Mrs. March in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
One of my secret pleasures this week has been reading Little Women while nursing Raya or holding her as she naps. It's taking about one hundred and fifty years for her second tooth to break through, even though its entire shape is perfectly visible under the gum, and she has been, for lack of a better word, one cranky baby. So....I've been holding her a lot. I read the above passage while she was nursing herself to sleep tonight, and it struck me as the perfect opening to a post that will celebrate Father's Day.
I feel so darn lucky to live with a man whom I not only love dearly, but who shares every one of my fundamental values about what it is to be a good human being, live meaningfully, and love fully. He is a wonderful partner, a thoughtful friend, and the best father his son and daughter could wish for. He wakes up at 5.30 am every morning, at Raya's first peep, and sits with her on the floor, playing and talking with her, until I muster the energy to get up an hour later. (In the early months, when she woke up 2-3 times a night after she had nursed enough, he was the one to always get up and rock her back to sleep. The guy works, too.) He comes home early whenever we've had a difficult day, always on time for dinner, and gives Sava a bath while I nurse Raya. He talks to his boy as though he, Sava, is the most important creature in the world. His smile makes Raya light up every time. He goes for weeks with 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and always worries about me being tired. The list goes on and on...We love him, plain and simple. As Mrs. March so eloquently puts it, I am "rich in the possession of a good man's heart, and that is better than a fortune."
Sava's gift to his dad this week, lovingly made at the Children's Corner, is this vinyl record with a photo of him in the middle and stickers suggestive of dad's other loves: vehicles, basketball hoops, planets--
My small contribution was a surprise trip to the Tech Museum in San Jose, where dad and son got to watch a forty-five minute film about the Hubble telescope in nothing less than a monstrously big domed IMAX theater (as in, the screen is a huge dome above your head, and you have to turn constantly in order to keep track of everything that's going on). It was the first IMAX experience for both of them, and we are proud to report that Sava endured almost all of it, despite the deafening sound system and the overwhelming size of the images (and despite the fact that someone had thought it fit to begin a film about Hubble with a preview of Twilight and screeching images of vampires; seriously?...). Rado reported after they came out that during a particularly spectacular scene showing the take-off of shuttle Atlantis, when Rado thought that Sava for sure was going to run out of the theater screaming in terror as white smoke enveloped the whole theater, Sava leaned over and said in his cool dude voice: Tati, this is booster separation. Look, they just go "pop!" We love this boy.
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Nothing nearly as exciting happened during the rest of our week, but good moments abounded. Sava attended a friend's birthday "water" party, which featured a bouncy slide that he gathered up the courage to try, while Raya, as usual, looked on, comfortably ensconced in the arms of her private escort--
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For some change of scenery, Sava and Levi had their weekly rendezvous on the grounds of Stanford's Art Museum, where Raya had a (somewhat) friendly encounter with a one-year old girl; and no, we didn't learn that the boys were not supposed to climb on the Rodins until after this picture was taken--
*****
OFF STEROIDS!!! Hard to believe, but true.. It's been a full week since Raya went on zero dose of steroids, and so far so good. Her lip is holding up and, if anything, she might be the first baby in the medical annals who is more hyper and sleeps less off steroids rather than on them. The doctors had warned us when she was taking the full dose that she would be a little monster, but in fact she was the sweetest little baby ever. Now that she is off, we are starting to see some attitude and personality beginning to emerge.
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Because of the steroids, Raya's body is still fairly disproportionate: she is chunky and short (almost 90th percentile for weight-to-height ratio, even though her height is in the 5th percentile and her weight-for-age in the 20th), and much of her weight is concentrated in her tummy. Because of this imbalance, she is pretty much unable to wear pants, since pants that fit her length are much too tight for her overflowing belly, and tight belly means reflux for our girl. So, it took me a few months to figure out that the solution to the dilemma of rompers vs bare legs was something called leg warmers--essentially pant legs without a bum. I got a pair from Etsy, made by a mom in upstate New York, and they've been a huge hit. She has spent much of the last three days wearing them--
Love the mismatched dots-and-stripes look on the pics above. As I reconcile myself to the fact that I am now the mother of a girl, and I have to find ways to dress her properly, I find myself thinking that the perfectly turned out Gymboree-style outfits with matching undies, dresses, shirts, and socks are as almost as boring as they are pretentious. Kids have the rest of their lives to dress properly and look adult, so who cares whether their bathing suit matches their sun hat when they are eight months old? The more color on babies, the happier the world. So, rock on, Raya, with your fabulous striped leg warmers and pink onesie with brown dots--
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And some random pictures, just because--
Raya has an obsession to suck on the cotton ball with which we wash her face during bath; as soon as I start wiping her face, she starts trying to bite it and does not rest still until she has it in her mouth--
She is not crawling yet but, when her tummy is empty, she loves a good romp on the floor; when it's full, the most awful refluxing sounds can be heard as she turns and tosses, which is why she does not spend a lot of time practicing--
She loves to put her arm under the bumper of the crib when she goes to sleep, and I know that years from now, the sight of these chubby fingers poking between the bars will turn our hearts to play dough--
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