4.5.12: Five months old

Ol’ Yeller:

My sincere apologies on the extreme lateness of this post. We have been incredibly busy and there’s just not been a lot of time to write. But that’s because we have been having so much fun!

This month you found your voice. I mean, really found it. You learned that you like to shriek and holler, and you are no stranger to very loud grunting when you’ve got, uh, business to take care of. Business that you only take care of once or twice a week. But it’s BIG business, if you catch my drift. In fact, just the other day you did your business in the bath tub. I was just sitting there, watching you grunt-splash, doing mental math on how long it had been since I had changed a poopy diaper. It’s like you read my mind, Buds! I didn’t know what to do so I hollered for your daddy to come clean up the mess, and I took you in the nursery and let you finish your important business on the changing table. You didn’t seem to feel inconvenienced in the slightest.

This month you were a smiling machine. You are such a happy baby! You only really complain when you’re having a shirt pulled over your head or when mama is taking too long to whip the ol’ boobs out. You have this funny little staccato cough-whine that you have had since very early on that clearly means “Stop fiddling with your shirt and let’s do this! I’m HONGRY.”

I have had a rough time being away from you so much this month, Holden. I started back at the office full time and I have your picture at my desk, and while I am glad your daddy is taking care of you so that you don’t have to go to daycare just yet, it is still bittersweet to be the one bringing home the bacon instead of the one changing your diaper and trying to coax naps out of you all evening. I would much rather hang out with you all day, even when you’re grumpy and I’m exhausted. My wacky hours means I miss your bathtime and bedtime all week, so I just get a precious few hours with you in the morning and early afternoon (unless I am scheduled for earlier than 1, which happens occasionally) and then you are in bed by the time I get home at night. It’s weird coming home to a house and having to be Very Quiet so as to not wake the baby, but that’s how you live with a baby in a tiny house. You’re pretty much sleeping through the night every night now, from around 9:30 until 5 or 6 a.m. This is wonderful, of course, but a little bit of a challenge for me when I work until midnightish, which is at least twice a week. Getting home, getting to bed, and then getting up with you all within the span of five or six hours is tough, but pretty much manageable when we get to take a morning nap. I just can’t sacrifice our morning time together by letting your dad take the morning shift, Buds. Sleeping in ain’t worth missing out on your wakeup smiles, which are so wide and so genuine, and always accompanied by vigorous kicks and stomps of the mattress.

There are plenty of times when you wake up in the middle of the night and you either jabber or stomp yourself back to sleep. I have seen you stomp in your sleep, even, which is bizarre and funny. Sometimes you will jabber until you start to sound annoyed, and then I come in to see what the problem is. It has been a learning process for me trying to navigate when you need me and when you don’t. You so rarely wake up crying, which is the obvious time for me to come in and scoop you up. I have had to learn to just back off and let you chit chat with yourself for a while. You don’t need me to hover all the time and when you do, you let me know. That means you often talk to yourself for half an hour or 45 minutes before deciding you’d like some company. It’s pretty adorable but I am biologically wired to not be able to sleep when you are awake, so I basically just lie there and listen to you carry on via the monitor at 3 a.m. I wonder what you’re talking about in there.

This month we had our first-ever away from home overnighter! We traveled to Shiloh to watch Paw and Grammy renew their vows, and you were such a trooper. You snoozed on Aunt Cathie’s shoulder much of the time, even through a storm and the sounds of gunshots and the orchestra. That night you and I slept in the guest bed and you were so pooped you barely moved, except for your invisible inching toward me so that I eventually had to scoop you up and move you back toward your side, or else I was going to fall off the bed. How’s THAT for a co-sleeping switcheroo? I don’t think you would have woken up at all if not for that, honestly. I took care to keep your bedtime routine pretty much as intact as possible, including bathing you in your whale tub. But you fell asleep before I could read you a book.

You spend your days with daddy taking walks to the park or going to the library. Sometimes daddy texts me pictures of you and what you’re doing. You two have a good time and you think he is pretty much the funniest person on the planet. I caught you yukking it up at him the other day:

You love watching him pretend to get hit, punched, or kicked. I am fascinated by how you would know that these things are funny. You still have the new baby smell; how do you understand slapstick humor?!

Weekends are really special for us now. It’s pretty much just you and me from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night, since daddy works a lot of hours on the weekends. You and I run lots of errands together and when I am feeling particularly brave (and desperate for groceries) I haul you to Walmart for a shopping spree. You are usually a good sport about that these days. You used to get fussy when the cart would stop, so checking out was terrifying. But more and more you’re able to see what’s around you and you are so into watching everything. Everywhere we go, people are just so smitten by those blue eyes and that sweet smile.

That definitely seems to be your thing: Observing. You are pretty much content to just lie on your back and look at stuff rather than struggle to move around too much. You love to kick but you aren’t too interested in trying to roll over and scoot right now.

What else? Oh yes. We gave you your first taste of solids — bananas — and you were pretty okay with it. We’ve not done much other experimentation but that will probably be the big story of month six, which I’ll be writing pretty soon (and hopefully with a bit more timeliness than this entry).

The weather has warmed up (we had SUCH a warm March) so we’ll be getting outside more and more (as soon as mama re-orders her stash of Skin So Soft). I’m looking forward to taking you to the Shell and letting you sit in the grass and listen to music ith all your new friends we’ve met these past few months. And we’re going to go to the zoo and all kinds of stuff. Get ready, Mr. B!