Moss, it's time we had a talk. Up to now, I've gotten away with pretending you'll always be my happy little boy with your wide, toothless grin and your ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, anyone. You've been growing this whole time -- I know that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise -- but it's been lots of little things and it's all been very gradual, so without concentrated comparisons of earlier photos or Mom's blog posts it's not always been obvious.
This week, you decided to change things up. It started with a sleepless night for you and Mom, after which we discovered your first little bottom tooth coming in. Then, after another rough night, we found out both of your bottom teeth are coming in at once. Then we realized both of your top teeth are on their way, too. I can't imagine the amount of discomfort you're feeling, but it's got to be pretty hard to deal with it all in one shot. That toothless grin is about to be nothing more than one of my very favorite memories of your first 7 months on this spinning earth.
We've been stepping up the real food lately, as well. Watching you suck down strawberries and romanesco and carrots and salmon and all the other delicious foods you're exploring for the first time has been so exciting and interesting. That sense of new newness I feel when I watch you discover a taste or smell or texture that I've long since grown accustomed to has added a sense of novelty to my life that I haven't felt in so many more years than you can even imagine at this point.
Last but not least, with all this new input, there's the recent development in your output that I can't say I'm as happy about. It was bound to happen eventually, I know, and of course "everybody poops", but that first big boy shit caught me entirely of guard. I almost threw up and apparently scared the hell out of you, but I wasn't exactly emotionally/physically/mentally prepared for that one. I'm going to try really hard to fight my knee jerk revulsion for your sake... Mom says it's pretty important that I not stigmatize this in a way you can't fully understand since we don't want you getting weird about it later.
Gone are the days when you were certainly a person but at the same time different; here to stay is the rest of your life, when you'll be occasionally gap toothed, when you'll have serious preferences about our food (dear god please don't be as picky as I was), and when you'll poop like a person rather than an infant.
So Moss has these fantastic plastic chain links that can be used for so many different things (teether! toy hook! rattle! ring toss! sculpture! drum stick!), but my favorite use so far has got to be "bus strap". We hung some on his car seat in case he wanted to look at them, or bat at them, or pull one off and bite it every now and again, but instead he grabs them and holds on for dear life. I'm not even a terrible driver! It's adorable, but the adorable factor is unchartable once he falls asleep holding them.
cuteness not measurable using standard instruments
Well I was planning to have a series of cute posts all week documenting Moss's arduous pursuit of forward self-propulsion...
Wednesday 2/5
Friday 2/7
But then last night (at 1:30am I might add -- that sleep-disruptions-around-motor-milestones warning is no joke):
So there will probably still be a series of cute posts, but they will be of Moss crawling around and wreaking mischief, rather than of Moss figuring out how to crawl around so he can wreak mischief.
Whoops, 2 weeks in a row without a Moss post! I was hoping that would never happen, but alas our life went a little cray cray. In late January we flew to Chicago, where it was, just... no.
Moss Bear handled it like a champ, though.
While there I was convinced to keep working on my PhD, despite my myriad fraught opinions on that topic. We got to see a 16 month old Elliot, a 14 month old Anja, a 29 month old Rose and her new negative 6 month old sibling, and a 5 week old Maggie. Delightful.
So cold though. Why do people have babies here?!
Then we traveled home over the course of 32 hours and an impromptu overnight pit stop in scenic Denver due to the sketchiest flight delay I've ever experienced. Southwest made us board our delayed flight so that we could all sit on the tarmac for 1.5 hours (causing half the plane missing connections) so that a single flight attendant from another flight could go to Denver. It was about 17 minutes within the terms of service and we missed our flight home by 8 minutes. Brutally unpleasant. I just have to pretend that someone she cared about was sick or dying or something because only then does the nepotism not make my skin crawl. And that was on last Sunday/Monday, explaining the first lack of blog post.
Then we got home and Ben immediately interviewed to switch job titles within Google, for which he'd been studying for the past several months, so everyone was super stressed for a while there.
Well, not everyone.
THEN I got sick. I can pretty much plan to be ill from post-plane ride days 5 through 13, so I don't know why I'm ever surprised about this anymore, but predictability doesn't make it any more fun. So I decided to pretend I wasn't sick and go on a grueling hike with a relentless 12% grade and a squirmy babe. Smaaaaart...
And then we immediately had house guests, and then Ben immediately went skiing with all his cool Google friends, and my ensuing lack of health and time and help explains the second Monday's absence of blog post, and here we are. So to make up for it, let's flip to the Moss Channel -- all Moss, all the time. A new post every day for the next 2 weeks will surely make up for our silence in the first half of February. And let's start our Moss Marathon with a summary of his latest project, CRAWLING. My prediction is that by the end of these 2 weeks of updates, he will be crawling, no ifs, ands or butts finally off the ground and wiggling around and getting into trouble.
Dear Moss,
You and I met 183 days ago. Together but separately, we were both doing a lot of hard work so we could say hello. Since that day you've become your own exuberant person. Since that day you've opened your eyes wide and shiny, every morning a little happier to be. Since that day you've almost tripled your weight: from 5 pounds and 15 ounces to 17 pounds and 1 ounce. Since that day you've learned to babble, roll over, self-propel, play with toys, hold books, eat food, drink water, pet your dogs, hold yoga poses (happy baby and cobra are your faves), focus your eyes, hold your attention, soothe many of your own anxieties, and communicate surprisingly effectively. Since that day you've grown your hair out one whole inch. And tomorrow you'll be closer to your first birthday than to that summer day we worked so hard.
You made it to 6 months of breastfeeding! The only non-breastmilk things you consumed during your first 25 weeks earthside were 2 rotavirus vaccines, several dozen vials of Cocyntal, a lick of cucumber, and a dozen or so sips of filtered water. I'm *so* proud of us for this. You started eating some fun solid foods around week 25 instead of waiting until right on your 6 month birthday or after because you showed every single sign of being ready. As of today you've tried tastes of avocado, green bean, lettuce, egg yolk, raspberry, broccoli, peas, cauliflower, and red bell pepper, and if your voracious chompings and suckings and gummings and cries-when-dropped are any sort of sign, you love them all. We'll see if that sticks, but as of now you're not a picky eater at all.
You love the baby in the mirror. We did the are-you-smarter-than-a-gibbon rouge test: we put a dot of white toothpaste on your forehead and brought you to the mirror. Turns out you're happily oblivious to the toothpaste on your head, so it appears that you believe the mirror contains several highly amusing playmates who seem to look very familiar but you can't put your finger on it. I must remember to get a picture of you and that fun mirror baby having one of your lengthy philosophical conversations. Your dad has kindly augmented the mirror for our continued amusement:
You have such a frolicsome personality. I love how your eyes light up when you think something is funny, or when you first see that I'm awake in the morning, or when you check to see that I'm still around and I wave at you from across the room. I can see your smile all the way back on your scalp. You really feel your oats, happily playing on the rug with your toys and dogs for many an hour each day. Sometimes you get frustrated because you really want to do something you can't quite do yet, or you're cranky and growth spurt-y, or you just need a change of pace, but 92% of the time you have a huge loony grin slapped on your face.
You played your first trick on me -- we were playing a pattern game where I was bending and straightening your leg along with you. You would stiffen your leg, then relax it slightly so I would know when to bend it. Eventually we established a lilting sort of rhythm with it, bend-ing, straight-en, bend-ing, straight-en, bend-ing, straight-en. And THEN. Oh and then. I'd say around the 20th go-round -- when it was time to switch from straight-en to bend-ing -- we got to straight-en and you raised your eyebrows and opened your mouth into an O shape, and then when it was time for bend-ing you didn't relax your leg you kept it stiff instead and then you just exploded with laughter.
You are a water bug baby, you love all faucets and sprayers and hoses and anything with water coming out. You close your little hands around the stream and pull them back to you and open them to look at what you have and are so confused and disappointed when there's nothing there. But you love them anyway. I can't wait to take you to see your first mountain stream, your first water park, your first fountain. I was reading that many babies go through a phase around your age where they develop a fear of the bathtub -- I would be so surprised if you went through this phase.
You like to grab my mouth while I'm talking to you. It makes you giggle to feel my jaw move up and down and to feel my teeth.
You fell asleep completely on your own for the first time in your entire life this month. You've always needed help, either with nursing, rocking, or being wrapped. But one night we were all hanging out in the bedroom, and you were playing happily on your back. I could tell you were getting sleepy because your eyes were getting puffy and red and you were rubbing your face with your hands. I started to hunker down for the 15-30 minute process that is helping you go to sleep, but something seemed different this one time, so I watched for a minute instead. Instead of getting more violent and flaily, your face rubs were getting more gentle and soporific. Your leaden eyelids started to sink towards your nose, and your movements became slower and slower. I actually started taping it because I couldn't believe it was happening. Usually the sensation of falling asleep is not a pleasant one for you, but just this one time, you made it there on your own. Got me all verkelmpt, for sure. This has definitely not happened again yet, but it was a bittersweet glimpse of the future when you won't need my help for the simple stuff.
You *love* naked time. Sometimes you cry when it's time to put your diaper back on, but you're so good-natured you've usually forgotten why you're crying by the time the last snap is snapped.
You went for your first ride in the jogging stroller, and you're a natural. I think you like it for the same reasons you like being in the moving car -- fun things to look at flying past your field of vision plus the sensation of moving quickly.
Your taste in books has improved, by which I mean you've curbed your compulsion to eat them and started actually looking at them. You turn the pages and scratch at the pictures, and sometimes when you're done reading you'll clutch the book for a long time without wanting me to take it away. I'm okay with that.
You roll around the floor like some sort of crazed rolling little hedgehog and you're thisclose to figuring out some sort of scoot- or crawl-like movement. Dad swears he saw you do downward dog the other day, but I missed it so I am skeptical. I did just now see you roll onto your tummy, fold your feet a little, and then press the bottoms of your toes onto the floor. You moved about 0.75 inches forward, but I don't think you noticed. One day soon you're going to notice. You're deftly exploiting the rolling-for-moving concept, but I can see it irks you that you can only move left and right, when you clearly want to go straight. One day you rolled yourself up in the blanket completely and decided that baby burrito was HILARIOUS and you didn't want to come out.
You figured out how to clap your hands, but in all your innovative cleverness you prefer to do this vertically instead of horizontally.
You like to scratch things to find out what texture they are. I watch you roll onto your tummy and scratch the rug, then roll onto your back and scratch the wood floor, then roll onto your tummy and scratch your shirt, then roll onto your back and scratch Aoro's paw, then roll onto your tummy and scratch the rocker on the chair. Once you started eating big boy food, you noticed an intriguing property of food -- you can bang it onto the table or squish it in your hand and it changes texture slightly. You've generalized this to the rest of your world and embarked on a very large-scale experiment where you bang everything you own onto the ground and into every other thing you own to see if anything changes texture after that.
You're not using words in expectedly contingent ways yet, but you certainly have a vocabulary: Hi, dad, dada, yeah, *raspberry tongue*, oowah, gur, *cough noise*, *guttural barbaric yalp*, rah, eh, wah, (and more). Your first babble syllables were Hi Dada, which continues to be a huge hit.
You like to put your hand into your mouth and make your babbling noises around it. I think it's helping you learn your bilabial consonants, which would be oh so nice if it leads you to the addition of Hi Mom to your lexicon.
You are a baby, but somehow not a baby anymore. You look very different this month compared to even just a few weeks ago -- quite kid-like, person-like even. It is a heavy, shining love I have for you, Moss. You make the stars sing and the moon laugh.
Sorry for the late post, Youtube was being strange for me yesterday. Moss has been learning about food this week, and the photo opportunities are RIFE. Around Xmas time he was allowed a few licks of things, just to learn about flavor: cucumber, apple, and carrot. He reacted somewhere between neutrally and positively to the taste, but then a puke-o-rama ensued, so we delayed for another couple of weeks. This week was good, no post-licking vomit festivals. Enter the avocado.
The what to the WHAT now?
Oh! It's messy and squishy and I can touch it and rub it into my face and hair and everything around me? Okay!!
Actually, I'm still not totally on board...
...but it does provoke exploration, I'll give it that.
For someone whose batting average of "put everything into mouth" is 1.000, Moss sure did strike out on this one. He did not immediately figure out that it was food, and once he did, it took him a moment to decide if the concept was worth pursuing.
(sorry for the video auto focus, hope it doesn't make you seasick)
But then he picked up a giant piece and figured it out.
And now the rest of the post will be a very large number of photographs of Moss maiming an avocado. I can't decide which one is the cutest, so we are all subjected to all of them.
Mistah Avocado, he dead.
And then, because he did so very well, the next day Moss tried lettuce...
sadly for him he did not also sample our ridiculous cheeseburgers and fries...
...and then the day after that he tried a green bean.
