Miles and miles

I know it's totally cliche to wail that my baby is growing so fast I can't keep up, but you guys, my baby is growing so. damn. fast.

two months
By the time I come to grips with having a two-month-old I have a nine-week-old and then ten weeks have gone by, and I'm sure it's going to be like this for the rest of my life.

nine weeks
Smiles are many and pretty easy to earn these days. There's not much in the world better than a big crinkle-eyed, open-mouthed, pure-joy baby grin, especially when it's meant for me. (And he has my dimple in his right cheek, hold me back!) He's even smiling at people he's just met now, which is a huge hit when we take him visiting.

I try not to get too hung up on milestones and dates, and haven't cracked my copy of What to Expect the First Year since Nico was a few weeks old. I'll admit to peeking at the developmental chart the hospital gave us, though, which I helpfully magneted to the side of the fridge when we brought him home. Of course I feel pleased every time I get to check something off, and with myself for not getting too Type A about it. (But the paper says he should be holding his head at least 45 degrees off the floor during Tummy Time. Find me a protractor!) In the past two weeks, he's begun to discover that he can make sounds other than crying, and it's awesome. No consonants or true babble yet, but there have been definite baby noises. Oh, and when we all went to visit our delightful chiropractor on Wednesday afternoon, he demonstrated a sudden talent for cheerful high-octave shrieks.

The other night I put him to bed with his feet toward the mobile, like always. When I woke up in the morning, he was still perfectly parallel to the sides of his crib, but rotated 180 degrees so that his head was toward the mobile and with both feet sticking out between the ankle snaps of his footie pajamas. He looked for all the world like he'd been placed there, and he was so perfectly aligned that I texted MB to ask if he'd moved Nico when he got up (he hadn't). This morning, he'd repeated the rotation, though he wasn't wearing an escapable pair of footies.

It was a gorgeous day on Wednesday, and I decided to follow through on my harebrained idea to take some photos of Nico in front of pretty flowers. The building next to my workplace has a small but very nice garden, and I was headed over there to meet up with Julia for a quick project meeting anyway, so I stuck the camera in the diaper bag and tossed the Bumbo seat and a quilt into the car. After my meeting, I put Nico on his quilt in front of a perfect bed of purple crocuses and started snapping away. But my poor winter-born baby...this was only the second time he's been outside without being strapped in his stroller or the front carrier, so he was all, "Sunlight? Fresh air? WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?" and in most of the pictures, his eyes are shut tight. I moved him to the Bumbo seat, and he opened his eyes but was highly suspicious of the whole operation.

Skepticism, with flowers
He was kind of hungry and sleepy, I reasoned, so I figured I'd try again with the lone clump of daffodils in our front yard once he'd eaten and was more alert. Same setup -- baby in Bumbo and then on quilt, strategically positioned in front of flowers. Same squinch-eyed results, with an added bonus. Because MB hasn't done this season's first mow yet, the grass is long enough that it was touching Nico's feet. I now have captured for posterity my small son with a very distinct "Grass?! WTF!" look on his face.



I tried to get this post finished on Wednesday, but didn't have a chance. And then Thursday came around and more stuff happened. (Skip over these next two paragraphs if you don't want to hear about breastfeeding.) Since he was born, we've been seeing the lactation consultants at the hospital for help with nursing. I came home from the hospital with instructions to nurse Nico every three hours, feed him a supplement of formula after he ate, and then pump for ten minutes. He started on 30 mL of supplemental formula or pumped breastmilk per feeding and was up to 242 mL of supplements per day when he was five weeks old. At that point, the LCs put us on track to start weaning Nico back from his supplements. For that, the goal changed to 8 - 10 nursing sessions per day and a reduction of no more than 30 mL of supplement every few days. After five weeks of recording every feeding, every dirty diaper, and every pumping session, he's down to an average daily bottle-given supplement of about 115 mL of breastmilk and hasn't had formula in two weeks.

At ten weeks, he weighs 13 pounds, 4.5 ounces and we've been officially declared normal nursers. The LC we saw yesterday took notes on Nico's progress and then said, "I'm kicking you guys out." No more weekly weight checks, no more worksheets. Just me and Nico and the milk we worked so hard for. Now that we're here, it's hard to remember what it felt like to pump for ten minutes and get 3 mL of milk. I can -- luckily -- barely recall the night in the hospital that he spent screaming with hunger and frustration while I wept onto his small stripey-hatted head. I knew something was wrong, had known something was wrong for a day and a half, but it was Sunday, none of the LCs were in the office, and we didn't know that there was an emergency beeper for the lactation department. The LCs came to see us first thing on Monday and got us started on the pumping and supplementing, and it didn't get easy right away, but here we are. We're normal. Even if he continues to take a four-ounce bottle of pumped milk every evening, he's still normal. I am so happy to be normal. Every time I look at the chub on his thighs, I feel proud of how far we've come.


And because my child is clearly a genius and knows exactly how the game is played, he laughed for the first time Thursday afternoon, at my parents' house, while my dad was making faces at him.