Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Experiments

Remember in high school and/or college when you used to have to do science "experiments" in class? (They were "experiments" because the teacher already knew what the outcome should be). Well, in science class you learned to keep all your variables constant and only change one thing at a time. Even though my husband and I have degrees in chemical engineering, the whole "change one variable at a time" thing didn't really sink in for us. See the following scenarios:

1. At the beginning of last week, Jayla was very fussy at the day care and at home. We thought it could be from coming off vacation for 10 days...maybe she needed more milk in her bottles for the day care...maybe she was constipated...maybe her gas was painful...maybe she was teething. So, last Wednesday, I added another 1/2 ounce to each of her day care bottles, she had two massive poops, I gave her Mylicon and Orajel and she finally stopped fussing. Do we have any idea which one was actually wrong with her? No - because we changed all the variables at the same time.

2. Over the weekend, Jayla let us get precisely 0 hours of sleep per night. So, last night after observing her in her crib for a few minutes, we decided to take off the bumper and everything soft in her crib. She was rolling around a bit much and specifically grabbing the bumper and pulling it into her face. So, we emptied her crib (for some reason there was alot of soft stuff in there - isn't that like against the new parenting laws or something?), turned on a night light where she usually sleeps in the pitch dark, and lowered the thermastat by one degree (to 73). She slept the entire night. Woke up at the exact time that she needed to get her morning nursing in. Again, have no clue which of those things did it for her...but, we're shooting for an exact duplication tonight!

1 comment:

Beth Fish said...

I know how that goes - you try everything you can think of and have no idea what worked, but as long as it works, who cares?