Yesterday was Takeshi’s one month checkup and he’s doing just fine. He weighed in at 8 pounds 5 ounces and measured 21.25 inches.

So far things are going well with us although the past few nights he gets extremely fussy right around bedtime. Even though it took him a couple hours to go to sleep last night, once he was down he stayed down for almost 5 hours! I think part of it has to do with the ‘gas relief drops’ we gave him. At first I thought all his straining and red-faced grunts were his attempts at taking a crap but now I’m realizing that it’s gas. I think that’s what’s waking him up and preventing him from sleeping longer so we decided to try the drops last night and they seemed to work. I’d like to try Gripe Water which is supposed to have the same effect but is more natural; the Europeans use it and they seem to be better at the baby thing. Ok, well they might not be better… but they have higher safety standards than the US. And besides, I’d like to say that I raised my baby Euro-Style.

I’ve also been on a baking kick this week. Although it’s really been more out of necessity than desire. I made cupcakes (a la Duncan Hines) on Monday, banana muffins on Tuesday (had some overripe bananas) and apple crisp (to get rid of the quickly ripening apples) on Wednesday. Thankfully, Jay works in a place where there is not a shortage of hungry people. I think I’ll make more apple crisp for him to take to work next week — we have a dozen apples that are not getting eaten and need to be baked (who wants to eat apples when you have apple crisp in the fridge?).

And if you are looking for a recipe, may I suggest checking allrecipes.com — this is my new favorite site. I got my banana muffin recipe and my apple crisp recipe (as well as my sugar cookie and icing recipes) from this site . What I love about it is that all the recipes are rated so you can see what other people think. I also check the reviews to see what other people think as far as adding/removing/increasing/decreasing ingredients. I only pick recipes that have 5 solid stars and I haven’t been disappointed yet. Seriously, check it out.