Baby Stats

When you have your first child, people ask how old she is and you say, "She will be four and a half months next Thursday. So She's Four months and almost five days." It may be my inability to do complex math like that, but times have changed with this baby. Ptolemy is seven months, but I like to say six because seven sounds too old.

Stats you get with a first baby are weight, height, percentiles, what foods they're eating, how much they're eating, what milestones they've hit. Here are the stats I have on Ptolemy...

*He chokes every two hours.
*He is heavier than he used to be, but no less inclined to demand to be carried all over.
*I don't have proof, but I'm sure he's in the 99th percentile of happiest babies ever.
*He is sleeping every...well, whenever he sees a soft arm or a warm carseat. As for sleeping through the night, it has never occurred to him. Why miss out on all that one-on-one nursing time with Mom?
*He is driving 5 carpools a week and has observed dozens of piano, cello and guitar lessons. He has driven down the ballet alley about 600 times. (I did the math.) This is why all of his toys are in the car.
*He loves life and acts like he has an incredibly awesome secret that would make you euphoric too, if he could just tell you about it.
*His hobbies include playing the DS, laughing, crying, grabbing noses, shouting and taking his socks off.

Everyone laughs about how the first baby has everything that goes in her mouth sterilized. Well, I'm down to peeling old Gerber Puffs off Ptolemy's clothes and giving them to him for a snack. Call it food storage. It works. If he can survive falling off the church stage onto his face, he can survive soggy snacks.

(Yes, he fell off the stage at the church. And I hit his head on a chair while I was trying to clear his airway Sunday. He came away from both incidents smiling. He'll survive. The question is, will his parents?!)