Milestones and Magical Elephants

Asher is now two months old.  He has reached several milestones that I want to tell everybody I see about, but that most people aren't that interested in because, well, he's not theirs.  So, I'm going to write about them here, where I can write whatever I want and not have to see the disinterested faces of those on the receiving end. :)

The one milestone that everybody seems to like seeing, even if they're not interested in hearing about it, is that Asher is now quite the smiler.  I saw the first smile that I was certain was a real smile, and not just gas, or some reflex, or whatever, when he was five weeks old.  There were some earlier ones that I wondered about, but this one was definitely real.  After weeks of either crying or a neutral expression, it was surprisingly gratifying.  My theory is that babies start smiling around that age because that is about as long as parents are willing to put up with them with no positive feedback whatsoever.  Asher now smiles when others smile at him, when Hugh and I sing to him, when he's in the bath, and when people talk to him.  The smiling is accompanied by cooing, which makes it even more fun.  (Positive visual AND aural stimuli: what more could weary parents ask for?)

The next milestone, which is probably exciting only to Hugh and myself, is that Asher has graduated diaper sizes.  When we had the lovely hospital incident when Asher was 5 1/2 weeks old, we discovered that he weighed 10 pounds and half an ounce.  (Newborn-size diapers are recommended for up to 10 pounds.)  One of the nurses in the hospital gave me size one diapers to use during our stay and I discovered that they fit well.  Asher has been happily wearing size one diapers ever since.  Today at his two month checkup, Asher weighed  11 pounds and 6 ounces, so it looks like he's still growing.  The reason that this is all so exciting is that it appears that all of my nursing efforts are not going to waste because Asher is not starving to death.

One of my favorite milestones so far is that Asher has learned to go to bed at a consistent time every night without me having to soothe him to sleep for an hour or more just to have him wake up when I try to put him down.  We were going to start sleep training him when he was six weeks old, but we actually started the night before because I just couldn't stand the long, sometimes-fruitless soothing anymore.  So, between 6:45 and 7:00 each evening, I feed him.  Then we change his diaper and put him in pajamas.  We read to him from the scriptures or tell him a scripture story.  Then we sing him a hymn (He LOVES the two-part harmony. :) ), say a prayer, kiss him goodnight, put him down, turn off the light and leave the room.  Sometimes he cries for five or ten minutes, and sometimes he protests weakly for just a minute, but there are times when he doesn't cry at all and just goes to sleep.  It does wonders for my sanity to know that sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 every night I will get a long peaceful break from mommying.  Now we just have to start nap training during the day.  I've been putting it off because once I start I'll have to be home every time it's time for him to nap--no more napping in the car or on a walk--but the sometimes-futile soothing during the day, while not as painful as at night, is still obnoxious, so it's time to start.

This last week, Asher has begun to develop a skill almost as good as going to bed: he has discovered that he can bring his hand up to his own mouth.  For some time, he has enjoyed sucking on his hand if it happened to be in a position of proximity to his oral cavity.  (Rule #478 of interesting prose:  never end successive sentences with the same word.)  However, in the last several days he has intentionally put his hand in his mouth and sucked on it.  It's still definitely a skill in the making, but he has managed to soothe himself for a short time several times now.  Before too long, I hope to be able to dispense with pacifiers in favor of hand sucking, which will be nice because it's a pain trying to keep a pacifier in Asher's mouth while he is constantly accidentally spitting it out.  (Sometimes I think he is spitting it out on purpose just to thwart me.)  We'll have to see how it goes.

The final milestone that I will disuss here is an increased interest in objects, which brings us to the elephants.  Very recently, I have noticed that if I present Asher with a toy or other object he will look at it very interestedly.  Asher has a stuffed zebra that my sister Micaela gave him.  I had showed it to him before, but he didn't seem to care.  In the last few days, however, I showed it to him again and he looked at it intently and followed it with his eyes in all different directions.  He also has a bouncer with hanging toys over it.  One of the toys is a small stuffed turtle, and he seems to like that one the best.  When placed in the bouncer, he will stare at the turtle in a concentrated manner and then swat at it.  Today, we discovered an object that he seems to like even better than these.  Yesterday we bought a Pack N' Play so that Asher will have a good place to sleep when we stay the night somewhere and a safe place to be when he has to come with me to cub scout den meetings  so that he won't be stepped on by rowdy 8-year-old boys.  We chose a basic one with a lower level and an upper level--lower for sleeping, upper for cub scouts.  It happened to come with an attatchable bar with three hanging elephant heads that you can place mobile-like over the baby's head.  Last night, after we put Asher to bed, I set the whole thing up, just to make sure that I was smart enough to do it.  I even hung up the elephants, just for fun.  This morning it was still up and I put Asher in it while I ate breakfast just to see how he liked it.  He was totally mesmerized by the elephants.  He stared at them wide-eyed and kicked like crazy.  When I finished my cereal, I was hesitant to take him out because he seemed to like it in there so much, but I didn't want the novelty to wear off.  (The cub scouts meet every week, after all.)  Tonight, Asher woke up from his nap early right when it was time to eat dinner.  Like he often is when he wakes up before he's had a full nap, he was fussy.  Since I really wanted to eat and not be stuck holding a pacifier in his mouth all through dinner, I tried puting him in the Pack N' Play--just to see.  It took him about 1.5 seconds to spit out the pacifier, but there was no fussing.  Once again, he was completely captivated.  I guess that floating elephants can capture the attention of more than just Dumbo and his rodent friend.  Thank you, Graco.

Someday I might get to the have-the-whole-house-clean-while-keeping-the-burrito-alive milestone.  I’ll let you know how that goes.  

Asher smirking at Erin, Hugh's sister, when she came to visit from California.