I cannot even begin to account for most of the past 60 days. At first I didn’t even believe it. But I’ve checked my calendar three times now and it’s true. Celeste is 2 months old.
2 MONTHS OLD!
I look back at the photos taken right around the day of her birth and then at those I took just a few days ago and she just seems so different. I remember worrying if she was eating enough and actually making the decision more than once to wake her up so she could eat. Now she sleeps 7 or 8 hours on most nights and we wouldn’t even dream of waking her up. We know by counting every single one of her cute little chub rolls that she’s eating plenty and we know by how cranky she can get at night that she’s certainly not sleeping too much.
She had to get her first round of vaccines done this week. I’d heard nothing but horror stories and I was expecting it to be a traumatizing experience. It wasn’t. We deliberately held off feeding her, so she was cranky and I was doing the Daniel-Patented walk-and-bounce maneuver to keep her cries to a minimum. The nurses came in and took her. She immediately starting crying, as expected, but nothing out of the ordinary. The squirted some medicine in her mouth which she didn’t like. Then they rolled down her leg warmers, prepped her squishy thighs with alcohol pads and counted to three. I don’t know how any needles they gave her but I do know there were two of them, they were both giving shots, and the girl on my side gave her three. They did all of this in about 5 seconds. Maybe 7. I wasn’t really timing.
As soon as the first set of needles went in Celeste screamed. Loud. Louder than I’ve ever heard her scream before. It was heart breaking. But, 5-7 seconds later, they stuck a Care Bears band-aid on each thigh and handed her back to me. She started calming down right away. 30 seconds after that she was happily feeding at her mother’s breast and it was like the whole thing never happened.
She has a low-grade fever now as was expected. We’ve been giving her baby Tylenol to help fight it off. That stuff tastes horrible. By far the most bitter thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I’m not quite sure how they expect infants to swallow this stuff. We generally have to trick Celeste into it by giving her a boob to wash it down with. But it seems to be working. She’s very tired and a bit on the cranky side. But her fever is sitting just barely about 100 and she’s had no other trouble at all. The fever should let up entirely within the next day or so.
Oh yeah, she smiles now and it will absolutely break your heart if you see it. Every morning on the days where I’m either lucky enough to work from home or manage to put off going into work until she wakes up I hear her stirring in bed and I watch her waiting for her eyes to open. As soon as they do I say to her, “Good morning, Punkin! Where are my morning smiles?”. On queue, she gives me the biggest smile you’ve ever seen. Despite the buggers in her nose, the crusted milk on her chin, and the smell coming from her diaper, the second her mouth curls into that little smile I just melt.
She’s cooing too. I’m still working on getting her to coo back at me when I coo at her. It’s a long process, there isn’t a manual, and I could either be going about it all wrong or attempting something that cannot be done, but I don’t care. It’s fun. And I feel like we’re making progress.
The doctor says she’s pushing on her feet, pushing up with her arms, and lifting her head like a 4 month old. This puts my goals of having a new hiking partner by the end of the year well into the realm of possibility. It’s not like it’s really held me off anyway. She’s already been to three of Texas’ fine state parks (Caddo Lake, Ray Roberts (#2), and Daingerfield) and four city parks (Bear Creek Park in Keller, Erwin Park in McKinney, the Grapevine Botanical Gardens, and Flag Pole Hill at White Rock Lake) all over the DFW metroplex. She’s even been to two states! I’m pretty sure she likes traveling and the outdoors. And she’s a morning person, so we have that in common.
Every day is something new and every one of them is incredible.
