Cayman Having a Happy Christmas

Cayman's First Food

Today Cayman ate his first solid food: baby oatmeal.

Cayman Loves to Play

Thanksgiving

Everyone was in town for Thanksgiving and got to meet Cayman. Cayman got to play with his cousin Emerson for the first time.

 Here is a video grandpa Carl made documenting the whole weekend:

Aunt Jessie's Wedding

Cayman got fancy for his Aunt Jessie's and (new) Uncle Ben's wedding. Thanks for the great photos uncle Blake.

Bye Old House

We have moved in the last few weeks. Above is Shelley and Cayman in front of our old house. We'll miss our little corner, neighbors, and trees.

 One of the first items to be moved is dad's buffalo head from South Dakota (head harvested from a butcher who was selling buffalo meat). 

We have a had a few cooler days now and Cayman is starting to dig into his extensive hoodie collection.

 Our new house has a jumper (which we have to counter-weight with salsa and sugar).

3 Months Old

Cayman has been growing, smiling, and laughing. He was very cute laughing with Mimi (see video). He has stopped using the pacifier and loves snuggling with and sucking on his blanket. Cayman also got a new swing at our friends Suzannah and Tim's garage sale.

Getting Bigger & Recognizing Friends

Smiling than 2 Month Shots

Cayman is smiling all the time now.

He was sad and tired today after his 2 month shots at the doctors office. At two months he is 12 lbs 4.8 ounces and around 23 inches in length.

Night Time Walk & Getting Chubby

Shelley, Cayman, Heidi, and I all took a evening walk. The photos below are Cayman in his front pack. Cayman is getting very chubby. He is 8 weeks old and now 12 pounds. 

Shark Week

Grandpa's Photos

My parents stopped by and my dad got some neat photos of Cayman.

 

Summer Fun

We went to visit our friends the Cortes's and Cayman was happy to visit with one of their friendly tortoises.

Two tortoises, however, turned out to be too scary.  

It was a little chilly this morning so Cayman got to wear his first hoodie. To celebrate the occasion, we put our dog Heidi's hoodie on too.

The family. 

Parkway Corn

I was sick of looking at all the weeds growing in my street's parkway.

 So I removed the weeds.

 Next, I set up a gravity feed irrigation system and planted corn.

Corn is around 18" tall now (7/28), I also added some tomatoes to the end of the irrigation line.  

Baby Sleeping Stats

The first few days after Cayman was born, he seemed to sleep and eat at random intervals. After a few sleepless nights of waking up for feedings, I started to wonder if there were patterns to when he was hungry and when he was tired. Shelley started keeping track of three behaviors: awake, sleeping, and eating. I put the behaviors into Excel and a month later we had this:

Close Up:

 

In the plots above, blue represents sleep, orange represents feeding time, and green awake time. Each column represents one day.

When we first started tracking him at a week old, the left side of the graph, we saw an unpredictable schedule filled with late night feedings and awake time. We certainly had a more ideal schedule in mind. We thought if we slowly worked at it, a schedule compromise between his schedule and our ideal schedule could be achieved. We calculated his average sleep requirement and noticed better nights (more sleeping) were associated with awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. However, awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM was associated with sleep time from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and so on (a butterfly/domino affect). We decided we would focus on trying to keep him awake from 6:00 to 9:00 PM and encouraging him to sleep from 3:00 to 6:00 PM. For the most part this worked as shown by the right half of graph. The green band near the bottom right half of the graph represents awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. As of now, Cayman wakes up once per night for a feeding and quickly falls back asleep.

Cayman's sleep pattern is shown below. He averages 15 hours, 20 minutes, and 12 seconds of sleep a day with a standard deviation of 1.54 hours. This means there is lots of variation in his sleep where he sometimes sleeps around 14 hours and sometimes around 17.5 hours. As the plot below shows he tends to alternate between a low sleep day than a high sleep day. In fact, he has very little moderate sleep days; he seems to like the extremes.



More valuable to us is when he is sleeping. Ideally, we would like him to sleep as much as possible when we are sleeping from 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM (we don't sleep this entire period, but we would like to option to). When looking at the proportion of time he sleeps during the 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM period, we get the the plot below.

The lowest dot represents a night when Cayman only slept for 50% of the time between 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM. The highest dot represents our best night of sleep when Cayman slept about 97% of the night. The orange line is the linear regression (least squares) trendline and shows that overtime, the proportion of time he is sleeping between 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM is increasing. If the trend continues, we can expect him to sleep an additional 3.78 minutes each night.  

Rose-Ringed Parakeet

Most days I am home, I see parrots around our house. Today however, I spotted a different parrot species outside. This Rose-Ringed Parakeet is the third species of parrot I have found near our home. The parrot only stuck around for a few minutes so the shots below were the best I could get. The long turquoise tail is amazing on these birds.

Here are my photos of the other more common species I see around our house: