Category: letters to E

Dear E,

Today you turn ten months old. To celebrate, we had a new dishwasher installed. (Surprise!) With any luck, it will still be up and running when you’re old enough to pull your own weight around here…say in, three years or so. (Sheesh, it’s not like we would expect you to wash the dishes by hand as a preschooler: we’re reasonable people.)

Developmentally, it seems like the wheels in head have really started turning. You’ve started to express your own will which (shocker!) does not always agree with ours. You used to love eating Cheerios but then I gave you some of these baby cereal puffs (they’re shaped like stars). Once you had a taste of the good stuff, there was no going back. If I gave you Cheerios, you either ignored them or flicked them off the tray onto the floor. I tried mixing the stars in with Cheerios, but you would carefully pick the stars out and eat them and then dump the Cheerios on the floor. So we quit giving you stars (because we’re mean like that) and after a week or so of Cheerios, you seemed to realize that they were the only game in town and so you eat them now, but only grudgingly.

There was a week or so when you stuck your tongue out ever chance you got, which was pretty funny. But as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

You still prefer to roll around on the floor instead of crawling, at least when you’re with us. By watching the video monitor of you in your crib we discovered that you’re pretty good at creeping around on your tummy and that you get up on your hands and knees pretty well. But you don’t like crawling when we’re with you; you prefer to have us hold on to you so you can stand. Maybe you feel self-conscious and would rather to learn to crawl on your own and then amaze us by trucking across the floor one day out of the blue. Or maybe it amuses you to see us down on the floor making fools of ourselves and encouraging you to crawl. (If that’s the case, it means that you’ve probably inherited your father’s sense of humor.)

I’m trying to think back on what happened during August, but a lot of things are simply a blur; it was a pretty busy month. We actually got in to see the allergist (instead of having to wait until October as scheduled) and it turns out that you do in fact have an allergy to milk. Banishing dairy, eggs, and nuts from our diets has been a bit of an adjustment, but things are going well on that front. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you’ll grow out of your food allergy in a couple of years but if you don’t, we’ll deal with it.

Your dad started a new job, which was pretty stressful. But even when he’s stressed out at work, the first thing that he wants to do when he comes home is play with you. If you’re taking a nap, he’s disappointed and wants to know when you’re going to wake up so he can spend time with you because you’re the life of the party.

It’s so interesting to watch your personality develop and to find out who you are. When you do something new or amazing (as happens frequently), it’s like meeting you for the first time all over again.

Love,

Mama

Dear E,

This last month was an interesting one. We finally got serious about feeding you solids a couple times a day, which you took to really well. You’ve eaten pretty much every type of baby food I’ve given you without complaint: peas, green beans, squash, apples, pears, blueberries, mangoes, veggie medley and so on. The only baby food you haven’t liked, or at least tolerated, so far is oatmeal. You’ve started to want to control the spoon instead of letting me do it (which I’m sorry to say usually doesn’t work so well). But you’re good at (and love) cramming Cheerios in your mouth and gumming them to bits.

Continuing on with this month’s theme, you also cut your first tooth. It was a good two weeks of you being uncomfortable and fussy before it (your bottom right incisor) popped through. It was a little hard on you. Out of nowhere you would suddenly burst into tears for reasons known only to yourself. It was a relief when your tooth finally cut through, but somewhat anticlimatic.

It was anticlimatic because it was when you were in the hospital that we noticed your tooth had finally popped through. Yes, that’s right: “when you were in the hospital!”

Even though you love all sorts of food, apparently not all food love you back. I gave you a bottle of baby formula for the first time and you had an anaphylactic allergic reaction to it. I’ll spare you all the dreary details, but you ended up being in the hospital overnight for observation.

It was hard to see you hooked up to so many monitors and the IV. After you finally fell asleep in the shiny metal hospital crib they had for you, I lay there in the dark and listened to the chatter of the nurses in the hall and watched the lighted squiggles on the moniters move in their reassuring patterns. It was hard, but when you woke up in the morning and I leaned in over your crib you smiled and laughed out loud. E, sometimes you are breathtakingly unflappable.

I guess we have to wait until we see the allergist to find out exactly what you’re allergic to. I’m hoping for your sake that it’s not cow’s milk (because ice cream is really, really great), but if it is your dad and I will help you through it.

We’ll help you through anything.

Love,

Mama

Dear E,

The months keep flying by. June was a busy month, mostly because of happenings with your dad’s family. At the beginning of the month we went on a family vacation with all of your dad’s family to Yachats, a town on the Oregon coast. You seemed to enjoy your dad carrying you around on his chest in the Baby Bjorn. He would take you exploring along the beach to look at tide pools.

It was fun to see you with your cousins. Your big cousin E. in particular seemed quite taken with you and would try all sorts of things to entertain you.


After we got back from the coast there was only a week left before your dad’s parents had to leave for Korea. They’re going to spend the next 3 years serving a mission for our church there. I know they’re going to miss you and all of the other grandkids, but they’re excited about this opportunity.


With everything going on, June was a crazy month. Some where in between everything that happened you got pretty good at sitting up by yourself. You seem to be more curious about the things around you and love crinkling up paper or trying to fit the remote control in your mouth. In short, you’re a lot of fun.

Love,

Mama

Dear E,

This last month was full of new experiences for you. You started eating solid foods–so far they’ve been a big hit. You’ve had rice cereal, peas, carrots, and sweet potatoes and have liked all of them. I think that carrots might be your favorite so far. It’s a lot of fun to watch you eat. Sometimes I can barely get the next bite of food ready before you’re craning your head around, mouth open wide.

You’ve gotten a lot better with your hands this month. You like to carefully rotate and manipulate objects with them; you love things that crinkle like wrappers or paper. This month you also started rolling over consistently. You’re not really big on crawling, but you’ll roll over and over to get where you want to go or until you run up against something in your way.

You’re still such an easy baby to be around: cheerful, funny, and mellow. As you grow you just keep getting more interesting and lovable. I know that you’re going to grow through difficult times (the terrible twos and your teen years come to mind) but sometimes your father and I just sit and wonder aloud at how great you are. We appreciate you breaking us in gently.

Love,

Mama

Dear E,

This week you turned six weeks old. It’s hard to be believe that you’ve been a part of our family for half of a year: the days have gone by so quickly and yet it feels like you’ve always been a part of us. Before I became pregnant with you the days, weeks, and months seemed to stream by in a blur. Don’t get me wrong – life was very good. I enjoyed my hobbies, my job, traveling, and spending time with your dad. But on some level it felt like the days were slipping through my fingers like sand. One week was much like the next.

But since you were born, every day is different and most of them are simply lovely. You have such a great sense of humor and are so good-natured. It’s interesting to introduce you to new things and see how you react.

Last weekend you had your first scare – when your dad unwrapped his birthday presents it freaked you out. Your eyes got so big at the noise and then your face crumpled up and you started crying. I would by lying if I said it wasn’t kind of funny. You settled down pretty quickly but continued to look distrustfully at the wrapping paper as if you were waiting for it to attack your dad again.

Hmm…other things you’ve been doing lately include your pacifier out of your mouth and staring at it like it was the most wondrous thing ever. You started grabbing your toes this month and bringing them to your mouth; it’s ridiculously cute. We got you a jumper that hangs from the doorway but you haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. You kind of list from side to side and slowly turn yourself around it in. But you continue to love standing on our laps and have started to creep forward on your tummy a little. But you still tire of being on your tummy after a while. It’s hard for you to hold up your giant noggin. I don’t blame you–your head is probably a solid fourth of your body. At your six-month checkup it measured 44.9 cm around, which puts it in the 75th percentile. You’re also a tall little guy. You measured 27 and 3/4 inches long (90%) and you weighed 18 lbs. and 1oz (50%).

This month there was some more health-related drama for you. Nothing too serious, you just had a bad flare of eczema on your face that was misdiagnosed and turned into a secondary infection. It took about 4 weeks and 3 trips to different doctors (one of them a pediatric dermatologist) to get it cleared up. At one point I had to give you two baths a day and then slather multiple creams all over you. And you took it so patiently. You’re such a trooper.

The days continue to quickly stream by but now every day is different because every day you’re different. And it is so much fun to watch you grow.

Love,

Mama

Dear E,

Over the weekend you turned 5 months old. Continuing the trend of your young life, month five was a veritable parade of minor ailments. Luckily, none of them were very serious. You picked up a strep skin infection on a very, um, delicate area (possibly from your 4-month checkup) and the antibiotics you were prescribed cleared up the infection but also triggered an allergic reaction. You broke out in crazy hives all over your chest, arms, and legs.

So at only five-months old you are now the proud owner of a pencillin allergy! To celebrate I thought about ordering you one of those dorky medical alert bracelets, but I don’t think they come in your size.

This last month was a good one for dressing you up in holiday-themed outfits: St. Patrick’s day and Easter were less than a week apart this year. I’m pretty sure that the pictures I took of you as a bunny are going to come in quite handy if a need for embarassing baby photos ever arises–like when you’re a smart-alecky teenager and you have a cute girl over at the house.

You’ve passed some developmental milestones this month. You can roll from your tummy onto your back and have gotten quite good at holding things in your hands. You LOVE to blow spit bubbles and have developed quite a rash on your chin from drooling so much.

This month we also saw first sign of your sense of humor. One night I was nursing you and chatting with your dad and we started laughing at a shared joke. And out of nowhere, you started laughing too (even though you were still eating)! And you were laughing hard. You wanted to be in on the joke. This of course made your dad and me crack up even more and so you started laughing harder too. You were almost hysterical with laugher and then suddenly it was too much and you got freaked out and the laughing turned to crying. But you quickly calmed down. It was one of my favorite moments with you so far. You laugh quite often, but this was the first time that you laughed not because we were interacting with you but because you wanted to interact with us. You bring so much laugher into our lives.

Love,

Mama

(I’ve been inspired by dooce to start writing monthly letters to E.)

Dear E.,

Today you turned 4-months old. And typical of this last month, you have a cold. Month four was a little hard on you: you came down with a double ear infection and a mild case of RSV. The RSV (and all of the horror stories I’ve heard about it) really freaked me out. I watched you like a hawk to see if your breathing became more labored or your rib cage sunk in when you breathed. But you only wheezed when you breathed and had a chest cough. It was still difficult to watch you suffer and not be able to help, though. You were actually one of the lucky ones; this RSV season has been so severe that at the local hospital they had sick babies with RSV packed three to a room. You recovered from both the RSV and the double ear infection you had in about two weeks. I had to give you tropical-flavored antibiotics for your ear infection and you took it like a trooper. My strategy was to make a happy face and excitedly say, “num, num, num!” and then squirt the medicine into your mouth when you opened it to giggle. You fell for it pretty much every time–sucker!

But now you have another cold. *Sigh.* It’s probably because in the last few weeks you’ve discovered that you can control your hands, to some extent anyway. You use that control to cram them (and any germs on them) in your mouth every chance you can get. You’ve also started being much more interested in your toys and you love cramming them against your face and cooing into them.

You’re such a joy to have around. You love to coo and giggle and gurgle and you like having ‘conversations’ with us. You’re such a cheerful baby and I think it’s largely because you’re such a good sleeper.

In the last few weeks you’ve fallen into a routine: I feed you around 6 or 7 pm and put you to sleep in your crib. After fussing for a few minutes, you fall asleep. (You can never just fall peacefully asleep–you have to fight it and cry for 2 or 3 minutes.) Your dad wakes you around midnight and gives you a bottle which you eat on auto-pilot while mostly asleep. You go back to sleep until 5 am or so when you wake up hungry and after I get you fed and changed you usually go back to sleep until 7 or 8 am. And you also take two or three 2-hour naps during the day. In short, you are an AWESOME sleeper. I feel very grateful to you because I’m a wimp and tend to fall apart rather quickly if I’m severely deprived of sleep. Your genial nature combined with your good sleeping habits make being your mother easy. Being your mother is so much better that I had dared hoped it would be. Your dad also deserves a big shout-out for handling the midnight feeding every night. He’s done it every night since you started taking a bottle and he does it without complaint–it is such a big help.

This month you turned 100 days old. To celebrate we took you to a Korean restaurant. You sat on my lap and gazed at the colorful food. I’m looking forward to introducing you to Korean food once you start eating solids. It’s hard to believe that you’ll start eating real food in only a few months time.

You’re growing so big – you have your 4-month checkup tomorrow and I’m pretty sure you’ll weigh over 16 lbs. All traces of the tiny newborn are gone and you’re now a full-fledged baby. Sickness aside, this has been a fun month. You take much more notice of what’s going on around you and like to sit in the little plastic seat we got you and watch what everyone’s up to. You are also fascinated by other babies when you see them at church or at friends’ houses.

You love it when your dad comes home and bounces you on his lap and asks you about your day. When your dad (and only your dad) is playing with you this deep belly laugh wells up and burbles out of you and your scrunch up your shoulders and laugh and laugh. You think he’s so funny and you love playing with him. It makes me very happy to watch the two of you together.

Every day you continue to be one of the best things that has ever happened to us. Keep up the good work!

Love,

Mama