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Almost Five Months

Sarah’s been really great at suggesting some of the best baby books a parent should read, and I’ve been really great at convincing her to just give me the gist of them.

The book that’s particularly relevant to today’s post is “The Wonder Weeks” by Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij. The weeks referred to are weeks 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 46, and 55, which are periods in your kid’s life where they undergo huge developmental leaps. Your kid acts weird for a few days (eats insatiably, sleeps like a coma-patient) and once they get to the other side, they’ve learned a new skill. Vocalizing, grasping for things, attaining massive gains in neck or leg strength, etc. Right now, Teddy has just emerged from one of the stormiest transitions—the eighteen to nineteen week mark. We were warned. The book told us: kids with established sleep patterns go all squirrelly, kids that were good eaters get all spitty-outty, and it makes the parents go WTF. True, true, and true. There were nights when he would wake up five or six times (as opposed to the awesome two or one), and there were times when he reacted to his bottle like you were trying to fill his mouth with hell. All the previous stages were a few days. This one just went on, and you couldn't help but think holy crap, is this the new normal. (And fine, I'll admit: we're a bunch of sucks. Because Good Teddy is GREAT Teddy, and Bad Teddy really isn't that bad. But you still can't help missing Good when Bad is in town.) Anyhow, the happy news is that he's through to the other side, and back to his old self. But now he's teething, so it's all about the drool, and the wiping of the drool, and drool-related barfs. Enough complaining though.

All kinds of stuff has happened, but I'll leave it there for tonight. I'll try to get back to this tomorrow, but I won't jinx this by officially calling in Part One in the subject line. I'll leave off for tonight with this—Teddy's passport photo, taken for a trip that we have lined up for Fall. Teddy managed to avoid the no-smiling rule, which should make the customs folk happy, but let's just hope there isn't an equally Nazish rule against drooling. Or giraffe sleepers.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Man. I hate having my mouth filled with hell. It brings back all of those memories of me asleep at your house and you sneaking into the room and...

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