9 months

June 22, 2009

SHE CRAWLS!!

Father’s Day weekend was the weekend Sava started crawling. She had been schooching around pretty good for the last week: Getting up on all fours; pivoting her bottom around, and getting across a room in a gradual zig zagging arc pattern. Also she has been sliding backwards for a month (sitting on her bum or on her belly and pushing her arms against the floor). But on Friday afternoon amidst a pile of books, she learned how to keep her front arms straight and locked upright while alternating front and back limb action: the advent of true crawling.

A major, phenomenal shift has occurred. Now she can couple motivation with ability. Now we get to see more of her personality emerge- if personality is to be understood as ambition and the pursuit of one’s attractions and desires. The house must be scoured, battened down, secured.

She took her first tentative crawl on Friday (lucky mother’s intuition: I caught it on tape) and by Saturday she was zooming all over the house. Something has happened to her: it is like the joy of the new frontier has unleashed this manic reservoir of energy previously locked away in her bone marrow or something. Now there is this feverish desire to explore, and to do away completely with naps. Silly mortal- who could sleep when there is this dusty corner to lick? By Sunday we were completely exhausted; I had already been through two minor breakdowns and one teensy panic attack- and had forgotten entirely about Father’s Day until the afternoon when Jamba said (innocently, gently) "I’m just going to pop into Old Navy and check out their Father’s Day sale". Ouch. I tried to make it up to him by giving him a footrub that night, and he gratefully passed out at the previously unimaginable hour of 9:30 pm while mumbling something about how it was the nicest present/ father’s day anyone could ever want. Truly, we are parents now.

So Sunday evening Jamba and I are on our bed, completely defeated- defeated but with this small happy tired center of joy and pride (a chewy nugget of warmth), watching Journey to the Center of the Earth, with Sava in the middle, and she is still just out of her mind with energy. Climbing over my body like I am Mt. Everest, tumbling in between us. Righting herself and swimming furiously towards the TV to grab at the bars at the foot of the bed to stand up, rock herself violently back and forth. She is going to eat the TV if I don’t do something. I grab her heel and pull her back to me (what a fun game!!), thinking to restart the whole process, like the bed is her treadmill. She will have to get tired at some point, right?

Right?


June 16, 2009

Okay now your favorite thing is when your dad puts his hand up to your mouth and fans it while you ‘awwwwww” into his hand and make an Indian war cry. By the end of that day, you were already starting to bring your hand up to your mouth by yourself, and looking at us with wide expectant eyes as if waiting for that wonderful sound to emerge again.

You are fascinated by sound. Anytime you are around a canister or cup of any size you experiment by bringing it up to your mouth and crooning into it, to see what happens to the sound when it gets amplified. Crawling into your toybox and singing into the cave of it. You love the drum, the piano, the ukelele, the recorder, and the harmonica we just found in the hall closet.

The sounds you are making are: “Aaaaaaahhhhhhahhhh” (done loud like a trumpet, careening up and down the scales, and whipping around the room like a lasso that is performing a sonic probe of the volumetric space (like a bat, like a whale); Also a screech that sounds like a pterodactyl swooping down onto its prey; and of course the perennial favorites “dadadadadadada” and “mmmmmmaaa ma”. Your daddy just told me that in the morning when you two wake up, he sometimes sees you looking at him, softly saying "dah dah dah dah dah" to yourself. And when you are crying for the boob or because you are tired, you purse your lips into a tiny squinch and make that “mmmmmmm” and it sounds exactly like a small little speaker in your throat has blown out. That same soft crackling noise. I have to get it on tape. I really do because there are sounds that are going in and out of publication. For instance- one of the first sounds you ever made sounded exactly like you were saying “erin” (well, more like ‘ey- wren’) and now you never make it anymore.

Today you said “hi”. The thing is, you have a pretty large range of vocal sounds, so you say a lot of words on accident but there doesn’t seem to be meaning or communication behind it. Like you will not repeat them back to us when we get excited and start saying “Hi sava! Hi! Hi! Hi! Can you say Hi?” You just look at us like we are really odd, and promptly move on to the next, all-absorbing experience.

There is so much to write about. It kind of wrecks me that an entire month has gone by without meaningful journaling. That is to be expected with a move (we moved up to our new house in Harrisonburg at the beginning of the month and have been hectically trying to settle in (read: paint an entire two-story house, organize: reorganize: reorganize again finding the perfect state of settle, construct new garden beds and slap some herbs into the ground and all of the things your parents are compelled to do to finally feel at home in a space) and all of these things take up a lot of the time-space continuum and do not leave a lot left over for things like journaling about the profundities of one’s precious baby daughter. Which is a damn shame really. For what could be more important than watching you grow? Does it really matter where the cans of foods go in the cupboards and where the teacups? And yet.. I still find myself praying for long nap times and have to temper my disappointment when you wake up precipitously (but wait- I almost had that basement shelf put up!!). Because I am a goddamn protestant-raised daughter, cursed by a pressure to perform, to complete, to hack away at the to-do list. Aurgh.

I am trying to be a really good mother. Honest. I am trying. But it is as hard as it is the easiest, most joyful job in the universe. To wake up. Don’t go to sleep. Wake up. Wake up and witness, wake up and dance with her. Don’t go back to sleep. Don’t be buried by your duties, your sense of purpose. Witness.

You, who are always present, completely and nakedly honest to your desires and your appetite for life, you constantly pull me back to an appreciation of the real. I actually looked at old baby photos the other day (I can’t believe I am already at this point- how can you be 9 months already?) and was shocked at how small you used to be. How quickly this time is passing, and you shedding old skin every day like a chrysalis.

Your dad and I have been talking about how these last few weeks in particular have been an enhanced period of transformation. He keeps shaking his head at the wonder of it: just last week, you seemed to shift from being a baby to being a child. A little girl. A kid. What is it??? That you are almost crawling, and every day more motile? We turn our heads and somehow, magically, you scooch to the other corner of the room. How did you do that? (A complex series of body wiggles and rolls). We place you in the crib and seconds later you have pulled yourself up on the bars and are leaning over the rails, looking down at the floor- studying the physics of altitude, velocity, plotting your course. You are on your hands and knees and you rock back and forth like you are humping the floor (we giggle, like schoolchildren at a naughty joke).

No- it is not that- not all that movement. It is this sudden shift in your face- a lengthening and leaning. An awareness in your eyes. An increasing prettiness and poise in the way you hold your head on your neck. Or maybe it is your growing sense of humour- your desire to cause laughter. Clapping so that we will then applaud. Cause and effect? What is it? Sometimes I look at you and imagine being enveloped by you. Dwarfed. I feel your shoulder and can imagine leaning my head against your strong adult shoulder someday. You are just so sturdy and strong and vibrant and vital. You seem like a teenager already, with these giant (95th percentile!) hands and feet. Maybe it is just that I need to start hanging around normal sized people more often- I am losing perspective. You are larger than you were last week. That is all I know.

It is so interesting to be around a child in such an active state of transformation. We older people, who can trick the eye into presenting an illusion of stasis, we can settle around each other into comfortable routines, and forget to LOOK at each other. To daily memorize the faces and record the particular nuances of our speech, body habits, smells. But you who are so precious, because you illustrate our change, our collective passage through time in such a painfully magnified way. How often I grab you to me and squeeze, inhaling fiercely your smell. Close my eyes to better feel the impossible softness of your skin, to memorize you as you are now, and never will be again.

I am in love with you. That state of being in love, where you lie on the bed and look into each other’s eyes perfectly content for hours on end- I am there. We are there together. The metaphors of to drink, to eat the beloved in the poems, in the sainted verse, I can finally claim without embarrassment. Because you return my passion, without question or thought of doubt. You do not mind my clutchings and all the deep inhaling, although you will soon enough. For now I too am your drink, the deep well. You cry to leave my arms, my sight and smell.

You are inches from crawling. You love being flown through the air like an airplane. You love jumping on the trampoline in my arms. I hold you tightly with my hand on your head so that it doesn’t jiggle too much, and we jump up and down in slow careful elevations. After we are done jumping together, we sit down on the trampoline and I make you pop like a jumping bean while you squeal and try to hold your balance. You love being upside down. You love thumping your chest like a gorilla, and have discovered that a naked belly makes a wonderful drum. You love balls. You love pulling books off the bookshelf and flinging them over your shoulder and tearing the pages. (Tearing paper and crinkling plastic is a major passion). You love the game where I pretend to drop you and catch you right before you hit the ground. You love it when three of us surround you and spontaneously start clapping and laughing and cheering for you. It sends you to the moon. You have started to clap all the time now. You clap when you see Nico- also you squeal with delight sometimes to see her come into the room after a brief absence. You clap when you see Kitty. You love cheerios and can be entertained by one bowl of cheerios (of course, the organic whole-grain version called “oaty bites”) for the entire time it takes mom to clean a sinkload of dishes (time has come to be measured not by minutes or hours but by such units. Nap units. Cheerio Bowl units). Mostly the cheerios get scattered across the floor- but some make it to your mouth (pincer grasp, and then flattening your hand against the mouth. Success rate: 20% in the mouth: 80% on the floor). Whole-grain spaghetti noodles are equally fun to play with. They get dangled in the air and swung around in circles and carefully hand-fed to Nico. Bananas are a new passion- I actually have to stow them in the fridge to keep them out of sight- because if you see one you start making the “mmmm eemmm mmaa” broken stereo bleating sound previously reserved only for my boob. Bananas are much messier than cheerios or spaghetti so usually you will get stripped down to your knickers, so that you can paint the world with your banana fist. There is this very large wooden salad bowl we have, and a really cute thing to do is put the naked baby in it, pour some cheerios straight from the box into the bowl, and hand you a piece of banana. Baby Cereal! I guess in this scenario you are playing the role of The Milk.

We are starting to teach you sign language. Water. Milk. Ball. Mother. Father. Doggy. Cat. Bird. Shoes. The first time I have actually seen you entranced by the television screen was when we were watching Signing Times. We lay on our bed together with our heads at the foot of the bed like two kids at a slumber party, and you strained your hand towards the screen, wanting to pet the little kids putting on their shoes. You are fascinated by other little children, and when we meet other babies you practically lunge at them in your desire to touch their face. I have to restrain your enthusiasm, saying “gentle”, as most are intimidated and start to cry or hide against their mamas, overwhelmed by your enthusiasm and/or your apparent desire to consume them. Lets just put it this way : You, my sweet, are no shrinking flower. You are friendly and open, curious and flirtatious. Even to strangers. The shyness and separation anxiety predicted for 8-9 months old has not taken place yet- and may never happen at this rate. If you have been freshly snacked and slept, you can play content in somebody else’s presence for a long time (especially if I am out of sight/mind/smell).
Okay, that should probably be it for now. You are planting rasberries on the living room floor amidst a pile of off-loaded books and it is time to take you and Nico for a walk in the warm rain.


June 4, 2009

The newest joke (starting the last few weeks) is that you have learned to click (or clop?) your tongue against the roof of your mouth. You wake up and it is one of the first things you do, have a bout of tongue clicking with Mom and Dad. You seem surprised and delighted to find out that pretty much everybody you meet seems to know this game too. Ros loves playing it with you and gets even more excited than you to play it.

Favorite games include having mom or dad put things into their mouths and pretend to growl like a dog, shaking their heads back and forth. For instance: Dad and White Plastic Hanger in the Backseat. A lot of mouth humour in general. You love to be bitten. Consumed. Eaten up. Slurped. Munched from head to toe. Feets are the funnest snack. You have your hand constantly plunged into the mouth of whoever is holding you. Probing dentition, exploring the cavity. Our little dentist, we say.

You have started waving a lot more now. We can almost get you to wave upon command (Say bye-bye!) Although it is still mostly spontaneous and often disassociated from context of arrivals and departures.

Favorite things:
Shoes. (the shoe box- emptying it out. Mouthing high heels, flip flops. Your new blue crocs from Grandma- favorite squeaking chew toy ever.)
Feet. Sucking on wiggling toes. (Moses supposes his toeses are roses. But Moses supposes erroneously. For nobodies toeses are poesies of roses, as Moses supposes his toesies to be). Aunt Joy calls you Grumpy toes. Sleepy toes. I do the same.
Kitties.
Nico.

May 4, 2009

Sava’s jokes: May

1)When mommy or daddy cough, you look at us and smile really big, thinking we are making a joke. I think it is because Jamba is always going “Hey Sava, who am I??? cough cough cough,” pretending to be you….

2) Today, you lay against my belly in bed and gave me a raspberry. I laughed really hard cuz it tickled and also the businesslike way you went about it. You looked up at me and grinned really hard. Then you leant down to do it again. I laughed really hard again- big belly laughs this time cuz it was so funny, and tickled. So you did it again- and really quickly looked up to catch me laugh…. This went on for awhile…. Until you were just leaning down “as if” to give me a raspberry, but you would look up really quick to catch me laugh.

3) You have developed the habit, in the last few weeks, of popping your binky out of your mouth with your teeth clenched so that it makes a popping noise. You love that game. It started with the light blue “orthodontic” binky that is shaped weird- like a drop of water- and for which previously we had no use.

April

APRIL 29th

Though she has been entertained by the game of peekabo for the last few weeks, she just now has actually started to initiate the game herself, which is a bit of a leap in my opinion. She was lying in bed and pulled the blanket over her head, and then quickly flung it down to look up at us mischieviously.
"Peekabooo!" we screamed at her in delight.
This went on for some time.

APRIL 24th

Driving to Virginia Beach on a Friday night, about to meet up with friends from Rosetta Stone at a beach house, Sava and I are in the back seat of the car while Ros and Jamba talk up front. She is babbling, really going for it, up way past her bedtime and thrilled with the lights flashing by and the nasal syringe we use to clean the snot out of her nose (she has another cold), and after chewing on the rubber of the syringe and waving it all around
video (as we were to find out this was an exercise- a build-up to the big event) SHE WAVES at me for the first time, right in the middle of a babbling spiel. She stops babbling to look at her hand wondorously, and then back at my excited face (I had responded with perhaps an inordinate amount of enthusiasm) and then did it again. A bit more cautiously this time.
Again, the mom in joyous conniptions.
Hmmmmmmmm... (i could see the cogs turning)

p.s She waved for Jamba on my birthday, apparently, but I was not there to see it

APRIL 17th

This is hard, hard hard. I know everybody warned us that our lives would never be the same, but man oh man. I miss whole glorious chunks of time to myself (and not just at night, after she has gone down to sleep at night- because by that point I am totally dumped. you know? bone tired. able only to crawl onto the couch and drink a beer and watch a movie. HELP!! I need a nanny! At least somebody send me a goddamn robot that can pay my bills for me.

APRIL 16th.

What I do in a day. Wake up bleary and empty. Stumble around the house for an hour, go for a walk around the block in the warm spring morning, pointing out the birds and thinking about all the senses i take for granted. Do you hear that bird? Do you register what it belongs to? Try to be entertaining and coherent until Sava is ready to go down for her nap. Nurse her to sleep. Extricate myself from the bed. Pound caffeine and try to get something done... hurridly, quickly. Pick stuff up off the floor. Throw a load of laundry in. Make a call/pay a bill. and then damn! she is up again. Already???. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Many days I don't realize until the afternoon that I have completely forgotten to brush my teeth. Not just thought... oh, I will do it later, after coffee. It is like I totally let it slip from my mind that brushing teeth is an integral ceremonial part of the morning in civilized countries.

What I do do with my day: watch her squirming eyeballs dance underneath eyelids, waiting for the signs of deep sleep so that I can slip out of that dreamlike space and into the jolt of action. A bewildering spinning dance of deep state changes, and rarely immersed completely in any. That is the maddening part- the splintering, the always staying on the surface of things.

APRIL 10th

I absolutely exist right now solely and only thanks to the invigorating reviving powers of Mate.

APRIL 5

YOUR FIRST TWO TEETHS!
We were in Virginia Beach, about to leave for Richmond and Heidi’s plane flight home after a glorious bday weekend, having Sunday brunch in an old cape-cod style restaurant, and I was letting Sava chew on my fingers while she sat in her high seat after a messy meal of pureed carrots, and Ouch! It hurt when she chomped down, and we looked at her mouth and there were two sharp little nubs coming up on the bottom. The cutest thing ever. I spontaneously broke into tears, which made Heidi laugh in joy.


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March

February 28, 2009 (letter to the Birthing Group)
Also, I laughed to read your ironic relationship with "drowsy but awake!" I know! that one always kills me. Of course, the moment Sava is shifted position (especially being lowered into the crib), she startles awake into full fighting mode. That is the whole reason I slipped into the habit in the first place, of nursing her on my side, in our bed (mattress just on floor) until she falls asleep suckling, and then ever so very carefully, like a ninja cat, slip my boob out of her mouth and ease ever so slowly out of bed, making sure to leave consistent pressure on the bed until I am off of it and able to ease the mattress up slowly and controlled, inch by inch, with my arms. It is pretty ridiculous actually. "The zen of slipping out of bed undetected, while your baby continues making phantom sucking motions into thin air, and you chortle with (silent) glee at having foiled them once again!!"
I am finally like "This can't be the rest of my life."... Also, since she has started to roll, I can't really in good conscience leave her on an unsecured surface. So I will try to start establishing a "go to sleep ritual" that doesn't just involve nursing... and we are going to try for the crib! I will let you know how it goes.

March 3rd, 2009 SOLIDS!
The other day, I was looking down at your face, and it was crying, and a little salt tear had formed at the end of your lash and I put my finger to it and tasted it (yep- salty) and I was struck with the thought- that your tear, and your eyelash for that matter, had all been constructed out of my tissues, and out of my breastmilk. That that tear was really just re-constituted breastmilk, because up to that point, the only think you have ever taken in (other than the occasional gulp of bathwater), was ME.
Well, that has all changed, now, because tonight, you ate your first non-mom food group. GERBER’S ORGANIC BROWN RICE BABY CEREAL. We got it on tape. You seemed to enjoy it. (not surprising, considering the extreme interest you have had lately, in watching me eat stuff, and grabbing for my spoons, etc.) We decided to start feeding you solids for three reasons. 1) 5 months is a good age to start new experiences (you are more malleable a person than you will be in a few months) 2) I am hoping it will help you sleep through the night better 3) You seem to be very curious, and ready for new experiences.

March 12, 2009

We are going through kind of a rough patch right now, where five months of broken sleep are catching up to me, and I feel a little evil on the inside. So it is finally time to get you out of the family bed, as much as I love sleeping next to you, your warm little clingy body next to mine, I think I will be a better mother during the day if I get some solid sleep at night. See, the thing is, by this age you are supposed to be sleeping through the night, with maybe one nursing- but since you sleep right next to me, you have gotten into the habit of just snacking all through the night. You can wake up around five or six times a night to nurse. It sucks, literally. My poor breast feel like wounded soldiers, marching disconsolate and bereft behind the others, emptied of all purpose and reason. They are sad, limp, hollow things. You never give them a chance to fill up again. You are a little piggy.
So, my cherished one, I am booting you out of the bed, and into the crib which we have put right beside it. You need to learn how to go to sleep on your own, and stay asleep through the night. That is a skill everybody must learn at some point, and now is your time.
But it is hard. My heart breaks a little. It is like the first crack in the undifferentiated blob that is YouMe. Pretty soon you will be 13 years old and you will just absolutely hate everything about me and you will sneak out of the house and be caught applying mascara in the school bathrooms before class.
On a lighter note… I fed you your second different food today….. organic Sweet Potatoes out of a little baby jar. It was quite cute. You seemed to like it okay. I am feeding you while you are standing in your exersaucer, and you seem to be enjoying taking little bites, and then going back to playing with all the toys, and then looking back at me and eating a bit more, etc…

February

A poem about Sava

Sava is the single most amazing person in the universe. Really- i look at her and it takes my breath away. A whole person dropped from my body, alive and functioning, with all the capacity to grow and think and love within her already. She is almost impossibly soft- there are no sharp corners or jagged edges to be found. Ankles and wrists are opportunities for the most egregious voluptousness. Her forehead as round and polished as a seastone.

She has recently discovered her hands: that they can be agents of change, and she is constantly stretching out to the world through them. Either they are clasped in her lap and she is staring down at them in studious concentration (what marvels, these hands!) or they are flying about her in haphazard frenzied orbit. She pummels her thighs in excitement. She sticks them deep inside her mouth, chews each digit thoughtfully. She nurses and her hands are in constant balletic motion.... curving through space in wide s-curves, curling and uncurling fingers, or stroking my chest with the most heartbreakingly loving touch. I am being petted. I am being told, "there's a good mommy". A few days ago, while we were at the local pizza joint enjoying a hard-won beer after a fiercely competitive racketball match, we had our first Sava/hand/engendered accident, when she stared at his beer, calculated trajectory and swiped, knocking it effectively all over his lap. We were awed and amazed. And wet.

February 2, 2009
Your first real cold, and you smiled bravely at us through swollen eyes and a burbled throat. In the bath, a new obsession with leaning over and trying to suck on your toes. I understand completely- they look very inviting to me. In fact… I am gonna gobble them up right now! Other new interests: looking at Nico and smiling and laughing at her. Spatulas- waving them around in the air. Hitting things with them.
February 4th
Your first doctor’s visit in our new town… we met Dr. George Sproul and found out that you are 16 lbs and 25 inches long. 90% percentile for length and head size, but only 50% for weight per length. In other words, you are an immensely healthy, long and lean (okay, maybe not so lean) wonder. You got your first vaccine shots, one in each chubby thigh, and you hated it… cried and cried and I nursed you and you finally calmed down. But it felt horrible to let them poke you and cause you pain.

February 9th
In the past two weeks you have discovered your feet and now when we are in the bath, you sitting like a corpulent little buddha, one of your favorite things to do is to lean over and stick your open mouth around the big toes and chew reflectively. Your face is becoming leaner and more defined… I see the beginnings of an elegance in your nose and eyes- a refinement in the bridge of your nose, so that you are even more heartbreakingly beautiful. I love seeing glimpses of the face that is to come. We place you facing outwards in the sling now, and you really love facing the world and checking everything out. Your fat little legs just pump in excitement, like you are trying to kick the machine into gear. I just found an exersaucer online for you to use as you are just now old enough to stand in one, and you love playing with all the little twirling gadgets and spinning around. You aren’t so sure about the jumperoo thing in the middle of the doorway. Hands are almost constantly stuck fist deep into the mouth.


Feb 14th- 24th
You are 5 months old and already you have flown in a plane to the San Juans for Thanskgiving, and now- from Washington D.C to SF, and from SF to Honolulu, and from Honolulu to the Big Island, and then back again. That is a lot of plane rides for such a small munchkin. You are an amazing traveler (I had people come up to me after almost every flight, to thank me for having such a well-behaved baby). I just strap you into our baby carrier, and we stride through the airports like Amazonian villagers lugging three bags and eliciting happy awestruck expressions from the other people in the terminal. Our strategy for happy flights is 1. Nurse upon takeoff and landing (helps with the ear popping during altitude changes 2. Bring lots of toys (our favorite traveling companion is Mr. Burroughs the burrowing owl, who is a hand puppet who can fly and he followed us across the entire continent, and then over the pacific ocean, and every time you were starting to get grumpy, Mr. Burroughs would finally catch up to us and land, panting, to whoo-whoo at you in a very deep and winded voice and ask “what, my dear, seems to be the problem?” He is a bit of an armchair psychologist. You would squeal in joy and grab him with both chubby arms and do a face plant onto his nose, and start chewing away.) 3. Walk up and down the aisles looking at all the nice people faces in all the rows, and meeting all the other babies (there were at least three or four of them on the flights to and from Hawaii).

You, miss Savalu, are an absolute magnet. People see you and just swoon. I have had many people tell me that you are one of the most loveliest babies they have ever seen. And then they go “I mean, all babies are beautiful. But yours, yours is realllly beautiful. Look at those eyes…”

This is the standard dialogue.

“Oh what a beautiful baby! How old is (she? /he?)”
- She. She is (x) months...
“Really? Wow! She’s big for her age!”
-Yep. She’s a big girl.
“Oh my goodness, LOOK AT THOSE EYELASHES!!”

So we just got back from our trip to Hawaii…It was nice and warm, a welcome change from the frigid winter weather of Virginia. It wasn’t too sunny, which was good because I fretted about exposing your tender peach-olive skin to the blistering rays. It was like an overcast, warm grey bath that we got to swim in for a week and a half.

We basically just hung out with the grandparents and enjoyed being warm, in a condo right off the ocean and a pretty busy street. Graham and Joy came to visit us from the other side of the island and they took us to the cool, secret beaches. We had neighbors next door in the condo who were loud and liked to party, and I hated them because they disrupted your nap and sleep schedule. (I couldn’t believe that I was getting mad at 50 year old grownups who were partying like college students. What a strange reversal for your mother, who at one point was used to having the shoe on the other foot).

I don’t think you really understood much about the trip- you are still pretty much taking the entire world in as if it was a foreign planet, and so why would it be much different for you- to be looking at tropical foliage vs. bare winter shrubbery. To be hearing the chorus of coqui frogs vs. that of winter birds.
Although…… Sand.
Sand was a pretty amazing revelation. We had some nice times sitting on the beach, with you stuffing your face with it. You were baptized in the ocean for the first time, the great Pacific ocean that laps at the great state that your mama was born in, but I don’t think you understood the portent of the moment, but only that it was COLDER than a nice warm bathtub, or for that matter, Harbin Hot Springs.

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January

January 18, 2009
You are almost four months old. You love being tickled by your mama. I can tickle you in three places- when I have my hands on your back and tickle between your shoulder blades (your favorite place), then, under your armpits, and then, where your thighs meet your belly. Your daddy likes to tickle you with his scratchy beard. He nuzzles your neck and you chortle with glee. You are laughing all the time now. Especially in the morning, when you are at your happiest and most relaxed.

January 20, 2009
Standing is your all time favorite thing, other than the boob. If you are getting grumpy and starting to kvetch, I will stand you up so that you are sitting on my belly, and you usually immediately stop frowning and give me a leery flirty smile, and a little waggle back and forth, a fistpump or two, and then strain upward in one straight line and gaze about your domains with the satisfaction of elevation.

January 21, 2009
A new voice was unveiled for Obama’s inaugeration day. This really lovely scratchy squeal like a alleycat in heat. It can mean a variety of things… it is not unhappy though it can signify the beginning of a meltdown. Mostly it seems to be when you have something really important to say, and you want to trumpet it. Also, it seems that you are really enjoying just trying out different sounds with your mouth and throat, so it feels experimental.

January 29th, 2009
You rolled over by yourself for the first time today. 4 months and 1 week old! I lay you on your back on your play mat in the living room, and you started doing this thing you have been doing the past four days, which is to bring up both your legs to your chest and roll to your left. You just kept touching your knees to the floor, and then rolling back onto your back. You were pretty happy and calm- engaged but not overly excited. I left to go into the kitchen and when I came back, you were on your belly!!!

January 30th, 2009
The firm floors help with this- you can’t roll over on the bed yet. You did it again on the bathroom floor this morning. This time, you weren’t as happy- you seemed to get frustrated by the effort and got lodged in an uncomfortable position against the cabinet until I could rescue you. But you are going to be crawling soon. You were trying to do the crawl on the bathroom floor after you rolled over, legs kinda pushing back against the rug and your whole body arched up and straining, and I could see the wheels turning in your head.

3 Months

December 14th                

Dear Sava,

We are sitting in the Darjeeling Café, eating crepes of chicken and apple and brie in our new hometown of Staunton, Virginia. The sun steams though the tall white schoolhouse windows onto our little corner where we sit on tatami mats amongst piled rugs and pillows. I have just nursed you to sleep and transferred you to a made-up bed of pillows and sweaters between us- you suck your binky and sleep dreamlessly. You are the absolute picture of repose, while your dad struggles though his book on Zizek- he started his new job last week and weekends are his only time to study for his philosophy PhD. He has been here since Thanksgiving. You and me and Nico have been here for exactly one week… we arrived 7pm on Sunday the 7th after a whirlwind trip across the country in great-grandpa’s old blue Mercedes so that somebody would be there on Monday to meet the moving truck. 

The Mercedes: grandma and grandpa up front with their maps and crossword puzzles and you and me and Nico in back, the old car so stuffed with toys and clothes and blankets and xmas presents and bottles of wine and all the miscellaneous doo-dads left over from the move, that grandma wasn’t allowed to even go grocery shopping- there was no room for things like lettuce.

You were an absolute peach on the road trip… we couldn’t believe what a quiet, happy baby you were (had all kinda steeled ourselves for a nightmare marathon of ceaseless baby screams) but we were saved by two inventions…. 1: the Binky. 2: Backseat breastfeeding, which I invented after the happy discovery that I could kinda jerk the car seat over to the right and lean over just enough to drop my boob into your mouth (not the most comfortable of positions, to be sure- but it beats listening to a crying baby!) With the above tools, and then all this time to stare at each other's face, we actually had a really good trip. You did a lot of sleeping. And damn girl- you love yourself some Binky. Nipple confusion be damned. That was one fine invention. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is not to be the sole solution to your sucking fetish.

So here is how it would go…. As the snowswept frozen plains of Kansas and then Missouri slipped past, I sat in dreamy winter sunshine slanting though my south-facing window, reading Obama's autobiography and playing and talking to you. When you started to get grumpy and lost interest in the myriads of toys spread out at your feet, I would stick the binky in. That would usually settle you down. If the binky failed, and you were tired of me singing or talking to you or showing you things to look at and you weren’t hungry and if you were seriously just losing it or overstimulated or exhausted, and we weren’t about to stop somewhere, then I would lean in and give you my 3rd weapon: a powerful round of Oms…. Right up close to your head so that the sound would vibrate your little cranium. That usually stopped your screams, and would at least tide you over until we could stop. We called it the Illinois Om in 3 Part Harmony, for a particularly long stretch of road right before we hit Kentucky, when Grandma and Grandpa were inspired to pitch in.

Side note: Your dad and I discovered Om-ing one night when you were restless and cranky, unable to fall asleep against my chest, and I was humming to you in my off-key way and your dad delicately suggested that I try something a little more harmonious to hum…. So (after shooting him a dirty look) I started to Om and he joined in and we just did these circles over and over until your lids dropped- you were powerless to resist the vibrations, and fell fast asleep. We couldn’t believe it. We just stared gratefully at each other over your head and mouthed “Oh my god- she is a little Buddha!” (meaning you don’t just look like one). And I swear- it is like something in you recognizes those sounds from a past life… those deep vibrations work when all else fails. My only fear is that I am conditioning you so well that years later, if you ever decide to become a Buddhist, you are going to be a complete narcoleptic in the meditation hall when they start to chant.

The other thing that happened on our road trip, other than our first-ever trip to a Bob’s Big Boy (in Kentucky- I forced us to stop there because it had been one of grandma Robin's first jobs, back in the sixties when she was but a wee lass…it was truly horrible food but all the waitresses just luuoooovved you- they all had to come over to our table to check you out and tell us aaullll about their little babies and kids and their sister’s kids and so on. It was quite the southern experience, complete with our first real accents (“my little girl just wakes me up so aurrly in the morning, I can’t even tell you! But I just luuoove her”)).

But I digress…. The other thing that happened was that you, miss Sava Talulah Dunn, my smart little biscuit, you learned…. to read. Quite possibly the smallest human ever to accomplish such a thing.

What happened was that your favorite thing to look at (unless it was at night in which case there was a toy that lit up all these different colored buttons in time to different musical tunes while pronouncing the names of the colors in all the different languages of the world “red! rojo! amarillo! blau!) But during the day, your favorite thing to look at was this felt-sewn book, all of 6 pages, called “Where’s the Bone?”. This is a beautiful book (compliments of your grandma of course, along with all the other goodies spilling over the seats), with a big-ole black and white puppy face all leaping off the cover at you, and then a bone on a string that you get to put places, like under the water with all the fishes…. or behind a fuzzy white cloud… or under a ball... you get the picture. Very tactile and awesome. Point is…. you would just stare at this book for hours, and I would occasionally turn the pages for you so that you wouldn’t get bored (I am really trying hard to stimulate your visual synapses… apparently it is supposed to make you smarter in the end, and since I have lost my fish oil capsules sometime during the move, I am guiltily making up for it with external stimuli). And you would just sit and stare at the pages, looking from left to right, and back again, just letting your gaze wander all over the open pages, and I swear it looked exactly like you were reading. At the very least, I think having such bookworms for parents has encoded some deep genetic memory of the act of reading into your bones, so that your body knows what to do with a book even if your mind doesn’t. Anyway, at one point, you just got so damn excited that you kicked your legs out and jerked your arms all happy and frantic-like, and you turned the page yourself. And kept reading.

I swear. I have it on tape. I will show you. You did it more than once.

We love Staunton. Staunton is the best. Staunton is this cool historic town with the most beautiful Victorian houses (with those deep southern porches) all jostling together on these rolling hills with lots of trees which are bare of leaves at the moment, since it is winter, and it is really lovely because that way you can see all the houses better- they can’t hide behind their green skirts. So many of them look like haunted houses, with their stark black skeletal trees posing theatrically beside crumbling front stoops and peeling walls. 

The train that comes through town- about a half-mile down the hill from our house- is the same train line that supplied the confederate troops with goods and food during the Civil War. It makes a lovely deep and rumbly sound as it passes by, and delicious low blasts of the horn.  It is actually quite a dramatic train,  so self-important, announcing its arrival at 11 pm at night with a great trumpeting fanfare. I like the fact that this fragment of history will be one of the earliest recurring sounds to be encoded in your auditory memory, and that we will be taking this train to places like New York City, Washington D.C...

Weather: In this one week it has been piercing cold- and also warmish and humid and tropical feeling. It kind of flops between those two moods. So far the weather has been mild and amazing, and I feel like saying “if this is what passes for winter.. bring it on!”  I like the warm moist days, when I get a hint of how it is going to be in the spring and summer, when we will have to be rocking furiously on the porch hoping to generate a gust of wind to cool our perspiring brows.

Apparently Staunton brings out the latent southern belle in me- I walk out my front door onto this deep curving porch, with the town falling away at my feet and the brown hills far off in the distance, and feel like flouncing around in a big hoop skirt. Yes, flouncing. Which I haven’t done yet but I have started sporting this pinkish/mauve velvety bathrobe everywhere. It is so soft and wonderful I can’t even tell you. Yesterday I met our new neighbors across the street while wearing that bathrobe and vacuuming our rugs out on the porch while you lay in the bassinet staring transfixed up at the empty sky. They were very nice- they didn’t say anything about my bathrobe. They loved Nico, kept petting her and laughing at how transfixed she was by the squirrel in the tree way across the street. This man liked your name, asked me if I knew that it was a Slavic name. I told him yes: it means old man. Then he said that Sava is the patron saint of the Serbians. He knew this because he was Serbian.

People in Staunton could not be friendlier. I don’t know if it is this town in particular, or Virginia in general, but we have been welcomed with open arms. The man carrying his motorcycle helmet in line at the hardware store (he was shopping for stocking stuffers and didn’t find anything he liked so he just bought a Mounds bar) seeing me juggle baby and new broom/mop purchase, insisted that he carry my things out to my car for me. He has lived here since 1974, raised his kids here. Or our neighbor Dante, who upon learning of our plight with the movers (the fact that we expected them first on the 1st and then on the 8th but they didn’t actually show up until the 13th, and that our Mercedes and its cargo of baby and grandparents and dog arrived to a house with not a stick of furniture except one little blow-up mattress Jamba bought at Wal-mart to sleep on while he was here alone, and which kept deflating half the night), absolutely insisted that we all stay at his house for the night. And not only that, but he was leaving for the week (he is only here on the weekends and lives with his partner up in Baltimore) and that we must stay at his house until the movers came. Which we did- for a whole week- and I don’t know what we would have done without him, or his big, lovely house with its grand wood curving staircase and sitting room and thick curtains on the windows.

Side note: Dante is fast becoming one of my favorite persons. Because he is this very kind, soft-spoken, lovely man, who has a habit of saying thoughtful and wise things and generally being a calming and grounding influence on this sometimes harried and frantic mother of yours. Yesterday while the movers were here and Jamba was at a yoga class and I was trying to juggle you (starting to disintegrate amongst the chaos) and the movers, Dante showed up and asked if he could hold you. It was so wonderful to have an extra pair of hands, and I gratefully handed you over and then started rushing around the house directing traffic. When I came downstairs it was to the sound of the most beautiful sonorous whistling, and Dante swaying with you near the front windows in the sun. I moved transfixed to his side, wanting to be close to that sound, and saw that you had passed out- your head leaning back and your mouth open in that pose of surrender which I had only before seen you do after the most satisfactory of breastfeedings. He told me it was an old Filipino lullaby, and I wanted to cry, so grateful that you were having such an enchanting experience and so sad that I didn’t know how to whistle such beauty into your ears. Or maybe, that I was not that baby being held and sung to in the sunshine.

The other neighbors have been just as wonderful- I am finding out that we are surrounded by painters and writers and history teachers and world travelers- and tonight we have been the recipients of not only a tin of cookies (“welcome to the neighborhood!”) from the neighbors down the street, but a bottle of wine and a paper plate of brownies still warm from the oven from the couple across from us- the ones who so loved Nico and who told us that the man who used to live in this house- the brilliant protégé of Ezra Pound- was a right-wing conspiracy theorist who had so many books stacked in his front parlour that the entire house tilted down towards the street.  I am devouring the brownies as I type. They are helping me deal with the fact that it just took us two and a half hours to get you to go down to sleep tonight.

Yes. I like this town. Today we sat on the path in Dante’s front yard as he took a break from gardening, and in his quiet, grounded way he put it best…"This is a place where you feel you can create, and make things happen. It seems like things are possible here- not only that- they are begging for you to make it happen. But mostly, it feels like a place where you can just… breathe..."

pictures..

6 weeks

Sava, you were born in the time of sunflowers, when they lined the country roads, tangled and wild amongst the weeds and the emptying fields. When great tall sunflowers filled the vases in our house along with the last of the summer flowers- the cosmos, dahlias, and baby’s breath. The leaves were just starting to fall. Then came weeks of golden sun, golden leaves, all the world throbbing with your birth color, and many walks we took amongst the crunching leaves, feeling grateful for each day that dawned warm and yellow. By the time you were six weeks old, most of the leaves had dropped and had been scraped into compost piles, collected and gathered, and suddenly our yard was transformed from a leafy, shaded green world of filtered hot sun, to a wide-open place, the sky and the yard emptied of intense color, so that everything seemed a piercing, lovely shade of clear gray or scoured dun. I can’t explain how but it felt nice to walk out into the yard and feel first of all how large it felt with the great quantity of clear air that surrounded me. As if without all the foliage and chaos of summer and fall, the air came rushing in, became expanded in volume. Humidity has fled this place and we are left with all this dry air- still warm- poised on the precipice and about to tumble into a splintering of cold.

Every day I fall in love with you a bit more, as you become more alert and aware of your surroundings, and as I learn how to be with you- more confident in the rhythms of the day and my new life. You are- luckily- a flexible, adaptable, and good-natured baby. Calm and grounded, and now more and more -obviously happy (because now you have started to smile, and so we can tell). Smiling often at us, smiling large when we zoom in for noisy kisses on your cheeks and ears and nose and mouth (you love that game!) We have started to spend mornings lying in bed together and just gazing at each other, talking quietly to each other with our assorted languages.
Me: babbling and singing and sometimes just reciting lists of things: jonagold, pink lady, granny smith, braeburn, red delicious, honey crisp!
You: warble. gurgle. grunt. heaow!

You can spend larger and larger periods of time by yourself in your bassinet, looking up at the world and grunting or talking quietly to yourself, before you realize that you miss me and need to be held (Instantly! Desperately! Now!) If I don’t react quickly, there might be a period of time in which I am consoling you, petting and holding you so close and warm in my arms, purring and trying to fill the void with love and comfort, as your lower lip quivers with the indignation of neglect and abandonment and you struggle to swim up to the surface of a great wet ocean of tears and screams. It is a tightrope walk: a careful dance between independence and togetherness, that we are cultivating.

I am not saying that there haven’t been rough times. I am really exhausted after over a month of incredibly broken sleep, and sometimes you cry with an intensity and a ceaselessness that scares us: we just don’t know what to do to calm you down. I have eaten something that doesn’t agree with you/ you are starving to death/ you are overtired- sometimes it seems impossible to figure out why, and I usually just end up sticking my nipple in your mouth to quiet you down- it is like an automatic mood reset button. Even if the attack is not from hunger, it seems to soothe you to the point in which you can drop off to sleep.
So these are my notes from the field, at 6 weeks of age. Everything is about to change. We are moving to a new town in a new state soon… leaving this house you were born in, and off on yet another adventure. It will be the town of your early childhood, and I can’t wait to explore it with you. I have already started to imagine all the walks we will do, hand in hand, along sidewalks littered with crunching leaves.