A Moveable Feast

A most kissable spot

You know, I expected baby-raising to be a job with a learning curve, and indeed it is, but the curve appears to be getting somewhat steeper.  Milo's behavior has mostly followed the major developmental milestones that my limited reading discusses.  That those developments happened so slowly at first now strikes me as a great gift.

In a conversation with my sister-in-law, Kim, when I was pregnant, she said something that stuck with me.  I'll try to paraphrase, but will likely lose the tone of graceful intuition and humor with which she said it at the time (no surprise that she is now motherhood-bound herself).  It seemed to her, she said, that the good thing about child-rearing was that you would learn to handle every phase as it emerged, and wasn't it lucky that the design of growing up meant that parents didn't have to tackle everything all at once.  At least we wouldn't have to have the sex talk with Milo for quite some time, she joked.

And although Milo is still indubitably in an early phase, there are little sub-phases -- small components of growth or change -- that seem to happen by the day.  Usually, the ratio is 1:1 in terms of frustrating new routines to sweet new phenomena.  So, for example, lately, Milo seems unable to nap for more than half an hour or forty minutes at a time (sometimes he'll hit the hour or hour and a half mark, but it's really rare).  If he isn't already asleep by the time I put him in his crib, he is now wont to spend a significant amount of time rolling, playing with the mirror in his crib, scratching at the bumpers or the sheet to hear the sounds his fingernails make, and making a difficult-to-ignore cooing noise that waxes and wanes in intensity.  (I often snap to attention now when I walk the dog without the baby and hear an actual dove.)  Often, he falls asleep after this routine.  Other times, not so much, despite how tired he seemed before I put him down for the "nap," and I just admit defeat and go in and get him.  He's usually pretty happy to see me.

But as exasperating as this new habit is, he's got a couple of other new things that make me laugh.  The first is that he has discovered, now that he has his two bottom teeth, that he can use them to grab his upper lip.  Kind of.  There's a baby fish-mouth look (and sound) that I find appealing, and, obviously, so does he.  Better yet, he has this new thing where he looks at you, cocks his head waaay to the side, and gives you a coquettish smile.  It's pretty freakin' cute.  Oh, and to keep the ratio intact, he has also begun to do this thing with a couple of his toys (one is Sophie the Giraffe, a squeezie teething toy, and the other is a toy that Ben has dubbed "Death Chicken") where he desperately tries to bite/gum it, but instead of soothing him, it just pisses him off and he starts screeching and turns into Frenzied Wind-Up Teeth Maniac Baby.  The screeching also happens sometimes on walks, when Milo is sans toy, and I have no choice but to pop a wheelie to see if it shuts him up.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Frustration notwithstanding, and of course Milo's age notwithstanding, I am already sometimes just flooded with these weird little montages of him -- the insanely joy-making grin that he gives when I lift him high into the air, the pink of those pinchable cheeks, the sound of his laughter when I tickle him or just tickle his funny bone, the little groove on the back of his neck under his hairline when I sit behind him, helping him practice sitting up by himself, the way his arms splay around me when he has fallen asleep on my shoulder.  They are worth the price of admission, to be sure, and sometimes I think ahead to how he'll be a grown man one day, taller than me (I hope), and living life on his own terms, and I'll have this crazy flip-book of pictures of him in my head.  It seems both utterly amazing and almost too much to bear.  I give props to all those parents out there who somehow manage to navigate this vast bittersweet ocean of feelings day after day for years.  Seriously: thumbs up.