In the last three months you have transformed from a screaming raisin into pink ball topped with a bobble head, pillow cheeks, and blue-blue eyes with lashes ending in innocence. You’ve graduated from infant to baby.
Luke, you are beautiful. Now mind you, the perception of a child’s beauty is skewed by the potent hormones of parenthood. Most babies are a Frankenstienian mash of their parents’ features. Moms and dads see beauty and we all reinforce that illusion with the perfunctory “how cute!” The parents believe it, deeply.
So if my judgment is impaired, how do I know you are beautiful? Independent third party verification, that’s how. Random strangers routinely urge us to put you in baby commercials. No kidding. “He should be in Gerber advertisements!” I’m already devising ways to embarrass you in high school; pulling out a Gerber jar with your image will do the trick!
Your cotton candy looks, however, betray little of your personality. You are an intent spirit thrusting your fat little hands wherever the action is. Drinking from a water bottle in your presence has become a ritual of feints and parries avoiding the tangle of your hands. We both wind up far wetter than quenched. Your hand-eye coordination has developed since the last blog!
You’ve evolved in other ways too. You are now even longer (the top 90th percentile) and, despite your pudgy looks, you remain an average weight (50th percentile). Your height originates from Rachel’s side of the family; your grandpa Moore and his brothers are all very tall. (I’m not sure if I like the idea of you taller than me.) On the weight side, I find it hard to believe you are normal. You can sit up now and when you do your bulbous belly is a thing of wonder. No one can resist rubbing it! I often find myself massaging that belly chanting “Buddha” over and over.
Your belly “anchor” prevents you from crawling but you are the world’s greatest hopper! Your godfather, Rick, bought you a seat that hangs from the ceiling leaving your legs dangling, feet just touching the floor. The contraption allows you to spring from the floor, and up and down and up and down you hop! When you do this, you wear a grin a mile wide, cheeks even wider. Watching you hop for the first time was an enchanting and bittersweet experience … it was the first time I glimpsed your coming independence.
Not only do you grin, Luke, you’ve evolved from a crying machine into a steady chatter box. You experiment with wordish noises, contorting your mouth into new shapes. You started with blurts like “Bah Bah” and have moved on to “Dah Dah.” You are not referring to me but rather testing different twists of the tongue. You have also shown signs of mimicry. If I start saying, “bah bah” you sometimes copy me -- our very first conversations! They say when you are in your teens we will be talking with more sophistication but saying just as much!
Volim te,Dad
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