the great food fight of 2010.
bigger than a david tua match or a david vs goliath; this should be an olympic sport! a battle of wills, a contest waged in the fiercest of conditions...
man ... vs baby.
i thought i would let you all know what the feeding situation is like over here in the Harlow home. it has been ... up and down. there are some days where Harlow shines. he manages his feeds with such finesse that you would think he had been born to do it. then there are days where he doesn't give a rats patootie and he will not even pretend to be interested. these are the days where it's hard.
for five days he shone with the fires of pride and accomplishment as he managed to complete the three day time feeds. for five days. Justine and i looked at each other and thought that the end of the tube may be just around the corner. wOOt!! that would be something.
of course, all good things come to an end. each night when he sleeps, Harlow has oxygen. one night, one of the taps was not turned on, and the oxygen did not flow. ever since then, the feeding has been substandard. for three days he took virtually nothing from his bottle. little toad. he is now starting to recover the ground that he has lost. we have turned the 10pm feed into a bottle feed and he is doing okay. this is all theory of course, we have no concrete evidence that it was the oxygen that caused him to lose ground.
needless to say, that damn oxygen bottle is checked twice and then twice again when he goes to bed.
i don't know if its related or not, but his sleeping routine has totally ... collapsed. he will sleep 45 minutes and then stay awake so long that he is too tired to feed anyway. then he will go down again ... for another 45 minutes and ping! again he is awake.
come on man, sleep a little!! you may as well get some practice in for your teenage years...
in a nutshell, that is most of the problems with Harlow wrapped up neatly in only a few paragraphs. if only the problems could be dealt with so easily.
all things will be well and all manner of things will be well ... with a little time.
i'm a geek and i like statistics.
to that end, i put google analytics on the blog because i was interested in knowing who, if any, are reading it.
well, i got a surprise. i have readers!! w00t!!
its a curious thing, who is reading this and where they come from. needless to say, analytics does not in any way record any personal information. the most specific it gets is what city you are in. but it is interesting none the less.
for example there has been 806 unique visitors, who, between them have visited 3078 times. over the course of those visits, they viewed an average of 1.9 pages. good stuff!
but thats not all. they have come from 15 different countries including the cayman islands, egypt, jordan, brazil, austria, singapore, russia and hong kong. i mean, how does a tinpot blog like this end up being viewed in such exotic countries? and what do they think of Harlow's adventures?
needless to say, the most visiting countries are new zealand, australia, america and the uk.
but it gets stranger. there are hits from 10 different german cities on june 1st. 10 different cities. in germany. i don't get it. i could understand 1 city, maybe a google search returned the blog as a result and they had a nosy, but 10 different cities? on the same day? that stretches coincidence a little...
there are timing statistics as well. the most common duration someone is on the blog for is 0 to 10 seconds. to the tune of 80 percent of all visits are 10 seconds or less. ha ha >:]
what about where visitors come from? most common is a direct link, most probably from the emails i send out, but the next most common sources are ohbaby, facebook, twitter and google.
i know this is small fry in terms of blogs, but i find all this kind of stuff ... fascinating.
fascination.
the kids are fascinated with Harlow. its a good thing really, it makes the sacrifices they have to make that much easier for them to bear. they love their little brother. it's a really good thing to see.
it doesn't matter if he is lying down with his nappy off, or lying in his bassinet playing with his toys, they will crowd round and watch him as if he is revealing the secrets to the universe.
he doesn't really know the secrets of the universe yet, he's at the stage when he smiles at the ceiling vent. yep ... the ceiling vent. he's fascinated. ( we're still waiting for his genius genes to kick in... )
wOOt!! he has made it to the local paper!! the whitby newsbrief has run an article about Harlow's battle and the huge rallying of support from the community. it's a great article and it just shows that even in the big smoke, there are pockets of community spirit lying around that are keen to help, even if they don't know who you are.
so, i thought for those of you who don't get the whitby newsbrief, i would put it here so you can read it too. click on the image to read a larger version.
the great food fight of 2010.
