One week ago today, Olive arrived. Clearly, this is plenty of time for me to write a retrospective.

A baby seven days old is still a newborn, of course. She's still got all her newborn habits and behaviors: she eats until she spits up. Then she may or may not nap. Then she cries until we feed her. That's the basic cycle, and it hasn't changed since we brought her home. Still, there are some signs that she's considering growing a little.

The first and most obvious is her weight. All babies lose some weight in their first few days, and have to gain it back as they figure out the whole "eating for sustenance" thing. Olive has already, yesterday, exceeded her birth weight. Breast-feeding clearly works for her.

Then, there's the whole question of "is it traumatic to have your diaper changed?" In the beginning, she thought so: it was time when she was awake, and not being fed. For the past few days now, she's changed her mind: she's been much more quiet and cooperative during diaper changes. Is it that she realizes that they lead to a clean feeling, or that she's just learned that once the diaper comes off, there's never any food until the new one is on? I don't know, but it makes the experience better either way.

Finally, there's the capacity to be calm. In the beginning, it wasn't there: she was eating, sleeping, or fussing. Now, it's much easier for her to keep her eyes open for some time and even interact with people a bit without indicating that she's starving. She's still a lump when it comes to personal mobility, and she hasn't quite figured out the point of the toys we've tried her on, but at least she's willing to gaze around for a while without getting too upset about the situation. She's been on my lap the whole time I've been typing this, hiccuping and calm.

Newborns are not easy; I can't wait for her to grow a bit. Happily, it looks like she's working on it.