Benjamin Penguin

Dear Benjamin,

I’d hate for you to think that the delay in my writing of your monthly letter and the ostensibly negligent way in which I have appeared to give up photographing every week of your existence is somehow indicative of how I feel about you right now. Au contraire, I would have to proclaim. Loudly. For the reason that I’ve been tardy in my writing and picture-taking tasks is that we’ve been hanging out a lot. In your earliest months, you would spend all your time sleeping, giving me ample time to faithfully document every breath you took and every grimace that could quite possibly be the first inklings of a smile. Then there were those months in which you firmly decided that sleep was for the weak and you scoffed at the idea that you would need such restorative time wasters as naps and bedtime. This resulted in all of us being awake more and all of us feeling sleep-deprived and sassy. Sassy and blogging can be a good combination, as it can result in some saucy turns of a phrase, but sleep-deprived and blogging do not mix. How long would the average reader be captivated by this narrative: “Today Benjamin opened hinjnd………………………………………………………………………………………………….” (<– this is what Mama types when she passes out and her face slams against the keyboard. Not very riveting reading). Now, however, you are napping and sleeping a fair amount at night, and Mama is napping and also sleeping a fair amount at night, and this allows us to feel well-rested enough to want to do things together during the day. So we eat, play, take walks, go to Starbucks, watch Spongebob and engage in all sorts of merriment for twelve hours a day. It leaves lots of time for having fun and relatively little time for documenting said fun having. So while I’ll probably regret not marking down all the new little things you do every day, I’d regret even more not taking advantage of this time while I have it. I’ve always been one to live and breathe and do and not document, which is why my brain is filled to the brim with wonderful memories of my life but the various photo albums I’ve received as gifts throughout the years are as barren as the pages of my Weight Watchers food journal.

You are such a happy little guy. I say this with a sense of awe and amazement because I think we really lucked out in the baby department. You are constantly smiling and babbling and chirping away. You laugh very easily and seem to always be in a very sunny mood. It could have gone either way – Daddy likes a good laugh and can be very silly, but I wouldn’t necessarily call him sunny. He is more the type of person that can’t help but smile after realizing that he avoided stepping in the pessimistically anticipated crap littering his path. Whereas Mama didn’t even notice the crap and could waltz right through it without a notice or care because, hey, did you see that unicorn sliding down a candy cane slide up there in the sky? I think it had a kitten on its back. A kitten holding a lollipop! At this point, you seem to have taken on Mama’s disposition because you have that same wide-eyed excitement when encountering new people, places and things. So many people comment on this that I can no longer regard it as people being nice. Just recently you met a friend of mine for the first time and, since I was struggling with the mandatory seven bags you must now carry upon having a child, she asked if she could take you to lend a hand. You readily went into her arms and as you were sitting on the couch with her, you leaned back against her calmly, looked around curiously and smiled warmly at her well-appointed townhouse. This is the norm, not the exception, and I’ve always just assumed that all babies are like this, but after the 400^th person commented on how friendly and happy you are, I started to think that just maybe you are something a little extra special. I think it also doesn’t hurt that you are unbelievably cute. I am biased, as all parents are, but you really are a fetching little baby. Even if you were wielding a machete and started hacking away at passersby, they would still probably smile through the pain after catching a glimpse of your cherubic little cheeks and – especially –those soft brown eyes.

I also think you have a sense of humor and a silliness about you that I hope you will keep for years to come. You think it is absolutely funny when you sneeze, and I’ve tried to ascertain what you are thinking when it happens. I think you get amused by the force with which a sneeze wracks your body to and fro. You’ll just be sitting there in your exersaucer, rolling a toy about in your hands, and all of a sudden you’ll sneeze and your body will ricochet forward and then back, prompting you to smile very wide. And it is kind of funny when you think about it – that an action so small could have such a big impact on your body. You also have taken to playing a joke with Daddy and every time you do it we marvel that we’re no doubt sitting in the presence of genius. You know that your pacifier goes in your mouth and you’ve actually become quite adept at taking it out of your mouth and then putting it back in place. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, you realized that Daddy also had a mouth and you thought it was the funniest thing ever to try and put your pacifier into Daddy’s mouth. You would place it in your mouth, and then you would take it out and try and put it in Daddy’s mouth. You would then take it from Daddy’s mouth and then put it back in your own mouth, laughing all the while. It was truly the first time Daddy and I thought we could see the little wheels in your head turning as you processed not only that you and Daddy both had this thing called a mouth, but that your pacifier clearly did not belong in a Daddy mouth. This was a terribly funny realization. Since then, I have seen you start to amuse yourself with the pacifier in other ways. You know that the little silicone tip is the part that goes into your mouth and just this morning I caught you laughing when you jammed the whole plastic base into your mouth instead.

You are also starting to communicate more through verbal sounds, though I don’t know I would go so far as to call them words just yet. We’ve easily made out Ma Ma Ma and Da Da Da, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a Ba Ba Ba and Na Na Na, but I really don’t believe that these sounds are tied to anything yet. Daddy insists that you know what you are saying and that the sounds are relevant, but I have my hunch that they are still practice sounds. Not that this renders them any less exciting, because it makes us all the more eager for the day that you will actually turn to us and say Mama and Dada and mean it. But even if you are not talking yet, you are using your mouth now more to express yourself. When you get really excited or are really amused and/or interested in something, you make a smirk, scrunch up your nose, stick out your tongue and make a huffing, breathing sound (“huh-huh-huh”). In fact, your tongue spends a disproportionate amount of time hanging out of your mouth now and I often feel as though I am watching an endless reel of the Girls Gone Wild girls playing out before my eyes. They all seem to have their tongues hanging out too, though I am fairly certain they are NOT drunk on a heady mixture of Similac and distilled water. Similac and distilled gin, maybe.

I’m not really one for reading the infant development books as they can leave me in a slightly panicked state. I’m still having flashbacks from the sleeping book that a friend innocently foisted upon me. So I don’t always know what milestones you are supposed to have met during any given month because you’ve historically been advanced in some areas and rather tardy in others. I think that this can be defined as “normal infant development,” but I translate any delay as a severe deficit requiring thousands of dollars of therapeutic intervention coupled with the need for me to wear a brave face while holding back tears and jutting my chin forward in defiance, daring anyone to challenge me when I say my son WILL be in normal classes just like his peers. It’s not you at all, buddy. It’s me. You would think an overactive imagination could be a good thing, but you would be wrong. It makes me a marginally better creative writer and a monumentally more irritating mother of a pediatric patient. Sometimes I think that you intrinsically know the average window of development for each of the milestones and then choose an arbitrary Tuesday during that last week of the developmental window to roll out all the little things the baby books say you should have been doing this entire time. I’ve just glanced at the milestones for month seven, and they state that you should be sitting unsupported, you can stand while holding on to something and you have wave bye-bye. Um, who is this baby that motivated the compilation of this list? The nice thing about belonging to a baby playgroup is that I can see what other babies your age are doing and while some of them are boldly, and sometimes arrogantly, flashing their sitting unsupported skills, absolutely none of them are standing. And waving bye-bye? Oh, please. You can sit mildly supported. You sit between my legs and you can hold yourself upright. You even sat in a high chair in a restaurant a week ago when visiting your Nana and Grandpa. So, you are getting there, but you aren’t there yet. I think this is why I never really worry. You always show me glimpses of things you can do without ever really doing the actual thing. Then one day you decide to do it and there you go. You did this with rolling, too. You showed me that you could do it by rolling every now and then until the one day when you decided rolling was the bestest thing ever and now I can’t get you to stay still. I have a feeling that sitting, and every other milestone, will be the same way. One of these days I’ll be sitting at the computer, playing around on Facebook in a desperate attempt to avoid actual work, and you’ll walk over to me and insist that I finally add that Pieces of Flair application. Having just typed that sentence, I am suddenly smacked with the realization, pal, that perhaps you have become the beneficiary of the gift that keeps on giving. By this of course I mean the gift of procrastination. Daddy and I have it by the bucketful. Perhaps your pace in adopting the milestones is evidence of your genetic tendency towards procrastination. You could sit up, but you’ll get to it tomorrow.

You’ve spent the past two weeks in the presence of your grandparents and even your great-grandmother. Daddy and I made sure that we spent these last few weeks of summer with loved ones because things are about to get busy in a way that they have never been before. Mama is about to start school again and Daddy is thinking of getting his graduate degree. Mama will also be returning to work some time by the end of this year. This is a bittersweet development. Had someone asked Mama to return to work when you were two months old, she would have been showered, shaved, pomaded and dressed before you could even get the car running. Again, pal, it was never you. It’s just that Mama likes to chat and hang out with people. She gets lonely. And sometimes Mama felt lonely when you were sleeping all the time and Daddy was working long hours. Now however? It will be a very sad day when Mama has to leave home to return to work and school. Part of Mama really loves working and thinking and writing and talking with colleagues. Mama has always really enjoyed using her brain. But this other part of Mama, the part she could never have known about until you entered her life, loves nothing more than to curl up next to you when you are napping on the bed and play Scrabble on the little Nintendo DS. We’ve spent so many days together, you and I, that I can physically sense when you are getting tired, getting hungry or getting bored. I know you like I know myself and our days move along in this intimate dance. We’ve learned all the moves and can execute the most fanciful steps together because we know how the other one ticks. Early on in your life, our relationship felt very one-sided, me always giving and you always needing. Now, however, this relationship that we are building involves me learning your quirks and you learning mine. You respond to me differently than you respond to Daddy or to your grandparents. There are things that you will tolerate from me that you will not tolerate from others. There are things that I cannot do that you will allow others to do. You’ve always been your own living, breathing entity, but each month you become more of your own person, and I’ve really started seeing you as such.

But as I mentioned above, you’ve been spending time with your grandparents and have been soaking up the love. One day when we were in Detroit, your Grandpa and I took you over to the park by their house and popped you in the baby swing. You were having it for a few minutes and then you suddenly hated it, but you were still a willing parkgoer for several other trips after that first one. Your Nana and I debated taking you to a baseball game, but in the end we thought that you might be too young this summer, so we went instead, but bought you all manner of Detroit Tigers gear at the stadium fan shop. Of course, being there made us all excited about taking you next summer since some things are more fun with a little guy around. Baseball games and Christmas day being two such examples. At Grandma and Grandpa’s house, you have this awesomely fun toy called a walker and you roll/walk yourself all over their house. You enjoy it so much that I wish I had the room for you to have one in the apartment, but in our place, you’d only get about four feet before running over a cat. Then, as you were backing up to try a different direction, you’d run over another cat. Then you’d probably plow over the dog, knock over my poorly arranged CD collection and bump into the stacks of books and papers laying about the sharply-edged, eyeball-height coffee table. And this is all before leaving the living room.

As for you, Daddy and I, each month is better than the last. In those first few months, our main goal was just to get through the day by any means possible. If we made it to the next day, it was cause for celebration. If we made it through another week, we actually did celebrate with some junkfood-type substance. And the three-month marker was met with such elation that I momentarily even considered doing this all over again. But now, at seven months, our days are generally quite joyful. There are stressful days, such as when you were teething or when you miss a nap and then proceed to rip my hair out of my head at the temple. But these days are few and far between. Overwhelmingly, Daddy and I awake each morning and greatly look forward to what a day with you will bring. I attribute this in part to the beneficial effects of sunshine on our bodies (I’ve been making it a point of getting us out for a little sun every day) and also because Daddy has taken on a large number of your feedings. Since you are mostly formula and solids fed now, Daddy can really participate in your care and that has been enjoyable for all of us. I think it also helps that any traces of postpartum depression and anxiety that were lingering since your birth have soundly left my body and I am feeling, mentally, much much more like myself again. So we’re in a really good place right now. I looked back over the monthly letters and saw that I wrote something similar at month five. I remember writing that back then and while it was mostly true, it was also somewhat forced. Things did feel better at month five than they did at months two and three. But the way I felt at month five was nothing in comparison to how I feel now. I remember writing that everything was super, but still feeling these unspoken pangs of fear in my stomach that one morning I was going to wake up and feel like I had this dark cloud hanging over my head again. During that period, I still had an impossible time naming my feelings as postpartum depression because I was scared to fess up to the depression part. It’s a big word and a big emotional state with some very big implications. Thankfully it never really stood in the way of me being able to take care of you or love you. But it made what should have been fantastically technicolor days take on a more monochromatic hue. Not grey, mercifully. Maybe a more reserved, yet still hopeful, blue-grey. Now, however, I can name those feelings as PPD and I can say it without a lurch in my belly. And more importantly, sweetie? My days are as bright and as colorful as a rainbow.

Love,

Mama