Living with a baby is like living in slow motion and in a time lapse at the same time. Lately the nights seem to never end; how many times is it possible to wake up during the night, how little is it possible to sleep and still be aware of being awake – nights when there is too much time to think while at the same time the mind seems incapable of doing so result in those kind of questions. The consolation is that tomorrow things might be different. Next week they surely will. Until then, all I can do is trying to stay awake with our child, and endure watching the nights snail by one by one.
By next week our son will be a different human being. So will I of course. And my wife. But the speed with which he grows, changes, learns and adapts is quite mind blowing to me. To be able to double his weight in less than four months is an accomplishment in itself, but the changes on the inside and in his abilities are even greater. Not having lived close to a baby since I was a child myself, I did not know what to expect and what I expected has been far surpassed by reality – our son is taking jumps of evolution from one day to the next.
When he sleeps, our baby is still my little baby koala hugging my chest, looking at the world with big newly born eyes when he wakes up, but during the waking hours our son is starting to leave the newly born phase. We feel that his personality is gradually coming out, and with that his ability to communicate with us. One morning he wakes up and he gives us a big smile, and just like that a new morning routine is born. One day he suddenly started laughing loudly when my wife and I were laughing; the most cute adorable laugh I had ever heard. And just like that, suddenly his dad is the funniest person in the world when he plays peekaboo with his son.
At my wife’s baby shower, she got a beautiful baby gym for our baby. When he was two and a half months old, we tried to introduce it to him, only to find a very bored and grumpy baby wanting nothing but to get out of under the hanging toys. A short time later however, he started to love his baby gym and now he can for a long time lie playing with the toys, talking to them. When he started to be curious about the baby gym, he could not use his hands at all other than to eat on them. Then suddenly one day he was hitting the little bee hanging above him. The next day he started to be interested in trying to grip the toys with his hand and from one day not being able to hold on to the apple hanging down, the next day he could get a firm grip. The next day again he could use both hands to hold on to the toys. Then he started to pass things between his hands, all while laughing loudly and talking to the little bee.
In one week’s time our baby went from beginner to master of the baby gym. Wow, if we continued evolving like that throughout life we would all be beyond superpowerpeople before twenty. I am well over forty and being a superman is as far from how I feel as it is possible right now, and I surely could use some superpowers to not be so profoundly tired. Instead, I find that my rest and reprieve is in doing the dishes – seeing the kitchen becoming clean while feeling the bubbles from the detergent on my hands is really therapeutic and makes me ready to meet whatever phase of evolution our son will enter tomorrow.
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