Category: Baby

All 7 lbs, 14 oz of him, after a short, drug-free (4:48) labour that I’m getting more and more fond of with several days to mull it over. 🙂

I’ll be password-protecting most of the baby posts, so leave a comment if you’re friends & family and haven’t received the password yet. (Sorry to internet friends, but we’re limiting the password posts to people we know in real life.) Also, Kevin’s started a photo blog here.

Such happiness.

Our box of cloth diapers arrived! This is 33 size small Fuzzibunz, and six extra hemp inserts for overnight:

They are really the cutest little things, and they feel great. Here’s one all snapped up:

There’s a whole grid of snaps on the front, and the plan is that these should last somewhere past six months, and then we can move up to the medium size which last many kids through toilet training. This brand seems to get the most kudos for fitting babies regardless of how chunky or skinny they are (hopefully all of the online reviews are right), and I’m so glad that they have snaps and not velcro for all of the laundering.

The outside is some sort of PUL fabric (it’s coated on the inside but feels quite lovely and soft on the outside) in pretty colors, and then the inside is fleece.

This style is called a pocket diaper, because there’s an opening in the top of the back where you put an insert (the ones that come with it are terry and microfiber, but you can use others as well, like our hemp ones). As they’re used, you separate the insert and cover and put both in the diaper pail. Then after the laundry is done, you put the inserts back in and they’re ready to wear again. (Somewhat time-consuming, but I wonder if that will become something we barely notice or if we’ll begrudge the effort?)

We’ll use disposables until we’re past the umbilical cord stage, then switch to these. I’m all pleased that they’re washed and ready to go – it felt like one of the last remaining things that needed to be taken care of.

My family all went to Brown – my parents (classes of ’73 and ’75) met there, and then I went (‘03), as did my sister (’05) and my brother (’07). It’s made me happy that Kevin (MIT) and I met right before senior year, so that he could get a good dose of the school before I graduated and moved on. So fast forward to pregnancy and when we knew it was a boy and weren’t forthcoming with a name, my dad dubbed him Bruno (an affectionate nickname for the Brown Bear – the school mascot). All of which is to say that I was very, very amused when college friends of Kevin’s surprised us with an amazing pack n play, and we opened the box to find this:

Brown and red, and with adorable little bears hanging from the sunshade:


We might as well employ the brown band to march around the nursery, playing Ever True. 🙂

Aside from the happy colors, it has all sorts of great features. We were planning on eventually getting a basic, cheap version (just the frame and the pad), but this has a bassinet for while he’s little, vibration and sounds, and a changer that folds out:


Neat! For the moment, it’s living in the otherwise empty nursery. We have the crib and shelves waiting to be assembled in the garage, but the carpet guys installed things incorrectly in that room, and so we’re waiting to set things up until they come out and redo it (eta: still unknown). Since we were planning to have him sleep in a bassinet in our room for the first little while anyway, it’s not seeming like a huge parenting failure to me, but it will be nice once we can finally have that room pulled together.