The Pip is a month old today. SteelyKid is three years and four months.

Status of the Pip:

At the doctor's today, he was 22.5" long (75th percentile) and 8 pounds, 11 ounces, which is a gain of 18 ounces over the last 20 days, or very slightly under the ideal 1 ounce/day target. His schedule on the small scale is pretty consistent: eat pretty close to every three hours, then either immediately fall asleep or be alert and cute for about an hour and then fall asleep, usually with a little bit of wind-down crying. On a daily scale, the immediate-falling-asleep is reliable from, oh, 10pm on or so, and is unpredictable during the day.

We have all now been graced with at least one social smile, which is lovely. (SteelyKid will declare that any time he looks in her direction and is not actively screaming is a smile, which, well, no. But she got a real one today, I saw it.) To the extent that one can tell personality this young, I think "easygoing" is reasonable; the pediatrician commented today that he was good-natured during the exam, and most of his crying is reasonably traceable to physical states. But it's so early.

(Speaking of which: I remain deeply bemused by people asking if he's a "good baby." He doesn't have volition yet, how can he be good or bad? I also don't particularly want to encourage SteelyKid to label her brother (or people generally) like that, as she is already prone to declaring someone is "good" or "bad" based on single actions or suchlike, and even if she wasn't, it doesn't seem like a good path to go down.)

Status of SteelyKid:

She's adjusting as well as we could hope. She is absolutely besotted with the Pip; when they are in the same room she cannot go more than five minutes without wanting to kiss and hug him (charming, though gets a little tiring when this requires repeated climbing on me to accomplish); she tells him "sssh, it's okay, I'm here" when he's upset; she desperately wants to pick him up (has been known to put the sling around her neck and ask); etc. etc.

Being a toddler is still stressful, however, and especially when she's tired or hungry we still get failure-to-cope meltdowns. (My favorite was a few days after we came home from the hospital, when at dinnertime she simply laid down on the floor and started crying out of absolutely nowhere.) This is exhausting for us, as well, even when meltdowns are averted, in a dancing-through-minefield way. But they aren't angry/destructive meltdowns, she rebounds from them remarkably well, and we are not above reasonable bribery to go around foreseeable problems, so it could be worse.

She's finally solidified her memorization of the numbers from 1-20, thanks probably to a period of infatuation with an iPad app called "Tally Tots," though after 22 she goes recursive: "twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-thirteen, fourteen, fifteen . . . twenty!" She's very interested in letters at the moment; most nights we must go through litanies of words that start with a particular letter, and this morning she brought some magentic letters over and had me make words. She's also working hard on word recognition, and every time she spots "Pooh" she crows in delight. (She has quite a good verbal memory and can recite a surprising-to-me amount of her favorite books along with us.) She still reads letters and numbers from right to left.

Let's see, what else? Toilet training is in a holding pattern. Her food preferences are still pretty limited. She is enamoured of Dora the Explorer—a DVD of it made its way into our house as a gift, alas, because it makes us want to pop our eardrums with rusty icepicks. (Until then, kids' TV "didn't work" in our house, except for a single episode of Wonderpets that Chad downloaded to his computer for when I was away on a business trip. I just keep repeating that it's very thoughtful of people to send her gifts in addition to the ones they send the Pip, really it is, truly.) She's basically given up napping on weekends. She continues to assume that everyone she sees is there to talk with her.

Probably there's more but I'm tired. If I remember I'll update the post or add comments.

Picture links for both of them, not many because we've been pretty busy, and a few already seen here:

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/meet_the_pip.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/glowbug_baby.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/the_pip_comes_home.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/the_pip_discovers_the_internet.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/its_hard_work_being_this_cute.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/11/monday_pip_blogging_week_2.php
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/12/belated_cute_blogging.php

And that's the state of the children in Chateau Steelypips.