A Tree for Olivia

Cambridge City Council has a great "Free Trees for Babies" scheme, where the council will give you a free tree to commemorate the birth of your baby. You then plant this tree, and you and family have a great tree, and the council gets more trees planted. Good for all!

We got Olivia's tree a few weeks ago, and finally had a chance to plant it. Olivia was still sick, and Suzanne needed to take care of Olivia, so I went to plant it myself. Our friend Liz graciously offered space in her garden for us to plant the tree, which is particularly nice since we'll be wanting to visit the tree from time to time after we've moved back to the states!

The first order of business was getting the tree to Liz's house- you'd be amazed at what you do _not_ need a pickup truck for!




The tree happily planted in Liz's garden. We'll be looking forward to bringing Olivia back here as she gets older to visit her tree.

Stackin' it up!

Well, Olivia's had this particular toy since just after she was born- the classic rainbow stacker. A great toy, and so far, she's been getting really good at getting the rings off of it. At first, she simply dumped all the rings off by grabbing the base and upending the thing. Then she started to take the off one at a time, usually upending it after a few.

Yesterday, though, she learned the skill of actually getting the rings back on! She's been trying it for a little while, and discovering that it's more difficult than it looks (you have to relax your grip on it, and kind of let it find it's way on- ever think much about that?). I helped her out a couple of times yesterday and then it seemed to click- and she had it! Now she's working on advanced maneuvers, like putting on 2 at the same time (no success yet), or putting one on while getting distracted watching Mom (about the same).


Anyway, I just thought I'd share. She's still under the weather, but a doctor's visit today turned out a new possible diagnosis, of a bacterial infection, so we're now armed with antibiotics and will hope that clears it up. We're looking forward to having her feel better!

Is this a video of Olivia Crawling?

Or is it really bigfoot? with the quality, that's the sort of thing you'd expect... I'll have to figure out how to get better quality out of my YouTube uploads. We'll see... But enjoy this for now, and with any luck I'll have more and better videos in the future.

Sick Baby :(

Well, in the interest of Full Disclosure, I thought it would be a good idea to include a bit of reality; Olivia's been sick with a cold/flu sort of thing for the last 2-3 days. It started with a simple runny nose and such, but on Friday evening (why is it always on Friday evening?) it progressed to a fever up to 103. She responded well to CalPol (the infant brand of paracetemol, which is what they call acetaminafin here, and slept "ok" during the night, but Saturday early in the morning woke up miserable with a fever again, this time accompanied by vomiting. Of course our local GP surgery (aka the doctor's office) was closed for the weekend, but Cambridge NHS has a service called CamDoc where we can go at these times (it turns out to be one of the only places we go since Olivia's colds wait until the weekend to act up).

Anyway, we went in and waited for a while, and were seen by the doctor. He didn't see anything wrong in terms of signs of bacterial infection, but wanted a urine sample to rule out a urinary tract infection- now _you_ try getting a urine sample from a baby girl! Long story short, we did get one and it was clear too. So the advice was, keep giving her paracetamol and ibuprofin, and wait it out.

We;ve been doing that for the last couple of days. When she's not in high fever, she still clearly feels crummy, not feeling like doing much but lie in Suzanne's arms. Occasionally she gets up enough energy to play for 5-10 minutes, or to eat, but she spends a lot of time asleep or resting, which along with fluids (which she seems to be getting plenty of) is one of the best medicines.

We hope she feels better soon. She's the sweetest thing and we hate to see her feeling lousy.

Another Polar hat!

Here's Olivia doin' a little dance while wearing her latest hat, directly from the South Pole! Katie picked it up on her way to Pole through Christchurch, NZ. Olivia loves her new hat- Thanks Katie!