It's been a while since I've written here. At first, that was about simple exhaustion; it was a rough few days back then. Then, for about a week, I had scattered ideas about things to write about, but nothing coalesced. Then, Olive got sick.

Naturally, if I could have taken this disease instead of her, I would have. It wouldn't even have kept me from working: just a stuffy nose and, initially, a mild fever. Super manageable, really; you just need to drink lots of fluids and breathe through your mouth more often, and go through a box of tissues.

The issue is that Olive hasn't yet encountered such concepts as blowing her nose, and we can't yet explain it to her. All we can do is endure with her as she snuffles noisily for hours, and occasionally coughs or sneezes.

Per the pediatrician, what Olive has isn't generally all that terrible, but very occasionally kids get too stuffed up to breathe through their noses and don't think to breathe through their mouth, and end up dying from it. She prescribed mucus dissolver to get droppered into her nose every eight hours, and saline solution which has the same goal but which can be applied on demand. Finally, she recommended that one of us parents stay awake with her at all times, at least until the fever dropped.

So, last Wednesday, I did something I hadn't done since leaving the Army: stayed awake for 26 hours. Olive spent most of the time in the carrier, snuffling and sneezing onto my shirt. Christina then took the day shift, watching Olive while I got possibly my best nine hours of sleep since Olive was born; I then stayed awake for another 27 hours to reset into a normal, sleep-at-night schedule.

Happily, by the third day, the worst of it was over: Olive's temperature was back at normal levels, and her nasal cavities were mostly unobstructed again. We're still giving her the prescription nose drops every eight hours and saline whenever she's particularly snuffly, but those times are less and less frequent now. It's a huge relief to see that she's recovering unscathed from this; hopefully the only lasting effect will be an improved immune system for her. She's not yet entirely back to normal, but it's easy to see that the way is clear to it.

And normal, these days, is better than ever! I really did have things to write about when all this happened. Social smiles are definitely confirmed. It is incredibly heartwarming to have your baby's face just light up in joy when you come into her field of vision. They only last a few seconds, which makes them tough to photograph, but they're there.

She does better pushups than ever now: even alone on her mattress, she can shove her upper body high enough to get her face pointed straight forward, for a few seconds at least, and she can keep her face held off the surface pretty much as long as she likes. Neck control, for her, is a solved problem; one thing she enjoys these days is to be lifted by her chest into the air and flown around like an airplane.

Perhaps most excitingly, she's learned how to pseudo-stand: her balance is still terrible, but if you hold her loosely around the chest to assist with positioning, she'll support her entire weight on her own legs, and even occasionally try to jump. The strength to actually accomplish a jump isn't there yet, but with some assistance, she really likes the game of stand-and-kick-to-fly.

Put her under a hanging toy, and she'll track it visually, and flail her arms until she bops it and makes it swing. Her accuracy isn't great as yet, but the simple realization that her arms are things that she theoretically has control of was a nice milestone to hit.

In short, at nine weeks she's continuing to develop nicely, tending to be on or ahead of schedule for the milestones that the books even give us at this stage. Christina and I are still pretty tired these days, but we've had some initial successes actually putting Olive to bed before we go to bed instead of just breastfeeding her to sleep, which gives us hope that we can improve on this in the near future. The virus was scary and exhausting, but seems to have passed without any real trouble. Onwards and upwards!