Wait, that’s for weddings… well, it is even more true for babies. Maybe they force you to borrow something for your wedding to get practice for having a blue-eyed baby. Everything Lev is wearing in this picture is a gift from someone. The polka dotted shirt is from my mother, the mat he is lying on from Arthur and Kelly Gleckler, and the blanket from the hospital
By the way, the peanut gallery has been demanding “Prego pics.” Here, first, are pictures from seven months or so, the way I looked through much of my pregnancy (more or less):
And here are pictures from the end when I got truly huge
So we have seen Baby, Daddy, and Grandma. What about Mommy?
I am much improved. When I saw myself in the mirror in the maternity ward, I was rather frightened, but then I realized that no one looks good in a maternity ward.
My mother Anne came for the first month, and her help was invaluable, both as a birth partner and keeping ordinary life humming.
Alexey, of course, has big plans for Junior’s intellectual development:
I can’t resist showing you the Austin Powers conspirators in crime:
Because he is too young to control his hands, Alexey helped him do the Dr. Evil gesture with his own pinkie.
I read an essay which said that Dads are better than Moms at soothing colicky babies, so I sent Alexey a description of the technique of swaddling and shushing. It seems to be true – if the baby cries normally, because he’s hungry or cold or wet, I’m the one who can calm him, but if he gets sufficiently worked up, or is crying out of pure Weltschmertz, it is Alexey who has the magic touch.
Enough with obsession with the baby! you may say. What about the parents?
I’ve tried to get Alexey involved by giving him bottles of expressed milk so he can feed and burp the baby too. Burping is my least favorite baby task. I thought I wouldn’t like changing diapers, but I have developed a fascination with baby poo. It is, after all, the final product of all my hard work, by which I can measure how well I’m doing. God, I can’t believe I said that.
At first Alexey only helped with the diapers, but I worried that was unrewarding. As he said “Mommy is the source of all good things, Daddy is the sink for all bad things.”
He has other expressions too: unlike adults, he doesn’t censor the expression of his feeling, and his face is remarkably mobile. I was surprised how much communication there is with a baby who can’t yet talk or even understand what he sees. It is what has made what would I would otherwise consider a harrowing month actually surprisingly rewarding. Here is a sequence showing his range of expression:
However, despite being too young to share his smiles, he still sometime has them. From very early on he had a “secret smile” that passed across his face for no apparent reason:
I wondered what baby thought crossed his mind to cause this sentiment. I still do not know for sure, but I got a hint one day when I happened to be changing his diaper. I looked up to see a grin on his face, and looked down to see a golden stream appear!