Juergensen Family Blog

We’ve entered a very cool phase of parenting: The Smile. Zoe now smiles frequently, looking as happy as could be at the sight of nothing more exciting that just Mom or Dad’s face. (Actually, Mom gets the biggest smiles, but that’s not surprising – little Z know what side her bread is buttered on.) Today the smiles were really flowing, and not just because the Steelers won. For both Mom and Dad, Zoe actually stopped drinking from her bottle in order to break out into a smile. To understand what a big deal this is, you have to know how much she LOVES her milk. Generally if you remove it even for a second a screeching cry follows immediately, so for her to stop drinking on her own just to smile is pretty amazing.

And not only is she smiling and laughing (that whacked crazy baby cackle-laugh), but she sleeps through the night almost every night now – her new record is 10 1/2 hours straight! All in all, just an awesome time.

So today we had a very cool first with little Z. As we’ve done countless times in our pre-parenting past, we went to lunch together. As in, went out to lunch together, to a cute little local place called The Stock Pot. This is the first time we’ve taken Zoe to a grown-up place (i.e., somewhere other than Babies R Us, where a screaming infant is likely to draw cold stares of reprobation). And I have to confess, I was very skeptical. Ok, I actually thought the whole thing was a really Bad Idea. Zoe is not so good at sitting still long enough to get through a whole meal at a restaurant. And our first attempt… well, we didn’t actually get all the way outside, with the front door behind us, before she started crying. Vindicated, I felt! After about ten minutes, though, we were still (surprise) hungry. We’d set her down in the car seat (which, as it turns out, is the single best place to set little Z down in the hopes of getting her to settle down), and she completely chilled out, and almost went to sleep. So we thought, although we’re not driving, there’s nothing that says we can’t carry the car seat over. And off we went.

The first ten or fifteen minutes sitting in the restaurant, with a nuclear cry bomb p0ised to go off at any second, had to be among the most terrifying of our lives. I think we said a dozen words between us, half of which were “uh”. But Zoe clicked right in to the whole being out in the big, bouncy world thing, checking out the legs of passerbys, until she decided to nap. And so we had our first meal together outside of the house. Such a small thing, and yet I don’t know the last time I’ve felt so completely liberated. Ah, we can see normal life approaching again.

Zoe started the new year off with a bang by hitting a key milestone: 8 hours of consecutive sleep! She slept from 11:15 pm to 7:15 am, leaving Deb pretty excited. (John was happy too, because he has night duty this weekend.)