Our big baby

Not an especially exciting post for the outside reader, but one for us to return to someday when trying to remember what our children were like at different ages.

Alice is now three months old, officially out of the so-called "fourth trimester"--though we credited her with plenty of personality even in those early months when she was supposedly a lump who might just as well still have been gestating inside were it not for my interest in walking upright, necessitating a smaller pelvis and thus the earlier birth of children. But I digress.

She seems older than three months to us. The scale suggests she is somewhere around the 15-pound mark, which puts her on the large size for girls her age, though not that different from Edith at the same stage. But she looks long, and clothing in size 6-months often seems to fit her best. She also appears to be teething, judging by the recent onset of copious drool, incessant fist gnawing, periodic bursts of pained crying, and the bulge of two large white squares just below the surface of her upper gum. Surely gummy smiles aren't going to give way to toothy grins already!

Blessed child, she is sleeping from about 8pm to 7:30am in her own crib. Tom and I reflected today that her sleep pattern has been critical to the success of the whole family program: If she were waking up every two or three hours at night, I never would be making it through this semester. So we feel deeply thankful for that gift.

We've started to hear the trace of a laugh sometimes in her vocalizing. But it was her babysitter's sister, visiting from out of town, who apparently got her laughing for real for the first time today. Yes, I am wistful that I missed it. But I trust she will soon laugh for us, too. It's a reminder to me that no matter how much we love our children, they aren't ours, their every accomplishment our rightful claim. Little as she is, Alice is starting to have individual experiences of which her father and I aren't a part.

But I do hope we share some giggles soon.

Some recent pictures:

March 9, 2009: three months old

February 2?, 2009: three decades + three years old

The pants on this new 6-9 month outfit are a bit long, but the shirt fits just right.

Edith wanted to disguise herself as "an old woman," so she chose to carry a walking stick and wear a Baby Bjorn. Societal busybody-ness being what it is about all things childrearing, it was only ten minutes before an overhasty observer stopped to inform me that a preschooler had no business carrying a baby. She was only somewhat mollifed to discover it was just a blanket in there--evidently we have no right to walk around fooling upstanding defenders of infants in the public sphere that way. I was never especially sympathetic toward libertarianism until becoming a parent. I get it now. Sometimes I fantasize about raising my children on the frontier with the Ingalls family, having them churn the butter at age four, play in the creek unchaperoned, tend the house through a blizzard, and ride in the wagon without a carseat.