Vignettes

By contrast with the nightmare of yesterday (weeping and despair) today is marvelous. Wren is napping on my lap while I type over his head. I had take-out Thai for lunch and the Listening Mothers group was funny and therapeutic as always. Here's the update.

Sleeping and Pooping
Wren slept well last night. He went down [the windy trail to sleepbunny land] at 10pm and slept till 2am, then woke again at 5am and finally at 7am... BUT..(there has to be a but) I had a mild case of insomnia and didn't take advantage of the second three hours.

It was kind of funny. Wren hasn't been pooping on his normal schedule. He isn't constipated but he has started doing a very large poop once daily. Yesterday he didn't do one at all so Joshua and I were waiting for it. When it didn't come by bedtime we were thinking he would poop in the night. Sure enough, Josh thought he heard the giant poop around 2am so he got up to deal with it. I said I would help. So, both of us end up in Wren's room wrestling him out of his swaddle, his PJ's and his diaper to find... nothing!

He did this again around 5am - another false alarm. He finally pooped mid-morning and managed to shoot it up his back. Ugh. I am sure he felt better afterwards.

I wonder whether all this changing behaviour - less pooping, less napping, more vocal, more active - is something developmental as he approaches 3 months. Perhaps he is shaping his world?

Next Cardiolog Appointment Scheduled
Wren's next echo is on April 23rd at noon.

The Man Who Loves Hummingbirds
To pick up lunch, I snuggled Wren up in the sling and covered his head with one of Josh's stockingcaps. It was spitting rain and a swarm of starlings were shrieking in the big-leaf maples still brown from fall. As I looked up I noticed yet another hummingbird feeder. The stroll to the Thai Restaurant takes me through the neighborhood of "hummingbird city" where a man has hung hummingbird feeders on every tree and on every eave - not just his own. They are clear plastic tubes with lurid scarlet openings meant to simulate a blossom.

We met him one afternoon pouring sugarwater into a row of feeders from a large bucket. When we asked what he was doing he said he was feeding hummingbirds, that it was a critical period in late winter because the hummingbirds have babies then, that each bird had a small territory so there would be different hummingbirds feeding from different feeders up and down the street, that it was a lot to manage. We counted at least 25 of them in his and neighbours yards. He was about 55, was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and has built an ornamental fountain in a raised cinderblock pond in his front yard. Oh, and he collects bowling balls. His wife told us that he drilled holes in the bottom of 30-odd bowling balls and glued a length of rebar in each so that he could arrange them as borders in the garden. Frost thinks they are fantastic. There is a whiff of outsider art to it - something children love more than adults, whimsy, foolish but compelling. He is very territorial about it much like one of the birds he describes feeds in his fiercely systematic way.