We had a rough couple of nights—particularly in the evening and early nighttime, Eila is just not interested in sleeping. It seems the thing she is most interested in is crying. We give her a chance to soothe herself, which during the day works well—but at night this does not seem to work. Neither does rocking, shushing, holding, cradling, walking, swaddling, unswaddling, singing, or any number of other things mom and dad have tried. Thankfully she has been sleeping OK from 2am-6am or so (and last night, from 12am-6am, with one feeding in there). Jill has been very sweet to let me sleep more than she does (since I'm not able to nurse). Eila's less than two weeks old, so hopefully she still has time to figure this all out.

Oh, and her umbilical cord (mostly) fell off, which is great, because it was smelly and getting blood on her clothes. (File under "surprising things about having a baby".)

Today, we took Eila to Children's Hospital to participate in a research study. It's for a lab that studies pre-term infants, measuring their brain structure and function against full-term babies. Eila is a control in the study. She did an hour and a half of MRI, and ~5 minutes of optical imaging (we were there for half an hour but it was hard to get her settled with a good signal).

Hopebench