I have hands? Where did they come from?

Atticus has recently discovered his left hand.

We were walking through my favorite paper store, Papersource, in Palo Alto, when Robby noticed that while Atticus sat in his car seat, he was staring at his hand under a blanket. He was moving it back and forth slowly & following his hand with his eyes.

Wow.

This morning, as we lay in bed, he stared intently at our hands. I was holding his left hand about 5 inches from his face, & we both watched his little pudgy fingers grasp my palm.

Atticus is also learning how to blow raspberries. I don't know where this term comes from - I just heard it for the first time last week. He blows his lips out and makes a sound like a motor. Our raspberries will shush him. When he pouts, he blows them unintentionally.

We love our starfish!

Bath Time

Tonight, I dared to give Atticus a bath by myself. Usually, Robby & I tag-team.

Atticus had woken up from a two-and-a-half hour nap, fed, and sat happily in bed smiling at me. I gingerly placed him on the bathroom counter & slowly took his sleeper & onesie off while talking to him animatedly. I tickled his belly, then carefully lowered him into the hammock of the baby bathtub. Instead of running water straight into his bathtub, we usually place a large bowl under the faucet & pour water over him from a cup. He was still staring intently at me when I turned the faucet on. We heard a sputtering in the pipes & a deluge of cold water suddenly shot our of the shower head. In a state of shock, Atticus froze then shrieked loudly. His face immediately turned beet red. I was as shocked as he was, and when I saw his little body wet and cold, I picked him up and hugged him until he settled down.

Luckily, Atticus does not begrudge us of our duties. He let me bathe him after a few minutes of consolation. I'm surprised that he even let us put him back into the bathtub so quickly after that brief traumatic incident.

Mothers of the World, Unite!

This year, Mother's Day has taken on a whole new meaning for me. Today, I woke up feeling exponentially special because I'd be celebrating my first year as a mother.

My first gift was a spectacular nighttime surprise: Atticus slept ELEVEN hours for the first time. Previously, the longest he had slept in one nighttime stretch was eight hours, already an astounding feat for a 2-month-old baby. The second gift: Even after such a long sleep, he did not leak out of his diaper. Phew! Needless to say, we had the most pleasant morning.

I called the mothers in my family to wish them a happy mother's day. I was especially appreciative of my sisters. One has three children (7, 4, & 2) and the other has two babies. One sister bakes cakes from scratch, assembles bento boxes for her kids' lunches, and drives the eldest daughter to 6 extracurricular activities every week. The other sister gives her babies lavender baths, wakes up 4 times a night, and goes to mother support groups after work. I have a new-found amazement for the efforts and accomplishments of mothers. A part of me wants to be a lazy mother, to do the minimal possible for what it takes to be a "good" mother, just so that I can maintain my own independence and identity. I know it sounds selfish, but when I think of child rearing, the only word that comes to mind is "tethered." I won't be making bento boxes for Atticus, but I will find my own way of showing my love and keeping my sanity.

Today felt like Christmas.

Robby gave me a card from both Atticus and himself. He held a pen in Atticus's hand & wrote a short, messy note. In his card, he called me the hub of the family and Atticus & he the spokes in the wheel. He went further: most importantly, the wheel was greased with breast milk. I love Robby's cards - he makes the funniest analogies and metaphors.

So happy mother's day to all the mothers in the world. We carry the future in our bellies, pop them out in excruciatingly painful ways, feed them around the clock, scrub yellow poop from their clothes (Robby draws the line here, so it's a Mommy duty), send them off to school, and learn to let go of them. Sometimes, thinking about it all makes me sad - the letting go part of raising a child - but that's just the way of life, I guess, like the inevitability of death and loss.

For now, I'm going to enjoy every moment I get to press heads and cuddle with Atticus until he pulls away and becomes his own person.

All smiles

Atticus is a big smiler. When he is well-rested and well-fed, he will smile at anyone. His big toothless grin masks the acrid poopy smell lingering from the trashcan, the achy-ness we feel in our necks and shoulders from carrying him... All of the unpleasantness that comes with baby-raising dissolves when he smiles, kicks his legs in the air, and throws a mudra with his fingers. Tonight, he slept on Robby with his middle finger sticking out. I don't think that's a mudra.

He also goes through a long period of stretching after being released from the swaddle or the car seat. He arches his back, then extends his legs and arms at the same time.

Why are babies so cute?
I think that the strange proportion of their body parts attribute to their cuteness. First, his arms fully extended barely reach over his head. Second, the length his head from top to chin is about a third of the length from his neck to his toes. Therefore, he's got a BIG head. Good for television, I've heard. Big-headed people always look better on TV. Lastly, he's chubby. How can we not gush at pudgy toes and fingers?

My mom always comments on how his face seems to grow horizontally. When he was smaller, his face would get wider and wider. When he sleeps, his face is all lines - his eyes, his mouth, his little pig nose.

Oh, the review for the new movie Babies is out. I love the movie critic A.O. Scott. I always prefer reading his reviews over watching most movies themselves. The worse the movie, the more acerbic his review, which makes for entertaining reading. He gives it an okay review. What isn't there to love about babies? There doesn't even need to be any subtitles for the four families from different countries. Here's the trailer if you won't end up seeing the movie. It's very CUTE.

We've got a sleeper!

Robby & I are such lucky parents to have a 2-month-old baby who sleeps 5+ hours a night. A few nights, he has even slept 8 hours! No, I'm not feeding the child Benadryl. All he drinks is breast milk. We are so grateful to have a baby who sleeps & fusses only when he has important needs to be met, like hunger, gas, over-tiredness, or a dirty diaper.

Atticus has an abundance of smiles to give us. He smiles as if he hasn't seen us in ages. & when he sticks his chin out and gives a toothless smile, I forget about the hassle of breastfeeding and changing poopy diapers.

Robby thinks that he will be an actor because he has some special & distinct qualities. He...
- can lift his eyebrows independently of one another,
- has dimples,
- looks ambiguous in his multiple ethnicities,
- has two swirls on the back of his head (hair is easy to comb into a mohawk), and
- is extremely handsome.
Plus, there is a kids' acting school next door to our apartment.

It's LA...We're allowed to dream!

An Infectious Posting

Wonderful news. Atticus has started sleeping 5 hours during the night. Whew! We hope he keeps it up.

But he has been fussy for the past few days, & Robby & I chocked it up to bad behavior. How can a 2-month-old acquire bad behavior? Well, I figured that he learned that crying loudly = getting picked up, so he kept fussing so that we wouldn't put him down. Babies are smarter than we think they are!

With all that crying, Atticus started getting mucus in his eyes, & the whites of eyes were turning pink. Something wasn't right. Was this caused by too much crying or something else?

This time, we were wrong. He wasn't exhibiting bad behavior. I took him to the pediatrician yesterday. The diagnosis: PINK EYE. CONJUNCTIVITIS.

Poor guy. I feel guilty for faulting his behavior when it was merely a symptom of his health problem. Bad mom.

Since I started giving him the eye drops, he has been much happier. He smiled all night before going to bed. His favorite spot is the changing table, where he stares and smiles at the butterfly mobile that hangs from the ceiling. He'll smile even when he wants to cry. Smiling toothless babies are adorable!

Last night, he slept for SEVEN hours! We know that this habit won't last, but we're going to savor ever extra hour of sleep that he gives us.

I'm already starting to miss his former infant self. Babies develop so rapidly. I'll be sad when he loses the chubbiness in his little fingers, his taut cheeks, and toothless grin.

So much work!

Taking care of a baby is so much work!

Robby & I have been exhausted from taking care of Atticus, who isn't even a high-maintenance baby. He's actually a pretty normal baby. His needs are easily interpreted. When he cries, he is either gassy, hungry, or tired. He occasionally smiles, which will melt anyone's heart. Thank goodness he isn't colicky. He never spits up milk. But we are exhausted from his sleep schedule, which is still pretty normal. He sleeps 3-5 hours at a time.

For the last two days, he has been inconsolable. He burped & spit up more than usual & would cry each time we tried to put him down to sleep. Robby found out on the Internet that his green, foamy poop was an indication of foremilk-hindmilk imbalance. Now that we've figured that out, we've changed his feeding style. It's worked so far today. Who knows? We haven't reached his nightly fussy period yet (6-11pm).

It has been only two months and we don't remember a time when we had energy. Last night, Robby said, "When is our life going to get back to normal?" I replied, "This IS normal!" He meant pre-baby normal, but we're never going to get back pre-baby normal.

The boy is cute, though. Especially when he is lying on the changing table smiling at the butterfly mobile hanging on the ceiling. Or when he emit gurgling and cooing noises. Or when he wakes up in the morning and smiles a toothless smile at us. Or when he stretches his arms & legs after being swaddled all night. Or when he tucks his head into my neck and curls up against my chest after a full feeding.