Eric had his two-month checkup yesterday. He's doing fine. The doctor confirms that he is a beautiful baby and has a cute face, says he's eating exactly the right amount, and was impressed by how active he was (more about which later). He weighs 12 pounds, which is exactly the 50th percentile for babies his age, and his head circumference is 40 cm, which is exactly the 50th percentile for his age. He is 23 inches long, slightly below the 50th percentile, so when I say, "He's the perfectly average baby," Scott says, "a little below average," but baby length measurements are notoriously unreliable--the pediatrician's office and the hospital measured him an inch and a half different at birth. So I am content to say that when you hear about the average baby, Eric is what they mean.
He has thrush in his mouth again, so we face another ten days of dribbling medicine in there four times a day. I haven't started the medicine yet; I'm too tired. We'll start it sometime today. Sigh.
He had his vaccinations, all four of them for a total of, let me think, six diseases. Poor little guy. The med tech came in to give them with the four syringes, alcohol swabs, bandaids already partly peeled out of their wrappers, all arranged on a tray. I said, "Looks like you're ready to be quick about giving them," and she said, "Oh, yes, we try to be quick. Giving them at the same time really helps keep the discomfort down, too." I thought she meant, giving the four shots at one visit, but she really meant "giving them at the same time." When she was ready, she called in a second tech, each of them grabbed one thigh and a syringe, they counted "One...two...three...stick," jabbed simultaneously, popped bandaids on, grabbed the next syringe, counted "One...two...three...stick," jabbed simultaneously, popped bandaids on, and had handed me my crying baby practically before he knew what hit him.
He then cried all the way to the car, where he crashed instantly upon being put in his car seat, and he stayed deeply asleep, except for meals, all evening. I feel bad about it, a little, because I think yesterday might have been the happiest day of his life, up until the shots. My mom and my niece Nevada, who is in town visiting Gary and Gloria, drove over to visit us yesterday morning. They arrived a little after 11, and Eric had just woken up from his morning map and finished a bottle. Mom and Nevada were here until almost 1, and Eric was awake and smiling the whole time. First he hung out in Nevada's lap and charmed her for a long time, and then he hung out in my mom's lap and charmed her. When they left, he dozed off in his swing for about twenty minutes while I got ready to go to the doctor, but he woke up and played in his car seat, stayed awake and played with me in the waiting room, played and played ("playing" looks like waving his arms, sticking his fist in his mouth, smiling at me, and so on) while we waited in the exam room for the doctor, charmed Mari when she arrived. He was just starting to get drowsy when the techs came in to give his shots. It was the longest he's ever been awake in his life. Both my mother and Mari commented on what an active baby he is, which, you know, came as kind of a surprise to me. I think of him still as our Lump Baby. My mother predicts early crawling, based on the strength and frequency of Eric's leg kicks. We'll see.
He's gotten interested in batting at things. He's in his bouncy seat batting at the hanging toys on it right now. More than once I have caught him smiling back at a toy with a face, which is very cute. I'm sure it's not true, though it can feel that way, that he is as happy to see a plastic lion as he is to see me.
He seemed a little uncomfortable yesterday evening, so I made David go buy some infant Tylenol and we gave him a dose. I'm not sure he needed it. By the time David got back from the pharmacy Eric was already settling down to sleep. But maybe it helped. He certainly slept hard all evening, though he woke up twice to eat enormous meals. By the 4 a.m. feeding this morning he seemed entirely like himself, so I'm not sure if last night's big crash was a reaction to the vaccines or simply a perfectly understandable reaction to having such a busy and stressful day.
Eric and I have had several very busy days. We've seen family three out of the last four. On Friday, we drove over to Fenton to spend the afternoon with my parents, and we had a very nice visit with them. They're both enjoying the baby a lot now, which is nice to see, and my mother had bought me a dress she spotted that "looked like Susan," she said--and she was right. Alas, it was too tight, thanks to my new improved post-pregnancy breasts. Then on Sunday, David, Eric, and I drove to New Hudson for the Underhill Family and Friends Reunion, which was also nice, though as is always the case with reunions many of the people I knew best and most wanted to see were not there, while lots of people I had never met nor heard of were. And then my mom and Nevada came yesterday, because Nevada especially wanted to see me before she went back to Florida, which I found very touching. She's a literature major in college, thinking about graduate school, so we had a long talk about, "wouldn't we love to be college professors, but, oh, the job market."
My other niece and nephew, Taylor and Garrett, have latched onto me and David as an aunt and uncle in a sweet way, too. Taylor greeted David on Sunday with, "Hi, Uncle!" and then followed the two of us around the whole time we were there. Yesterday, my mom asked if she could borrow my Little House on the Prairie books for Taylor. Apparently she's been trying to get Taylor (age 8) to read them, and Taylor, a good reader in general, has not been interested. My mom said, "But she's very attached to you, so I think if I give them to her and tell them they're Aunt Susan's books, they'll suddenly seem more appealing." I said, "Tell her also that some of them take place not very far from where David grew up." Turns out I was wrong about that; DeSmet, where the Ingalls settle, is in South Dakota, but I figure it's close enough for an 8-year-old. I mean, South Dakota, North Dakota, what's the difference?
I heard a good story about my Aunt Hazel (you remember Hazel and Lillian, don't you?) at the reunion--I had heard it before but had not remembered it. My mom's cousin Linda was visiting once, and my Aunt Hazel made Linda watch while she chopped the heads off two chickens and then the chickens ran around spurting blood. Then Aunt Hazel made Linda scald, pluck, butcher, cook, and eat the chickens, all because Linda "was a city girl and needed to know where her food came from." I said, "Thank God Aunt Hazel had mellowed by the time I started visiting her--the worst she ever made me do was weed the vegetable garden." Apparently my grandmother disapproved--she didn't let her chickens run around after their heads were off, because it got them dirty.
When I was born and until I was about a year old, we lived in an old family farmhouse that had been divided into two apartments, and my great-aunts Hazel and Doris lived in the other apartment. My first hazy memory is of my Aunt Hazel taking me up the hill in the wheelbarrow while she worked in her garden. And one version of the "Susan's first word" story is that it was "Dor," said while pushing on the door that divided the two apartments, and nobody was sure whether I meant "Door" or "Doris," but either way it was pretty clear I wanted to go see my aunts. According to my mother, I was always contrary with her but docile with my aunts. She remembers one morning in particular when I absolutely refused to eat my breakfast, which was an egg. Some time after she gave up on me, she discovered me in Aunt Hazel's kitchen, propped on phone books, happily eating an egg.
Just in case the recent dose of family isn't enough, Eric and I are also thinking of attending the Penn family reunion this Saturday (even fewer people I know will be there). I wouldn't think of it, but it's in Port Huron, and I am going to be at Julie's, all the way over on that side of the state, on Friday. So I think Eric and I may just stay somewhere Friday night and go on up to the reunion on Saturday morning. We'll see. Right now I'm so tired from all these busy days that I can hardly imagine moving from where I am to the couch. I told David I thought Eric and I might do one errand today: running to the library first thing to rent a bunch of videos. Followed by sitting on the couch watching them all day. But even that feels too ambitious; I have downgraded my expectations to daytime television. A&E does an afternoon sequence of Law & Order, Northern Exposure, and L. A. Law that looks like a pretty good way to while away the latest of our 90-plus degree days.
Eric is now dozing in his swing, with a look on his face that makes him resemble my mother's brother Louie, I think. The other day on his changing table he scowled and it made him look like my dad.
I am signed up to teach a class this fall. I find I am actually looking forward to being in the classroom, though not to doing the grading. I have to take an updated resume to human resources so they can give me the right pay (more than I used to get because I have more experience), so I sat down yesterday and tried to count up the credits I've taught. I have not kept systematic records, so I'm undoubtedly off by a little, but I come up with 91 credit hours. That's about 25 classes. This will be my tenth year of teaching. Wow.
The basement is poured at my parents' new home, so we went up there on Friday to admire it. The house is small, but bigger, my mother says, than they need. It has a walk-out basement, and I said, "You probably won't finish it, but somebody could," and my dad said, "Oh, no, I'm putting two bedrooms and a kitchen down there and renting it out." My mom said, "It will be our mother-in-law apartment." I said, "But neither of you has a mother-in-law anymore," and my mom said, "But when I'm dead and your father marries his trophy wife, he might." She cracks me up sometimes.
In the course of all our chatting, I was reminded of why I think it's a bad idea to give children the same names as their parents: my mother updated me on the latest happenings in the life of a high school friend, the son of friends of my parents. "Little John" is almost 40 years old now, and will be "Little John" to some people until he dies. My relatives still sometimes call my brother "G.B." and during one of my previous rare appearances at a family gathering, someone actually asked me how "Benj" was doing (my brother's name is Gary Benjamin). I said, "Who?" I had forgotten that when we were small, Gary's nickname in the family was Bad Benj.
My Aunt Alice used to call me "Sue-Sue," but fortunately nobody seems inclined to resurrect that.
I was thinking at the reunion that to fit better into the family, David needs to learn to fell trees, repair cars, and operate a combine harvester (I overheard a discussion of farm implement maintenance when I went to fetch some more punch once--but there aren't really many farmers left in the family anymore). Then he can stand around and chat with the men more effectively. But I've probably ruined everything for him already, by mentioning to my parents that his father played bridge competitively. Anyone raised by a man like that...
I was updating my e-mail address with mailing lists I'm on and came across the subscription info for a paddlesports (kayaks and canoes) list I used to be on. I dropped it because it was extremely high-volume, quite technical, and flamey. But I decided to re-subscribe and see what it was like now. My in-box was immediately swamped with dozens of messages along the lines of, "If Brett weren't so quick to take offense, he would know that I wasn't attacking him, but merely questioning the wisdom of his decision to undertake fiberglass repair when the ambient temperature is above 72 degrees F and the relative humidity is above 60. As the holder of an advanced degree in Fiberglass Boat Repair and someone who has spent more time repairing boats than most of you have spent paddling them, I believe I am qualified to comment on repair techniques." I trashed the whole pile and sent an "unsubscribe" command by return mail.
Eric is waking up, so I think he and I will begin our television odyssey.
Posted by Su Penn at August 7, 2003 03:11 AM | TrackBack