Noah is now 3 months old and we can hardly believe it, although he himself seems indifferent….
Most of the time he is a very happy baby, but there is one thing in particular that draws his ire. He doesn’t like it when Whitney eats anything that tastes good. Apparently he can monitor her milk supply for the minutest hint of flavor, and reacts to it by working up a heroic amount of intestinal gas. So Whitney’s been sustained largely on a diet of plain flatbread, plain rice, and some unseasoned turkey meat, with a few plain baked potatoes thrown in once in a while. Have I mentioned how plain that is? The blandness of the cuisine is rivaled only by the British.
Whitney has been back to work for two weeks now. It's tiring (for all of us) but we’re making it work so far. She's working shorter days so by 3:00pm there is a changing of the guard and I can start getting some work done. My days are spent taking care of Noah, and we have a great time together. He has a couple of new tricks this month. One is to kick the bars on his play gym to make the animals move. This is serious work and the look on his face while he’s doing it suggests that it requires a great deal of concentration. He has also recently found his hands and sometimes he just puts one of them in front of his face and stares at it for a few minutes solid. We conjecture that by making him occasionally wear pooh-bear mittens, we’ve inadvertently trained him to expect that if he waits long enough his hands will turn into small woodland creatures. What he really wants is to cram one of those things straight into his gob. Sometimes he succeeds at that.
Sometimes he doesn’t.
Noah is very fond of bathtime. He gets a bath every night because it helps with the "bed time" routine – and, who are we kidding, it is also because he starts to smell like Cheetos by the end of the day. Sometimes the bath actually gets him in the cozy bedtime sleepy mood. Most of the time it just makes him feel more well-groomed for the night shift. As soon as his toes hit the water, he stares at Whitney with this adorable look on his face during the entire bath.
His head actually gets stuck that way, and it is really a challenge to get him to turn his head so we can clean the other side properly. We always wonder if the far side of his head/face (and particularly under the neck-rolls) is where he secretly manufactures his extensive line of cheese products.
His vocabulary is expanding: to “aaahh,” “coo,” “ah-goo,” and “oongoy” he has added “Goya.” Who would have guessed that he would come to appreciate a great Spanish artist so early? We thought about getting him to specify it was indeed Francisco de Goya that he is referring to, but what other explanation is there? He has also achieved his own special brand of mobility. When he's lying on his back he digs his feet into the floor to lift himself up and do a mini back-bend and then scoots backwards a couple inches. He does this over and over and is quite pleased with himself. He can get pretty far across the carpet if you give him a few minutes, so now we always have to make sure he's really far from the wall or any furniture so he doesn’t whack his melon. He is wonderfully chubby with all kinds of extra rolls in just the right places.
This month Noah enjoyed a great visit from his grandparents and he also got to meet his Uncle Varun who happened to be in town on business one night.
He delights us with his adorable facial expressions and we've spotted two different dimples. He just loved getting to know his Yadav grandparents and spent hours entertaining them with his winsome coos and smiles. He is even capable of a good hearty chuckle on occasion.
Last month his favorite book was 10 Little Monkeys but he is SO over that now....by the time you get through the first monkey, he knows exactly where you’re going with the other nine, and he’s simply not interested. So now it’s Brown Bear (“Brown bear, brown bear, what do YOU see? I see a red bird looking at me?” etc. etc.) . When we start reading it to him this smile slowly spreads across his face and gets bigger and bigger until he starts laughing and trying to talk too. He also likes The Tiny Bear's Bible but he thinks it's way too long. We can't get through it in a single sitting. We need to start it in the middle next time so we don't always get stuck ending on Daniel and the Lion's Den.
