We brought everyone home yesterday in the early afternoon. Overall, Christina spent seven days there; Olive spent three.

Olive remains a pretty good baby. I would have said an excellent baby—we'll talk about her qualities in a minute—but this is best explained by analogy. There exist several zombie games in which time passes during play, and there's a day-night transition. During the day, the zombies are something to keep a watchful eye on, but they're really not a big problem. At night, though, they transform into shrieking monstrosities who can easily defeat the player.

During the day, right now, Olive tends to be very quiet and reserved. For newborns of this age, most of any given day is spent asleep, and the question "is she hungry" is isomorphic to "are her eyes open". There are brief periods of quiet contentment during which she's watchfully alert without wanting anything in particular, but they don't last very long. Still, one of the most notable things about her is how little she cries. For her, it's a last resort, which follows a long progression of chirps, squeaks, and other attention-getters which gradually increase in intensity. If you're not right there attending to her, half the time she'll just doze back off again¹. A very polite baby, in other words.

However, last night, sometime after the point at which, in the hospital, I would have brought her back to the nursery and gone home, this all changed. Suddenly, she was really awake and active. Suddenly, she was ravenous. Suddenly, she was entirely intolerant of any delay in bringing her to the breast. Between 9pm and 3am last night, we fed her four times, changed her diaper twice², changed her clothes twice when they got too spit-up-on. Then, finally, she was done: she fell asleep on her side over the burp cloth, and didn't wake until 9. Right now, she gives every indication of being a cutely cheerful kid again.

So she's a night person. That's not too big a surprise; both her parents are. What was more surprising was her intensity: red-faced, wailing, punching her arms, pistoning her legs. It was the first time I've seen her really upset, and it didn't make it any easier to change her diaper.

Lessons learned last night: don't feed her without a burp cloth under her head. Don't take her away from the burp cloth for at least 15 minutes³. When she wails, feed her first, even if you just finished feeding her half an hour ago and she is in fact poopy.

Items we're still figuring out: how to get her to spit up onto the burp cloth, instead of onto herself. How to tell if she still needs to spit up, or if she's done. How to slide her from the sidecar onto our bed for feeding without waking Christina any more than is necessary. How to get by with 20-minute catnaps until she's actually asleep for the night.