Dear Ashden,
Holy camoli, you’re eight months old today! Have I mentioned yet that you’re amazing? Let’s start of this newsletter by telling you how fantastic you are. YOU ARE FANTASTIC! AMAZING! THE BEST PERSON ON THE ENTIRE PLANET!
You’re a talking machine, my little friend. You said your first word this month, and it just happened to be on my birthday. I came home from a massage and you said, out of nowhere, “MAMAMA.” You have continued saying mama throughout the month, and I’m pretty sure you know what you’re saying and that you’re referring to me. Your favorite consonants are M and B, so we hear MAMAMAMAMAMAMA and BABABABAABABAA all the time. In the past couple of days you’ve managed to squeek out a few GAGAGAGAs and it’s pretty freaking awesome. Who would have thought I’d be so excited about consonants? We call your father Papa, but you haven’t managed to say any Ps lately, so we occasionally refer to him as Dada, but you have no idea what a Dada is so it just goes in one ear and out the other. We just hope that you’ll be able to pronounce Papa at some point soon, mostly because it feeds into your father’s ego. We are a family of bears. You are Little Bear or Baby Bear, I am Mama Bear and your father, obviously, is Papa Bear. I’m not sure when it started, but I think it’s super cute.
We started swimming lessons a while ago and they’ve become your favorite part of the week. Saturdays your father and I take you to the Dartmouth Sportsplex to their heated baby/children’s pool and we sing songs (Grand Ol’ Duke of York- your new favorite song, Wheels on the Bus etc) and mostly just swim around. You have a favorite plastic ball that once you grab onto, you will not let go of. If it comes out of your hand you frantically look around and grab back onto it. Your father and I love the fact that you enjoy swimming so much because it’s one of our all time favorite activities too. I’d be devastated if you hated swimming, just like your father would be devastated if you decide that you dislike fishing. Please don’t dislike fishing.
Your love of the pool has transferred into an even bigger love of the bath. If you even hear the shower curtains being moved, you rush into the bathroom and (if I let you), pull yourself up onto the side of the bathtub and beat your hands on it, looking lustfully at the tap to see if there is water coming out of it. If it is bath time, we let you look over the side of the bathtub and you get so excited you bounce up and down and sometimes even try to scale the side of the tub! When you’re in the bathtub I have to have an extra facecloth for you to suck on, otherwise you just try to grab the one I’m using to clean you with. We have a couple of plastic dinosaurs that are squirt toys, so I’ll fill them up over and over and squirt you in the chest and in the mouth.
You have nearly stopped your army crawling and moved up in the world into real crawling. Congrats! You’re one fast little bugger when you want to be too. You often disappear from sight and I yell, “Aaaaash, where arrrrre you?” Chances are, you’re getting into trouble. Sometime ending up in the bathroom, or your second favorite place to be, peaking into the washing machine whether it’s on or not.
On a different note, we had a rough couple of days this month when I got really sick with Mastitis. We went with Ute and Sophia to a prenatal/breastfeeding group one Tuesday and I was feeling fine when we arrived and two hours later when it was time to go home, I was overcome with nausea and feeling so faint that as soon as we walked in the door I called your dad to come home to take care of you because I could not. I had a horrible night, I had a fever and my right boob hurt enormously. My 5am I was throwing up every few minutes. By 10am we were at the doctor’s office for antibiotics and within a couple of days I was feeling normal again, but mastitis was one of the worst physical experiences of my life. I say that now, but I actually don’t have much memory of it because I blocked it out it was so bad. I was very happy that your dad was able to help me out with you because if he wasn’t able to take a day off work I would have been screwed.
We hit a big point this month Ash, and I must say that I’m happy it happened when it did and it was as painless as it has been. Glory, glory, you are SOOTHER FREE!! It just happened to coincide with stores taking BPA-riddled products off the shelves (including the kind of soother you’ve used since you were three weeks old, I’m really sorry to say). You just didn’t seem to want it anymore, and now it’s been a couple of weeks since you’ve really had it. It was a painless process and THANK GOD FOR THAT because I really didn’t want you to have it anymore, but I didn’t know where to stop and I had flashes of the future when you’re two and still needing it to sleep. Not that I’d ever allow that to happen.
I have some bad news. Not only are you allergic to cashmere (and since switching mattresses we have no more issues, luckily), you’re also allergic to banana. You had a runny nose for several weeks and it wouldn’t go away. It started with yet another cold that our family got, and I thought it might be a persistent symptom, but then I listened to my intuition which was screaming IT’S THE BANANA. I was sad for you because it was one of your favorite foods, but we cut it out and within a couple of days the congestion was completely gone. Just to make sure that it was actually the banana, I gave you about an inch of one in the morning one day and by the evening you were fully congested again, so much so that you had to mouth breathe while you were sleeping. So, no more bananas.
The food problems didn’t stop there; the day before my mastitis hit, you came down with a pretty severe case of diarrhea that ended up lasting nearly 2.5 weeks. The doctor thought it might be because of the antibiotics I was on, but it still lasted a week after the antibiotics stopped (not to mention the diarrhea started before the antibiotics). When we went to see the doctor on day 15 of diarrhea she suggested that I cut out all the vegetables from your diet (which were not being digested at all- full pieces of rice and broccoli were coming out looking exactly the same as they went into your mouth) because they had “lots of fiber.” She told me to keep up with the Cheerios (your other favorite) and rice. I wasn’t sure of her advice, and from encouragement from another mom whose child has numerous food allergies, I cut out the Cheerios along with everything else and lo and behold, my intuition was right again, and your diarrhea has stopped. I’m not sure if it’s the additives in the Cheerios or if it’s the oats themselves (likely the oats), so once we get back from our trip to Georgia I’ll try plain oatmeal and see if you still get sick. It was hard to see you so sick, even though you didn’t show any other symptoms of feeling bad. We were changing a dozen dirty diapers every day.
You learned how to pull yourself up this month and you haven’t stopped doing it. It’s incredible how quickly you learned it and how confident you are. You will bounce up and down, hold on with only one hand or stand only on one foot. The other day while I was making cookies, I had both hands full of cookie dough and you crawled over to me and pulled yourself up and hung onto my jeans. Well, then we were stuck. I couldn’t move because you would fall over, you didn’t want to move, I could pick you up because my hands were covered in cookie batter, and so there we were. Somehow I bent my knees to make it hard for you to hold on and told you to sit down (which you know the meaning of) and after a couple of minutes were able to go our separate ways. It was a close one.
You love to eat and now you basically refuse anything pureed. You love to feed yourself, so we’ve moved past the stereotypical baby food and onto finger food. It was hilarious watching you learn how to pick up food and move it into your mouth. Eating Cheerios was like playing a game of tiddly winks. You’d try to pick it up with just one finger, right on top of the O. It would often just fly off your high chair and never see the inside of your mouth.
So far you’ve tried banana, avocado, barley cereal, brown rice cereal, brown rice noodles, broccoli, beets, squash, carrots, green beans, sweet potato, apples, apples/apricot mixture, Cheerios and blueberries. You disliked all of the fruit, but nothing compared to the blueberries. I boiled them first, and you tentatively picked them up with your fingers not know what to expect, put it in your mouth, tongued it a little until WHAMO, it burst open and holy jesus, you HATED it. You gagged, you squinted, you nearly cried. I had never seen anyone have that kind of a reaction to any kind of food, even my first time eating sushi.
You’re more and more amazing. You’re learning about the world so quickly, almost too quickly. You’re 20lbs now and you don’t feel like a baby anymore. You’ve even started putting yourself to sleep. You nurse and then kick and kick and kick me until I leave the room and then suddenly, moments later, you’ve put yourself on your belly with your butt way up in the air and you’re fast asleep. You didn’t even need me to whisk you off to dreamland. I act like more of a distraction from sleep than anything else.
I love being your mom. You make me smile and laugh more than I ever have in my entire life. I love hearing your voice. I love hearing you laugh. I love seeing you smile, especially when you wake up from a nap or in the morning. I love hearing you say Mama. There is no sweeter sound than any sound that comes from you. I even love your burps.
Love,
Mama
