Almost 8 Weeks!

As Noah closes in on the 8 week mark, I realize how negligent I have been about this blog. So much has happened in the past two and a half weeks!

Noah turned six weeks old on the day of my Penn graduation ceremony. He attended the event with his dad and his aunt Katie, and tolerated all but the last 10 minutes of what was a very long event. (He did better than his mom. I was fussy and restless by the third "greeting" speech.) By the time we all arrived home, it had been nearly 4 hours since he had seen me, and the first thing he did was to give me a huge grin--his first ever truly social smile, and the best graduation gift anyone could ask for.

Over the past couple of weeks, he has radically expanded his range of communication. No longer does he just fuss or cry to indicate that he needs something. Now he has a whole conversational register of vowel sounds--"ahhs" especially. When he really gets going, he can approximate the pattern of conversation too, filling in "answers" to questions and taking turns vocalizing when he is spoken to.

His motor skills are growing daily as well. He can push himself up on his forearms now and bat at things with relative accuracy. He's a master at pulling my hair. Sometimes when he is especially hungry, I will pick him up to put him to my breast and he will grab a hank of my hair and yank me towards him, as if to say "don't even think about doing anything other than feeding me Mama!"

We have had some wonderful family adventures these past couple of weeks also. Most notably, we traveled to Kansas City for Tom and Kelly Boling's wedding and Noah got to meet many family members, including his uncles Michael and Ryan, great aunts, cousin Maddie, and great grandfathers on Trey's side--his great-Grandad and his Opa. This past week we also drove down to Delaware to visit his great-Grammy and great-Grandpa Bowman. Noah delighted in meeting so many new people, and proved himself adept at both plane and car travel from the start.

Five Weeks

How have two weeks elapsed since the last post? Noah is five weeks old today. He astonished us last week at his 1 month pediatric visit by being 11 lbs and 22 inches long. I'm pretty sure he's hovering near the 12 lb mark this week. I call him My Little Brick. I also call him a bunch of other things, including: Monkey, Bug, Buggie, Bug-Monkey, Munch, McMunch, Munch-ka-pie, Tiny, Little Man, Muffin and assorted other variations. Our dear friend Rosan commented that our little boy is apt to wonder why, on occasion, people refer to him as Noah.

We took our first road trip this past weekend to visit my mom in Baltimore. Noah spent 210 of the approximately 220 minutes of the trip down and back asleep. Not much phases him, but an empty tummy can take him from sleeping to red-faced and wailing in one second flat. Luckily, we had a bottle of breast milk to get us through his 10 waking, hungry minutes.


With the exception of hunger (see image on left), Noah is both a patient little person and a very sociable one. He got to meet lots of new friends in Baltimore and really seemed to enjoy looking at everyone and being held by new people. He even injected a few conversational "ahs" into the talk around the hors d'oeuvres. His mom and dad were very proud of his social precocity.

And we had another first last night--Noah moved from the Pack n Play bassinet at our bedside into his own crib in his own room. Noah weathered the transition with his characteristic grace and good temper. I, on the other hand, got teary eyed. I must admit, though, the decision to move him seems a good one by this morning's light--Trey finally got a peaceful night's rest, and Noah also seemed to sleep better, leading me to wonder whether we've been rousing him with our cover-rustling as much as he has roused us with his sleepy baby grunts, groans and squeals.

Bug Muffin is growing up.

(sniffle)

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.