Cured at last!

This evening I was standing in line at the pharmacy when I realized something amazing -- I wasn't bobbing the item in my left hand up and down unconsciously.

For the first several months of Kai's life, he spent a lot of time swaddled in his blanket, nestled in the crook of my arm. I would try to sooth him when he was crying by shushing him or singing to him, and always gently bobbed him up and down or rocked him side to side.

I spent so many hours a day doing this that it became an unconscious behavior. I caught myself at a party rocking my plate of hors d'oeuvres. I've spilled drinks. I've gently bobbed watermelons to sleep in the checkout line. I've soothed books at the bookstore. I've rocked my Chihuahua to sleep in my arm. I have, to my embarassment, been caught doing this at work too with various objects in the lab.

Usually I catch myself doing this when I'm in line. It's always when I'm stuck doing something monotonous, where my mind wanders into nothingness. Some dreamless-daydream state brought on by months of unending tiredness.


But tonight was different. It was weird. I distinctly thought that something was wrong -- usually the feeling I have when I first become aware that my arm is moving, but this time it wasn't!

Cured at last!

8 days old

9 months old

Crawling towards insanity

Kai just turned 9 months old a few days ago, and a couple days after his "birthday" he crawled. He's been on the verge of crawling for well over a month, but every time it looked like he was going to crawl, he sort of flopped over and rolled back and forth instead. It was pretty amazing how accurate his rolling was -- when he spotted something across the room that interested him, he'd almost invariably be able to reach it by rolling and rotating his body.

But now he's crawling! I admit that when I first saw him do it, I couldn't help but just stare at him with the biggest shit-eating grin on my face. I put him down on my bed to undress him for his nightly bath. He was running low on baby wash so I tossed the new bottle on the bed. And then he just sort of crawled until he reached it. I was so proud of him! I thought it was a fluke, so I dragged him a few feet away, and again he crawled until he reached it.

This is just one of many moments in his life where I've simultaneously felt a set of emotions that I previously thought were mutually exclusive. I was thrilled and sad. Relieved and terrified.

Kai's best friend Kingston started crawling at around six months. He was walking before his first birthday. Another friend's baby, just a few weeks older than Kai, had determined the cause and effect that pushing buttons on her entertainer resulted in animal sounds and music being played. Kai has the same entertainer and never was interested in pushing those buttons. I mean, he was interested in the noises when I pushed the buttons, but never figured out that he could do it too.

It's impossible not to compare every little thing about Kai's development to other babies, especially when it seems like those other babies are so much farther along than Kai. I feel this enormous pressure to do everything perfectly -- as if by not reading a story to him one night I've ruined his chances of getting into a good university.

We've been having a lot of fun lately. We go to the beach a lot, I sing to him all the time and every night before bed, and make sure to play with him during the days I'm not at work. I know that every kid develops differently, and that I can't say that his accomplishments are signs of failure or extraordinary achievement.

But what makes it so hard to accept that, on an emotional level, is that I don't think that these are Kai's failures, but my own, and the guilt associated with them are because the consequences of my failures will be much more hard on Kai than on myself.

Is this just the typical parents' dilemma, or am I just crazy?