For the Record

Since my idea of a baby book is to whine about not having a baby book until I receive two; then to pile atop it stuff I think might go nicely in a baby book until I have a pile of things perilously close to toppling height on my table and then to look over periodically and sigh, I hereby record right here and now that Trombone turned 12 weeks yesterday. To celebrate, he napped for a total of 45 minutes all day, then melted down around 7 and spent his first night in his crib (after much cajoling by the Superior Saint Aardvark, King of the Babies) and thus in his bedroom. Oh, there were tequila shots too but he is such a bad drunk I don’t want to go into detail here.

Until last night he has spent every night in a basket by our bed so last night was also the first time we used the baby monitor. The other day I tried it out from the first floor to the second; I heard baby squeaks and came back downstairs; sure enough the baby was squeaking. So I figured, you know, it works.

I positioned the “walkie” part of the monitor beside our bed. I woke up at 2 am thinking the kind of thoughts you think when you’re spending your first night in a different room from your baby (why is it so quiet? was it always this quiet? what time is it? what time did he eat last? should I go down and check on him? what if he wakes up? did I put the laundry in the dryer on Wednesday?) At about 2:30 the monitor went SQUAWK! and my brain went RELIEF! so SA went dashing down to fetch our poor, screaming, freaking-out baby. Except he wasn’t really screaming or freaking out. In fact he wasn’t even awake. But he woke when he was fetched and wasn’t opposed to the idea of eating, so I fed him & put him back to bed. We just assumed he’d squawked in his sleep. It happens. I do it all the time.

At 6:30 I heard him cry. But not on the monitor – through his open door. I fetched and fed and while he was eating, I heard a baby cry on the monitor.

Um.

Then I heard someone coughing. And realized that our walkie was picking up a) ghosts b) aliens or c) the people next door.

Today SA read the instructions and it turns out there are two channels for the monitor: ours and the people next door.

In the past 12 weeks, Trombone has learned:

to eat
to sleep
to pee on things
to wait until my back is turned before peeing on things
ditto pooping
the difference between night and day
the difference between me and Saint Aardvark (me: food! SA: beard!)
to smile
to laugh, especially when I sing, the higher the notes the better
to grab things if they are offered to him
to shake said things if they are rattle-like
to kick while lying on his back so that he can get out from under the clean diaper that’s being applied
to heave his weight so hard to his right that he almost flips over
to hold his head up when I help him flip over
to grab his knees
to almost grab his toes. He has seen them now and he totally has their number.

He no longer shrieks like a mad banshee when you change his diaper. (Unless it’s his first meal after a long sleep) He has almost but not quite figured out how to suck his thumb. This is frustrating for both of us because he wants to practise sucking his thumb when he is eating and though I have explained this a m i l l i o n times, he doesn’t really get that he can’t put his hand AND my boob in his mouth at the same time. He eats, he looks up at me and smiles, (just the other day he discovered that my face is in some way attached to his food) I smile back, he sticks his thumb in his mouth and then he cries because hey! there’s no milk in his thumb.

Rinse. Repeat. Sigh.

And I can’t quite believe that in only 12 weeks he’s gone from this:

to this:

which is why I record it here.