7 Weeks Old

Noelle is now 7 weeks old and we're all a little better adjusted to family life. During the early weeks, Noelle often had 2-3 hour crying (screaming) spells in the evening. These have thankfully turned just generally fussy periods. We have learned that baby girl still gets over-stimulated very easily... even spending some time in a friend's apartment in our building for a few minutes seems to be a lot for her. So, we're trying to keep things mellow until her tolerance for stimulation increases.

The final thing that has really helped is getting her to sleep ASAP when she starts to show signs of being tired. Most of the time, she's hardly awake for an hour before it's time to put her down for a nap. Her naps, during the day, are all about an hour to an hour and a half. One nap, the early afternoon one, will be a little longer. A nice side effect of this is that Alex has been able to get some work done at home, so he's spending some more time hanging around during the day. Sometimes, he has a little helper! The 'morning nap' picture below is her in bed next to me right now, as I play around on the computer =)

Dad's little helper

Morning nap time

Happy Halloween

Considering we were housebound with baby duty, we had a very busy Halloween. Our friend Pete, from Cornell, came to visit. Pete came down to LA on his motorcycle from San Francisco, where he is currently working on his PhD at Berkeley. It's always wonderful to see fellow A&EP (applied & engineering physics) alumna. Pete has been much better about visiting us in LA than we have been about visiting him in San Francisco =)

Traditional Halloween antics ensued, with some very serious pumpkin carving. The finished product was impressively scary. Given this is Noelle's first Halloween, Alex and I couldn't resist having a little fun with her... seeing if she would fit in the pumpkin. It wasn't her favorite part of the day. After all of that visiting and parent shenanigans, she was one tired baby!

Noelle's first crush!

 Serious business, pumpkin carving

The finished product

Pumpkin Baby

Passed-out Baby