Six months

Dear Ruth,

Happy six-month birthday (almost a month late)! Looks like I'm not very prolific at these letters to you. I have over four months of events and milestones to catch you up on. It's true, these last few months have flown, in that bizarre momentum that life gets where some moments seem endless, but stringing them together shrinks and compresses their duration so that I feel only yesterday you were an inert newborn, and now you're nearly crawling.

Where did we leave off? Oh yes, the last visit to your midwives at six weeks. With that visit, I guess I imagined the "birth" phase to be over, and now it was parenthood. But I continued to have hiccups with nursing, having no idea that something so simple in theory could have so many devils in the details. I mean, my midwives had guided me through the first six weeks, at which point I assumed I was a professional. Then we faced the fact that you weren't much for bottles, even if you would sometimes take an ounce or two. This means that I haven't been apart from you for more than four hours since you were born. That's alright with me, our nursing hours are mostly blissful, with you doing this cute little eye-wobble when you first latch on, as if you were entering ecstasy. I have my rocker, and so as not to distract you and risk ADD, we do not watch any TV. Instead, your dad got me a Kindle Fire for my birthday in November, so I sit and read, play Words With Friends, and watch Downton Abbey while you're nursing. Sometimes when you're awake, you'll suddenly pull off and look up at me with a look of fear across your face, then you'll see me and break into a giant grin, snuggling down even closer into my breast, content that the world is right. I love it.

You and I have spent many hours like this.

You often fall asleep at the end of a feeding, and sometimes I'm more successful than others at transferring you to the cradle we have in the living room. When I don't feel like moving you, I let you sleep there on me, and you always sleep the longest on me, sometimes two or three hours. I feel comfort that you are so comfortable close to me.

I also got accustomed to the fact that my milk jugs are kinda finicky and I get clogged ducts if I'm not careful. Swimsuit straps in particular bring them on, because they obstruct the ones that start in my armpit (say what?! milk ducts go into the armpit?! Indeedy they do, I have learned). I used warm compresses and gentle massage to unclog the ducts, but must have been a bit too enthusiastic about it once, because I caused some damage to the tissue that took a good week to heal. So every time I nursed, it hurt. Then, at five months, you got your first tooth. It's the bottom teeth, and your tongue covers them when you're latched on, so it's not as horrendous as it sounds, but a couple times you used my nipple as a teething ring, biting down and grinding your jaws back and forth. I would yelp, bop you on the head and put you down. This deterred you from doing it again. But then once you bit me, actually breaking the skin, so I had to nurse a week or two with an open wound on my nipple. Yeah, that was fun.

At the New Mexico Bowl in December.

You LOVE getting out and about. You cannot get enough of sights, sounds, lights, people. Grocery stores, restaurants, bars, football games, basketball games, we actually go out more now because you get such a kick out of it. It is intensely stimulating for you, though, and you will tire out but be so enamored that you refuse to sleep. So we tote the trusty Baby Bjorn everywhere, and tuck you in it with a blanket over your head to sway you back and forth to sleep when you really need it. The blanket is like a horse with blinders, it helps to keep you from getting distracted and focus instead on the task at hand: sleep.

At the three-month mark, I had a few episodes of sadness. It was not every day or even all day on the days it happened, but the thrill of my newborn had worn off and some days, when we didn't have anywhere to go, we sat around the house and I started feeling like a very expensive baby pillow. Wasn't there a way to be more productive with my life, so that I could both feel some self-worth AND be a fantastic, nurturing mom for you? I have been wrestling with that question for a few months now, and am still hatching a plan to re-debut on the job scene. Other things that helped were your father growing more in tune with what I was going through everyday. Sometimes he would suggest something that would get us out of the house, and that perked me up immediately. Another invaluable happiness inducer was meeting up with friends. My friend Monica has a daughter about your age, your friend Chloe. Getting together with them has been the cornerstone of our social world, and we have averaged a walk or swim together at least once a week. She and I take turns watching you girls while the other of us swims laps. In the beginning it was a grand experiment, but now is routine, and soon will be superfluous: you are now old enough to go into the gym's daycare room!

With Mike, Monica and Chloe in February.

I think putting you in daycare, to mingle with other kids will be fantastic for you. We have been going to a new moms' playgroup at the local JCC, and you have lots of friends there that you like to look at. All the babies are about your age, so not very interactive with each other, but you'll sit and paw at each others' faces, and goo at each other. It's cute.

You with your playmates at New Moms' Group

Then you friend Cassidy and her parents Cindy and Andy came to visit over Christmas. Another great opportunity to take you girls out on the town, we went to a Nuggets game in Denver. You girls LOVED it. Cass is six weeks older than you.

Rolling with Cassidy at Christmas.

You and your birth classmates, all boys.

We also go to our monthly birthlodge, hosted by your midwife, where all of her clients from the most recent months meet for a monthly potluck to visit and let the babies play. Sometimes it's a madhouse, with up to 20 moms and their little ones, all crying and feeding and pooping and playing on the floor, but a great community to rely on. We see some of the moms from our birth class. We also had a birth class reunion back in November, when you were three months old. It was so amazing to see all four of you little ones on the outside!

Birth class reunion in November.

Sometimes at home when it's just you and me, I feel like an inadequate playmate. There are only so many times I can show you your pet ladybug before I start itching to get up and do the dishes or laundry, or something so that at the end of the day I feel like I hit a modicum of productivity. But that leaves you to languish on the floor by yourself.

Here, at three months, you would stay where I put you.

For a while I put you in a bouncy chair, but your mobility increased and you were soon twisting and turning enough that I was afraid you would work yourself out of the restraints. And anyway, now you are a roller - you roll hither and thither, and that seems to entertain you more than anything. Far be it from me to strap you down in a baby contraption!

You at four months, Christmastime, in your jungle gym.

Best plaything ever: the floor, preferably with your dogs nearby, who can still get out of the way fast enough to escape your determined baby advances.

Reaching for a barely-willing dog.

Your favorite things ever are shoelaces, and you now know where we keep our shoes near the front door. No matter where I put you down, you roll and army-crawl your way over to our shoes to suck on the sweet tips of the shoelaces. Here you are, getting mobile, at six months:

To combat boredom, we got out for walks. This was tricky since it was the dead dark of winter, and you being so tiny, I wasn't sure how cold of weather you should be exposed to or for how long.

You were so small when we started going for walks!
You at first snow in October.

Bundled for snowy walk in February.

For the first few months, a walk in the
Baby Bjorn would put you to sleep.

But if I accomplished my main goal of every day (brushing my teeth by noon), I would focus on the second goal: getting us out. At first it was a predictable way for you to fall asleep. No sooner would I get you in the Baby Bjorn than you would nestle your head into my chest and be dozing before we left the house.

But now if I face you towards me in the hopes that you will sleep, you just as often push away from me, your face searching towards interesting sights and sounds. You hit 14 pounds at four months, so got a little heavy to wear for very long, so I got out the jogging stroller we got for you. This works well. Its break is especially handy for our hilly terrain. We still use the Baby Bjorn around the house, wearing you while we do household work. You love seeing what we're up to.

Doing dishes.

Hanging out.

Making cookies.

With Opa (five months).

Your Oma and Opa come and see you often, about every other week. They come and watch you while I get tasks done. Virtually everything is easier to do without you, so it is awesome they can come and do this.

You were always a smiley baby. It seemed like you smiled from the get-go. At three months, you started smiling when we made faces at you, sometimes bigger smiles than others. 

A big smiler in November, at three months.

Also at three months.

Here's a video of you in January (at five months), mustering a smile for the camera:

Also at about four months you started to experiment with your voice. You made a raspy, barking noise all the time. You loved it. You would look at us, utter this noise, and we would repeat it back to you. This went on in an endless loop. Then you picked up on the shrill scream. That was a fun one in restaurants. Several times I apologized to entire rooms of people, since you had called attention to ourselves with such a startling scream, and the room was silent anyway. Now you repeat strings of vowels, but you have yet to put together a consonant and vowel, like in "ba".

At five months, you were obsessed with food and water. You stared us down whenever we were drinking, and you were always on the lookout for my purple Nalgene that I carry everywhere. You had to touch our food, and loved lifting your fingers to your mouth to try whatever they had picked up. One day, your dad was eating an apple and you were staring at every movement. He held it out to you to lick, and you glommed on, gnawing at it with gusto.

Trying your fist food.

We giggled at how into it you were, gumming away at this apple and making apple goo to ingest. You were so into it.

You were really into this apple.

But then we started worrying about choking or whether this was 'right', so we took it away. You threw a fit. It was the first time you had gotten genuinely upset over something we did to you. 

Your first fit when we took away the apple.

So we started a nightly routine of eating real food, beginning with squash that I had roasted, pureed and frozen months ago. You get a nightly dollop of squash, and it is the best thing in the world to you. You flap your arms in excitement whenever you see your little dish come out. 

 

You love trying to feed yourself.

We recently got a hand grinder for food, and have decided to let you have a taste of anything we're eating. I talked to a pediatrician recently who said the staged approach to baby food - first squash, then fruit, then avacado etc, was bogus, that it hadn't obviated food allergies at all since it was implemented a few decades ago. Instead, they are seeing food allergies skyrocket, so he said all bets were off, and it was best to just let a diet go free-for-all in his opinion. So we are letting you eat meat and all kinds of soups and stews, and today at lunch you tried a lime with your spicy brisket at the pho place. The only thing he warned against was trying the big three all at once: eggs, peanuts and shellfish, so we're staying away from shrimp pad thai for now.

We've taken you swimming a time or two and even started you in swimming lessons after you hit your six-month birthday (I'm now writing this post a month late, BTW). You were unsure of it, but we played for a while and you at least seemed to relax a little.

So often I want to capture every moment, or just cuddle you and keep you as the sweetest, cuddliest baby you are. 

I imagine investigating baby cryogenics so we can freeze these moments and take them out whenever we need a baby cuddle, but of course we are excited about seeing you blossom and develop as a person. Your budding personality holds great promise - your curiosity, cheerfulness and sense of adventure all seem large.

And of course we love you very much! Your dad loves walking around with you when he gets home for work at night, and reading you books. Normally you two go to bed first, and you snuggle up against him to go to sleep. We both love it, and love you more than you can imagine.

Our little kiss magnet.

The whole family in February, close to your six-month birthday.