Adventures In Light And Sound
Or:
Blue Is Good And Dishes Cause Wakefulness
Today my son is 1 month old. He's 58 centimetres long (up from a mere 52 at his birth) and weighs 9lb 10oz (up from 7lb 14oz). He has big bright blue eyes and fair hair and eyebrows. He recognizes his mum and dad and follows us around the room with his eyes. He has 3 different cries we can distinguish - 1 for when he's hungry, 1 for when he needs his nappy changed, and 1 for when he has wind or just wants to be picked up and held. He's not smiling yet, but he has a funny expression a bit like a smile that he gets if you tickle him or *boop* him on the nose. He has a playmat with some hanging toys like an elephant and a lion and a giraffe and a monkey, and he likes to grab at the elephant. Sometimes he manages to hang on to his tail. We've been discussing colours with him, and so far he favours blue, which produces a strong show of interest, with pink coming a close second. Turn-offs: brown. Black. He likes to hear songs, or just humming, and he likes to be bounced, especially if he's in your arms. When you're feeding him, he stares into your eyes, and sometimes tries to grab the bottle. A couple of days ago, he managed to hold the bottle for himself for about 20 seconds. He's trying to hold his head up a lot, and usually only manages it for a couple of seconds. I feel for him; he's a strong little tyke, but his head is half the size of his body, so it's a tough task. Overall verdict, both medical and otherwise: Joshua is thriving, lovely, cute, healthy and in all ways excelsior!
How are we doing? That's trickier. I'm adjusting to having less free time to spend doing all kinds of luxurious things like playing chess and playing Civ4 and writing nodes and, uh, talking to my girlfriend. Jo is tired all the time. She may still have some kind of lingering infection, and she's going back to the doctor tomorrow. We're not getting to spend a lot of time together that isn't 100% focused on the baby's needs. We knew it would be like this, so it's not putting massive strain on our relationship or anything; it's just difficult. A typical day will see Jo getting up at 3:30am and, if she's lucky, getting another couple of hours sleep between 4am and 6am. Then she'll be awake all day with Joshua; even if he sleeps, she doesn't sleep during the day. I get home about 6 and take over; she stays awake till about 10pm and then crashes out. I stay up until about 2am. It's working OK so far. It's not exactly something that we'd like to sustain long-term, but then, he's not going to be 1 month old for long. Bedtimes should settle down and he should start sleeping longer. Also; in 1 month's time I will no longer be working in an office, and we'll be living in the country, near Jo's family.
Dishes cause wakefulness. They do. It turns out that the sharp, sudden sound of dishes and glasses touching each other, even lightly, is a major cause of Babies Waking. When he's asleep we tread lightly and speak softly and we don't touch the dishes, even to put them into the dishwasher. There's no feeling of stupid as stupid as the feeling of stupid that a stupid dad gets when he's trying to pack the stupid dishwasher quietly and he stupidly fumbles a stupid dish and it crashes into all the other stupid dishes and makes a giant sharp sudden horrible stupid crashing noise and the baby wakes up and starts crying. Stupid daddy. But when he's asleep, everything drifts like a cruise liner in the tropical sun, passengers out on deck in sunglasses sipping cocktails. He waves his hands around sometimes when he's dreaming and we wonder what he can possibly be dreaming about. I wish I could see inside his head at those times. Giant blue dishes rolling down endless hills that look like sofas, huge floating cartoon heads speaking gobbledygook in a vast white sky with a lampshade stuck in the middle? Or things far stranger, that we can't even imagine? Memories of another place? Bare neurons firing sparks in a grey void?
He doesn't like orange. I tried to explain to him that the bright orange I was showing him was the exact colour of his own poo, but he wasn't having any of that. He knows what he likes, and no amount of noise from my giant mouth is going to make him look at that colour with any degree of interest. Turn the page: Blue! Yay! Eyes widen. Daddy's blue work shirt is also a big hit. Eyes following it as I walk across the sitting room to get my bike on my way out. Blue is my favourite colour too and I am uncertain as to whether this is a coincidence and I like to think not.