Little EC has had her first bouts with fear the last couple of days. Last night, at a family get together, someone made a quick yelp because they were afraid of the dog. EC had a sympathetic response, and did a very short time screaming as a result.

Today, the Empirical Grandparents came to visit. My dad, who has a history of scaring other grandchildren through no fault of his own, scared EC for the first time today just by looking at her. It took about a half an hour to calm her down. I haven’t seen that kind of response from her ever. (For the record, she did fine with him the rest of the day.)And tonight, the third round. She was sleeping peacefully, and then suddenly woke with a yell, and was inconsolable for nearly an hour. I suspect she had a nightmare, and based on her recent experience, she knew how to respond to it. Perhaps her grandpa visited her in her dreams!

I laid little EC down yesterday on a mat on the floor to do tummy time. She’s not been the greatest fan of tummy time recently, because she loves to eat and eating makes for an uncomfortable compressed stomach. Yesterday she found a unique solution to her problem: she promptly rolled over onto her back, and laughed at me. I laughed right back…I didn’t expect it at all. She’s never shown any inclination to roll, not even from back to front, and I hear that front-to-back is harder.

We (read: I) of course tried immediately to duplicate the results, without success. It reminded me of the time, back in October, when she found her thumb and started sucking it…she promptly forgot what she had done and only now, about two months later, is she consciously bringing fist to mouth to suck and chew. Likewise, I’m guessing that the roll was just a fluke…she was in just the right position, and her random flailings happened to be just those required to flip. She doesn’t remember how to do it, and is probably only vaguely aware that she did it in the first place.

I will, naturally, continue to coach her.

I learned today that the technical definition of a baby “sleeping through the night” is midnight to five in the morning.

*Blank stare*

Ok, well little EC did something more like what I would consider sleeping through the night last night. 9 pm to 4 am. Granted, that’s a little jet-lagged, but given that she ate at 8 pm, and therefore went 8 hours between feedings, I was pretty impressed.

So, next time someone asks me if my baby is sleeping through the night…I’ll let them know that’s child’s play. A full night’s sleep—we’ve discovered it’s possible, and that’s the metric I’ll be tracking. Veteran parents will probably tell me that it’ll be awhile till we get there consistently. We’ll see.

One of the prerogatives of the parents of a small child is ascribing intent to their actions when probably there is no intent. Little EC will often reject a pacifier by swatting at it with her fist. She’s been doing this since she was only a couple weeks old—too young to actually know that she has fists, much less be capable of bending them to her will. Nevertheless, I started out thinking that she didn’t want the pacifier because of her movements. Only later did I notice that if I offered repeatedly that she would take it. Probably she had an instinctive reaction to move that arm when something was stuck in her face. No intent, but we as parents get to read into it.

We get to do this all over the place.  We can pretend she likes or dislikes certain things or people. This was most fun during the presidential campaign. When she hits at a toy, we can pretend she’s boxing or exercising or giving her opinion on its merits. For most of EC’s short life, this has been a flight of adult fancy.

But at what point does this not hold anymore? Here at 8 weeks, she’s clearly intending to smile at us, laugh at things we do, and occasionally I think that the wild arm and leg flailing actually has some meditated forethought behind it. Sometimes when she spits out her pacifier, it’s because she did something she didn’t mean to do. Sometimes, she actually doesn’t want it.

Intent has everything to do with behavior. That makes the question an important one…because you have to deal with intentional actions much differently than random or instinctual actions.

Today little EC is one month old. I suppose she was four weeks old on Tuesday, and when you’re only talking about one month, the difference between one month and four weeks is almost ten percent. As a smattering of things that she can do at one month:

• Control her neck reasonably well in all scenarios. She can raise her head during tummy time. If I raise her up using her arms from a lying position, she can make it all the way to sitting with decent neck stability. She can head butt me while I’m trying to burp her if she’s not 100% satisfied.
• Eat like a maniac. She’s gone from a little less than an ounce after birth to something like seven ounces per feeding on a regular basis. In the last week, she put on about a pound.
• Kind of hit and kick at a toy hanging in front of her, if she pleases.
• Sniper crawl, if I provide her something to push off of.
• Nurse. Two weeks now since we got the tongue-tie taken care of, and she now almost knows what she’s doing.

And things she can’t do anymore:

• Fit into a bassinet. We’ve gone through two, and have graduated to sleeping in either a buggy or a playpen.
• Wear newborn clothes. Even size 0-3 is getting a bit tight.

At the pediatrician’s office today, she discovered TV for the first time. We don’t generally have TV going around the house, but Disney was playing in the examination room…and once she saw it, she was riveted.

For the next month, we’ll just be working on physical exercises. She’s got a lot of growing to do, and developing some coordination will be key. Otherwise, those head butts are only going to get more painful.

She’s the cutest little thing…but all dads no doubt say that. At least I’m right.

Yesterday was a big day for little EC…she found her thumb while doing some tummy time, and latched onto it like a pro. I immediately predicted the demise of the pacifier, but just like she’s not that interested in the pacifier, turns out she’s also not that into the thumb. She hasn’t gone back for it since.

In other news, this heat wave has to stop…this many mosquitoes in mid-October is unheard of and unjust. Just a couple cold days to kill them off is all I ask…

It’s been a big two weeks for EC. She’s past the eat-sleep-cry-eat-sleep stage, and now spends a decent amount of her waking time quietly observing…something. She loves looking over her right shoulder (just her right…whatever’s over her left isn’t interesting at all) and has been having some fun with tummy time too. She seems to be super strong for her age, and will lift her head during tummy time, and even scoot around by pushing with her feet if I give her something to push off of. The other day she almost rolled back to front entirely on her own. If she could just figure out what to do with her right arm in the process, she’d have it mastered. I’m working on teaching her to grab things…today she grabbed a doll we’ve been playing with and shook it about. She doesn’t have the “intent-reach-grip” cycle figured out yet…but hey, she’s only two weeks old. She’s been tracking with her eyes and head now for about a week—again, mostly on the right side.

We took her in for her first surgery yesterday. She was tongue-tied, and that had to be fixed for the sake of proper eating. The pediatric surgeon took her away drowsy but awake, and brought her back three minutes later in exactly the same state. She’s a trooper. She’s now working on learning what to do with that tongue…she started sticking it out a little today, something that had been impossible before.

She doesn’t have much patience with me reading to her just yet. I was explaining the finer points of mutual fund fees to her yesterday, and she just drooled and slept. But she did give me a smile when I declared that her college fund was up and running.

There was a 50% chance that EC (the Empirical Child) would come before the 29th. She seized the opportunity. On 9/27, EM (Empirical Mom, of course) spent 9.75 hours in labor, pushing for the last 45 minutes or so of it, and at 13:31 produced what by all accounts is a big baby, at 8.75 pounds and 21 inches.

EC has been adept at keeping me up all night, as expected. Volunteering for the night shift, I got zero sleep the first night, maybe two hours the second. But the third was a breakthrough. Five hours, in two sessions, and EC slept flat in the bassinet which she had so far refused to do.

She’s a strong baby. She already has pretty good rudimentary control of her neck, and as of day three she’ll naturally turn over onto her right shoulder when laid down. Given sufficient motivation, it may not be long before she can roll over. But I understand the average age for that is 5-6 months, so I may have wildly inflated expectations.

According to the doctor, everything is in perfect shape. The baby’s head is right where it should be and the shapes and positions of all of the relevant organs are correct. If the way everything else has gone is any indication, it seems likely that we won’t have any reason to worry about complications. If we’re lucky, we might even get an easy (relatively) delivery.

I don’t know what the odds of an easy delivery are; if I had the data, I might venture a guess as to whether it was likely in our case. By way of anecdote, it seems to me that the odds are quite narrow. I would like to think we have better odds than most, because of Mother’s  generally good health, but that is just speculation on my part. And maybe a healthy dose of wishful thinking.

We will know shortly…

This baby’s due date is 9/24. Or is it 9/29? The 24th is the LMP date—Last Menstrual Period—and everyone accepts this date as truth, it would seem. But that date is entirely based on the mother’s recollection of when the first day of her last period was. The method seems problematic to me. The 29th is based upon an ultrasound taken early in the first trimester. That’s a pretty objective criterion, as long as the ultrasound operator’s hand is steady while drawing a circle around the fetus to measure its size. I trust it more.

But, since natural variation in what each woman’s body will consider “full term” is much greater than the difference between the two due dates…why should I trust either of them, except as an indication that it will happen, with high probability, somewhere within the four week span from late September to early October?

Nevertheless, anticipation will continue (justifiably) to build with passing days because the probability of birth today, given that the birth did not happen yesterday, is greater than the same conditional probability was yesterday.

At any rate, I’ve learned that the mother typically carries the baby for 38 weeks. The standard figure of 40 weeks is counting from the first day of the last menstrual period…and conception typically can’t happen for about two weeks after that.