Where Are My Teeth?

Water Budget

Over at Baghdad Burning there's a post about the what the lack of running water does to your psyche. We're pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum here -- since Charlie got home, it's been an ongoing battle to throw as much water away as we can.

Humidity in the shop, which is heated to all of 45 degrees, is 17 percent. According to this handy calculator that same air warmed to 70 degrees would have a relative humidity of 7 percent. Charlie's nasal passages and lungs wouldn't have a chance (and neither would ours).

So:

In the living room, a wicking humidifier with two tanks of 1.5 gallons each, refilled roughly once a day.

In the den, ditto, plus a 1.5-gallon heated-water humidifier, refilled every twelve hours.

In the bedroom, ditto plus a 2-gallon piece-of-crap heated-water unit refilled every couple of days because it bubbles water all over the floor on any but the lowest setting. And we leave the bathroom doors open and the exhaust fan off when we take showers.

What's the result of pumping close on 10 gallons of water a day into the air of our house? A tropical 40% humidity in the bedroom and 30 in the den. Oy.

(A quick back-of-the-keyboard calculation suggests that our house leaks air like a sieve. A generous 700 cubic meters of warm air should hold no more than 2 gallons of water, so -- ignoring condensation on the windows and inside the walls -- the air in the house is turning over every four or five hours. No wonder we keep almost running out of heating oil.)

Unmediated Emotion

Charlie's face can't really show anything but what he's feeling at the moment (or at least what his neurons and muscles translate those feelings into). So it's interesting to see the range of concentration, surprise, anger, frustration, resignation, anticipation that he can display. I like it when he gets a look like some kid in a comic strip about to pull a prank, or when he shrugs his shoulders and heaves a tiny enormous sigh of resignation. I have no idea what's going on inside his head as his face displays all of these expressions, but whatever it is, I'm pretty sure he's not putting it on.

Multitasking

All I need is Skillet on my lap to complete the picture. And whoever invented this sling has my everlasting gratitude. Charlie got his monthly vaccine shot today and is kinda tuckered out, waking only to eat and then for just a little at a time. (We've stopped worrying if he's getting enough to eat -- this morning's weighing came in at 10 pounds three ounces.)

Catch-22

If only Charlie could sleep standing up.

Reflux means that whenever he goes to sleep on his back, the leaking stomach acid starts him squirming and spitting and wakes him up. In a bad mood. Sometime feeding makes him feel better, sometimes it makes him feel worse.

He's much more comfortable sleeping on his stomach, but you're really not supposed to put babies on their stomachs to sleep. Given Charlie's earlier habits (since outgrown but still very much remembered) even a small additional risk that he might stop breathing does not make for peace of mind.

So we've adopted a compromise for the time being: After he eats, Charlie goes to sleep, stomach down, on one of us. It's comfy all round, even if it does pretty much preclude ever doing anything else.

Chief cook and bottle washer

OK, assistant cook and bottle washer. I never really thought much about what that last term meant until now.

I'm sure that any woman of the past century or twenty would laugh at my naivete: I'm fascinated, in a sort of mouse-and-cobra way, with living from dishpan to dishpan Every time I go into the kitchen I do the mental arithmetic on how many hours worth of bottles and nipples and lids are still clean. Charlie is on a nominal four-hour schedule, and we have six four-ounce Avent bottles in play, plus about eight 60cc preemie bottles culled from the NICU that we use for milk mixed with medications or for snacks. There's an absolute minimum of three of those a day. Oh, and the syringes (three a day or six if we want absolute precision on the iron supplement)) and the miscellaneous parts, for washing of.

Joyous is the day when there are enough plates and glasses in the dishwasher to justify running a load of bottles and bits; otherwise it's the tub and gloves and gallons of hot soapy water and a quarter-scale sponge. And as I wash, I count and think: this will get us through 8 tomorrow morning or: this will get us past the afternoon feeding and dinnertime. I try to hold off on the washing, if I can, until that last or more safely second-to-last Avent bottle has been guzzled from.

I suspect it's a sign of the state I'm in that I can find things like this not only fascinating but demanding of most of the logistical thinking I can muster....