6 mos.

Finn is six months old today. It's hard to believe that it's been half a year since that late May afternoon when we drove, white-faced and full of trepidation, to the hospital and to an uncertain future. At the same time, it's hard to imagine a time when Finn was not here in our lives. Just like it's hard to imagine a time when we slept in the same bed, and I slept for more than four hours in a row.

My expectations of Finn are that he Be Finn. I don't think of him as a preemie, nor do I think of him as a 6-monther. He's himself, and he will do what he does, when he does it. Every once in a while I have a twinge of worry for his development, but it's easily overcome by his responsive smiles. He is what he is, from day to day, week to week, and month to month. I talk to him, read to him, show him things, walk him around, and I watch him. I don't know what babies do; I don't know what they are supposed to do at certain ages, so I am not putting mental pressure on myself or on him to excel or catch up to anything. I want him to grow, eat, poop, pee, and be content. He changes gradually, from day to day, but it has to accumulate for us to notice a difference, and one day, I see that he really is trying to grab for objects, or I note that he is following Pete with his eyes as Pete walks around the house.

I looked at the infant development chart in our baby book for the first time in a couple of months, and just like it was the last time I consulted it, Finn is all over the place.

The chart I have lists "Master Skills," which I find amusing when applied to a baby.
He's over the First Month skills, so I will leave them out. For the Second Month, his Master Skill is to "visually connect to parents." Got it. Third Month: Hand Play. I am not quite sure what that means. He has just started to put his hands together and wring them like a nervous old lady, if that is what they are getting at, and he loves to jam them into his mouth. Fourth Month: Displays accurate visual tracking. Got it. Fifth Month: Reaches accurately. Uh, still working on that one, but he's getting better. Sixth Month: Sits. No way. I sit him up sometimes now to play, but there's no way he could sit on his own yet.

For "Gross Motor Skills, " I can skip Month One and Month Two.

Month Three: stretches limbs all the way out, cycles and makes freestyle movements; holds head higher than bottom, searches; briefly bears weight on legs; holds head steady when held; rolls from back to side.

Finn's head is very steady, and he has almost no troubles with control. He will roll onto his side sometimes as well. He has been good with both of these skills for quite a while. He also enjoys standing on our laps and bouncing, which he has also done for some time. The bouncing continues to get more vigorous, and he's getting stronger at standing.

Fourth Month: Stands supported, Sits propped on arms, lifts head 90 degrees, scans 180 degrees, rests on elbows, rolls from tummy to side.

Finn hates being on his tummy unless he is sleeping on someone's chest. He does lift his head, but he's not quite there with the rest of that list.

Fifth Month: sits propped on floor and with pillow in high chair; stands, holds on only for balance; rolls from tummy to back; rocks on tummy--airplanes; assumes push-up position; wiggles a few feet forward; cranes neck forward to see; possibly grabs toes.

Finn does not know that he has toes. I have been showing them to him, though, and he sees them. He'll figure it out.

Sixth Month: sits briefly by self; sits in high chair; stands briefly while leaning on furniture; rolls over both ways; digs in with toes and hands to move toward toy.

Nope.

Hand skills:
For Month Three, he is supposed to make swiping reaches, which he does; hold and shake a rattle, which he does if I hand it to him. He only holds things for brief periods, having only recently figured out that he has hands. He is getting better at his aim, but it's still hit or miss.

Language and Social Skills:
He has figured out screeching and is starting to make different sounds and repeat them. I can't tell if he's laughing, but sometimes it seems like it. He's drooling, so there are definitely bubbles. His depth perception is on, and he tracks and gazes accurately. He turns his head toward sounds more often than not and watches our mouths.

Cognitive Skills:
He's getting the cause and effect and seems to expect reactions from us sometimes.

What Babies Like:
He loves to watch faces, hear repeated noises, stand and bounce, look around him, watch lights, look at pictures, be carried on the hip or in a carrier, have a dry diaper, hear music and see Pete playing the guitar, make noise. He's all over the map on development, but he fits in best in the three to four month area.

What we have here is a baby who's figuring it out as he goes along.

Same as his parents.

The Long Awake Continues

Pete "let me" go to Greta's birthday party on Saturday night. I was wary of another social situation as Halloween was such a stone cold blast for me, but I decided that it sounded like a pretty casual affair, just a "Jeans and Cute Top" party with a potluck, so I might be safe.

It turned out to be quite fun. I knew everyone there, and my best friends already have kids, a few of whom were also there, and they did not mind some baby talk. I tried to make it funny, so I could at least be entertaining.

I did not get home until 12:30, and Pete and Finn had just gone to bed. Pete was still reading, and I climbed in and debriefed him on the evening. He invited me to stay, but I figured I had better get my two hours of sleep, so I went to our room. And yup, it was two hours of sleep.

It's Tuesday morning now, and Tyrannosaurus Baby thrashed, ate, and grunted from 4:00 a.m. until we finally got up at 8:30, and I am again wondering "Why do I do it?" Why do I try to go out and do things that involve me staying up late? I don't ever make up those hours, I just go deeper into debt. When I come home, the routine stays the same. Pete keeps him until somewhere between 2 and 4, and then I get him, from which time on, he does not sleep soundly. I can do with around four to five hours of sleep a night, but that one night of two hours has just killed this week so far.

I think that babies' development is timed so that you don't just decide to give up and donate them to charity or sell them to the circus. Just when you think you can't take it anymore: you're too tired; you're sick of the barfing;don't think you can stand to carry them around anymore; they start to smile, and you melt into a pile of goo.

He's going to have to come up with something really good this time...

Oh look! He's reaching for his toys!

aaaawwwwww...

And here's a video from last night's sing along, to lighten the mood:

Dreams

For the second time in a week, I had a dream that Pete either:

a) did not want to marry me ("Never did," he said), and I was going to have to go and marry my ex-husband again; or,
b) wanted to date other people.

In neither of these dreams were we married or did we have Finn.

It goes to show you that at this point, my brain is pretty sure that the only reason Pete is still around is because I incubated him this awesome baby. It's not a new story. Once you have a baby, that's the focus of the relationship. You really don't have much of a relationship with each other. You are triangulated toward the white hot ball of need wearing the Onesie. You are hardly ever alone with each other, and you rarely talk about things that are not related to the baby. I think this is especially true if one of you is home with the baby all the time. That person has very little new information to impart; it's not like you are running important experiments in the lab or out in the world having new experiences. Especially now that it's RSV season--I am not taking him out to places anymore. So all I have to tell Pete is how many times Finn barfed on me or what interesting tidbit I learned from watching the extras in the extended version of Two Towers.

Again.

Family Fetishwear

If we show up somewhere encased in rubber, it's not because we have embarked upon some new adventure in fetish fashion, it's because rubber is easily hosed off. Mr. Barfy von Droolpuker is in rare form lately. In one six hour period, I went through two bathrobes, two fleeces, and one tee shirt. This morning, my hair was encrusted in curds.

Baby cheese.

I admit to being weary of the barfing.

Finn, however, seems fine.

It's easy to wonder if they are actually digesting anything because they seem like cheerleaders before prom. Everything is binge-purge/binge-purge/gotta fit into the dress/I can't BELIEVE I am in 6 month sleepers/Do I look fat to you? (The answer is yes.) But in reality, the volume of liquid is not as much as we think it is. Even though it appears that nothing is staying in his stomach based on the gurgly fountains issuing from his slimy gob.

Pete went in to change the little monster many minutes ago. First, he peed all over the place. Then, just as the new onesie was on, I hear "Someone does not want to be wearing clothes today." He's either peed or puked on a succession of garments. Now that he is in dry clothes, it's almost a certainty that his diaper is wet.

And as he is very likely low on barfy resouces, I am sure he's also hungry.

Fine Knit Goods

I started knitting for the future baby early in my pregnancy, but nothing I was working on was as small as the baby we got. Still, it had not occurred to me to start knitting for His Tiny-ness until I saw him in this travesty:

Granted, those hats are knitted and crocheted as a charity to the hospital for babies like Finn, and one should not look a gift horse in the mouth or a gift stitch in the row, but as One Who Knits, I simply could not let this continue. I whipped up a couple of hats (modeled here by Miss Hazel):

And later by himself:

One nice thing about knitting for babies is that the stuff is small, so it's fast. Preemies are even smaller, so it's lightning fast. You almost don't have time to notice you are knitting before the hat is done.

He has received many fine knit (and crocheted) goods over the past few months, and I have contributed a few more as well:
There are hats by me, a hat, blanket, and bear by Christine, blankets by me, bunny by me, and a crochet blanket by my mom. That's the blanket for which I had a baby in the first place. And now it's mine, all mine.

I mean, Finn's. Of course.

He had better not be thinking he is barfing on that masterpiece.

Auntie Dorkchic added to the pile with these cutest of cute things:

And to top it all off, many of the members of a discussion board on which I post random comments contributed to blankies solicited by a woman who lives in the Twin Cities. They sent her squares from all over the country and across the pond, and she seamed them up into these wonderful patchwork blankets. They also sent wash cloths and socks. I was, and still am, in awe of all the work and beauty. Humans can be really cool.



This is one lucky boy. We intend to instill in him a deep sense of gratitude for how fortunate he is, which will lead to a heavy weight of crippling guilt, further leading to years of therapy and a complex about how he can never live up to all the expectations heaped upon him due to his early birth and our idea of his perfection.

Just kidding.

But he is really lucky.
And so are his parents.

Curious George

Curious George is a convoluted tale of kidnapping, adventure, social injustice, and the mayhem that ensues when two evolutionary cultures collide. To say that the original tale of Curious George is far-fetched is to bring an American Classic into scrutiny under which its assertions will not hold up. Indeed, one must not only suspend disbelief to swallow the occurrences, but one's knowledge of the natural world must be subsumed in fanciful claims of simian comprehension and behavior.

In the case of Curious George, the monkey, we learn that his downfall is his curiosity. It's a classic case of blaming the victim. Because he is curious about a new object in his surroundings, it is his fault that he is kidnapped. What kind of message does this send to our children? The messages of "don't look into new things" and "if you do look into new things, bad things will befall you" are not helpful.

We open with a classic human depiction of the happy monkey. Swinging on a vine, in a tree, smiling, and eating a peeled banana, with flowers and butterflies. However, as George has no tail, I believe he would be classified as an ape, so we are sending an incorrect scientific information to our children as well.

The Man With the Yellow Hat is an interesting character in American literature. As the story seems to think that it is told from the monkey's perspective, the main human character in the story has no name, only a descriptor (How George himself has a name is never explained), and his interest in the monkey is simple: "What a nice little monkey... I would like to take him home with me." Aside from the fact that this betrays TMWTYH's nine-year-old stimulus-response/want-get attitude, who the crap does he think he is? Not to put too fine a point on it. This book gives the reader the idea that, not only can a person of apparently no credentials basically steal a wild monkey, that person apparently only requires a big yellow hat and a drawstring bag to accomplish said feat, provided, of course, that the dumbass monkey in question is curious and possibly has a fetish for headwear.

And then, once you have the monkey in a bag, it would appear that the government of "Africa," which appears to be a homogeneous blob of which our former vice presidential candidate would be proud, requires no paperwork or legal maneuvering to remove said monkey from its jurisdiction.

As is often the case in stories told from either an animal's perspective or a child's, the grown-ups in this story are almost preternaturally stupid or ineffective. TMWTYH explains George's situation to him, revealing the fact that he is clearly a bounty hunter for a zoo, and admonishes the monkey to "run along and play, and don't get into trouble." Preternaturally stupid.

This is clearly his first Monkey Job, for those statements, when voiced to monkeys, or children, are incongruous and incomprehensible. The fact that he 1) says this to a monkey, 2) expects his wishes to be carried out to said monkey, and 3) is saying this to a monkey he stole because he thought it was "nice," gives us a clue to TMWTYH's nationality. He's clearly an American.

Once in America, George is saturated, briefly, in the privilege of the White Male: a meal with spirits, an after dinner pipe, pajamas, and a warm bed. Methinks TMWTYH has done this before, just perhaps not with monkeys. He has quite the set up.

Leaving the monkey unsupervised on the ship led to a Monkey Overboard situation, and leaving him unsupervised at home leads to a Monkey Imprisoned situation. In this author's America, a monkey is thrown in jail for accidentally calling the fire department (He was curious. Curiosity lands you in prison). Interestingly enough, it is the Fire Department's embarrassment, more than any illegal action on the part of George (though it is unclear to me how often human legal codes are applied to nonhuman animals), that causes his incarceration, revealed by their comment, "You fooled the Fire Department. We will have to shut you up where you can't do any more harm." Which means: "We will have to shut you up so you cannot make us look like idiots again." How like a quasi-governmental agency. Benjamin Franklin would be proud.

George escapes from prison, and in a series of misadventures that includes the scientifically spurious act of being lofted away by a bunch of balloons, he winds up back in the hands of TMWTYH, who was apparently unaware of George's absence until that point.

We are supposed to believe that it is a happy ending when George is placed in the zoo, but I sense that the tale of Curious George is not over...

"Curious George" by H.A. Rey
Scholastic Book Services, 1941