Three Weeks

So, I'm finally writing in from the mom side of this blog. Noah is three weeks old today. Right now he is snoozing away to the vibration mode on his bouncy seat, which is stationed on the floor next to me. He looks so darling: one hand up, one hand down, with his little tongue poking out slightly, mouth gently working as he dreams about eating.

Seeing him every day, it is hard to mark all of the changes he has undergone these past few weeks, but the evidence of change is clear. Today I am going to weed all of the outgrown newborn clothes out of his dresser. On account of his bigger belly, the relentless pace of round-the-clock 2 hour feedings has abated. Our nights are punctuated with only 2-3 rounds of nursing. And eating is not immediately and invariably followed by sleep. To my joy (at, say, 2 pm) or my dismay (at 4 am), sometimes Noah eats and wants to look around, interact, be entertained. Just in the past few days, he has been striking out with his hands with obvious purpose. Never knew I could feel so pleased about someone tangling a fist in my hair or batting me in the face.

The One-Year-Old Giant

The smallest person I knew until recently turned up at our door over the weekend, and revealed himself to be a virtual Paul Bunyan. Last fall I hoisted Kailas to inspect a tree branch and he was no more a burden than a fist of balloon strings. On Sunday he made Noah look like a jockey at a sumo event.

The boy is verging on 25 pounds.

"The human baby's brain starts at 369 cubic centimeters," I read from what seems a respectable source, "and increases, during the first year of life, to about 961 cubic centimeters."

When I rest Noah's head on my spread fingers, I feel soft spots and unbridged seams between the plates of his skull. He hasn't figured out what his arms are for yet, unless you count spastic waving, which of course has its own rewards in the currency of parental amusement. It will be a few weeks before he's able to focus his eyes on a moving object. He’s helpless. For all we know, he thinks John McCain's economic plan is aces.

Kailas springs up from our hardwood floor to walk around. He fingers through our mail. He can slap his father right in the middle of the face with exciting accuracy. Who, in his own turn, deftly interprets the assault. "That's right, Kailas! That's my nose! Good job!"

The sophisticated parenting of a man whose brain measures about 1,400 cubic centimeters.

Of course that just means there's more surface area for Kai practice punch combos upon.

But that's small change. Humans pay a hefty price for their big brains and every baby is a reminder of the evolutionary tradeoff. They come out with their skulls in separate pieces, to squeeze through the birth canal and start fusing after the brain grows a bit more. The value of that gray matter is so huge, and the birth canal so small, that we bear our young in a state of helplessness almost unknown in the rest animal kingdom.

More than 20 years ago I watched a doe nuzzle its head against a calf that had just dropped out of her belly. My mother and father and brothers were all there. The young deer seemed to be less than an hour old. Shiny afterbirth glistened on its coat. Before our eyes it raised itself on four legs and took a step without falling.

Judging from Kailas’s example, Noah has 50 weeks to go before he pulls that off.

What happens in the meantime -- to judge from his father's example -- is the recapitulated emergence, in miniature and for the many-billionth time, of human culture from human biology.

The doe had no doubt invested a great deal in her calf, and may even have cheered that first step in its own way. None of us, however, noticed a buck on the premises.

Wisdom Received, Revised

"He seems pretty even-tempered and willing to be pleased so far," I told my parents as we drove from the train station toward their first visit with Noah. "But I’m told that you have to wait a week to really see how their temperament is going to be. So I guess we’ll have a look at the seven-day mark."

My mother laughed out loud. "Seven days! Good luck. I’m still trying to figure out your temperament after 32 years."

I thought about her statement calmly for a few moments, blinking my eyes widely at the pedestrians in the crosswalk in almost saintly sort of way, and then I drove off the road in a howling tantrum, waiting for the vehicle to come to rest before defiantly pooping my pants.

She had been quite right. The look on my father’s face was one of stoic resignation as he changed my underpants.

Noah isn’t much for bowel-mediated defiance just yet. For one thing, it would undercut his effort, by example, to teach his dad the merits of restraint. For another, peeing straight up into the air above the changing table is so much more entertaining.

By day six he had hit Liz and me multiple times with this little piece of cunning, and on the seventh day he did not rest. Of course the official position on peeing is that we love it, airborne or otherwise. Hallowed be the healthy kidney. And the shade of green I chose for his walls could use a little yellow anyway, especially right next to the changing table. Win, win.

But the seventh day won’t go down in my memory for any of that anyway. A week after he was born, Noah woke up in his bassinet with a little fuss. His diaper was clean. His mother was showering and breakfasting. The floating die in the magic eight-ball came up OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. I scooped him onto my chest and lay back down, and for once he did not root around with parted lips in a mad dash for a nipple. Quietly he rested his face against my skin and set his lungs to a rhythmic purr. Five minutes passed and turned into fifteen. That turned into thirty, a close cousin of forever, as his matchstick fingers opened and closed around the tiny tufts of chest hair gathered in his fists.

Afternoon Nap

I dedicate this nap to the men who fired up a jackhammer outside our window at 7:30 this morning.

Snipped

As far as birth quips go, after Liz's 14-hour struggle I will agree that "that's why they call it labor," as the saying goes. But let me tell you, there's a reason they call it "circumcision" too. It is because no father would ever consent to the custom if they called it "pecker trimming." As Liz put it yesterday afternoon, a circumcised penis is one angry-looking entity.

Yet by the time I saw him, he was a happy little guy, eyelids peeled and alert, squirming around in his swaddle.

He and Liz both continue to thrive, but I never would have guessed the method the former employed to utterly delight the latter before bedtime last night. The nurse had been waiting for urine all day, and waiting, and waiting, but none had come. Liz had her fingers crossed during her post-dusk feeding, but all we got was a poop. Inspiring in its own right, no doubt, but not the proverbial pony she'd wanted for Christmas. I changed his diaper and Liz went for one more stroll around the ward, after which I went to refill her water pitcher.

And oh, the joyous noise that greeted my arrival back in Room 455! "He peed!" sang my wife, whose competence has been certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. "He peed everywhere! All over everything! Look at his shirt -- his blanket!"

All covered in liquid glory. A triumph indeed, one that I soon found myself proclaiming at the nurses station. So there you have the time it takes for a modern American adult to begin cheering numbers one and two: 50 hours. And to think of the ecstasies potty training will bring.

Second Life

Last night I dreamed of Noah. It has been three nights since he was born and this was the first that he came to me in sleep. There was his little foot, dark and webbed with dry wrinkles like a desert dweller's. His mouth was open.

An old experiment came to mind when I arose. Scientists investigating the connection between dreams and memory outfitted a number of subjects with eyeglasses tinted red. The next day these people talked about their dreams; nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The day after that, it was the same. No noticeable difference at night. But on the third night, as I recall, it began to happen. "I noticed the strangest thing," they said. "About a quarter of my dreams were tinted red."

The percentage increased on the fourth night, and again on the fifth. By the time the week was out, dreams were virtually all red, all the time.

Last night I walked a dry valley in high desert country after Noah faded from my view. Maybe he will come up the mountain with me tomorrow night.