Last night was an exciting night for us, because before settling in for the night, Claire decided to give us a little fashion show, treating us to all the latest in Size 0-3 month onesie fashion.
First, she was resplendent in a pink and other shade of pink striped onesie, which boldly made the statement: “I’m a pretty flower”. It didn’t just make that statement figuratively — onesies are apparently required to spell out any metaphors or messages right on the front in case a figuratively challenged parent is too dim to get it on his own. (Not “or her” own, just his. This is fashion, after all.)
Next, she was 100% adorable in a red and pink outfit with flowers. If anyone thought she was only 99% adorable, they’d be wrong, because it said it right there on the onesie: “100% adorable”.
Next, she honored her father in a pastel green number which announced to the world that she was “Daddy’s little sweet pea”.
She followed up the homage to Daddy with a playfully polka dotted baby unitard (I’m getting tired of saying onesie), proclaiming: “I’m a little ladybug.” She looked fierce.
Finally, she closed with her most daring number, a plain white short sleeve t-shirt that left nothing to the imagination since it didn’t even have snaps to close at the crotch. Only her diaper kept her decent. Some might think a plain t-shirt with no writing on it would be boring or worse, playing it safe, but I think I understood what she was getting at. Sometimes, you just have to strip away all the frills and step outside the onesie box to just be seen for who you are, and not what bug you resemble or which adjective fits you and by what percent. Sometimes, you just have to be: Claire. It was a brave statement, and quite a show, even if it did only last about ten minutes.
I should also mention that between outfits, Claire kept spitting up what she had just eaten all over whatever she was wearing, thus necessitating the next outfit. So young, and already purging like a real runway model.
When Brooke and Claire were born, it was not very easy to tell them apart for the first few minutes because most newborns look alike before they get cleaned up, and as cool as the ultrasounds were, they didn’t really give us much in the way of detailed features to distinguish one from the other. After they got cleaned up, though, it was easy to tell them apart for a couple reasons: 1) Their size; and 2) Their hair.
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Hey, Brookie, look what Daddy has! It’s your bottle! Look at that smile on your face. You’re so pretty. Okay, here it comes, open up. Whoa, what’s the matter? Where’d your smile go? Remember ten seconds ago when we you were all happy and smiling at Daddy? Those were good times, weren’t they? It sort of reminded me of that other time twenty seconds ago, when I showed you your bottle and you smiled at me like you wanted it. I’ll never forget those happy times we had. It’s just like that other time thirty seconds ago when I told you how pretty you were while I was holding you and getting ready to feed you, and you smiled at the compliment. I treasure times like thirty seconds ago. You never know when things might take a turn for the worse, Brookie, so savor those times like you had forty seconds ago. Remember that time? That was a special, happy time. Sometimes you don’t even realize how good you have it until the moment is gone, like this one time fifty seconds ago, you were smiling and looking forward to your bottle, not like now when you’re crying and spitting the nipple out every time I try to give it to you. There you go, that’s better. See how nice and cozy it is when you don’t resist and you just eat when you’re hungry instead of crying about it? You even look like you’re on the verge of happiness again. This is so nice, it reminds me of another nice time we had lo these sixty seconds ago. I remember it like it was yester-minute.
Hey, Brookie, look what Daddy has! It’s your bottle! Look at that smile on your face. You’re so pretty. Okay, here it comes, open up.
Whoa, what’s the matter? Where’d your smile go? Remember ten seconds ago when we you were all happy and smiling at Daddy? Those were good times, weren’t they?
It sort of reminded me of that other time twenty seconds ago, when I showed you your bottle and you smiled at me like you wanted it. I’ll never forget those happy times we had.
It’s just like that other time thirty seconds ago when I told you how pretty you were while I was holding you and getting ready to feed you, and you smiled at the compliment. I treasure times like thirty seconds ago.
You never know when things might take a turn for the worse, Brookie, so savor those times like you had forty seconds ago. Remember that time? That was a special, happy time.
Sometimes you don’t even realize how good you have it until the moment is gone, like this one time fifty seconds ago, you were smiling and looking forward to your bottle, not like now when you’re crying and spitting the nipple out every time I try to give it to you.
There you go, that’s better. See how nice and cozy it is when you don’t resist and you just eat when you’re hungry instead of crying about it? You even look like you’re on the verge of happiness again. This is so nice, it reminds me of another nice time we had lo these sixty seconds ago. I remember it like it was yester-minute.
Brooke and Claire turned four months old a few days ago. Besides the requisite amazement at how fast that much time can go by, I reflected on some of the things I can do now that I couldn’t do four months ago, such as:
We listen to a lot of white noise these days. Not long after the girls came home from the hospital, we got a machine for the nursery (plus another kind for downstairs), so we’ve heard a lot of wind, rain, ocean, and sundry other things that hiss, whoosh, and swoosh. The nursery machine has a setting where you can combine sounds, so I like to keep the babies on their toes by combinations like heartbeat + seagulls, or rain + buoy. I hear the vacuum is also a very effective source of white noise, but I hate to waste the electricity, and I don’t know how to turn it on anyway. In the car, we usually find some static between stations to crank up for the girls until they fall asleep. I sometimes listen to white noise (rain or waterfall, usually) when I write, because it’s effective at blocking out distracting sounds without being distracting itself. So, I’m not new to white noise, but until recently, I never gave much thought to why it works.
Kat and I lean toward the homebody end of the lifestyle spectrum already, but from the time her bedrest began around the sixth month of her pregnancy to now, we’ve had a lot of time together, but very few “dates”. We haven’t been completely housebound, but outings have been either one at time (while the other one takes care of the girls), or family outings to such exotic destinations as “the pediatrician” or “the eye doctor”. We still don’t have the pediatrician’s go-ahead to venture out to crowded or enclosed public places like restaurants —giving immunity more time to develop — but we’ve done outside seating a couple of times during off-peak hours. Our last leisurely outing with just the two of us was long enough ago that neither of us could remember when it was or what we did, so we decided to ask Helen to come to work early one day recently so we could have a date. Here’s how it went:
It was, without a doubt, one of my best dates ever.
Last night, when Kat and I took the girls up to bed, Claire and I had our first conversation. Kat was sitting in the glider giving Brooke the last of her bottle, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against the crib, with Claire propped on my bent legs, facing me. Claire was already finished feeding, and as she often is at bedtime, was very alert and smiling a lot. I was smiling back, and she said, “Eh.”
Most of the sounds that come out of the babies’ mouths are crying or hiccup related. They’ll make other sounds occasionally, but they definitely seem random and accidental, not deliberate. There’s been a lot of happy cooing during their first few months (almost four now), but it’s all been unidirectional - cooing by us at them. For Claire’s first “Eh,” I didn’t get too excited.
If you’re a parent, you can probably relate to looking at a hundred different pictures of your baby or child and appreciating each one for it’s unique cuteness, but you probably also know that if it’s not your baby, one or two pictures is usually enough to fill the cute tank and the rest just look the same while you smile and nod politely. That’s sort of how I feel writing about mundane details like who’s eating what or how much they weigh. It’s all interesting to me and I’m grateful for everything about being a father, even the mundane parts, but I’ve steered away from describing Brooke and Claire in meticulous day-to-day detail because I reckon it’s just not that interesting to anyone besides us, and also because one day is pretty much like the next at this point in their development. I don’t mean that as a complaint, and I know that soon they’ll be doing and learning new stuff faster than I can share it in my blog, but for now, the general fatherhood stuff is more interesting to write (and hopefully to read) than redundant updates about how the pooping is going. If you really go for the more mundane stuff, though, here’s what you’ve been missing:
I understand a horse’s hooves; they make it possible to support all that weight on a variety of surfaces at a variety of speeds. I understand an eagle’s talons; they’re useful for keeping a good grip on perches and for killing and holding prey. I understand a bear’s claws; they’re great for knocking a salmon out of a river in one swoop, and for scratching bear asses. I don’t understand a baby’s fingernails.
Baby fingernails are cute in the sense that all baby things are cute (“Oh, isn’t that the cutest little poopie!”), but for the most part, they’re an excellent argument against Intelligent Design. Only a moron would combine a complete lack of motor control with little razor blades on the fingertips, and for good measure, throw in a clenching reflex to make it almost impossible for a parent to safely groom or maintain them. (I proposed giving my Dremel tool a shot, but Mommy has an irrational fear of using power tools on babies.) If there’s a Designer involved in that, he’s either an idiot, or he hates humans. Here’s how I see that design process going:
Let’s see…cute irresistible face? Check. Stirs up deep feelings of love and a desire to nurture them? Check. Teeth for chewing? Nah, I’ll make those come later, because they might interfere with breast-feeding. What am I leaving out? I know! They need claws so they can gouge their own faces and scratch the bejeebus out of Mommy’s and Daddy’s necks when they’re being held!
Taking care of Brooke and Claire is immensely satisfying and rewarding, but there’s not a whole lot of variety at this point from one day to the next. Both to amuse ourselves and to have some convenient shorthand to get us through our days, we’ve come up with some baby lingo that makes complete sense to us, but would probably leave anyone else scratching their heads at times. Here are some of my favorites:
Yours (That one)/Mine (This one) — Both babies are ours, and we do use their names most of the time and we balance our interaction with both, but when we’re holding or otherwise attending to one baby each, it’s easy to just describe them as yours (that one you’re holding) or mine (this one I’ve got).
Latte — A bottle that is prepared with a combination of formula and breast milk. We’ve learned that we’re less likely to waste any breast milk (which is hard to come by) if we just feed it first and give a formula chaser, but lattes were common for a while.
Chaser — The extra 1 oz. or so of formula we’ll give if a baby has finished her usual amount but still seems hungry.
About to blow — The transition from perfectly content baby to fussing or crying is quick and mostly unpredictable, but if you’re looking when it happens, you can usually tell the fuse is lit from the signs of impending unhappiness written on their face and expressed in body language. That’s a baby that’s about to blow.
Fussin’ Roulette — When both girls are calm or sleeping and we want to pick one up (especially if we’re each taking one), this describes that chance that the one you pick up will start fussing soon, or if both are involved, that the one you pick will start fussing before the other one.
To Poop — Our girls poop on their own from time time, but they still frequently need help in the form of a suppository, so besides the standard usage, we also use “poop” as a transitive verb, as in, “It’s time to poop her because she hasn’t gone in almost two days now.”
Fire in the hole — Sometimes, when we attempt to poop one of the babies, they go immediately upon being stimulated with a Q-tip and some K-Y, or the subsequent insertion of a suppository. Other times, the suppository has to stay in there a while before it has the desired effect, so if a baby has a suppository in but hasn’t pooped yet, she has a fire in the hole.
Zizzy Chair — We owe this phrase to our baby nurse, Helen, who’s originally from Hungary. She’s very fluent in English, but there are occasional gaps in her vocabulary, like the word “vibrate”. A zizzy chair is what we would otherwise call a bouncy seat. Bouncy seats have a vibration switch, so combine that with a gap in one’s vocabulary and a little onomatopoeia, and you get zizzy chair.
So here’s how our conversations go these days:
“I can’t remember who ate when. Did this one eat recently?” “Yeah, I gave that one a three-ounce latte about an hour ago and she even took an ounce chaser. This one is probably ready to eat soon, though. “I guess that’s why mine is nice and calm and yours is about to blow.” “It seems like I lose at fussin’ roulette every time. I don’t think this one has pooped for almost two days now - think I should poop her?” “No need. She’s already got a fire in the hole.” “When did you do that?” “I did it when you were changing the batteries in the zizzy chair.” “Have you eaten today? “Nope. You?” “Nope.”
“I can’t remember who ate when. Did this one eat recently?”
“Yeah, I gave that one a three-ounce latte about an hour ago and she even took an ounce chaser. This one is probably ready to eat soon, though.
“I guess that’s why mine is nice and calm and yours is about to blow.”
“It seems like I lose at fussin’ roulette every time. I don’t think this one has pooped for almost two days now - think I should poop her?”
“No need. She’s already got a fire in the hole.”
“When did you do that?”
“I did it when you were changing the batteries in the zizzy chair.”
“Have you eaten today?
“Nope. You?”
“Nope.”
