My baby is now four months old and has reached all the developmental milestones that you’d expect from a kid of that age. She’s in the 70% percentile for preventing parental sleep, 60% percentile for being inconsistent on feeding choices and 100% percentile for being damned cute.
She’s good on all the serious stuff like weight and height which we know because we’re obsessive about trawling the internet to find out if our child is ‘normal’. It seems as though all parents desire their kids to be average, even though our own experience is that the world is full of short and long people, fat and skinny people and people with different sized fontanel’s.
My wife and I regularly talk about how we don’t care how our daughter turns out as long as she’s healthy and happy. The truth is though, that we both secretly hope that she turns out to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist, preferably in a field that pays well so that she can keep her parents in the retirement style to which they aspire.
So we watch keenly for any signs of high intelligence, although nothing a four month old baby could do would give you any clue to their future ability to write novels or find a cure for cancer.
Mother’s groups feed this frenzy by creating a competitive environment. You can be sure that all the parents there are benchmarking their kids against the other babies in the room and going home to the fathers with tales of the child who learned to roll first, or the first one to grab a pen and paper and knock off a symphony (apparently Mozart did that when he was three, so there is a precedent).
Last week our little one discovered her toes and we took this as a major breakthrough on the scale of Einstein unveiling his theory of relativity. There were high fives and a few tears while the baby looked on wondering what all the fuss was about. From my point of view I was just happy that at least one member of my family can still touch their toes.
She has a new found interest in the dexterity of her limbs and their extremities. She can stare at them for hours as though she doesn’t actually realise that they are part of her body and it has meant that we have saved on expensive toys, knowing that she can keep herself amused by twiddling her fingers and grabbing her toes.
One downside of this increased dexterity is that she had started to treat my glasses as a combined sucking implement and hammer. So when I pick her up for a cuddle, she’ll make a grab for my goggles, give the frame a quick suck and then hammer them against the nearest hard object, which unfortunately is usually my head. It does have its advantages however.
Last week I was holding her when I sneezed so violently that my glasses flew off my head. It took me a second or two to refocus and when I looked down my daughter was holding the spectacles in her hand. I was ecstatic and gave her an extra long hug as I dreamed of her future high paid job on a Japanese female baseball team.
My sister warmed me about this attraction that kids have to glasses. She ended up getting expensive laser eye surgery because her first born took to grabbing her specs and hiding them behind the sofa before she had a chance to focus. Her eyesight is now twenty-twenty and her kid is bored.
In honour of her super charged development, we thought it time that we invested in a proper cot so that she could progress from the bassinet which has been her home for the past four months.
She used to get lost in it and now she can almost touch both ends and bangs on the sides like a trapped animal.
She woke us up on Sunday morning and made it clear that she was ready to embrace the day. We got up and had some breakfast and then piled baby and her assorted baggage into the car and set off for Baby Bunting, Melbourne’s one stop kiddy shop. We got there ten minutes before it opened, which was a new Sunday morning experience for me. I’ve never been anywhere on a Sunday before it opened, with the possible exception of kebab shops.
By 1.30m we were in town, with the baby in the front pack like a kangaroo and her Joey. It felt like we’d been out for the whole day at that stage, which is an unfortunate by product of getting up at 7am. She seems to like shopping it must be said and casts a curious eye over all that she sees. It helps of course that she doesn’t have to pay for anything. Her attitude might change when the clothes we buy are coming out of her pocket money.
We were home by 4pm, knackered and ready to bed. I’m now going to bed at roughly the time that I used to get up.
But it’s all good. A friend with a child a little older than ours says that the greatest pleasure you get at four months in an internal sense of achievement that you’ve managed not to kill your offspring. My wife and I look back on the last four months with amazement at our naivety, as we will look back in four months time at the mistakes we’re making now.
In the meantime our young one will plod along. Poohing at will, feeding from the never ending supply of nectar from her mother and sleeping for about 14 hours a day. And probably lying there wondering why her parents are acting like crazed loons.
It’s not a bad life if you can put up with being picked up at random by adults, tickled in places you haven’t even discovered yourself yet and kissed by people who haven’t shaved for four days.
But she’s happy and healthy and like I say, that’s all parents care about.
