Son of the sea

One of the reasons I chose the name Dylan was because it is easily pronounced in both English and Italian (OK, they say something like "D-Lawn" but I can live with that). I also liked the name Ian and I emailed that to Cristiano at work one day shortly after we found out that we were having a boy. He emailed me back telling me it was a name he didn't know but he liked it. He came home and told me, "Yes, I like the name 'Yawn' too. 'Yawn Cugini.' Has a nice ring to it." No, no. I was not going to have a kid whose name was pronounced "Yawn" by Italians. What won me over on the name Dylan was the meaning. It means "son of the sea" in Welsh. I thought that was perfect as Dylan was to be born in a country surrounded by seas. Cristiano loves the sea, as do I. Today kicks off a big holiday weekend in Europe. Mom, papà and the son of the sea are going to the beach in Tuscany. I have a cold and my usual spring stress cough but what can you do? Maybe some relaxation and sea air will do this tired famiglia good. We need it. See you when we get back.

Fussy

Dad made a rare appearance at lunchtime today. Dylan was on the fence deciding whether he was going to be in a good mood or going to be fussy (video below).


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Fussiness won out - as it all too often does - and dad spent his lunch walking Dylan around in the sometimes successful "colic carry" while his pasta got cold.


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Rain redux

Yes, it's still raining here. I'm struggling to find exciting things we can do indoors. There's only so much time an infant can spend on the tummy-time mat or in his bouncy chair. Today Cristiano's parents, aunt and cousin Luana leave for a week on the beach in Sharm El Sheikh. That means my team of babysitters will be away and I won't get my two hours of "me time" (in which I do laundry, clean the house, grocery shop and cook dinner; sigh - $31,500 spent on that Master's degree down the tubes) in the afternoon. And with rain forecasted through Thursday, I may start climbing the walls. Dylan and I have a nice little pattern going now. No, he's still not (grrrr) sleeping through the night. Nowhere near it. But he now eats about five times a day (not counting the unpredictable night feedings, obviously), and I can plan the day around that. I can also almost always anticipate when he's going to get fussy and try to quickly change scenery (changing scenery can mean going to change a diaper or putting lotion on his baby eczema) so as to avoid hours pacing the house with a screaming infant. Today he is looking especially cute. I'm posting two videos below. In one he's just "kickin' it" (literally - he's always got his legs going!) and in the other he's making various perplexed faces. I think he often doesn't look like himself in pictures but the second video is very him. Observant BabyCugini readers may have noted that he continues to lose his hair and is well on his way to being bald!

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Rainy day activity

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Coming to America!!!

Last year Baby Cugini came to the U.S. in bun-in-the-oven form. This year, he'll be there live and in the flesh ready for his first (pureed?) bagel. We bought our tickets to the U.S. yesterday! We fly into New York on July 23 and return to Milan on August 22. Cristiano's parents and cousin Luana will meet up with us in the U.S. in Ohio eight days later. We have not nailed down exactly where we will be and when but most likely we are coming to a city near you so clear your calendars! Dylan was getting into the mood yesterday.

Someone dressed me (not mom) and forgot to button my pants

I'm getting a little big to be hanging out in the Boppy

New-bed effect

I don't want to jinx anything but we've been seeing a little bit more sleep (like one night this week I DID sleep four straight dreamless hours - the next night Dylan was up all night again though...) since we turned Dylan's bassinet into the crib. We are grappling with the whole self-soothing thing (trying to put him into bed drowsy so he will learn to fall asleep on his own and trying to cut down on his falling asleep on the breast or while being rocked). We do a lot of picking him up, comforting him and putting him back down only to have to pick him up again a minute later because he's screaming. It's exhausting physically and mentally but I've seen enough Nanny 911 episodes to know I don't want a 7-year-old sleeping in our bed while one of us has to sleep on the couch, so we are trying to instill good habits now. It's not easy and I understand why people have a hard time following through. I'm morally opposed to the cry-it-out method. At least for a three-month-old. Talk to me in six months and if I'm still not sleeping, I may have changed my mind.

Cibo

I've always been very gadget-y. I'm not necessarily an early adopter but I've always been covetous of technological things. If I had my way, I'd have the below.

Unfortunately it would serve no real practical purpose for someone who spends her days breastfeeding and changing crappy diapers. Even when I go back to work next month, I'll be working from home, so an iPhone would be a mere luxury. I have Internet access here and if anyone wants to reach me, they can call me on my home phone, my cell phone or Skype. Below is my latest gadget:

It's a baby food maker! Why not use a blender, you say? Because with a blender you end up dirtying pots and pans because you first have to boil things before blending them. And blenders leave air pockets, and air pockets can mean upset baby stomachs. With my baby food maker, I just dump everything in the device no boiling required, decide on consistency (completely pureed, strained, steamed, etc.) and press a button. My pediatrician told me I can begin Dylan on solids at the end of this month, but I'm going to wait. I am following the Anglo recommendations, which include waiting until birth weight has doubled and the baby is able to sit up properly in a high chair. I'm also going to start with rice cereal (grinding my own in the baby food maker - yes, I'm nutty!) as opposed to fruit, which is what they start with here. I read that if you start off with sweet things, it's difficult to transition the baby to more savory foods later. I'm getting a headstart on this because, quite frankly, I need a new project.

One of the things I like in Italy is that children eat the same food adults do. When you go to a restaurant, there are no special menus with kid-friendly junk foods. Granted, I don't see me pureeing up rabbit (sold in the supermarkethere whole, skinned and with the eyes that stare up at you - one of the many reasons I avoid the meat section) for Dylan but I'd like him to be exposed to and have a love for a variety of foods.

Rewind. Where it all began...

I know this is probably TMI. I know sometimes I overshare. So I hope I'm not offending anyone's sensibilities when I just let you all know that Dylan, uh, came about on this day last year. The thing was that a Baby Cugini blog - much less a baby Cugini - was the furthest thing from anybody's mind. If somebody had told me last April 7 that a year from then I would have had a near three-month-old, I would have never believed it. Here I am on that fateful morning (pic above). We were in a pretty hilltop town for our friends' wedding. I was enjoying my continental breakfast and probably thinking, "Weekends away. I like weekends away. Mmm, weddings mean champagne. I like champage." Little did I know that in just a few short weeks, I'd begin feeling strangely nauseated and NOT because I was training too hard for a half marathon. Mamma mia, how life changes! But we wouldn't have it any other way for all the weekends away or all the champagne in the world. Baby Cugini, you are a true force of nature!

My baby is growing up (in some ways)

Quick newsflash from cranky-land. Sleep deprivation is still the name of the name of the game. In fact, we seem to be regressing instead of moving anywhere toward "sleeping through the night." Lots of red-faced screaming when it's time to go to sleep. Lots of waking up in the middle of the night. Lots more red-faced screaming when it's time to go back to sleep after eating. Lots of pacing the house with a screaming 13-pound baby at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. I'm convinced that the prisoners in Guantanamo get more sleep and are exposed to less psychological warfare. Four straight hours of uninterrupted sleep would be paradise at this point. That's our goal right now.


Here are a few pictures of Dylan in his bassinet in a rare moment of peaceful slumber. He is awake day and night and is quite literally driving us mad but he gets exponentially cuter by the day. Don't you agree? The bassinet was supposed to last 100 days. It lasted 85. We wake up every morning to find him with his feet hanging out the end. Today we turn it into a crib. Hopefully this bodes well for more sleep for all of us...

Too cranky to post any pics

I keep running into people who tell me they have babies that simply mangiano e dormono. I hate these people and feel violentally jealous of them. Unfortunately, my baby doesn't just "eat and sleep." He eats. A lot. He cries. A lot. He fusses. A lot. He sleeps. Sporadically and whenever he damn well feels like it and usually not at times when I could catch a nap myself, such as when I am pushing him in the stroller or when we are driving down the street. On good nights he wakes up twice. On bad nights he wakes up every hour. We are approaching 12 weeks and I thought he was supposed to be sleeping through the night by now. In these 12 weeks I have never ONCE woken up feeling refreshed and rested. Not once. I'm hitting my breaking point. I feel I will go the way of the woman whose husband and baby we ran into in the mall a few weeks ago.

We were in the mall looking for a birthday gift for Cristiano's dad. Cristiano and Dylan went ahead of me and as I went to catch up with them I noticed Cristiano was talking to another dad who was pushing a baby in the same stroller we have. It was one of those moments that initially seemed really cute but then kind of weirded me out. These two dads were talking performance and sort of "kicking the tires" of each other's strollers. Apparently this guy was pushing his kid around the mall so the mother could sleep as the baby had never slept through the night and the mother was - in his words - "absolutely destroyed." The dad said "We have to be out by 1 p.m. and she won't let us come home before 5:30 p.m." This baby was seven months old! And as the dad rolled away with his kid in our same stroller, he said, "Just wait until vaccinations. They sleep even worse after..." This was a few days before we were set to get Dylan's first vaccinations. Am I destined to only get unbroken sleep for a few hours on Saturday afternoons? Is Cristiano destined to spend his Saturday afternoons pushing Dylan aimlessly around the mall because I've locked them out until a set hour?