So the kid is 17 months old now and I'm just starting the blog so there's some back story.....
He was born March 1, 2004:
My wife gave birth naturally, which is a pleasant way of saying "without the benefit of modern medication." I was heavily medicated during most of the labor due to a variety of phobias and hospital-related anxieties, but managed to clear my drug-addled head for the delivery.
To the experienced child-rearer we had a rather unremarkable infancy--to us however, it was one freak out after the next.
For the first 3 weeks or so we just tried to get a handle on things. It's kind of a blur, but I do remember both my wife and I rejoicing in the fact that ours was not an "ugly baby" and we hypothesized about whether parents with "ugly babies" either could not admit that their baby was hideous or couldn't see that their baby was hideous.
Looking now at pictures of our "beautiful baby" may shed light on the real answer:
Here is our son at about 5 weeks old. Basically he got the worst case of baby-acne ever....ever. My normally unflappable friend Jake visibly recoiled upon first gaze at my son during this dark period.
Fortunately it only lasted a few weeks and he was cute again:
See, here he is at about 8 weeks and as good as new.
At about 4 months old, he started sleeping through the night and my wife began to emerge from her miasmic sleep deprived haze. What we didn't realize just then was what a phenomenal sleeper he turned out to be. We probably averaged 12 hours a night from then on. After 7pm or so we actually functioned like normal humans for the first time in a 1/3 of a year. We ate dinner together, renewed our subscription to the New Yorker, and occasionally rented a movie. Other than the odd illness or bad dream, he has slept through the night ever since.
I don't remember exactly, 6months?--my wife'll yell at me about this one, he began eating solid food.
He ate well from the start and continues to eat well. He certainly should; he was named after one of the great eaters of the 20th century, my paternal grandfather.
OK, he sleeps well, he eats well. Sounds like a perfect kid, right..? Well, not exactly. There has been plenty to stress about. We've covered his "Pizza-Face" period, not to mention the part where I was sure he was deaf after he failed his first hearing test at the hospital (he just had a little fluid in there, it dried up and he's fine.)
He had a fat phase:
After that, it was the teeth, or should I say, lack of teeth. He didn't have a tooth in his head until 14 months. At 11 months I was mildly worried. At 13 months I was googling such terms as "baby dentures." The first poked through a few months ago. There was much rejoicing. Now, however, we've got 4 coming in simultaneously and he's been shreiking his head off for 3 out of the last 4 nights.
The most recent cause of irrational concern has been his reluctance to walk. Though he's been "cruising" for 6 months (moving around the house upright while holding on to furniture, walls, etc.), until very recently he has simply refused to walk unassisted.
Well, thankfully he started walking last week at 16 months old. And not a moment too soon, I was about to punch the next parent that shot us a pitiable look as their 11 month old danced around our kid crawling on the ground of the playground.
These days we're waiting of some more words, his newest "Wow!" offers little encouragement for multisyllabic communication in the near future.
Here's his current list: Daya (me), Mama, Uh oh, Num-Num (food), hat, hot, and now Wow. His animal sounds vocabulary is more comprehensive. He recently added the gobble gobble sound of the turkey.
That about sums it up to the present. Here is a recent pic:
