In the system

The last couple of days have been filled by a rapidly more entertaining Mira, growing more conscious of her surroundings (I think she has gotten much better at focusing!), smiling at us for extended periods (for non bowel pushing reasons) and becoming more vocal (in both acute and benign ways). She continues to gain weight, we do not own a scale (who wants to live in fear of knowing ones weight) but purely on how she carries herself in her clothes. She has also continued her intermittent fussiness. While we still have not really figured out why, we suspect that this may be a multifactorial problem requiring years of data collection and many samples to accurately assess causality.

Perusing pubmed there seem to be some interesting articles that address the role of crying in mammals and means to evaluate communication cues by parents. These shed light onto crying as an important tool in a babies development and while it may be hard for a parent to listen to, there are ways to identify why the child is crying and try to resolve the situation. Further, excessive bouts of crying can lead to undue stress, strain relationships and trigger the onset of postpardum depression thus understanding how to alleviate crying and cope with the repercussions are critical tools for young parents. What we have learned thus far about communication is that it is really important (perhaps adults can take a page from this). Before a child is capable of communicating using language it seems to be really helpful to expose them to sign language as a means to facilitate communication and prevent frustration due to failure of communication.




Sleeping and then...



Fighting until she is completely out of energy, she collapses into a deep sleep.



On another note, Mira has received her paperwork from The Man. Will she be a productive member of society? Some predict that she will be a dog show judge (Thanks Faryn & Eli!! wrybaby: mysterio predicts) but honestly could Coco drive her to see perfection in dogs? Only time will tell.