Ex utero exactly as long as in utero: update

Miss Amelie,

As you sit on the floor knocking yourself in the head with a near-empty bottle of breastmilk, I am amazed how much you have changed after being outside of me exactly as long as you were inside me.  39 weeks and 1 day ago you were born; 39 weeks and 1 day before that you were conceived.  Here's an update of your life.

Your body and movement
 Your eyes have become an icy crystalline blue, and you effuse such joy with your near-toothless, open-mouthed smile that you cheered up an entire packed Department of Motor Vehicle office while we waited in line.  You look like a porcelain cupid, your skin a delicate white with naturally rosy cheeks (which you got from Daddy, who calls it ruddy on himself).  You have very fine, wispy red hair, a strawberry-golden sheen that shows bronze in the sunlight and curls up below your ears like the Gerber Baby's.  I dress you as beautifully as I can -- smocked dresses, eyelet, ruffles, velvet, embroidery -- and you sometimes wear your nicest outfits even if we don't go out.  Daddy likes footie pajamas when we're home and overalls or jumpers for going out. You were born 9 lbs 4 oz and are now about 21 lbs, still big (I hear a lot of she-never-misses-a-meal-does-she) but regressing toward the mean, now in the 80th percentiles; you are long too, between 27 and 28 inches, which is also in the 80th percentile.  You look weirdly lean to me now, but you still have a fold like a perma-bracelet around your wrists.

You crawl just like a little wind-up toy, each arm and each knee moving singly and deliberately, and you're getting so fast that yesterday you made it from the play room through the living room into the kitchen and had your hands in the dog water before I realized you were missing (about 2 minutes).  When you stop to focus on something or reach for something, you adopt what Daddy calls a hurtler's stretch with one leg straight and the other bent and behind you. You have stood alone only twice, once with my ex-advisor Dr. Andy Cowell (who stood you upright, my shriek of joy echoing through CU's entire Linguistics office) and once of your own choosing.    You pull yourself up to standing but do not walk around holding onto furniture (yet).  You currently have a bruise on your forehead, a scratch on your nose, and a patch of scratch on your knee because you want to move faster than you can balance so you do a lot of diving.  Doula Stephanie's son Liam was playing with you on his driveway when we discovered you had a scratch on your knee -- he was humbled in complete admiration and said "Awesome!  She didn't cry!"

Your vocalizations and moods
You don't cry very often, and some experienced mothers like Aunt Sarah and Erin Donelly think you are spoiling me rotten by being so cheerful and easy.  You complain in "iiii" before you cry; we think of it as your check-engine light.  When I tickle you you laugh and if we are in the playroom with the TV off you get to talking up a storm sometimes.  I am just in love with your voice.  When you were born it sounded just like I sound to myself in my head.  And now you are awakening from your nap...


Your phonetic inventory thus far is varied and fascinating; Daddy said this morning that one of the surprises of fatherhood has been how greatly he enjoys listening to your voice.  Sometimes you listen to your voice as if you were testing a violin -- you articulate slowly, changing your utterance only very slightly in one way (volume, pitch, the shade of the vowel or the voicing on the consonant like d to t).  You fixate on one pattern pretty much every day, and we never know what you'll pick -- one day it's hitow, hidow, hitow -- the next day it's wow, wow, awow, yawow. You have said 'dadadada' for many months and you still do it every day, but you've never yet said 'mama' at all.  Right now you're on 'ba' and 'bwa bwa' so I'm hoping M isn't far away -- the only difference between B and M being nasalization -- but it'll be quite a while before it has meaning, I'm sure.  You've just barely begun to show an understanding of the sign for nurse, because when you're hungry and I sign nurse you ramp into making monkey noises the same way you do when you see my breasts.  You also as of last week have seemed to have been making the same movement with your hand more often while nursing than otherwise, but you do not mimic gestures or sounds at all that I have seen.

  

Your behavior, eating and sleeping

And now, an hour later, I return after nursing you back to semi-sleep (what Daddy and I call sleeping on tap, in which you awaken the instant you stop nursing) -- and reading for a long time.  This is a really large part of my experience of your infancy that I'd not thought to mention, but I read a TON, because I am often faced with deciding between remaining beside you (and reading) or you waking up.  You have reached most for books by Orson Scott Card, perhaps because I read all of both series he wrote related to Ender's Game, something like 3000 pages, in January and February.  I am currently beginning Survivor Moms to help understand my experience of your birth more compassionately.

Your Daddy has an easier time getting you to sleep  -- oh, you're awakening!  I boobytrapped the pillow so a dangling hairband will fall off it when you wake up, because you finally slept again on top of the bed and I didn't want to put you in your pack-n-play (surrogate crib) or you'd have awoken.  But you're sleeping on the bed alone, so I have to get you as soon as you do wake up -- you haven't yet.

So your Daddy puts you on the bed between his body and his left arm, your head on his shoulder, and you cry a bit before you fall asleep for naps; at night he lifts you out of your playpen when you start crying and puts you on his bare chest where you nestle your cheek against him, listen to him breathe, and fall back asleep.

You nap unpredictably because I haven't instituted any kind of schedule.  All my life I've resented having to follow a routine -- but, as Doula Steph says, if you don't institute order you can't complain about the crazy.  I am almost sufficiently frustrated to discipline myself enough to put you down at the same time every day, but not quite.

I'm almost convinced that I need to start feeding you more predictably too, because right now I still nurse you when you want to and feed you solids if I feel like it (which is maybe once a day, maybe twice, maybe none).  I don't do the pureed thing; we follow what's called Baby Led Weaning, a sort of modified form in which you eat mostly bananas and avocados but also anything else I feel like giving you.  Fortunately nothing ever causes you intestinal upset.  This morning we went to breakfast with Nana Julie, a kind woman I met when you were an infant who has adopted you as a granddaughter and takes care of you -- and so you had whatever fit on my fork, potatoes and egg frittatta.  Sometimes you gag but I never intervene.  Twice you've had to... produce a bit of a current to get the object dislodged, lost rather a bit of what you'd recently eaten, but you always take care of it yourself.

Yesterday you had your first Indian Tacos and your first fry bread at your first powwow, the Denver March Powwow, where we went with Nana Julie's brother Harry.  You were entranced by the dancers and the drums -- you grinned, clapped your hands, waved your arms around, and didn't sleep for 6 hours.  In April I plan to take you to Wind River Reservation to meet my Arapaho family.  Our Arapaho family, neiteheiho' hinono'eino'.

Our parenting
Our primary rule when deciding stuff like whether to comfort you when you cry -- which surprisingly can be a stressful decision, pressure being what it is to cultivate independence even in infants in our country -- our unchanging standard is to follow our instinct.  That's what my mother seemed to learn through the first 5 of us kids, the thing she did the most differently with your Uncle Kelson -- by then she did exactly what she felt she should.  Other people could advise her until they were blue in the face, thank you very much, and she'd do exactly as she felt was best for her child.  My logic is that no matter how fiercely I love you and pour my heart into making good decisions, you'll end up in a therapist's office eventually, so the best I can do is stay true to what feels deep in my heart to be best for you.  When you have cried to a point that you no longer seem capable of calming yourself, I help you, whatever time of day or night.

Partially that's because our 2nd guiding principle comes from physiological scientific research (The Science of Parenting is the best book) and a fascinating field called ethnopediatrics, which describes the vastly different standards of what must be done for children according to the norms of cultures as disparate as the Masai and the Amish (see Our Babies, Our Selves).  My conclusion is that whatever we do, your system will adapt; secondarily, babies evolved separately from adults, and your basic design hasn't changed since humans were hunter-gatherers, so the nurturing style most natural to your physiology is one that mimics the mothering of a nomadic woman living in a group of people.  That means holding you and feeding you whenever you need me to.  That jives with neurological evidence which shows that in the same way an infant's immune system is primarily based in the antibodies of breast milk, so does your nervous system (especially in the first weeks and months) rely heavily on physical contact with mine to calm you down.  You need my heartbeat the same way you need my milk.  I carry you in a sling whenever we leave the house and you sleep in our bedroom.  It feels right.

You feel right.  I can't wait to see what happens next.  Congratulations, sweet pea.  Thank you for coming -- hohou tohno'useen.