Before Makili was born I told my friend Cara that I didn’t expect myself to like a baby too much. I could imagine myself with kids, even young ones, but the baby stage didn’t seem like that much fun. “Wait till he’s five months old,” she said. I guess I can see her point. He suddenly is awfully cute. And what a performer. When it’s just us, he cries and wants a lot, but when other people are around, he is so well behaved…smiling, sitting calmly on laps, and I think to myself “what is going on here, he isn’t like this when it’s just me.”
When Makili was a week old, his cousin Gabrielle came to visit and she was five a half months old. Raph would play with her, she would smile, and I would watch, tormented by those post-partum hormones that cursed through my veins. When we were alone, I cried to him, “you like Gabrielle more than Makili.” (I know I sound like a sniveling crazy woman here, but that’s pretty much what you are right after you have a baby.) His response. “No. I really do like Makili better. It seems like everything there is to know about Gabrielle is known. We barely know anything about Makili.”
And now that Makili is five months old, Raph was right. I know him SO much better. I know when he’s hungry, tired, cranky, playful, when he wants to be left alone on his back, when he wants to touch anything and everything in sight, when he wants to nurse, when he just wants to suck, etc. We’ve come a long way in five months.
And when Gabrielle and Laura showed up for that visit in Hawaii, Laura would say, “Yep she’s all grown up.” Makili is grown up too. He’s not an infant anymore, as Cindy, Raph’s aunt says, not just “a lump that poops and cries and sleeps.” He has personality. He is engaging, spontaneous, and resilient. He’s athletic, social, and expressive. I like him. Most of the time. I tell him all the time that I like him more when he sleeps through the night and doesn’t cry, and that tactic works sometimes. I like it a lot when I can get him to laugh, but that isn’t all the time. I like it when he smiles for me, and he has started reaching for me, which is really warm in its infancy, like it is, but might get old in the coming months. His reaching can be dangerous at times. When we walk through a store, he grabs at every hanger, every tag within reach. Sometimes it feels like he has clotheslined me, having hung on and arrested our momentum. He also is working on pulling my hair out of my head. He can be quite a menace at times. He sits up on his own now, in silent focus, investigating the whisk, or measuring spoons, or a coaster, whatever his favorite toy of the moment happens to be.
My mom called me a “nervous mother” this week, because Makili had his first fever and I freaked out. For a little while. I read all the books I had, to determine how high a fever warranted calling a doctor, if the ear thermometers are accurate, etc. But he took a nap and woke up less cranky, with temperature lower, and a fountain of snot coming out his nose. The happy disposition reassured me and he’s been okay, although still snotty, every since.
My mom said this morning, “they don’t make em any cuter.” I know everybody thinks that about their baby, but I can honestly, objectively say, he’s the cutest.
