End of the Fourth Trimester

At three months, you enjoy books, you musical penguin, and a hand-me-down corpulent zebra named Clarence. You love kicking and babbling and baths and second breakfast and Ella Fitzgerald and Old Macdonald with silly animals and you grandmother. You sleep much of the night. You dislike tummy time and loud noises, and get socially exhausted like his mother. You have Dad's face with Mama's eyes. You smile while eating, you eat in your sleep. Leggy, with delicious feet.

A Quiet Day

Today is the last day that all four grandparents are in town, and your dad has planned to make a video for you, for your eighteenth or perhaps twenty first birthday. Right now you are awake from your morning nap and Manamana is playing with you while you are in your bouncy chair. You are smiling at her, and I don't think I have ever seen someone so happy. Do I mean you, or do I mean my mother in law? Maybe both.

We all agree that you seem to have grown visibly overnight. Your hair is getting thicker, and your eyelashes are long pale brown fringes. You fell asleep on my chest at seven last night, an hour earlier than usual, and I think it was because you are growing, but also because you - like me - get tired out by too much socializing. You have had days on end of grandparents and friends, and you were warm and personable to the last. But tired.

When you are excited you waggle your arms and kick your feet all at once, and you say OOOO and WOO and HOOO! You sometimes drop your wubanub because you are smiling around it. For Christmas you were given many board books and from our friend Claire in the UK some darling clothes including a Harry Potter onesie complete with cape. I have to write some thank you notes for you - I'll try to do that today. You love your giraffe wubanub and your weird secondhand fat stuffed zebra (we call him Clarence) and this tall giraffe who looks over your baby pouf, and you get super excited if I sing Old Macdonald to you with your stuffed animals for illustration.

You loved looking at the candles we lit for Hannukah, and you enjoyed watching me open holiday cards and put them up on the mantle.

We just sang You are my Sunshine for you and I did my best to harmonize. Your dad and you and I am Milo dog and Uncle Eli all have matching red plaid jammies, but we haven't been organized about wearing them, so you are in your soft camel jammies today while dad and I are in red plaid flannel.

And that is how things stand today, after your first Christmas and Hannukah, and a few days before your three month birthday.

Eleven Weeks Eve

All the grandparents are in town, and tomorrow your uncle the Ward arrives, and then you first Christmas will begin in earnest. Last night we did the first Hannukah candle, and you were fussy because it was your bedtime, so I got a picture of your dad beaming while you squirm in his arms like a fish.

You are asleep, and I am tired, and watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I enjoyed in high school, and which funnily enough is making me reflect on how lovely the Griswold marriage is as represented in this film. Clark sets his expectation sky high, and Ellen, despite knowing it's going to happen, seeing it about to happen, waits to pick up the pieces anyway.

Your father and I agree. You are the most wonderful and amazing baby who has ever lived. Tonight, as I was holding you in Nana's chair with the lights of the avenue below us, I whispered to you that I loved you more than anyone in the whole wide world, and that I would always love you, no matter what mistakes you make, or what you do, or what you say, and even when you are grown up and have a family of your own, some part of you will always be my little baby who I love more than anything or anyone in the whole wide world.

Then I started to cry, of course, and you yawned your tiny baby yawn, and that is how things stand on the eve of your eleventh week of life.

Ten Weeks

You are asleep on your Manamana on a rainy cold winter day in New York City. In about an hour I will change you and wrestle you into a cute sweatshirt with a dinosaur on it and then wrap you up in your bunting at pull on your soft gray hat with little bear ears - all children's outerwear has animal ears now, I don't know why - and strap you into your bassinet stroller and then I will wrap myself up in scarves and socks and puffy coats and gloves and after all that we will wheel our way through the rain to meet my editor for lunch. Your first high powered editorial meeting, and my first tentative step back into my professional life.

Much of my job pretends to be social, which as an introvert who is quite possibly on the spectrum, albeit subclinically, I find baffling and exhausting. But I genuinely like my editor, and I think she genuinely likes me. She has sent you two baby gifts so far, a sweet towel set and an unexpected shipment of clothing, including the aforementioned dinosaur sweatshirt. This is why you are wearing it. I can imagine gestures that will appeal to other people, sometimes. Let us hope she likes me - you, let's be honest, you're the big draw here - well enough that it matters less that not so very many people bought my latest book.

You are sweet and chubby and definitely look bigger than a 2 1/2 month old baby. You are in baby clothes sized 3-6 months, and the last couple of nights you have fussed more than before at bedtime, which might spoil my parents' hopes for a dinner on boxing day involving you. But you are you, and you are growing, and right now you are in a rather large developmental leap, and you will not be rushed. Nor should you be.

You are in the midst of the first chapter of your life, with your first big editor lunch only an hour away.

And that is where things stand on this, your tenth week of life.

Colic

For the first time, last night we could not figure out why you were crying, and were powerless to help you. It started around 6:15, as you were nursing. You seemed to get frustrated, bopping your head and flailing your fist against me - a newly acquired skill, this flailing baby fist. Your face turned red and your mouth opened and you screamed.

You screamed for almost three hours.

You weren't wet. You weren't hungry (or if you were, you were too upset to eat). You weren't hurt. You didn't have a fever. At one point I stripped you naked on your changing pad hunting for secret torments - a sharp pin, an itchy patch, a bug bite, anything, anything at all - and you stopped your crying and smiled gummily up at me.

We soothed. We walked. I started to freak out and stepped out to talk the dog around the block. When I got back you were still screaming. You dad stepped out to take a break and I pressed you naked to my chest and wrapped you up in a Moby and that helped a little, and you caught your breath for maybe ten minutes before you started squirming and the scream wound up again. I started to cry. Your dad got angry at me for crying. We were both exhausted and surprisingly terrified, because even though we both knew, intellectually, that babies do this sometimes, and crying won't hurt you, and you were safe and healthy and warm and dry and fed and maybe this was just due to overstimulation, or maybe an earache, or maybe you were just at a developmental moment of stress and you had no other way to cope, even though we knew all these things we - certainly I, I assume your dad too - were unprepared for how much actual pain your cries would cause us.

I realize, of course, there will be many times over the course of your life that you will be in a mysterious state of distress which I will be unable to soothe. You might have a tantrum, or later on, you will have your heart broken by some thoughtless young person. You will fail to get into a college you really want to attend, you will lose a job. These disappointments and pains are an important part of life. They help you recognize the magic of when good things happen - when you fall in love and it sticks, when you get a different job you like better. Today, you spent the early morning nursing and dozing snuggled up next to me, quiet, occasionally squirmy, mostly relaxed, just as long as you screamed last night. Right now you are dozing in your baby pouf after playing for a bit with your grandmother. The dog has just sniffed your hands to make sure you are safe, and you are. I am grateful for it.

Maybe that's one thing I can take away from your inconsolability last night - gratitude for the moments when we know exactly how to give you what you need to be happy.

That, and a sense that the pain shows me how much we truly love you.

Sleep

You are half-dozing in a bouncy chair which I keep moving with the pressure of my knee while I write a bit on a laptop on our coffee table. Last night you slept for five straight hours, most of which I wasted by being awake for no reason. Then after your three am feeding you wanted to be held all morning.

Awhile ago on Twitter some stranger posted that if he could go back in time and tell himself one thing, he would go back, tell himself to get some sleep, and then his present self would stay awake holding the baby all night. I now think about that whenever you drift off to sleep on me. I remind myself to notice it, as it is happening. I try not to jump ahead to when it won't happen anymore, because if I do that I will be sad, and I'm getting better about not thinking back to when I was sure you would never happen, because I was sad then, too.

You are here, right now. Half awake in a secondhand bouncy chair, with your dad asleep in the back and your dog asleep on the sofa under the window and I am awake and writing, just a little. We are here, together, right now.

Two Months

You are asleep in our bedroom, where we moved your bassinet after the Duraflame smoke log fiasco of Thanksgiving 2019, but which wound up being a good thing. We are slowly figuring out how to help you get onto a sleep schedule.

It's hard, when you are asleep. I miss you, and find myself looking at pictures of you even though you are just in the next room.

You have started looking in our eyes, and smiling when you see us. You hold your head up, but you still wobble back and forth and sometimes while rooting plant your face in my neck, or against my cheek or my lips, a wild baby kiss.

I sometimes tear up reading you board books as we camp out on our whale-patterned blanket.

You are chubby of chin and kicky of feet, and you find tummy time frustrating because all you want to do is move and you can't quite, yet. But you will.

Very, very soon.

And that is how things stand on this, your two month birthday.