Parker Week 11 – Signs of Love…
March 27, 2009
Happy Baby!
When babies are first born, they say that they can already recognize your voice, and that it doesn’t take long before they can also recognize your scent. After a month or so, they can begin to recognize your face. All this leads to them associating you as a primary caretaker. When they have needs, you respond to them (and based on the amount of crying involved, you’ll respond pretty quickly!)
It takes a little while before babies start showing signs of pleasure at seeing you. For a few weeks now, Parker has been showing signs that he recognizes me, and is happy to see me. When I pick him up from day care, or after a nap, or put him down on the changing table he sees my face, gets a big grin on his face and wiggles his whole body. It’s adorable, and it’s clear that he is happy to see me. It’s similar to my post about Xander when he was just starting at day care.
I think it takes babies a while to learn about their parents, but it’s nice to start seeing those signs that they might actually love us almost as much as we love them.
I have always had tons of admiration for single parents. Parenting is a tough job when there are two people around to share the burden. Taking all of that on by yourself can sometimes seems like an insurmountable task. More kids means the challenge starts to look a little more like Mission Impossible.
Somehow, I was back into pre-pregnancy clothes about 3 weeks after he was born. When I went back for my 6 week checkup (I was rescheduled, so it was really 8 weeks), I had dropped 10 pounds from my pre-pregnancy weight. This was super encouraging! Without any real effort, I had somehow shed 10 pounds! Of course, I have no idea where those 10 pounds disappeared from, since I was still the same pant and shirt size as I was before.
Babies don’t have many favorite activities – sleeping and eating seem to round out the list for quite a long time. Sometime around 2 or 3 months, they start to get a little more interactive. Parker has decided that his newest favorite activity is having “coo conversations”. I talk to Parker all the time, and when we make eye contact, he seems to watch what I’m doing. However, when he coos and I coo back at him, he smiles and wiggles and becomes much more engaged in the activity. This has lead to regular “coo conversations” in our house – even Xander gets involved sometimes. It’s not always the most exciting conversation, but it’s lots of fun to see how much enjoyment Parker gets from it, and as the experts say, we’re hopefully setting him up for good language and conversation skills down the road. So, for now, two languages can be heard in our house – English, and Baby Coo (though Parker is the only one who can interpret the latter…)
