Month: March 2008

… with their rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts and their baggy pants.

“You want me to wear your logo, talk to my agent.”

… he is not happy and angelic all the time. For the last few days he’s been having a fussy period in the evenings, lasting from about 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. We’ve also had a couple of nights when he won’t go back to sleep after the 3:00 a.m. feeding, and it takes maybe 45 minutes to get him calmed down again. In those 45 minutes, I have employed every single comforting method I have read about, and attempted a few of my own. He likes being bounced and jiggled, he responds well to swaddling and shushing, and he thinks the exhaust fan in the bathroom is God.

I’ve tried singing to him as well. One thing I never anticipated when preparing for fatherhood was the need to memorize song lyrics. At 3:00 a.m., you forget them. For some reason I tried “American Pie” first, which was one of my first favorite songs. The chorus is easy enough, but then you get into the whole “do you believe in rock ‘n’ roll and can music save your mortal soul” part and it’s easy to get lost.

I hit on “Hey, Jude” next, but before I knew it I was in the “na na na na na” part, and that’s not very satisfying. Finally, my addled brain settled on one song that I know cold, without having to think about. That’s how I ended up singing “The Star Spangled Banner” to Conrad over and over again. If he grows up to be president, we’ll know where it all started.

According to one of the 80 to 100 baby books we have accumulated, your baby is advanced if, at the end of one month, he can raise his head while lying on his stomach.

Oh yeah? Check this out:

Three weeks old and he’s doing frickin’ yoga. This one is cobra pose. We fully expect to wake up tomorrow and find him doing a sun salutation.

In addition to tummy time “I hoped I would be able to avoid some of the baby jargon, but so far no such luck – except we have decided to call pacifiers “pacifiers” and avoid any other cutesy-poo abbreviations”, Conrad went for a stroll today, with his mom and Grammy. Luckily we bundled him up against the brutal North Carolina winter:

Today’s high: 59 degrees

One of today’s many costume changes included this cute little number:

Why does he need pockets? What’s he going to keep in there?

Although he did get his insurance card in the mail yesterday. It was the first piece of mail addressed to him. I was momentarily confused, like after you get married and receive a card seemingly addressed to your parents. So he’s getting mail, and accumulating identity cards. I suppose he needs a wallet now, too.

More pics from tummy time, Grammy time and Opa time added to the Flickr page, along with a shot of Jean and her favorite new feeding time accessory.

Those of you who groused about having to register before being able to leave a comment and tell us how adorable our son is, get to commentin’. I have made the comments section open to all, although you will have to do one of those word verification things to prove you aren’t a Viagra-shilling robot.

Conrad’s baby acne arrived right on schedule, and just in time for the weekend’s scheduled photo shoots. Still, it’s just a phase and we know it’ll pass. He’s also been asking for his own cell phone, and he wants us to drop him off at the mall.

This is the expression we’ve been calling “breakfast face” since he was born, but earlier this week the doula told us it didn’t mean he was hungry, it just meant he was thinking. Uh huh. Right. Thinking about boob.

Years ago I read the results of a study linguists had done on newborns that determined babies are born with the ability to make all the sounds in all the languages of the world, even the ones that are hard to learn as an adult, like rolled French Rs and African !X sounds. I believe it, because lately it seems Conrad has been speaking dolphin. We’ve been calling him Flipper, in fact. I’d be afraid to take him to Sea World right now, for fear they would claim him as their own.