Sam’s Story: Week 7

I’ve noticed something: Every conversation with a new parent that starts with by asking “How are you doing?” will, within 5-10 words, begin orbiting around the topic of how much sleep you’re getting, and by extension how well the baby is sleeping through the night. So since you asked, I’ll tell you that things are very uneven here. Some nights Samantha sleeps like a rock and we’re able to catch some rest ourselves. Other nights, she’s a wailing, sleepless bundle of energy that refuses to let you put her down, much less leave the room. If you try, she’ll scream so loud that you think –WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY– that her head is going to explode if you don’t pick her up. And if that happens, June Cleaver or Betty Crocker or some other perfect mother will walk in, take one look at your headless baby, and declare you to be a bad parent. That’s the kind of thing that shows up during pre-employment background checks.

So yeah, I’m tired. How are things with you?

Of course, the flipside to all this is that Sam is adorable. This last week she’s made great progress in mastering smiling. If I tap her on the nose and say “Beep!”, half the time she’ll respond with a big, full-face grin that spreads ear to ear, brow to chin. The other half she’ll still give me a “what the hell are you doing?” look, but it’s progress. She’s also been experimenting with making sounds other than crying. She’ll sit there and grunt, coo, and moan, pause to consider what she’s done, then start over. In fact, she’s started talking. I’ve very clearly heard her say the words “glue,” “burlap,” and “hummus.” I’m sure she would have used them in a complete sentence by now if the had a good reason.

So besides the smiling and the fascination with glue and hummus, there’s not much else to report this week, except that Sam had another visitor this week as Geralyn’s friend Margaret from CalOptima came to visit and present her with a beautiful, handmade quilt. Also, I’m really getting the hang of using hands-free technology to multitask and get on with my life.

So that’s pretty much it as far as news goes. Sam is 15% cuter than last week, though, as evidenced by these pictures:



The Baby Product That We Couldn’t Live Without this week is none other than the common household FM radio –any FM radio. Newborns love white noise. It has an almost magical calming effect on them, and for Sam it works better to calm her down than almost anything else. I removed the antena from the small sound system in the office, and whenever Sam gets really fired up I can bring her in there, set the tuner to a nonexistent station, and crank the static up to 11. It sounds awful to me, but not to her; she’ll often calm down like someone flipped a switch from “fussy” to “tranquil”. That switch may flip back if I leave the room with her of if she’s really hungry or uncomfortable, but otherwise it works like black magic.

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