9 Months in Review

Well Bry, you're officially 3/4 of a year old. Unfortunately, the governing bodies in this country fail to recognize the status of someone who's lived as long as you - no voting, driving, smoking, gambling, or other rights seem to be conveyed to the 9-month old set. Those cheerios that you got for the first time the other day seemed to excite you quite a bit though, so I'm not too worried that you'll be picketing outside the capital next week in support of more rights for the under-one-year old crowd. It doesn't take much for you to feel like you're already living life to the fullest, is all I'm saying.

In case you're wondering, this month you were 28 and 1/4 inches tall (I prefer to think of you as 2'4") and weighed 20 pounds, 14 ounces. Your height is at the 50th percentile (down from the 90th at 6 months), and your weight is at the 60th percentile. I guess if we do the math: daddy (freakishly tall) + mama (short) = Bryson (average), it all makes sense. However, the pediatrician tells me that your "true" growth trend won't really be figured out until you're about 2 years old. Until then, if you could give me some hints about how much you feel like you're gonna grow in the next few months, that would be great. I get the feeling I'm going to have to return a lot of the 18-month winter clothes I so thoughtfully bought for you back when I thought you'd be clearing door frames in the near future. That's the thing about you babies, I guess. Just when your daddy and I think we have you figured out, you go and change things up, just to keep us on our toes.

If daddy and I, as your current bosses, did a 9-month performance review, I think it would look something like this:

Bryson is an outstanding employee who always shows up for work early (in the 5:30 - 6:00 am range). This clearly shows remarkable dedication to his primary and secondary tasks: chasing the cat and scattering toys to every corner of the house. Bryson's productivity levels have increased steadily since day one on the job, leading to record-breaking performance in the last quarter. He has put in overtime on a regular basis, working weekends to ensure that no shoe in the house misses oral inspection, and that all electrical cords are present and accounted for. Bryson has also been vigilant about on-the-job security, daily testing the safety gates that surround his work environment by rattling them vigorously. Overall, performance is rated as superior.

Keep up the good work, Bry!

The senior executive hard at work.

Put Your Hands Together Now

Bry's been adding steadily to his bag of tricks over the past few weeks. He waves goodbye and hello, and sometimes just for the fun of it. And when he waves, it's no meager side-to-side swipe of his hand or the cute hand opening and closing thing that some kids do. Bry gets into it, waving from the shoulder and emphatically pumping his whole arm up and down. It's not subtle.

His other new skill is clapping his hands. After about 400,000 rounds of "patty cake," Bry will sometimes clap along to his own little rhythm. Most of the time he claps his closed fists, rather than his hands. This is endearingly cute. Trust me. He is also very picky about when he will clap and when he won't. He is certain to send us the message that he is not a trick pony and he will clap when he is moved to do so, thank you very much, not just because mama or daddy is grinning at him like a fool, urging him to do it.

But when Bry wants to clap, there is apparently nothing that will stop him from fulfilling the urge, not even say, the fact that it is 5:00 am and anyone with any sense at all is still SLEEPING. Ahem. Steve and I groggily awoke this morning to Bry sitting in the middle of our bed (after we had, in desperation, brought him there at 3:30 am), wide awake and cheerfully clapping his hands as if to say, let's get moving people! There is much to be done today! He was giggling too, at some private joke that neither Steve nor I had been invited in on. The cuteness of all of this just barely canceled out the fact that it was happening in the middle of the night, as far as I was concerned.

For Fun!

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Try it out! You know you want to.

Archival

Every now and then, Steve and I will reflect on just how much Bry has grown and changed since he's been born. Ever since I was told that the paper on which ultrasound scans are taken tends to degrade over time, I've been meaning to scan and upload them. Of course, I've also been meaning to learn how to knit and to clean out my office, but have lacked the proper motivation to get a move on those goals. Recently I've been trying to study for my written prelim exams - which pretty much determine whether I get to continue as a doctoral student - in between chasing Bry around and going to work. It took 9 months, but avoiding studying has provided just the level of procrastination needed to get some of those ultrasound pictures scanned:

That's a head in profile, in case you were wondering.

He's already looking more buff than his daddy.

I've decided to spare Bry the later humiliation of posting the scan that was helpfully labeled "boy" by the ultrasound tech. I also seem to have temporarily misplaced the very first view of Bry that Steve and I were treated to - the one that earned him the nickname "Skeletor" for the remainder of my pregnancy.

It's hard to believe that that 14 cm long blobby thing has morphed into this:

Go biology!

Defeating the Purpose

As I've previously alluded, babyproofing has been a progressive process at our house. We've put up some gates, covered the outlets, and locked up the most dangerous chemicals. We also got some of these to prevent Bry from entangling himself in the cords for our window shades. Ironically, they only seem to make the cords that much more enticing:

This is totally unsafe! And therefore totally fun!

No one babyproofs the Bry.

Part of the babyproofing process is of course determining all of the dangerous items that Bry is attracted to. One morning, when nature called, I brought Bry into the bathroom with me (yet another glamorous side to mothering that no one informed me of). Two seconds after the rubber hit the road, as it were (OK, after I started peeing), Bry made a beeline for the doorstop that is supposed to be anchored into the tile floor of our 1955 bathroom. In one swift move he yanked it out of the floor and proceeded to stick the very pointy end of the anchoring screw into his mouth. I guess those Kegel exercises they tell you to do after giving birth come in handy in multiple scenarios. Like needing to stop midstream, lunge across the bathroom, and prevent your child from ingesting a rusty screw.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Bry has been working on his babble skillz recently. As in, "Ba ba ba ba ba ba. Pphhhhttt. Ahhhhh!" He only says "ma" when he's crying. Hmmmph. Steve's been putting him on the accelerated program to saying "daddy," coaching him throughout the day and putting a tape recording of "can you say daddy...daaaaddddy" under his crib mattress at night. But so far nada.

Applying some parental creativity to Bry's babblings, however, we've determined with 95% certainty that Bry's vocabulary consists of the following: flower, bologna, hi, bubble wrap, agua, and transcendentalism.

OK, Steve just wants him to say transcendentalism, but he hasn't bit on that yet either. Grandpa E was pretty sure he was saying "grrrrrandpa" by about 3 months of age. I'm betting his first word is going to be either "gentle" (as we say this approximately 40,000 times a day as Bry approaches the kitty) or "food" (because the Bry likes his chow).

I'm Just Gonna Stop Talking Now

I take it back.

Bry has changed his mind about sleeping through the night. He has apparently decided that if he is going to solve the problem of world peace, he will need to work overtime. Preferably on the 3rd shift.

The magical shirt of sleep has remained in his crib, however. Pretty soon I'm going to need to figure out how to sneak it away long enough to wash it. It's damp a good part of the time from stopping the flow of drool constantly dribbling out of Bry's mouth. (And no, he doesn't have any teeth yet.) He still likes to rub it over his face as he's going to sleep, too. I would wonder how he could have such a gross thing so close to his face, but then again, he likes to chew on my shoes too. Guess there's just no accounting for taste.

I Also Avoid Black Cats and Broken Mirrors

It's been awhile since I've been able to chronicle the life and times of the Bry. It turns out that my new job, which I started last Tuesday, requires actual work. The result thus far has been much, much less blogging. There has also been the matter of sleep. Or to put it more accurately, the complete and utter absence of sleep. It has felt a little like the newborn days recently, and my befuddled brain hasn't thought of a coherent sentence to write in a long time. For about 2 weeks straight, Bry decided that anywhere between 3:30 and 4:30 am was a fine time to greet the day and do some serious partying. He would stay up for 2-3 hours before finally collapsing back into a heap for another 45 minutes or so of slumber, after which - you guessed it - party time again. Nothing we did convinced Bry that staying horizontal with his eyes shut was really the way to go when it was still completely dark outside. Not rocking or nursing. Not leaving him alone or letting him cry. Not bouncing on the yoga ball or (just one time) sleeping on the floor in his nursery. Early bedtimes, late bedtimes, random naps, scheduled naps - none of it helped.

Then one evening, the sleep battles extended to bedtime, and I started hunting around for my receipt, because it felt like it was about time to return this kiddo. I have nursed Bry to sleep pretty much every night of his almost 9-month life. And I scoff at the books that say to put babies down to sleep drowsy, but awake, so they can "teach themselves" how to fall asleep. Bry has not read the same books, and is not convinced that this is the way to go. But nursing has always been a magic bullet - he conks out in 10 minutes and I'm free to twiddle my thumbs and do sudoku for the rest of the evening. This is totally how I spend my free time. I'm nothing if not lazy, and I'd opt for the easy way to get him to sleep over the "correct" way to get him to sleep every time.

But, one night, the sleep deprivation that Bry had accumulated over 2 weeks of poor sleep had caused him to be a lot more keyed up at bedtime and nursing was having no effect on his wound up self. After 30 minutes of crocodile wrestling Bry while he was nursing, I gave up and put him in his crib. Being no fool, he promptly started to scream. I told Bry it was time to sleep, as Steve and I had been doing in the middle of the night. (The books also say he's supposed to understand this if we simply repeat it enough. But they don't account for babies whose native language is Swahili, as Bry's appears to be.) And the screaming continued.

10 minutes later I went back in, patted his back, and told him it was still time to sleep. I left, and Bry threw his pacifier at my retreating body. Or, he just pushed it out of his crib, but either way, his timing was impressive.

Fast forward 10 minutes. I went back in, and this time, feeling desperate, I took off the t-shirt I had been wearing (sorry readers who don't know me very well - I'm not usually in the habit of randomly stripping). I handed it to Bry, told him it was time to sleep, and watched dumbfoundedly as he dropped onto his side, cuddled the shirt, and closed his eyes. He started murmuring a little to himself as I made my stealthy exit across the treacherously creaky wood floor in the nursery.

I strained to hear for noises coming from the nursery, but that was it. Bry slept the rest of the night (although I still woke up at 4:30 am, and have every night since - curse you maternal hormones or whatever it is that is causing this insomnia). He's slept every night since then too. Every now and then he'll wake up briefly and fuss for a few minutes, after which HE PUTS HIMSELF BACK TO SLEEP. Cue angel chorus. (And take that, sleep books.)

I have no idea what it was that finally helped Bry to sleep a little better again. But I'm not taking any chances. My t-shirt has stayed in his crib ever since then. And if it happens to find its way into his suitcase when he heads off to college (if you're reading this in the future Bry, no commuting from home to college, OK), so be it.