Eleanor and I have been playing a little game. During most of the day, when either girl wakes up, we’ll check her diaper, feed her, burp her, and hold her a while until she looks sleepy enough to fall asleep. Twice a day, between 11:00 and 2:00 and again between about 5:00 and 9:00, they’ll refuse to sleep. With Eleanor, we’ll give her a pacifier and she’ll seem content. That is, until she spits it out one minute later. Then she starts some fast, panicked breathing followed shortly afterwards by a cry. If I don’t put the pacifier back in her mouth, she really starts crying. So, I’ll pick up her pacifier, put it back in her mouth, and hold it there with a finger so that it doesn’t pop out again right away. She settles down, closes her eyes and starts a rhythmic sucking. Five sucks, some quiet breathing, five more sucks. Then, when it looks safe, I’ll leave her side and try to eat lunch or dinner. A minute later, she’ll spit it out and start crying again. We’ll do this for hours until it’s time for her to eat again.

I’ve tried staying by her side to see what’s going on. Sometimes, she moves her hand next to her cheek and with a sudden motion fling the pacifier out of her mouth. Other times, she’ll get tired, yawn, and the pacifier falls out. The most confusing one is where she’s happily sucking away and then she’ll spontaneously just spit it right out.

The solution would seem to be to just continue holding her, but then we would never eat since this only seems to happen during lunch and dinner. We’ve tried letting her cry for a bit to see if she’ll stop, but she doesn’t. She just cries and cries until she’s worked up a good sweat and her hair is all matted. We would try trading off with holding her, but as often as not, Miranda’s fussing during this time as well.

We may have found our best compromise yesterday evening. Agnes and I were eating dinner and we each had one girl at our feet in their carseats. We would stick the pacifier in their mouths, shovel food in ours, and then stop to repeat the process whenever the pacifier would come back out again. It seemed to work okay.

There are times when we’re looking for a place to set down either Miranda or Eleanor and we don’t want to put them in their cradle quite yet. Maybe they’ve just eaten and lying flat will make them more prone to spitting up. Maybe it’s just a temporary thing while we deal with the other one. One of the things we found is that Miranda seems quite comfortable in her carseat. She’ll quite happily fall asleep there.

Yesterday evening we decided to just let her sleep in her seat as long as she could. I was doing some work in the office and when I decided to take a break, I got up to check on the girls. I couldn’t find either of them. Neither were in the cradle or Pack n Play. I found Eleanor in the darkened bedroom sleeping on top of Agnes, who was therefore pinned. I found Miranda alone out in the living room, still sleeping in her carseat.

When Miranda finally did get up, I fed her a bottle. Miranda normally takes somewhere between three and four ounces of formula. Sometimes she’ll take the 4.5 ounces. This time, she finished her 4.5 ounce bottle and still looked hungry. She was making grunting noises, opening her mouth and craning her head. I warmed a second bottle and fed her that as well. She ended up taking a total of 170 mL (almost six ounces)! That’s an insane amount for her to be eating. Finally, I checked back in our logs to see why she was so hungry. She had been sleeping for almost five straight hours. Eleanor had had one extra meal while Miranda was sleeping.

The good thing is that this long nap didn’t seem to spoil her sleep for the night. After the 170 mL, she was quite tired again and settled in to her cradle for another three hours.

We haven’t really been keeping up with many of the Chinese traditions that one is supposed to follow with newborns. For instance, the mother and child(ren) are not supposed to leave the house except to visit the doctor during the first month. While there is some sense to this recommendation, given that newborns that get sick and develop a fever in the first month need to be hospitalized, we tried going out several times — to Babies R Us, to the beach, and to their grandparents’ place. At the end of the first month, we’re also supposed to have some kind of official “meet the baby” gathering where we invite a bunch of people to see the new baby. Nope. Not us. A number of people have come by to visit the new babies, but we’re certainly not throwing a get-together. Call us lame.

The traditions that we have been following all have to do with food. No red meat in the first week of recovery. On the first day back from the hospital, both Agnes’ mom and mine said something about fish soup. Agnes’ mom brought over the fish. I have no idea what kind it was. It was red, had a large head and spines. I was instructed to make soup out of it by boiling it in water with ginger, tofu, scallions and two kinds of unidentified dried root. The fish floated to the surface right from the start, so I was afraid that it wasn’t cooking all the way through. To compensate, I boiled it for a really long time, and it kind of fell apart in the soup. Agnes had some of the fish. I had some of the soup. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but there were way too many fish bones.

Next was sesame chicken. Sesame chicken is supposed to be good for recovery after surgery (Agnes’ c-section). This is a whole chicken, chopped up into chunks and stewed in a broth with ginger and a lot of sesame oil. It’s served with thin somen noodles that soak up much of the soup. Agnes’ mom insists on black sesame oil. My mom prefers some kind of Japanese brand. We didn’t find Japanese black sesame oil. Fortunately, both of our mothers decided to cook this sesame chicken for us, each with their own preferred sesame oil. Over the past month, I think we had it for six or seven meals.

Third up was pork feet. For those not familiar with the dish, I’m sure it sounds gross, but it’s actually pretty good. The feet are boiled for a long time in a water, ginger, scallions and soy sauce and maybe a couple other ingredients until the cartilege in the feet soften up. There’s a lot of pork fat to flavor the broth (pork fat rules). The feet themselves have some meat, some skin (which is soft and flavorful), a bunch of fat, and bones. This is served as a meat dish along with rice and whatever else you want to eat. This dish is supposed to help aid one’s breastmilk supply. It’s not a bad dish — quite tasty. It just probably has more fat than we would normally eat.

In the broth created from cooking the pork feet, one also cooks eggs. These eggs are hard boiled first, then shelled. The eggs are then put into the soy sauce based broth which is then brought to a boil and allowed to cool two or three times. The eggs are left soaking in the broth overnight. The pork fat and the soy sauce seep into the egg, turning the white part of the hard boiled egg a light brown color and making it slightly more firm. The whole egg takes on a bit of a pork and soy sauce flavoring. We cooked a dozen of these. Then, Effy brought over another half dozen. We ended up eating them all. They’re pretty good too. No idea if they’re also supposed to increase milk supply, but it seemed to go along with the pork feet dish. Just don’t check our cholesterol this month.

The final dish that a new mother is supposed to eat is another type of fish soup. I think it was sole cooked in a soup with some kind of unidentified dried berries, the same two dried roots as in the first fish soup, ginger, scallions, and papaya. Yes, papaya. We’re not that fond of dishes that mix fruit and meat, and out of all of the fruit we do eat, we don’t really like papaya that much. Agnes had some of this dish — fish, papaya and all. I ate some of the fish.

I’m not really sure if there’s anything else coming up. It doesn’t seem like it. It hasn’t been too bad having these dishes. Most of these dishes were cooked in advance and then heated for our meals, which was very nice since it’s been hard to cook.

Anyone know if we’re done? Are there still more traditions that are coming up in the next couple of months?

Eleanor and Miranda just turned one month old today. We have some new photos of them. We probably will wait until the girls turn two months old before we post the next set of photos.

Anna and Shane’s pregnancy was tracking pretty close to ours (their due date was two weeks later than ours), and they just delivered a beautiful baby girl named Kali (rhymes with Sally) yesterday, August 31, at 11:26 AM. She weighed 5 lbs, 13 oz and was 19 inches long.

Congratulations to Anna and Shane, and a big welcome to Kali.

Unlike Miranda and Eleanor, Kali seems to have been born with eyebrows.