It’s hard to say what has changed because the months feel like moments and the minutes feel like molasses. Barnaby is our entire life now, he fills both of us with dread and elation every single minute of every day.
He’s big and he’s strong and he likes being that, I think. There is a game we play called “stand up routine” or “stand ups” where he gets his feet flat in our laps and we hold his hands and he stands up as tall as he can and he tries to balance there. When he gets all the way up, we just squeal, “look at you! Look at how well you’re standing!” and a lot of times, he’ll be delighted and laugh.
I have pointed out to him that, with this skill, he could go to the DMV. Also, when he’s got both the standing up and the laughing, all he needs is some jokes and an audience.
There’s one thing that’s very clear. We love him and he loves us just as much. He does this thing where he just stares at us… for the last few days he has spent a lot of time just staring. He will be looking around the room, gazing off and then BAM, he sees his mom’s face and he’s entranced.
Mom’s right off camera
Some of the loveliest moments of my life now are when he’s half standing in my lap, leaning on my hands, and he just stares at my face with wonder. He looks and looks, his little mouth hanging open, his hands gripping my fingers. He looks at my eyes, switching from one to the other, he looks at my cheeks and mouth, and he loves looking at my hair, because it’s often stickin straight up.
The pics with the flash are bad, but Jordana caught this moment…
He loves to talk to us. Some of the time when he’s crying, I can tell he’s not really crying, he’s just pissed that we don’t understand what he’s trying to say. I mean, it is crying, I’m not an anthropomorphic jerk, but there’s a continuum from his very quiet cooing and mewling all the way up to his can’t-breath screaming, and some of that is when he’s just hollerin’.
I gotta say, he cries some, but he seems pretty even-tempered. He needs a lot of sleep to feel okay, and he’s almost always willing to nap a little if tricked. In fact, I learned last night that if I comfort him and swaddle him and rock him, he’ll go to sleep even when he probably shouldn’t, because his stomach is still hurting and we should have burped him.
He spits up a fair amount and it would concern us if he wasn’t so heavy, long and bright-eyed. He’s about 25 inches long now, just shy of that and probably just under 15 pounds. He can basically hold his head up for as long as he wants.
In direct opposition to what I just wrote, I should point out that Barnaby has his mother’s tendency to have trouble relaxing. He wants to do stuff, and the stand up game seems very satisfying to him because he’s been kicking his legs for two months (or longer) and now when he tries to kick his legs, it lifts him up in the air. He looks genuinely thrilled by this accomplishment. He doesn’t want to let go of the day, he doesn’t want to let go of what he’s doing, and sometimes for the first ten minutes of a nap, his eyes are closed, but his mouth is as well and he’s rigid as a board.
My mom says that we don’t have pictures of him screaming and while that’s true, it’s mostly because of the bottomless pit of panic that hits us when he goes off. He doesn’t scream that much, but when he does it is just awful.
Maybe the only picture of him melting down…
He loves the bath. I set him down in the tub and every time his eyes go a hundred miles wide with the shock of the cool net, and then his mom pours water over him and he becomes sedate and thrilled. I think he will be a water baby- again, like his mom.
Yeah, I know, but he won’t be humiliated for years.
But a lot of the time, Barno’s just bored. And when he’s bored, he whines. He doesn’t really full on scream and yell, he just pouts and bitches. When he does that, the thing that helps the most is “walking the right of way”, which I stole from the movie “Station Agent”. This is his favorite thing to do. He particularly loves the kitchen because he likes the glass doors and all the glasses inside. He just wants to walk around the house, check out his domain…
Yes, every single picture is out of focus. I just hate the flash…
I hope that he’ll eventually love to walk around Astoria with us, but right now it’s about ten degrees outside.
There is no way to do justice to the first few months of a baby’s life, but Barno, if you’re reading this, my writing is dry and uninspired because I’d rather be playing with you than documenting all of this. Your mom and I love you, but I should say, more than that, that you’ve made my whole life both better and worse. Worse only in that I now want so much more for you, and better because I feel like you can have it.