This is Shelby in the early days when she was still grumpy at us all for dragging her out of her 24/7 sauna.

She's since forgiven us for this, on the condition that we provide her with food and accommodation free of charge.
















We've also taken her out to social outings with us, which I think is rather generous.











However, all that said, I do think it was this maroon nappy that won Queensland the State of Origin (Shelby was wearing it during the Decider), so we're pretty happy about that.

Matt | 8:56 PM | |

You'll find that if you have a newborn baby, you'll spend the first few weeks predominantly involved in the following activity: trying to work out why your baby is crying.

Babies cry for a number of reasons.

The usual reason is hunger: they're letting you know that their stomach (that starts out the size of a marble and increases slowly over the next few weeks) is empty.

The next most usual reason is wind: this usually comes straight after a feed and requires a bit of back-slapping and other weird gymnastics to get them to burp.

The next most usual reason is their nappy: they don't usually enjoy having a soggy nappy on.
After that, the reasons get many and varied, and can be things like: they're in pain, they're tired and cranky, they're uncomfortable, they're too hot, etc.

Anyway, generally, if they're crying, if you go through the following three step process - 1) Feed 2) Burp 3) Change - you will be able to stop most babies crying.

You'd think three steps would be fairly straightforward.

Not at 2.00 in the morning when you're tired.

During 45 minutes of constant grizzling from Shelby, we alternated between feeding (by Rach) and burping (by both of us), until we suddenly thought of changing Shelby's nappy. Lo and behold, it was very soggy. we changed the nappy . . . and all of a sudden, we changed the baby.

Well, for the next three hours anyway.

I'd like to think we learned from this little lesson, but we probably didn't.

Matt | 3:04 PM | |