At first she mastered control of her eyes. About the same time, she worked on controlling her head. The Girl has more or less mastered those skills.
Next come the hands. That’s a little tricker — they still fly around like she’s a hyperactive orchestra conductor. But then, in calm moments, she surprises us all and holds her bottle.
When we’re bathing and photographing the girl all at the same time, it gets kind of crowded.
After we change the girl’s diaper, she’s usually pretty happy. I guess I would be too, considering her movement patterns — save it all up for one big explosion that leaves a mess so big that it creeps out the diaper here, there, and sometimes everywhere. It must be a relief finally to get changed.
We finally got some footage of the after-diaper fun.
A developing child goes through so many “firsts” in that initial year that it’s easy to forget about some of them.
Take for example the first time L grabbed something other than a someone’s finger.
A parent’s finger is warm and I suppose somewhat inviting to be — conducive to being, at least — held. A plush toy? Not exactly soft, but warm I suppose. Perhaps this just means the end of a short era of preferring Tata’s finger to just about anything else?
Another big development is the ability to sit.
It’s a long way from sitting with supports to sitting alone. But like everything else has to this point, I expect the one to melt into the other unexpectedly.
The Girl slept fitfully last night. Friday night she drifted off at eleven at didn’t wake up until five Saturday morning. That is a survivable schedule. Waking up every couple of hours is not.
Morning comes and I take care of the girl while K sleeps. After her 7:00 feeding and burping, L lies on the bed between us, looking up at the ceiling, smiling wildly at who knows what. She turns her head and looks at me and an even bigger smile breaks.
Later in the morning, in the guest room with babcia, she looks at the bright morning light coming in through the window. Calm.
A bit of motion and she looks my way. Of course I have the camera…
A change, some rocking, perhaps a nap — then it’s time to start over.
L’s 90 day money back guarantee would have expired yesterday. But unlike the magazine subscription we recently purchased, various CDs we’ve bought, tons of clothes, pipes, pens, furniture, etc., we haven’t said a word about taking her back.
It’s not a question of depreciation — far from it. She’s far more dear to us now than when we brought her home from the hospital — so dear, in fact, that we continue to invest regularly in various upgrades. And she attracts quite a crowd:
“[We think] we’ll keep her.”
The Girl has been sick-ish. Lots of saline nose drops and bulb syringe work as a result. Lots of crying. And least significantly: a beautiful weekend spent inside.
L is at the age now where she’s starting to recognize things — including bulb syringes. Which means she sometimes starts before the whole process starts. Then, the degree of difficulty increases significantly as she jerks her head from side to side, crying, snorting, and being generally miserable.
And so now that we’re at the point of L’s life we were all sort of looking forward to (the time when she’s not so fragile as when she was first born), we’re looking forward to when she’s able to communicate her needs, and, more importantly, we’re able to communicate with her.
“I know this hurts, but I need to do it so you’ll be able to breathe better.”
L is almost eleven weeks old, which means she’s entering that period where every day she does something new for the first time. A few of the recent firsts:
She’s slowly discovering that those spindly things sticking out from her sides are arms — her arms. This morning she tried to bring her hand to her mouth after holding it in front of her, studying it for a few seconds before slamming her hand directly into…her forehead.
L has added a new cry to her repertoire: the “I’m bored” cry. She likes to be toted around the apartment so she can see anything and everything.
Lastly, she’s discovered her voice, and learned that it too is subject to her control. And so she’s taken to making vowel sounds to show her interest and her joy. We’ve captured it twice on video.
K is a cartographer. As such, she has an abiding interest in maps. As such, we have a very nice map of the region of Poland where she comes from (and where I lived for seven years) hanging in our forayer.
L is turning into a smiler. It’s gone from “Honey, come quick! She’s smiling!” to a many-times-a-day occurrence. In fact, she smiles on-cue now. Sort of.
Whenever we hold L so that she can see our forayer map, she smiles — 99% of the time. We’ve caught it on video a couple of times.
The question is, what is so fascinating for her about that map? It has nothing but muted earth-tones; it is extremely low-contrast; it is very detailed — all the things a baby L’s age are not supposed to find particularly interesting. But she loves it — she comes closest to laughing when looking at it.
Maybe she senses that mom’s a cartographer. Maybe she senses that its a representation of her roots. Maybe she just gets off on low-contrast images…
It really began some weeks ago — the first smile, K says, was when L was six weeks old. I didn’t see it for some time, because L would smile once one day, give it a couple day’s rest, then smile again — usually when I wasn’t home.
And then she began smiling often enough that I saw L with her eyes sparkling above a toothless grin.
But it took some time to be able to capture that on film memory card.
Now, we can cause her to smile — if she’s in the right mood. All we have to do is flash (and hold) an exaggerated smile and within seconds, she joins in.
The best time to get a smile out of her is after a bath. L absolutely loves being bathed, so much so that it is actually an effective calming mechanism.
And when she’s calm and smiling, we’re calm and smiling.
When I photograph L, I try to avoid using a flash — for somewhat obvious reasons.
I’d finished burping the girl; something was holding her attention; K had the camera:
Things went well for a few moments, and then L got testy.
But she’s still gorgeous when she’s positively wailing.
Does it count?
A newborn holding up her head — one of those milestones we all know about. When L was first born, her head bobbled back and forth, giving cause for alarm a couple of times: when you have an energetic baby who still doesn’t have control over many of her body’s muscles, you get some literally breathtakingly jerky motions.
L has been holding her head up for a moment here, a moment there, for a couple of weeks. The other night I got a couple of good shots when she was in a good belly mood.
K and I bundled L up Sunday afternoon and took her on her first outing: a walk through a local university’s botanical gardens.
We made a couple of loops around the trail that runs literally over the river and through the woods. Toward the back, there is a historic log cabin.
L, though, was unimpressed: she slept through most all of it.
Being house-bound is perhaps the most annoying difficulty of having a six-week-old infant. To date, it is certainly more difficult on K, who has been home with L since her birth and can go an entire day without leaving the apartment. That explains why she’s so eager sometimes to run to the store to pick up that forgotten ingredient for dinner — to go anywhere is a treat.
It’s something we’re both anticipating with smiles.
K and I look at L and try to imagine what she’ll look as a toddler. As a young child. A pre-teen. And so on. I can’t get much beyond the young child.
There are, however, a few things K and I are sure of.
She’ll have an inordinate number of bad hair days, thanks to that swirling cowlick just beside her right temple and another more toward the center of her forehead. In adolescence, they will likely drive her to angry tears at least once.
“That’s all assuming she’s the type to be terribly worried about her physical appearance,” one might suggest.
No, they’ll upset her no matter what — they’re that bad.
As a kid of ten, summer seemed endless, as did the school year. And that’s reasonable, for one year then represented ten percent of my life.
My folks are coming for a visit today — the first visit in two weeks. And today, of course, L is six weeks old.
Two weeks since they’ve last seen her. She’s fifty percent older. She’s probably close to a pound heavier and a couple of inches longer.
“Everyday something new” we read in all the baby books. And that’s not surprising, for even now, each day is more than one percent of L’s total life.
When I arrive home from work, K and L have usually just finished the four o’clock feeding/burping cycle. Occasionally, I get home in time to do the burping.
A couple of time, I’ve managed to get back just as L’s going to sleep.
“What a convenient time to be sleepy myself,” I thought last Friday, the last time I came home to find L’s eyes droopy.
And K crept in with the camera…