Personality

Well, ND is now 2 and a half weeks old. I find myself wondering what kind of person she will be.

But then I remind myself that she's a person right now. I'm able to think that way about elementary age kids all the time. I hear people hypothesize about what job the kid will have as an adult, and I want to just focus on who they are in the present instead. But I haven't had much experience with KNOWING newborns before.

It's so hard to apply adjectives to ND right now other than "precious" "gorgeous" etc. and my dad says "why apply any words at all?"

I think the main things I've learned about ND are through her cries. I've held other babies before, and the moment they start to fuss, I hand them to their moms. But with ND I usually know what I need to do. And if I'm wrong, I know what other options to try.

I know she loves being naked on the changing table, as long as she's clean.

I know that sucking calms her more than anything else.

I know that she is also calmed by seeing my face. Last night when she didn't want to fall back to sleep after a 3 AM feeding I got really close to her and hovered while she lay on our bed and was able to hush and calm her back to sleep before sleeping with her in my arms.

Because I also know she LOVES to be held and I hate denying that to her.

When she's really upset, she screams gutterally, almost the way I did while in the last moments of labor, but much more continuously, and usually that happens when she has a tummy ache.

She sometimes seems offended if you give her a pacifier when she really wants a breast.

When I burp her, I hold her sitting on my lap, prop her chin in my hand and pat her back. She wraps her little arms around the arm that's holding her until she's done, then throws herself backwards again to feed some more.

She has a mild cry too that almost sounds more like communication than anguish. It comes out like a motor starting and stopping, in little bits and pieces.

When she's nursing she'll sometimes become distressed for any number of reasons and, adorably, will breathe in really fast spurts before calming down and sucking really hard.

She also will sometimes just let out a high pitched scream while nursing, or even in her sleep, seemingly for no reason. She sounds like those fireworks you can set off in your own driveway that are all-noise and no fire.

Here's a picture of her when she's really upset. I feel a little guilty exploiting a picture of her in anguish, but I want everything she can do recorded somehow. U. saw this picture and said she looks like Barak Obama.



But she's also lovely when she's sleeping, with her little overbite and her little cheeks getting fatter and fatter daily with all that milk she's gulping.