby).

One thing that has changed, though, is his weight. The midwife was very impressed when she found out that he was gaining 60 g per day, reaching his birth weight in less than a week. The normal range for weight gains is 25-50 g. This is good news for us, because it means that Gabriel is getting enough food so that we can let him sleep when he doesn't want to wake up for almost 6 hours during the night. Unfortunately, we don't get this amount of sleep every day yet. For example, when he's too tired during his 11pm/12am meal to eat sufficiently, he wakes up after 4 hours already.

The midwife who came to check on Gabriel has been visiting us at home. For both Michelle and me it was great to have someone come, have a look at Gabriel and at how we handle him, and listen to our questions and concerns. All her three visits were paid for in full by the Swiss maternity insurance. In fact, she would have come as many times as necessary during the first 10 days since birth to make sure the three of us are doing fine. I can only shake my head at the thought that it took the Swiss so long to vote the maternity insurance into existence (the Swiss voted against it in 1984, 1987, and 1999, until they finally accepted it in 2004), and I remember how not proud I was of my country when I had to try and explain to a Swedish exchange student in 1999 how the Swiss could do that. It's good to see, though, that things are improving at home.

The many faces of Gabriel

Michelle and I are slowly settling into our new life as parents. So far, Gabriel has been nice; after a meal around 11pm, he sleeps till 3 or 4am, and then again till 8am. Thus, we are able to get a reasonable amount of sleep.
He is a bit more awake now in the morning and especially in the evening, when he doesn't seem to sleep at all between feedings. He doesn't communicate a lot yet aside from indicating when he's hungry, when he's cold, and when there is too much light. Even though they aren't really conveying any particular message, it's neat to watch him go through his wide range of facial expressions, and I wanted to share this pleasure with you (click on the image to see it all).

Fourth Generation

Yesterday, my grandfather came to visit his great-grandson on yet another beautiful summer day.

He brought four Gladioli from his garden, which are quite probably the tallest flowers not only Gabriel, but also his parents have ever received.

Once Gabriel joined his parents, grandparents, and his great-grandfather, there were four generations at the table - not a very common occurrence in Switzerland.

Home!

Yesterday, Gabriel and Michelle came home.

Gabriel on his first day outside...

... accompanied by his happy mother with some of the flowers she has received...

... and finally, still asleep, in his bed at home. The white teddy, Oursinette, has been made by Michelle.

Michelle has stayed at the hospital for four days out of the five she was entitled to. Even though it was hard for me to drive home and leave Michelle and Gabriel behind at the hospital every time, I am still glad that she had the option to stay there for a bit. This allowed us to learn from the experienced nurses and midwifes how to handle the baby. For example, I bathed Gabriel twice under expert supervision, and I was glad that the second time I did most things right. A baby has lots of moving parts, which make dad's life difficult, and you can't just dunk the baby a few times to wash it.

Now that Gabriel is at home, I have the opportunity to watch him and to hold him whenever I want. According to the advocates of attachment parenting, I should not only do that, but I (or Michelle) should carry him around wherever we go.
I am generally wary of all parenting styles that come with a label, because they tend to overemphasize the labeled aspect, and I believe that this could be the case for attachment parenting, too. I have a very strong urge to hold him all the time, and once I held his little body against mine for a while, I don't want to let go of him anymore. This is supposedly good, though I believe that if I just give in to these urges, my life will revolve around Gabriel and only around him, which is neither good for him, nor for me. For one, I should not forget that am still married to that other person who gives milk to Gabriel.

More pictures

I've added a few more pictures to the album of Gabriel's first day.

The third time's a charm

As promised, here's the story:

On Wednesday, at 8pm, Michelle's water broke. Knowing that giving birth may take a while, we first finished dinner, then Michelle took a shower, while I sent out the information that "Bouton" was going to be born soon.
We arrived at the hospital at 9:30pm. Unfortunately, the assistant doctor was not able to confirm that Michelle's water had broken indeed - there was no amniotic fluid coming out anymore. While the midwife believed Michelle because of the way she described what happened, the doctor wanted to send us back home. Eventually he agreed to the midwife's suggestion that Michelle and I should go walking around for about two hours. The midwife believed that the baby's head was completely blocking the uterus, and that walking could sufficiently displace the baby to get the sanitary napkin wet.
Two hours of walking around in the city later, Michelle and I tried for the second time at 12:30am. However, the sanitary napkin was still completely dry. The midwife asked whether contractions had started, and Michelle denied. However, her belly hurt a little bit, and so we decided to still do one final check before we went back home. That was a good decision. On the monitor that recorded Bouton's heartbeat and Michelle's contractions, there were clearly visible contractions. However, there were also signs that the baby's heartbeat slowed down after the contraction peaked. This was a bad sign that indicated stress for the baby (it is much more normal that there is a deceleration of the heartbeat in sync with contractions followed by immediate recovery as contractions end - that means that the umbilical cord is being squeezed). Now, suddenly, the doctor was very alert.
Fortunately, the deceleration disappeared, and there were nice, regular contractions - one every three minutes - for the entire hour Michelle was hooked up to the monitor. Thus, instead of getting a caesarean, Michelle got admitted to the hospital, and she was given a bed around 2am.
Since contractions hurt more when she was lying down, Michelle decided to walk around. So we walked, until I got really tired (I didn't have contractions to keep me awake), and I slept for about an hour in a rather comfortable chair. We both got plenty to drink all the time, which was very nice (in the birth preparation class in San Diego we were told that all Michelle would get were ice chips from time to time).
Around 5am, the contractions went from rather painful to extremely painful, and around 6:30am, they came so quickly one after the other that Michelle didn't even have the time to take a deep breath in between. When it turned out that in the entire time since labour started, there had been no dilatation yet, it was clear that Michelle would opt for the epidural.
At 7am, she came to the delivery room for the third time. Since she had to wait for the anesthesiologist, the midwife prepared a hot bath for her. This did wonders. Michelle was able to relax, and suddenly, spacing between contractions became much longer again, and contractions weren't as painful as before. Michelle almost opted out of the epidural, though when she was lying on the bed after the bath, there was no longer any doubt that it would be a good idea to be without pain.
The epidural worked like a charm. Contractions stayed as regular as they had been during the bath, and from then on, everything went great. At 10:30, Michelle was already 5cm dilated, and at noon, dilation was complete. The baby was still quite far back, so the midwife suggested we let it move down on its own. That didn't happen, so from 12:30 on, Michelle was ordered to push. She did that very well, "as if it wasn't her first child", as the midwife said.
It was quite amazing to eventually see the head come out. I have seen babies before, but when one finally came out of Michelle, I was really amazed at the size of that head and then the body. Also, Gabriel was rather blue, though that was quickly remedied with exposing him to oxygen. He was, and is, in great health.

When we heard a midwife insist "Push! Push with all your force!" in an adjacent room a little later, Michelle and I were already able to exchange knowing looks, and a slightly tired, but happy smile.

Gabriel, age 1hr

More pictures can be found here. Story tomorrow; now I need sleep.

PS: Michelle at in the Hospital of Sion, room 518
Her phone number at the hospital: +41 (0)27 603 54 59
Visiting hours: 13-16, 18-19:30

It's a boy

Gabriel Jonas Dorn
12:52 pm
3.220 kg
51 cm

It has begun

It looks like the baby is going to be born on July 26. Michelle's water just broke.

Still waiting

Once again, we've only seen the hospital from afar (the orange building on the right side of the image).
Speculation goes on when the baby will be born. Several people suggested it would be tomorrow. Among them is the Swiss doctor, who arrived on the due date through calculation. Others reason that tomorrow is the day of St. Ann (Anne is the first name of Michelle's mother).
Personally, I like the 27^th, because 27 is 3³.

Waiting

The US due date has passed. We're still waiting. In the meantime, we have taken the opportunity to go for a little walk. We can't just bake cakes or write code all the time.


Yesterday, a database of first names for the Canton of Zurich has been published (thanks to my dad for the info!). We were glad to see that we have chosen good names for the baby. There are also first name statistics for Switzerland and France, in case you're looking for ideas, or in case you want to know the popularity of your name.

Why Bouton?

I guess I should explain where "Bouton" comes from, given that it's most likely only a few more days we will use the name.
Friends from San Diego had called their child Peanut before it was born. I still remember thinking at last year's Halloween party that it was really smart of them to have some sort of a code name to be able to refer to the baby - like us, they didn't know the sex of the baby yet.
Then, on January 31st, when we were celebrating our 4 year anniversary of our civil marriage with our best friends from San Diego, who had had their civil marriage on the exact same date, we were talking about baby names. Returning home from the excellent dinner, I suggested to Michelle that we should copy the "Peanut"-idea (incidentially, I also copied the idea with the blog from them. Smart people!).
Bouton is French for the English button, and the Swiss German chnopf. The latter can also mean little kid, which is quite fitting. Michelle liked my suggestion - after a while.

Speaking about names: In Switzerland, when you go to the hospital, you apparently have to tell them a boy's and a girl's name, even if you think you know it's a boy. Fortunately, we already know two names.

Tomorrow is the US due date. Michelle is having Braxton Hicks contractions a bit more often now. It seems that Bouton may be born at any time. I'll keep you posted!

Stroller

Michelle has been to the hospital for a checkup today. Apparently, the local doctors don't supervise the birth. Rather, this is the hospital's responsibility. Fortunately, everything is fine. Her next visit is scheduled on July 26, the Swiss due date (to calculate the due date, the Swiss seem to count every month as 30 days, unlike the Americans (July 23), who do it exactly. Who would have thought?).
Edit: A pregnancy takes an around 280 days from the first day of the last menstrual period. If you use months with 31 days to calculate the due date, it will be earlier.

In the meantime, I tried for the second time to get the stroller (Baby Jogger, because it is relatively small and accepts the Canada-approved car seat available here) from the store. On Wednesday, they had kept saying that it was ready and assembled within just another five minutes for way too long. This time, the stroller was ready. In fact, one of the assistants immediately hurried to get it when I came in. Unfortunately, the car seat didn't have any belts attached to it. At least, this gave me the time to take everything apart and put it together again. I wonder: How did people manage before strollers were high-tech machines?

On a completely unrelated topic: I have been asked to put also an image of myself onto the blog. Here you go:

Happily Pregnant

Michelle is still happily pregnant

See her happy face?