Freedom of Thought
Ender is… well I won’t call it Crawling, but by the time you finish reading this post it might be. He’s got the legs mostly worked out, but his arms stick out stiff in front of him, effectively providing breaks to his forward momentum. Sometimes he topples forward and manages to scramble a few inches, sometimes he sort of hops, frog style, and his whole body slides forward a bit. Sometimes he tips to the side and ends up in a roll which takes him somewhere unless he gets distracted by looking at the ceiling.
Whatever I want to call it though, Ender is starting to be mobile. It might take him a while to get there, but he moves from point A to point B. Or at least to point A and 1/2. So far he rarely travels further than a few feet at a time, and by the time he makes it that far he’s probably ready for a nap, or at least a different point of view. Nonetheless, my baby is moving (or rather crawling) slowly into a significant new phase of independence.
I think the reason I’ve been so excited about crawling (despite many many suggestions from more experienced parents to enjoy the lack of mobility while I could) is because it is the first time a baby is able to inflict his will on the world. Up until this point, Ender has been subject to my choices and my whims. Obviously he still is, but before the only protest he could make was to cry or to hold on to the toy a bit tighter. Now he can run away. He can go places I’d rather he not.
Obviously it’s not just about baby vs. parent. Ender suddenly has the ability to make real choices.
I mean, sure, before, while he was playing under his baby gym, he could choose to bat at the owl, or yank on the blue bird, or kick the padded bar, but this is the illusion of choice we give to toddlers to appease them (would you like the blue socks or the red socks today?) not a real decision.
Soon, Ender will be able to survey the room and decide: do I want to go play with the ball, or do I want to hide under a blanket, or do I want to try to pull up on that chair? Or maybe shake the security gate or bang on the door?
We think of crawling as a big milestone, but we lump it in line with sitting up and rolling over, we see it as a halfway point to walking. It’s more than any of those, because it is such a significant shift in how the baby’s world operates.
I realize this will sound absurd, but it makes me think of the video game the Sims. Sims 2 to be specific. (And this isn’t even the first time I’ve talked about life mirroring the Sims.) In the Sims 2, when your sim has a baby, it functions as an object in the game for three days. You have to feed it and change it and bathe it, and you can play with it or sing to it, and you put it to bed. After three days, it morphs to a “toddler” a slightly larger crawling sim. Only then can you see the intent of the sim, the moods, the metered needs and wants and fears. Only then does the sim have selectable actions, and begin to learn skills. Only then does the sim become a playable character.
From the time Ender was born, he was learning of course. They do that. Up until now, he was not a participant in his learning, he was a passive receiver, truly the sponge we say babies are (a really CUTE sponge though). Now he is on the same continuum as a toddler or even a preschooler. Of course there is a world of difference between a crawling baby and a three year old, but it is only one of time and experience, not one of being.
Yesterday he was an object. Today he is a player.
Chyna
I wonder why they say “It’s for the best.”
Rather, I know why they say it. If you’re a vet, you probably see mostly sick animals, and when they’re really sick, death is a saving grace to the pain which is your vision of that animal’s normal. If someone’s cat was hit by a car, of course you wouldn’t say “It was for the best.” When your cat gets a sudden illness, or even a less sudden illness, it is one long car accident, culminating in death. When it’s over, and you’re stroking the fur of what used to be your cat, you are still reeling from coming home to find her wheezing and lethargic, barely able to move and not interested in tuna. When the vet says “It’s for the best,” you are still thinking of uneaten tuna.
“It’s for the best” is like a slap, but a slow slap, that you can see coming.
It brings up those secret worries about snowballing vet bills. Googling “hepatitis” and the dismay at complicated and expensive long term treatment on top of the twice a day insulin injections and hepatitis has a different special diet than diabetes and there will probably be more urine and vomit and blood and probably diarrhea to clean up now. In the end you conclude she’s worth it, but when the vet says, “It’s for the best,” that little part of you that was tallying up the logistics of animal illness slinks lower down inside you, hunched with guilt.
Chyna (pronounced Chee-nuh) was probably about 8.
Back when Matt was still living in his own apartment, I had a project using a little piece poster board. The rest of the poster board I folded in half, into a rough Teepee shape and wrote “cat house” on the side. To my delight, Chyna ran right over it and proceeded to camp out. She played in that paper Teepee for weeks as it lost it’s shape sliding wider and lower, and she had to crawl on her belly to get underneath.
A pair of freshly ironed pants once attacked her, and she was afraid of pants for the next several months.
She liked to attack dust, or towels or toes under doors.
If you made the mistake of scratching your leg beneath a blanket, Chyna was there to help you SCRATCH harder. Then when you jerked your hand out from under the blanket she perked up and said, “pet me?” with her eyes.
Her meow sounded surprisingly like the word “hello” and I’d always meant to record it, but never got around to it.
She liked to carry toys in her mouth and meow around them, and often meowed in the darker corners of the house, as though she was exploring. If we called out to her, she we glance at us, then continue her expedition. Hello? Hello?
A few years ago we adopted Tricky, and Chyna, though she was eventually happier for the company, started binge eating to keep the new cat from getting her food. She slowly gained weight and started slowing down, acting old. About a year and a half ago, we found out she had diabetes, and almost as soon as we started treatment, she started acting like a kitten again, and was more loving and social than ever. The new house was likewise good for her, with more spaces, more places to climb, more perches, and spaces to crouch beneath.
With some cats it seems like the only time they come near you is when they want to be fed or they want to be pet, but Chyna would follow you around to see what you were up to. If your lap was full, she would curl up by your leg, or if it was too hot, she’d curl up a few inches away, purring and clearly just happy to be near you. Her favorite place in the world was the bathroom, and the first time she tried to jump on Matt’s lap he was in the bathroom and he was, shall we say, unprepared for a lap cat.
When Ender came into the picture, Chyna was the first cat to sniff him (though she’s also been the smarter cat in terms of keeping out of reach as he starts to grab for furry things) and when he cried she would meow at us in evident concern that we weren’t taking care of him fast enough. One of our friends brought a toddler to the house, and when we weren’t watching closely enough, she picked up Chyna around the middle, and carried her into the room, arms and legs sticking awkwardly out in front. Chyna didn’t try to scratch or bite the little girl, she just looked at us and meowed pitifully as if to say, “can you do something about this please?” I really hoped we would get a few years of trying to stop Ender chasing her around before we would have to say goodbye.
Whenever we got home from a trip, or even a long day of errands, Chyna would be sitting at the french doors, looking out for us. As we got out of the car, she would stand up expectantly, and we could see her mouth opening to meow at us.
Hello?
Hello?
No Thank You Gymboree
Ender started in the Gymboree Play and Learn stage 2 at the beginning of December, when he turned 6 months old. He had just been starting to make crawling like attempts, and I thought maybe getting him at a place like Gymboree would help get him going.
His favorite place to experiment with movement is our bed. He has been wriggling and moving himself there for well over a month now, but when he gets on floors, carpet or hardwood, he tends to be a lot more cautious, which is probably pretty smart now that I think about it. Since Gymboree is just padded everywhere, I thought it might let him be more adventurous, without me having to drag him back from a bed edge every few minutes.
It didn’t work out quite as expected. First of all, Ender had almost no interest in trying anything at all at Gymboree. Maybe if I’d stuck around longer he would have gotten used to the newness and started to play more, but the bright colors seemed to bewilder him and something about the way the room was built made sounds echo unnervingly- it gave me a headache, and I suspect it is part of what kept Ender static. He DID love the colored wiffle balls, but you know, balls are easy to come by, and I’m not sure he loved them because of any particular quality of their own, or just because it was the only thing in the play area that was small enough for him to handle and shove in his mouth. By the end of the month, he was also pretty interested in the bubbles, which prompted me to buy some for him, since he’s never taken the slightest notice before.
It’s possible that Ender was just too young for something like Gymboree. Aside from thinking it might get him crawling a little sooner, I didn’t want or expect some miracle exercise routine. I don’t think it’s necessary or advisable to push that kind of thing on babies. Mainly, I think the purpose of baby activities such as Gymboree is to keep people like me sane, giving them something to do and a reason to get dressed and leave the house. I was disappointed all around though: Ender pretty much just sat there and watched everything until he got overwhelmed enough to cry (admittedly not often). And though he was the youngest baby in the class, the other babies didn’t seem much more engaged in the equipment or activities than he was. Left to their own devices, the babies played with the whiffle balls, and maybe occasionally grabbed the mini trampoline. Everything else was parent led, urging the babies to go down parallel slides together and watch each other to promote socialization (not kidding) or ride in the boat (the babies seemed pretty bored with it after the first 20 seconds) or roll a ball down the slope (they preferred to hang on to the balls actually, thank you very much). Not only is this overly parent-directed style pretty contrary to my ideas about parenting, it also made socialization a bit strained, because we were too busy trying to entertain babies who would have been content to chew on wiffle balls.
What it comes down to I think, is that I’m spoiled. When Ender was about 3 months old I discovered story time at the local library. Then I realized that there are seven different Cuyahoga County libraries within 20 minutes of my house, and they ALL have story time. I can go to story time every weekday- a story time geared towards 0-18 month olds. It’s short, about 15 minutes, which is about as long as the babies can go without getting restless, and it’s followed by an open play time with library baby toys. We do rhymes, songs, and usually one or two short picture books. And it’s FREE. During the free play after I can chat with other moms (and the occasional dad) while Ender gnaws on the library toy nearest him, and then when he decides he’s had enough, we can leave. If he’s cranky, or ready for a nap, or if something else comes up on any particular day, I can skip story time without feeling guilty, because 1) it’s (once again now) FREE and 2) I know I can try again the next day. Ender loves watching the other kids, (far more of which are crawling around at story time then Gymboree) and the only suggested “activity” is, you know, reading stories. I decided to give Gymboree a try in December, because the story time series took a break over December. It started back up today.
So Gymboree didn’t do much for us. I have to realize though that this is only because I already had something better.
*Gymboree image from flickr user sully213
Jedi Soccer Moms
Ten years ago, TEN, I saw a Star Wars onesie at Hot Topic with “Future Jedi Master” printed on the front. I bought it immediately. I knew SOMEDAY either I would have a use for it, or one of my friends would.
We are nerds. Of varying degrees and types, but everyone I spend any degree of time with is a nerd. So Star Wars is always a hit, and as it happened, I got to use the onesie for my own baby. It got me thinking though, watching him roll around in his Jedi shirt.
Maybe it’s just the hormones. Maybe it’s paranoia. These days, I swerve between absolute joy, and horror at the possibility of loss of any kind(with bouts of boredom and exhaustion thrown in for good measure).
So, as much as anyone might wish to banish the prequels from existence (and I don’t, I’d keep them if only for the light-sabre battles), I kept thinking about Yoda declaring 9 year old Anakin Skywalker too old for the training.
When DO children start training at the Jedi Temple? 8 and a half? 6? 3? Infancy? I suspect the (fictional) answer is around 4 or 5, much as you might see of young athletes being taken for training in some places. Or, you know, Battle School.
Battle School isn’t a bad parallel. You have this child, who has in all likelihood been remarkable since he or she was a baby. Not to say that people would love their gifted children more than typical children, but a precocious toddler probably has a little extra sparkle and charm.
And then your baby tests too high on the midichlorian scale and your life is just ripped apart. You get those fuzzy bright – too sweet years, and then you don’t see them until they’re vague and peaceful calm as Obi Wan. Does anyone refuse? You leave this beautiful bright four year old to meet his destiny and 20 years later, he’s a stranger who has seen more of the universe than you’re capable of imagining. Maybe all parenting is kind of like that.
But maybe it’s not like that at all. Maybe the four year old isn’t so much adorably brilliant as he is frustratingly advanced. Maybe he constantly pushes against your artificial boundaries, ready to cross them long before you are ready to let him. Maybe all parenting is kind of like that too. But this little child doesn’t just cause trouble in school when he’s bored, he levitates, and talks his teachers into letting him have extra recess. Every day. Maybe if hadn’t been found by the Jedi, he would have been lost on a path of drugs, crime and force lightning.
And maybe you don’t have to just hand him over to the priesthood, maybe that was just unique to Anakin’s circumstances, what with Mom being a slave. I mean, obviously it’s a boarding school, I doubt they have Jedi-letts who commute, but maybe they have parents weekends every couple months. Maybe the little ones put down their training sabres and pack up for a long holiday over Thanksgiving. Maybe they make paper planets with heart stickers and glitter for Mother’s Day.
Then there’s sure to be at least a few families who moved to Coruscant to be near their Jedi tots. In fact some probably even moved to Coruscant just in hopes that their child would be accepted. They probably used special belly-headphones to play special force channeling soundtracks for the fetus. When the baby turned 18 months, they enrolled him in a class that claims to raise midichlorian levels, satisfaction guaranteed.
Do the parents ever hang out watching light-sabre kata practice? Does Dad pick his Jedi up from a match with a younger but more talented boy and scold him for not triple flipping into the opening he saw two and a quarter minutes in, or what about a little force nudge when the kid blinked sweat out of his eyes a minute later? Does Mom observe her daughter meditating and tell her maybe she needs to work a little harder at it since she always seems to need to itch her nose after only a few hours?
Why do I assume the Jedi parents would be overbearing and… awful?
I guess it’s because I know (however it is you can know something about a fictional universe) that there is no room for parents in the world of the Jedi. Parents are distracting, they are attachment, they turn Anakins into Darth Vaders.
If it’s genetics (and Luke says it is) most parents of Jedi must have had some feel for the force as well. Probably they wouldn’t have turned into Toddlers & Tiaras type psychos, they would have been sensitive, aware of nuances, feeling the subtle needs of their baby. They would have been there with a hug when the training was too difficult, they would have felt the pain of struggle, of the alienation that must be necessary to finally attain a detached calm. And the hugs might keep the student from struggling through, from learning what needed to be learned.
Was a Jedi ever allowed to be a child? Did they have time for games and giggling and stupid stunts, or was it all concentration and breathing?
The Jedi. The Jedi’s father. The athlete and her parents. Theresa and John Paul and Ender Wiggin, Mr. and Mrs. Madrid. The parent of every real world soldier, alive and slain. They give so much, and we expect it all of them. Was it worth it? What they missed, what they lost?
To be a Jedi?
Crawling Lessons
Ender’s first Christmas was fantastic.
He (like most babies I imagine) was far more interested in the wrapping paper, boxes, and the excitement around him than in his gifts.
It was a task to keep him from eating the wrapping paper.
He loves people though, so I think having a chance to visit family was the best part.
His cousins, aunt and grandma all loved having him there and he ate up the attention. Our younger niece helped him unwrap his presents.
Our nieces, especially the older one, tried to teach him to crawl.
Not quite sure… I think he might need some more examples.
Your arms go like this, and your legs go like… what?
He’s still not quite there yet, but he was definitely watching.
Our older niece played Peek-a-boo every chance she got. Ender got so much attention last weekend I think he’s bored with just me and his Dad now.
Love. Hate.
Hmm. What’s this?
Yuck!
Why would you do that to me?
Well, ok.
Ugh! It’s terrible!
Hey what’s this?
Wait, that’s not…
Bleah.
Why????
Hey what’s this?
He ate like this for half an hour.
Out of Reach
One thing that has surprised me about being a parent is how fascinating babies can be. Don’t get me wrong, by the time bedtime rolls around it seems way past due, but I can spend so much time just watching Ender puzzle out the world. Even when it seems like there isn’t much going on, he’s working on putting it all together.
The most recent observation on my mind is the question of why Ender is not crawling yet. I don’t mean in terms of hitting milestones — Ender is 6 months old which is still early to be crawling. I just mean the physical and mental hurdles that are keeping him stuck like an overturned turtle.
Pediatricians stress the importance of tummy time because it allows babies to develop the muscles they need to crawl, and eventually walk. Supposedly they develop the necessary muscles around 6-10 months. It seems like the going theory is that as soon as they are strong enough, they up and start crawling, but I have my doubts.
Ender is STRONG. He was born able to hold his head up for short periods of time (and peck us like a bird, mouth agape, when he wanted to be fed) and support his own weight with his legs. The first time I laid him on his tummy, about a month and a half, he rolled over. Which is NOT to say he rolled over early. I count his real rolling over somewhere between 3 and 4 months. At a month and a half he had NO idea what he was doing, he was just angry to be on his tummy and flailed his way back onto his back.
My point is that I don’t think strength is what is keeping him from crawling. I may be wrong. He could sit with support — I thought just balance — for a long time before he was able to sit unassisted, and he was quite shaky at first. He would sort of gradually lean forward until he was almost on his tummy with his legs out next to his head (which, btw, he really did NOT like). So apparently his back muscles weren’t as developed as I thought they were. And maybe now, they still aren’t as developed as I think they are. Nonetheless, I think there’s something else going on.
A baby has no understanding of perspective. There is no near and far. There is just, I dunno, here? And not here? In my hand, (or usually in Ender’s case, mouth) or want it in my hand? It must take a lot of new brain power to understand the concept of traveling, because from the baby’s perspective, objects move to them. Or they don’t. True, much of a baby’s life is being carried from one place to another, but since the baby exerts no effort to get there, since they have no control over where they go, it is as if their entire environment is one big object being turned and brought to them.
So when you think about it, crawling is quite a leap. Even reaching is a leap. We think it’s lack of hand-eye coordination that prevents small infants from grasping objects (and obviously that is the main issue) but maybe part of it is that it just doesn’t occur to the baby that an object CAN be effected by their hands, maybe a baby needs to concentrate over months and months to understand that they have the power to move themselves from one object to the other.
Ender is not quite there yet. He is trying, oh so hard to crawl, but he just doesn’t quite get how it works. I have no idea if the motion is instinctive, or if he’s imitating other babies he’s seen at Story Time, but he makes quite convincing swim-crawl motions with all four limbs that do absolutely nothing to help him. They are so convincing that I can’t quite see why they AREN’T moving him. He’s probably further frustrated by the fact that in his crib, he gets all over the place, assisted by having walls to kick off of from every direction. I’m not even sure if, in his baby brain, the movement has a purpose, if he thinks it will move him, or if it’s just a Pavlovian response to wanting something out of reach.
My favorite motion, and I’m pretty sure this is a legitimate intentional attempt to move, is his inch-worm. This is the most hilariously ineffective thing I’ve ever seen.
He does this mostly when we put him on the bed, I have no idea why, and he doesn’t necessarily do it to try to get anywhere in particular, it’s like he’s really just practicing. First he kicks his legs about for a while, like he’s trying to remember what to do with them.
Then he bunches them up under his belly, and squishes into a potato bug like ball. Sometimes he falls over at this point. Next, he sort of straightens his legs and pushes his butt way up into the air. He falls over even more often at that point. Often enough though, he balances, perched on the verge of motion.
He LOOKS like he’s going to do it. Surely, he is just seconds away from pushing himself a few inches forward and experiencing the triumph of movement.
But no. He only makes it halfway. Once he gets his butt in the air, he seems to think he’s accomplished his goal. Rather than pushing forward, or even slumping, or falling, or sliding slowly forward, his legs SHOOT back out and he ends up right where he started.
Fortunately, he never minds when I laugh at him.
Halloween
I’m working on another post right now, that I meant to get up before posting Halloween photos, but since Thursday was Thanksgiving, I guess I’d better go ahead and post these while it’s still 2011.
I had some really cute photos of Ender sitting in a box of pumpkins, but I can’t find them now. I think my phone may have eaten them. Fortunately, Ender has no shortage of cute to make up the difference. Maybe next year he’ll let me get a picture of him in a box of pumpkins. Because toddlers are known for their spirit of cooperation.
In case you didn’t catch my obsessive Photoshop tribute a couple weeks ago, we went as characters from the movie Labyrinth.
*On the right: my friend Amy went as Martha Stewart this year. (Costume not pictured. Actually I think she went as a gypsy, but seriously, check OUT that haunted house.)*
Having a baby this size was too good an opportunity to pass up dressing him in red striped pajamas and calling him “Toby,” Matt was David Bowie AKA Jareth the goblin king (side note: Jareth was one of the names we briefly considered for Ender just because we REALLY like that movie), and I was, obviously, a goblin. Sarah (the protagonist of the show) would have been a more obvious choice, but I don’t have the hair for it, and she’s a whiny little twit, so I opted for a costume that let me make a spiky helmet instead.
When you think of babies and Halloween you imagine lots of crying and utter horror at the sudden chaos that has befallen their small and so far predictable universe, but Ender was unphased. I think he may actually have been a little too young to be frightened by scary costumes. It might be more traumatic now that he’s starting to get an idea of what the wold is supposed to look like.
His older and wiser friend had a much more pragmatic reaction to being held by a ring wraith.
Next year he may better understand his danger. I mean even without the spooky mask, check out what he’s doing to that piece of cheese! Seconds after I snapped this photo he crushed that mug into ceramic dust. Which was then put back into the tub for clay grit, obviously. Just because you’re a nazgul doesn’t mean you have to destroy the earth.
Wait. Yes, that’s probably exactly what being a nazgul means. I lied about the ceramic dust. You can’t really mix in fired and glazed clay with raw clay anyway. Duh.
Anyway, my point is that Ender really wasn’t bothered by the scary costumes this year.
He just looks bored. Probably looking for something to put in his mouth. Babies actually have quite a lot in common with zombies.
The scary costumes didn’t impress him, but he sure was happy when he found Waldo. Then we all got to try to find Ender.
We went to two Halloween parties this year, one at my brother’s and the company party at Secure State. We were in kind of a rush before my brother’s party, and Matt did his own makeup with questionable results. I tried to make fun of him for his makeup failure, but he claims he is not at all embarrassed to be terrible at putting on makeup.
I was able to get to the Secure State party a little early and did his makeup for him. Lot’s of glitter. I also spent some time trying to get the wig to look a little less like a Ludwig and more like hair metal. Apparently they don’t come out of the package looking the way you want them to look. Since I was going for 80s hair, I stuck with the classics: Aquanet to the rescue.
We didn’t stay in the main party room for too long because the music was a little loud for a baby. We could have left him home with a babysitter, but he was kind of our main costume prop, so we just hung out in a quiet area instead.
I tried to get some photos in for Photoshopping later.
Ender was not entirely cooperative, but he was, as usual, pretty tolerant.
He conked out before we’d been there for too long. Matt had a few things to finish before we could leave.
Fortunately he stayed asleep when we put him in his carseat. He NEVER does that anymore. It probably helped that he was already in pajamas.
Next year we’ll get him a more costume-like costume. This one was nice and simple though, and kept him comfortable.
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. When I was young enough to be thrilled by Christmas it was a toss-up. The fantasy and the disguises, the opportunity to play at being someone or something else for a night are more intriguing than the candy (though it’s hard to compete with Santa Clause and new toys). Next year he’ll be a little older and I would assume, a little more wary of strangers dressed as zombies, so we’ll have to play it by ear. I don’t want to terrify him. I’d like to give him the chance to love the holiday as much as I do.
Photoshop my Baby
Ender went in to SecureState to visit his Dad today, and I guess they were a little short handed, so they put him to work.
It’s not all that surprising really, the last few weeks or so, Ender’s been shoulder surfing while I nurse him. Or maybe you would call that boob surfing. I left the room for a minute yesterday, and now I know why they say you should never leave an infant unattended: when I came back my desktop was crowded with photos of Bindi Irwin, and I had autoconfirm emails from Amazon regarding 172 new purchases of Muppets, Loony Tunes and Phineas and Ferb. Imagine how much trouble I’ll be in when he learns to type, or even talk. (For those who are confused– Matt works at a computer security company which includes a team of hackers that are hired to attack companies in order to test their security.)
Contest Rules:
1. Show me what Ender was working on today. Larger photo blank here.
2. Mildly inappropriate is OK, but please remember that this is MY BABY and resist the urge to insert him into a raunchy porn scene. Images that make me want to puke will be deleted from comments.
3. Leave a link to your entry in the comments. One entry per commenter. Additional photoshops are welcome in comments, but I’ll only judge the first entry, or the entry you note as your chosen entry (you may want to use all caps so I don’t miss it).
4. Contest ends at 8pm Eastern Standard Time, Sunday August 14th. I’ll choose my favorite from the comments as the winner.
5. Winner receives a T-Shirt from my CafePress store with artwork of your choice.
Go forth and Photoshop!
Oh, right. I keep meaning to post about my CafePress shop… please go check it out. I have a bunch of my artwork print-ready as shirts and other gear in the shop now. If you have an image from my gallery that you’d like on a product, or a image from the store on a product that’s not offered, contact me and request it, and I’ll add it temporarily to the store.
At some point I intend to also offer prints of my artwork for posters and wall hangings.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing what people come up with for Ender’s day at SecureState. Have fun!
Six Weeks
People are always commenting on how small Ender is. He’s never looked especially small to me, except maybe a few hours after he was born when I slowly came to admit that he was NOT as enormous as he felt like coming out… at 7lb 7 oz, he was almost exactly average.
For most new parents, the biggest clue that their baby is growing is how quickly they outgrow their clothes. In my case, I thought I could feel Ender seeming larger in my arms, taking up more of my chest as we cuddled. The clothes came after.
He was 10 lb 4 oz at his 1 month check up, which is almost a pound a week. He went from just under 50th percentile for weight and length to 75% and 85%.
This probably explains why he does nothing but eat for hours on end.
I guess it’s called cluster feeding, and it’s pretty obnoxious, but it is both rewarding and exciting to watch him grow so rapidly. He outgrew the newborn clothes almost immediately, and now my favorite set of PJs, which looked five sizes too large when we first dressed him in them, are officially too small. I am dressing him entirely in 3-6 month clothes now, before I even got a chance to dress him in all the 0-3 onesies on his shelf.
Many mothers find it hard when their babies outgrow their first set of clothes, but I love seeing the proof that he’s growing and that I’m making enough food for him. Maybe I’ll get the weepy fit when I get the time to actually pack away the baby clothes he only wore for a few weeks.
I think part of the reason everyone sees Ender as small is because of his hair. His hair makes him look so much older than the newborn he is, when he cries it’s easy to picture him as a toddler throwing a tantrum. He has a pretty bad case of baby acne, but the spots across his nose look almost like freckles, and with his sweet cowlick, he looks just like one of the little rascals with a disproportionately large head. He looks just a bit more like a child than a baby.
Ender is a relatively easy baby. At night he sleeps in three hour chunks, and every once in a while graces us with a five hour stretch. I’m told he doesn’t cry as much as most newborns, but he still demands to be held and cuddled for most of the day, usually allowing me one two hour window where I can get set him up with the monitor and get some work done around the house.
Probably the coolest (and the most challenging) part of him getting older is how much more time he spends awake now.
He doesn’t like me to pump milk, because he can smell it and knows it’s not going right into his mouth, where it belongs. I think his baby brain has a very simple equation: “I’m awake” + “I smell milk” = “I must be hungry.” Only recently does he have some waking times during the day where I can hold him without him demanding that I feed him.
I have to admit I sometimes delay feeding him for a minute or two, just because he’s so hilariously cute when he’s hungry.
Much like a cat, Ender seems to be most alert when he wants food. Babies do this thing called rooting, where they move their mouth around trying to get a nipple, but when Ender does it, this means bobbing his whole head back and forth like a bird searching for seed. He pants and makes this “uh! uh!” noise that goes with it, and the first time he did it in the hospital I laughed so hard he shook on my chest.
He’s very easygoing, but I can’t help but think of him as a little cranky.
He never smiles, because he’s not yet old enough to smile, and since I’m used to older babies, emotionally I think this means he’s grumpy. He has been more fussy than usual the last week or so, but since week 6 is supposed to be the peak in endless crying, I’m pretty sure he’s actually showing us a pretty laid back personality. He really only cries when he’s hungry or gassy. Occasionally, when his “I’m awake!” period lines up with Matt and my “time to sleep” period, he’ll start fussing because we’ve tried to put him to bed, and he’s bored. We’re working on getting a mobile set up in our room over the pack’n'play in hopes that it will keep him interested and lull him to sleep.
He really is hungry all the time. When he’s at top appetite, he’ll try to eat anyone and everyone that comes near his path, but when I’m holding him, he zeros in on my nipples immediately, even through a shirt and a padded nursing bra.
I do love the moments, even though it sometimes means I get a little less sleep, where he’s fussing and furious in the crib until I pick him up… and miracle of miracles, he isn’t hungry. Instead he lays his head against my chest and settles immediately.
I know that right now, as far as Ender is concerned, his dad and I are just warm bodies, and pretty much anyone would do just as well for a cuddle buddy, but it’s still heart melting. Matt and I don’t co-sleep because it would take way too much to change our bed to a baby-safe environment. Also we’d like to give Ender a younger sibling sometime in the next few years, which means we’ll need the bed to ourselves at least once. But when Ender snuggles up against you, it’s easy to understand how people who plan not to co-sleep end up with a “family bed.”
Parenting, obviously, is full of adjustments. Depression runs in my family so even before we started trying for a baby Matt and I knew to be on the look out for postpartum depression, but so far, I’ve been just fine. Or as fine as any new parent, staying at home with an infant for the first time, can be expected to be. I have had a few breakdown moments, where I felt completely incapable and horrified at the thought of being stuck with all this new responsibility for a couple decades or longer. Each of these breakdowns though has had much more to do with sleep deprivation than real depression. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine the rest of the time, but my negative feelings are temporary resignation at being so static, pinned under a small tyrant.
It’s helped that we’ve made it a point to not be shut-ins from very early on.
My brother’s wedding was only a few weeks after Ender’s birth and it was an outdoor wedding with the best weather anyone could hope for in a Cleveland June wedding. It was perfect for us as well, slightly overcast evening so we weren’t terribly worried about the temperature or the sun.
I did try to pick up a sunhat for Ender, along with a cute outfit for the wedding, but although he fits 3-6 month clothes, he does NOT fit 3-6 month hats, and for whatever reason, they didn’t have any hats for a younger baby.
Fortunately it was pretty shady at the wedding, which was held in my brother’s (and his wife’s) back yard.
We’ve been back twice since for evening bonfires and potlucks, and since I’m generally a pretty anti-social creature, I’ve actually had more social interaction the last month than I did before having the baby. He’s so small, and his needs are so primitive, that for now he actually allows us quite a lot of freedom, so long as we have the energy to exercise it.
We’ve been out to restaurants with friends a few times. For the most part, Ender is quiet at restaurants, we shove his car seat into the back of a booth and give him a bottle if he gets hungry.
Sometimes he gets fussy, but he’s little enough that the looks people give us are still of the “aww… how sweet!” variety rather than the, “why can’t you control your brat” type.
He had his first real bath only a few weeks ago, in an infant-toddler plastic whale tub (actually a very clever design- much better than the detachable sling/hammock things that most tubs use for infants which just look kind of gross).
He also outgrew the infant insert for his carseat, which shifted him from slowly enormous looking, to suddenly tiny again. It’s been utterly strange to look back at photos from a few weeks ago and be able to see a noticeable difference both in his face and his size.
For me, the weirdest transformations haven’t been in Ender, which I expected, but in myself, and in Matt.
We took a trip out to PA to visit family a couple weekends ago, Ender’s first long trip. We planned on stopping frequently to give Ender breaks from the carseat, and ended up taking two days on the way out rather than our normal 6 hour drive.
We stopped at places like Bob Evans and Perkins, where we knew Matt and I could get a decent meal while giving Ender his bottle. Side note: the booths at Bob Evans are just a little too small to comfortably feed a baby.
It was strange for me, to hear Matt request a table for three. Every hostess or waitress looked down at Ender to evaluate whether he was old enough to need his own menu, and while most were bright enough to realize, no he’s not even old enough to try and eat the crayons much less color with them, just the fact that they had to look at him and judge reminded me that we now have this new real whole person in our lives.
Ender was fairly fussy at the stops, and so I spent much of the time between bites of my food standing and rocking him, trying to keep him from bothering the other customers.
Most people weren’t bothered, they just smiled at me and went on. The way they looked at me surprised me, because I realized they looked at me and saw a mother, they looked at us and saw a family of three. I wanted to tell them all that I’ve only had this beautiful boy for a month and that this is a new role. I don’t yet know that’s me.
