Seven Months

You are sitting behind me, playing with wooden toys, happy as a clam after making a high pitched sonic screech all during dinner because, it turns out, you don't like carrots.

I endeavored to both encourage you to say "Mama up" if you wanted to be let out of your high chair instead of "EEEEEEEEE," and then I explained to you that if you kept up this high pitched whine approach I was going to drop you off at the abattoir. Then I enjoyed narrating your various letters home from the abattoir. "Dear Mama," you wrote. "Please don't think me ungrateful, but the abattoir is not nearly as nice as everyone says."

At seven months you are chubby! You have leg rolls, and a double chin, and you are very winning. Clothing sized for 12 month old babies is snug on you. Your hair has grown in, and your eyebrows are very expressive. You are very focused on standing up, but not able to get yourself there yet, even if you are just able to totter while holding on to your Zany Zoo. You are still on three naps a day, and each nap these days takes place in my arms. At times you conk out on my shoulder and I try, ever so softly, ever so delicately, to lower you into a pack and play in our room. The moment your back touches the surface of the pack n play your precious eyes fly open, and your mouth opens, and your objection begins to wind up. Presumably this won't always be the case, but you don't like be apart from us (me, really) when you sleep.

It's okay. I will miss it, when it ends. Whenever that may be.

You are enjoying more food, and only want to drink water from a real glass. You have no use for sippy cups, and you are over bottles it seems. In truth, you are fascinating to watch. My parents lately sent up my 1978 plastic Fisher Price whinnie horse, and you just about lost your mind with excitement, even though you can't walk or climb onto it unassisted.

Your obsession with Milo continues unabated.

I am starting to see outlines of what you will look like when you are a boy, and no longer a baby. Sometimes, when you are asleep on me (as you are for thirteen hours out of any given 24), I will thumb through pictures of when you were brand new, astonished at how long it has been since you arrived, and also at how lately you got here.

It's amusing to me that you know your name, and you know the dog's name, but not your father's name, or mine.

Today you are wearing a striped romper with a collar, which is your first collared shirt. You look very serious paging through a book about babies, and something about the collared shirt and the short sleeves makes you look older, which is a weird thing to say about a romper with snaps in the crotch and stripes and an applique of a seal playing with a big round ball.

Your mother, Succotash, is rife with nostalgia.