This Little Piggy
Eidan is a piglet. Here is my evidence:
Eating, quantity: at 4 weeks he was over 10 lbs, so he had increased his body weight by about 60% in one month. He’s six weeks old now, and we haven’t weighed him again, but my guess is he’s 12 lbs. He’s a very robust looking baby. Kai was never particularly large, so we’re wondering if Eidan is going to turn out to be less skinny than the rest of us, or if this is just a phase.
Eating, style: when he sees that bottle coming, he sometimes gets so excited that he grunts and snorts uncontrollably. Unlike Kai when he was an infant, Eidan is a very sloppy eater, with milk dribbling down his face as he tries to force as much milk out of the nipple as quickly as possible (an aside: I came across a great quote the other day: “the only intuitive user interface is the nipple, everything else is learned.”).
Odor: We bathe him almost every day, but there’s no denying Eidan is a stinky baby. It’s not just the diaper or dry milk - it’s BO. Actually, it’s mainly his head - he has stinky hair. Maria’s mother tells us there’s some ancient Chinese proverb about a stinky baby head being a sign of good fortune, but I am dubious.
In the not-pig related aspects of his development, Eidan continues to be a good nighttime sleeper. He’s up every 3 hours to eat, but he always goes right back to sleep. He’s much better than Kai was in this respect (we hardly slept for Kai’s first 2 years). Until a few days ago he was a good napper too, but now it’s much more difficult to get him to sleep in the day - hopefully it’s just a phase.
By this time with Kai, we had some sense of his personality, at least in terms of general temperament. But so far Eidan is still an enigma. He’s actually fairly sour most of the time - he typically has a look of general displeasure on his face. But I did get my first smile over the weekend. We had been trying without success for a while to get a smile out of him. On Sunday Maria’s friend Julia was visiting, and she facetiously suggested we pet him like a cat. I said, “oh, like this”, and I stroked him under his chin, and viola - a big smile! We’re looking forward to more.
