Better!

Two recent developments that I’m pretty sure are going to make my life a whoooole lot easier:

1. I discovered a way to get digital copies of the newspaper archives that I need for my thesis.

b. A certain someone has decided that she will now take a bottle.

(You just have to heat it up extra hot).

(I’m sure she didn’t get her diva-like tendencies from me).

(Yeah. Right.).

While idly googling today, I figured out that the New Pittsburgh Courier, while not exactly the old Pittsburgh Courier, has online archives for all of the many flavors of Pittsburgh Couriers, including all of the columns that I have been painstakingly tracking down on microfilm, photographing, and then transcribing. All for the low, low price of $30 a month! Worth. Every. Penny.

I wish that I had discovered this back in September. I would have saved myself about 10-15 hours of work and two very stressful trips downtown to the Boston Public Library. But, hey, think of all the work I’m going to save myself in the future! And, now I can expand the scope of my research! Because, hey, digital means searchable. I am going to search the hell out of those archives over the course of the month that I just paid for. I might even get a little crazy and pay for a second month.

The bottle thing makes me feel really silly, because it should not have taken a rational human being (which I allegedly am) this long to figure out that babies often like their bottles to be extra warm. I mean, at some point we should have tried applying a little extra heat. It wasn’t until I saw the daycare ladies heating a bottle in a rice cooker that I realized that, hey, the bottles here look really warm. And Lilian eats fine when she’s here and refuses to eat at home. Maybe we should, I don’t know…. heat them up more?

It’s pretty amazing, actually. You give her a room temperature bottle and she screws up her face and then gives you a look like you’re trying to poison her. And then you heat it up a couple of degrees and she chows down like it’s the greatest thing on earth. My parents are enjoying their time with her a lot more these days.

Sadly, this hasn’t translated into more sleep for me. But, it does mean that she’s back to being a smiling, happy baby at the end of the day. And that’s a fantastic improvement. Because, I’ll be honest, five nights a week of semi-constant screaming was starting to wear a little thin.

I’m probably jinxing myself with this post, but I think that things are getting better.