Newborn Maeve at Five Weeks: One-Month Check-Up, My Birthday and More

Happy parents Carrie and Joe with our 5-week-old daughter Maeve. We don’t have a lot of photos of the three of us together… this one was taken by Carrie’s brother Bob earlier today.

It’s been a relatively uneventful week for baby Maeve, born July 30th 2013, about to turn five weeks old as I post this. Yesterday, my wife Carrie posted some of her thoughts at one month. I am going to post briefly with plenty of photos and a few thoughts. I’ve been posting weekly updates on my our daughter’s progress, find earlier ones here.

Maeve sure looks cute when she’s sleeping and moving around

Baby Maeve at Two Weeks: Sleeping, Breastfeeding, and Being Wonderful

Maeve relaxing somewhat during a diaper change. She’s glorious!

I am trying to get in the habit of posting weekly with the progress of our precious young daughter Maeve, born July 30th 2013 – entering her 14th day as I write this. My wife Carrie and I each posted our accounts of her birth, here and here, respectively. I did an update at one week, here.

I am not going to guarantee any great parenting guru insights in these weekly posts. There are perhaps a few interesting thoughts, but it’s mostly a sort of electronic scrapbook that we can look through and share with others (especially our family and friends on the west coast.) I hope to keep posting a lot of photos of her – all the photos here are from this past week (click on images to enlarge.) Perhaps if Carrie and I post frequently enough, we’ll be able to see some of the arc of Maeve’s growth. Perhaps I will get too busy to keep posting as long or as frequently. I may to try to shift to a shorter format – getting short pieces out sooner. Maybe Carrie and I will write some stuff together. We’ll see.

Week two wasn’t radically different than week one. The new normal felt a tiny bit more routine… but Maeve is still doing lots and lots of sleeping and breastfeeding. In between these major pursuits, she takes time out to look around the room a lot. It seems like she’s just a bit more squirmy. During a lot of week one, she was sleepy and content in seemingly any position; now she wants to sit up when she’s laying down, or lie down when she’s sitting. She doesn’t like to be face down on my chest any more (awwww) because when I do this she goes into feeding mode: she smacks her lips, sometime bops around trying to find my non-existent milk-filled breast, then looks around for her mom. Week two she’s looking to her mom for comfort – maybe I just didn’t notice this in the whirlwind of week one. 

Some Musings Seven Days into the Baby Maeve Era

Maeve sleeping – which she does a lot (see below), with Carrie’s hand to help show size

Our beautiful baby girl Maeve turned 7 yesterday. 7 days that is.

She’s a newborn. I wrote my take on her birth story here. She’s doing fine. Her primary purposes in life are: breast feeding, pooping, peeing, and sleeping. Frequently she tosses in a bit of hiccuping, arm/leg flailing, grunting and looking – all for good measure.

I am not sure what format is going to work to blog about Maeve… I figure I will start with a couple paragraphs as a sort of status report, then write some not-all-that-deep thoughts about some things I’ve been noticing.

Mom’s Art 1: Stockholm Drawings

Riksdaghuset (Parliament Building in Stockholm, Sweden), drawing by Marge Linton, done in the late 1950s, pencil on paper, about 8.5″x11″

Here are a couple of pencil drawings that my mother did during her junior year abroad in Stockholm. Margaret Gerhardt Linton 1937-2011, then Margaret Eunice Gerhardt – mom – was a junior at Occidental College, she studied abroad for a year, during which she traveled quite a bit through various countries in Europe. 

Mom’s House (part 3)

(This is the third part of three – if you’re interested, start with part 1 then part 2.)

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This third post is sort of journey through my sketches of mom’s home – first interiors, then exteriors – each group in chronological order, oldest to newest.

Mom's Den - 1987 pencil on paper in sketchbook 12, 11"x17"

This one is my mom’s den nearly a quarter-century ago. It’s roughly the same view as this image. The glass table on the wooden sled thingie was in the middle of the den most of the time while mom’s four kids were growing up. When the grand kids started walking around, mom swapped it out for more of a wooden trunk thing. The configuration changed a bit then – the chair on the far left moves to the right, and the couch was moved to the be along the plate glass window in the background.

I remember mom didn’t really like this drawing, because it has a big messy pile of newspapers – in the middle left next to the chair.

Mom's Den 1987 pen on paper in sketchbook 12, 8.5"x11"

This one is slightly oddly cropped. That’s a TV in the bottom right. Sitting atop it, in addition to a couple of bowls, is a painting of mom. The painting also features my sister Liz, though she’s cut off. It’s an oil painting that I really like – one of my best, I think. There’s another painting on the ground, too, visible in the middle center of the painting. That one is a self-portrait – me. And of course, lots of books, which I wrote about a bit here.