The Fifth Month
Field notes from a first-time mother
It's six in the morning. In the gray predawn light, I see my baby's eyes popped wide open. He's laying between us in the bed.
A week ago, he learned to reach and grasp; last night, he rolled all the way over nearly on his own. Now, I'm watching his little head turn back and forth between his two parents.
The hands come up. Soft, they land on my cheeks and nose. They curl, feeling: nostrils, lips. Then he retracts, looks left, rolls onto his side, and reaches for Robert's face.
Too far away. He wiggles. He turns back to play with my face.
"Fshaa. Blbhmm. Doot. Huaaa," he whispers. He blows a raspberry and then raises his feet high in their little sleep sack.
Another day, on the floor in front of the fireplace. The baby takes my chin in his two hands and turns it so he can suction with his mouth. He seems hungry, so I offer him a feed.
He picks a patch of skin near—but definitely not on—the nipple, and sucks so hard he leaves a hickey. He gets on the nipple, starts to suckle, then pops off with a big smile, letting the milk spray his face: baby jokes.
Another day, the couch. The baby enjoys being read to. He doesn't understand anyway, so I just read whatever I'm reading —at the moment, an anthropology text.
"The aristocracy consists of the subtitles…" I read to my son.
I look up from the book to meet his eyes. He's looking straight back at me, attentive, gumming on his toy giraffe.
"Just wait until the next page," I tell him, conspiratorial. "There's a picture on it."
The baby can't be trusted with the thin paper pages of my interlibrary loan, but he is making some headway on the handling of objects. A friend gifted us his first board book: a short, multi-textured treatise on rabbits.
It's not as detailed as the anthropology book, but you can touch the velvety ears and scratch across the rough Velcro paws.
Baby is working hard on fine motor skills. In the last few weeks, he's developed the critical ability to reach for objects within his very short arm span. In my arms above the gravel driveway, his little hands have reached out to grab and crunch the ends of a sword fern. I held him close and watched the first time he noticed the roughness of tree bark. We touched the edges of shiny salal leaves, the soft fronds of a cedar tree.
If you hold a rubber ball directly above the baby's face, the chubby arms slowly lift and come together. Sometimes, the hold is good enough that he can bring it to his mouth for a while. The reaching game stills him; it takes his whole focus.
Since we're reading the rabbit book, I hold the next page partly turned and wait. He reaches out and grasps the edge. I can't tell if it's by design, but he does get the board to flip over. He's rapt, rewarded by another rabbit-themed vista.
I think colors are coming in; I'm watching the baby learn to appreciate art. When I lift him on the couch, he stares at the photographs on the wall behind me. Eileen has decorated the changing area with colorful prints I remember from my own childhood, and he twists to converse with them.
His eyes track better now. Before, the cats moved too fast. But last night, he watched my Coraline twist and jump in pursuit of a toy. We sit next to her bed when she naps. He stretches out a hand and grasps at the fur. My strange-humored cat purrs.
I don't usually feel young anymore. My doctor is younger than me. The kid up the street I once babysat is pushing her own pram now—strange how it resets us to the same effective age.
Four months feels like a lifetime — because it is, so far. This strange creature learns from every moment, changing visibly week on week. He changes us, too.
As I sit cross legged on the bed, swaying my baby to sleep, I feel impossibly young. I see my husband's unlined face just now, tonight, smiling at our baby boy; myself, just now a mother. I think of my parents: so young in my own baby pictures—so much yet to come.
Previous: Babies Get Jet Lag Too
Babies Get Jet Lag Too
Baby’s first flight is a transatlantic: ten hours over the pole from London to Seattle. It’s February, so we’re changing one gray sky for another — but it’ll be chipped trails rather than cobblestones beneath our feet; forest rather than city.