Nina had her first day (just a half day) with the nanny today. It went great - and she took the bottle without a fuss from the nanny. And Nina seems to like her nanny, who’s very sweet and warm. Re. the bottle, she’s now taking it without issue for her first feeding in the AM. Dad gave her a bottle later on after the nanny left, and it was a bit of an ordeal, but she eventually drank it down. We’ll have the nanny give her bottles throughout the day for the rest of the week.

Nina’s enjoying tummy time more, and today - with prodding from the nanny - I put her flat instead of propped up on a pillow, and she rolled herself over onto her side. I get the feeling she’ll be flipping soon from front to back. She’s also really into a seat called the “Bebe Pod” that our friend Allison gave us. It holds her up in a sitting position, like a big girl! She also likes to stand up on her legs while someone holds her. Those chubbers are building some muscle!

She’s also enjoying sucking on her fingers and has recently begun sucking occasionally on her upper lip, which is very cute. She likes being bounced to sleep on the edge of the bed or the exercise ball. And she loves being outside - feeling the breeze and looking up at the trees.

Nina met her Great Granny Nina, one of the women for whom she was named, last week. Granny came up to New York with Aunt Kathryn. Nina was very well-behaved, hardly fussing and showing Granny and Kathryn lots of smiles. And Granny, age 89, took a long walk with us around Brooklyn Heights. She has the health and stamina of someone much younger. Let’s hope that Baby Nina’s got some of those genes!

Nina’s doing great at almost 3 months. We’ve had a busy several days - hence the lack of a blog post. We visited Atlanta and Athens, GA, stopping to see friends and family, including Nina’s grandparents. Nina had no problems on the plane, sleeping most of the way, nor did she mind the hours we spent in the airport due to weather-related delays. We also discovered that she sleeps really well in hotels with blackout shades.

Grandmama and Grandaddy are smitten with little Nina. Grandmama gave Nina a few baths during our stay, which Nina loved. Grandpop put Nina to sleep by bouncing her in his arms. In Athens, Nina got to meet baby Jack Luken, who is just a few weeks older than she is. Plenty of photos are up on our Flickr site.

Since returning home we’ve lost one nanny (she decided she didn’t want to work the hours we’d agreed upon) and hired another. The new nanny starts on Monday. The next challenge is the bottle — Nina has suddenly decided that she doesn’t like it. I guess she’s wised up. We won’t be fooling her with any plastic nipple! Well, she’s going to have to learn to take it. We tried it yesterday and today, and I finally got her to drink from it both times after a long bout of hard crying. For some reason she seems to take it more easily from me than John.

Nina’s become increasingly curious about the world around her. She follows all kinds of things with her eyes, but is particularly fond of faces. Smile at her, and she smiles back. Today she also really enjoyed watching her Daddy cook a fritata.

Nina’s been making better use of her hands lately. She seems closer to realizing that they are part of her body and I think will soon reach out and grab something. Right now, she’s basically just staring at them and using them to bat at things at eye level, as in this video I made.

I had more trouble than usual getting Nina to go to bed tonight. Usually I nurse her, swaddle her, put her down and within a few minutes, she’s asleep. Tonight she started crying and was not placated by tummy rubbing or “earthquake bed,” so I had to pick her up and rock her for a while. This is the view from the rocking chair. Seeing it reminded me of the nights when she would wake up and take an hour or sometimes two to get back to sleep. I did a lot of staring at that lit window across the way. Now she sleeps until morning on most days.

I think she may be moving toward an earlier bedtime. She fell asleep on her own around 8:30. I woke her up for a bath and feeding and bedtime at her usual 10:00. Tomorrow I’ll try putting her down for the night a little earlier and see what happens.

So far, the big event this week for Nina was our trip on Monday to Inwood, to see Yishane and Tashi. It was the first time the babies met since they visited us in the hospital, and everyone had a great time (except for a brief moment when Nina cried after Tashi bopped her on the nose with a plastic star; but no harm done, and Nina quickly went back to playing on the floor; link to the video here). Nina liked Tashi’s safari-themed playmat so much that she was allowed to take it home with her. She’s been enjoying it since.

That night, we stopped in at Nina’s first party - celebrating our friend Ruth’s 50th birthday. Nina got lots of attention and chilled out for a while in the back bedroom. She met a celebrity astrologer who said that she’s bound to be a talkative Gemini!

On Tuesday, Nina had her 2-month checkup. She had to get four injections, which she bore heroically. She cried hard but recovered quickly, and then she fell asleep in the stroller on the way out. She now weighs 11 pounds 12 ounces and is 22.75 inches long!

I had grand plans to read a bunch of books during my maternity leave. But it turns out that books and caring for a newborn don’t mix, at least for me. I read one book - White Noise, by Don Delilo, and have gotten part way through another novel, The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard. I’ve also read chunks of various baby-related books. That is about it. I need books that are good for my newly shortened attention span; books that I can read in fits and starts. I found a good one at the bookstore the other day. It’s also going to help me appreciate baseball better. It’s called Watching Baseball Smarter. I just started it, and already it’s cleared up a lot of confusion. My goal is to be able to listen to baseball on the radio and really be able to imagine the game. Nina will likely have no trouble with this once she’s older. Today, she played on the bed with John while they listened to a Mets-Reds game on the radio together.

Nina’s had a lot of firsts this week. This is a photo of her first picnic, in Prospect Park. It was a hot day but a beautiful, cool evening. Nina only got fussy once, and I calmed her by wheeling her stroller in circles on the grass. This weekend, she had her first subway and train ride when we went out to Long Island. She slept pretty much the whole way. Speaking of sleeping, she’s been sleeping a lot (pretty much through the night, with some long naps during the day) but also staying awake for longer periods. So her sleep’s becoming more concentrated. And for the past week or so, she’s been doing a lot of what John and I call “conversing” — funny cooing noises that she makes in response to us looking at her and saying something. The noises sound sort of like a pinball machine. It’s a lot of fun to communicate with her in this way.

Nina also smiles all the time. When she does wake up in the middle of the night, she breaks into a big smile when I go to pick her up.

Aunt Ann’s Baby Dress

Nina had a busy, fun day. First, we had a fashion show of Feltman Brothers dresses that Ann wore when she was a baby. Then, Nina and I attended a Mom and Baby yoga class. Nina was the youngest baby there - most were between 3 and 6 months - but she did great. She was awake and hardly fussed, and she seemed relaxed by the whole thing. She snacked a couple times and stared at the woman next to us.

Tonight was beautiful so we took a walk on the promenade, with Nina in Daddy’s sling. Then we came home and Nina went to bed. We’ve learned that we can put her down awake and she’ll go to sleep, but she needs us to turn off all the lights and step out of the room. Otherwise, she gets distracted by us or by things like her Mets mobile.

Nina’s getting increasingly interested in her surroundings. The Mr. Met crib mobile’s been fascinating her for the past several days, often so much that it distracts her when she’s trying to go to sleep. Before this, she hardly noticed it. She also really enjoys the fish mobile on her swing and her black and white animal cards.

I try to keep Nina awake ahead of her 10 PM bedtime, so last night I read her some books between nine and 9:30. She really seemed to like the Madeline book. She was quiet the whole time I was reading, and she was lying on her back staring at the pages. I think the pictures were bold enough in that book to catch her eye. It’s about little school girls in Paris. I had forgotten how beautiful the illustrations are. So far, Nina dislikes Goodnight Moon. She cried when I tried to read this. It is kind of a strange book. There’s something a little creepy about that green room.