Wide asleep.

Maya has taught us a new concept – being wide asleep. It is a combination of being fast asleep (because it happens very fast) and wide awake (because her lips are opening very wide when she is screaming). The combination is due to the fact that there is no visible transition from one state to another. But we did manage to find a trigger for this transition – a slight change in the movement. So here is how it usually plays out: She would be fussy and noisy and one of us would put her in a sling and through a series of tries and errors find that correct combination of sleepwalking around the house and holding here and rubbing there so that she finally quiets down. And then we would continue doing what works for a few more minutes until we would risk a change in a pattern, and being experienced parent (she is more than three weeks old now) we would only change a little bit at a time. Well, turns out that my baby is better in pattern recognition than and CIA code breaker. And the moment she spots a change is the moment of lightning fast transition from fast asleep to wide awake, or peacefully quiet to furiously discontent. For example, turns out that you can not go from walking around to walking in place – you have to go to bouncing on an exercise ball first, and so on.
Another thing she learned to recognize pretty well is a barbed wire touch of a fresh diaper. Maybe after wearing a poopy diaper for a while one gets so used to this wonderful sensation that the touch of a new diaper on your skin is so painful that you just have to spray it with fresh poop to break it in. As a result we have performed a double change a few times. But we are learning – now before we change a diaper we interrogate her to make sure that she is not planning on catching us off guard. Oh, the pleasures of child rearing.