Week 17

This week started with a trip to Duisburg to visit our Brazilian friends, Clovis and Adri. Unfortunately, they are about to move back to Brazil, leaving us only a few more weeks to enjoy living barely more than an hour of driving apart. So we made full use of the short time left and spent a great weekend with them - meeting some of their friends, going for a walk in a nice park in their neighborhood, talking, and of course, cuddling Daniel, playing with Daniel, feeding Daniel, changing Daniel's diapers, giving Daniel a bath... ;-)

The rest of the week, however, was much less pleasant. We were still struggling to get used to the new routine without the help of Jefferson's mother. This was especially hard on Jefferson: getting up early in the morning despite taking care of Daniel until late at night and occasionally during the night, spending the days alone at home, driving Daniel all across town to drop him off at my office at university and quickly catch a bus from there to his German classes (missing them after all when the bus driver forgot the stop and left Jefferson wandering through unknown streets in the rain trying to find his way back)...

It doesn't exactly help that Daniel has become very particular in how he wants his milk - sometimes he won't take anything but the breast, sometimes only the bottle, sometimes he wants to be fed lying down, sometimes only when carried in our arms. Unfortunately, not infrequently none of the available options seem to please him, no matter how hungry he is. Then nothing helps but heavy distraction, preferably with a flying saucer (i.e., a hand in front of his face, hovering and humming and zooming in and out suddenly) or a squeaking rubber duck, until he forgets that he wanted to be stubborn and starts sucking "by accident". Then eventually he discovers that, uhm, actually, this doesn't even taste too bad, so maybe I just stop complaining and continue sucking...

On top of all of this, Daniel caught a cold. On Wednesday night, he kept waking up several times, screaming in panic because his little nose was too stuffy to breathe! I took him to the children's doctor on Thursday morning, where he was prescribed his first nose drops. Luckily, he quickly got better, even though he had to skip baby swimming this week, was pretty cranky for the next few days and still couldn't always sleep well, since his nose kept getting stuffy again from time to time.