Seth!: May 2008

Dear Seth,

Congratulations on learning how to fall asleep. I have had the good fortune, lately, of being able to put you down in your bed awake, leave, and tiptoe back a few minutes later to find you dead asleep with nary a peep. And still, you are sleeping at night (well, except for that brief, 4-day interlude where you woke up ready to play at 3 am and threw a fit when we didn't want to let you). Am I the luckiest mama in the world? For so many reasons, I just might be. In terms of sleep? Almost surely. In fact, your Dad and I recently overheard someone saying that their baby wakes every 45 minutes all night long, but sleeps well during the daytime. We thank every power that may or may not be that you were never like that. And now that we have you fully converted to daytime naps and many many hours of uninterrupted nighttime sleep, we think it's time for you to have your own room. You've graduated.

This last month has been a celebration of independence on your part. You seem so much more at ease in this crazy world, and you are learning how to do things on your own. Last month saw you learn to hold your own bottle, and this month has brought you the ability to put your own cork back in your mouth, roll over from side to side, reach for (and play deliberately and intently with) your toys, stand up (albeit with some support from us) and most importantly, the ability to just hang out in your crib without losing your marbles. No seriously, we lay you in there, give you a couple of toys, and then we can actually do things like get ready for work and you just play by yourself and delight us with your funny noises. I know, I should realize that these small independences are really just a prelude to the agonies we will suffer when you realize you also have independent thought, but for now it's pretty darned cool!

Having said that, I must point out that this is also the month that you discovered that you do not like to be bored. Can I tell you a story about the first day you got bored? We were driving from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando to catch our plane back home from Florida (where I was attending a conference while you, Dad, and Grammie and Grumps all got to bask in the sunshine and play in the ocean), and you started to cry. Just a little at first, but then much more insistent. It was really making everyone in the car pretty annoyed, I don't mind telling you, and even though you weren't quite ready to be hungry, and shouldn't really have been tired, everyone figured that one of those things must be the cause. Oh, but not me. I know your cries, and this one was not a tired cry, and it was not a hungry cry, and it was not even your uncomfortable cry. This was new. This, I was pretty sure, was boredom. As soon as we stopped at a rest stop and took you out of your car seat, guess what? You stopped crying. And thus signalled the end of life as we had come to know it.

But there are up-sides to your development of a limited attention span. For example, this implies that you pay attention! Yes, you are now capable of focusing your attention on things, toys, activities. You are so aware of your surroundings, and you reach out to your world in such delightful ways. All of your senses seem to be engaging with the world around you - you are no longer a passive observer. Where you used to watch attentively, you now reach out to touch - be it a toy, a friendly face, or your dogs. Where you used to bat at your toys with open hands or fists, you now prefer to hold, to feel, to pull apart and to throw. Where you used to just make noise, you now do so with purpose and you actually expect to have someone (or something) respond. You are becoming SO MUCH FUN!

You are so funny, you know: you greet the world with an open mouth. From the wide, open-mouthed smile that has become so familiar, to the way that anything that makes its way into your tiny fists is immediately thrust in the general vicinity of your mouth, to the way you also use that mouth to communicate your many needs, you are definitely tasting life with great zeal. I hope you always stay as open to the world as you are right now.

Seth, I can't possibly guess what this world has in store for you, but I do know it will entail a great deal of growth and transformation - some of it on your part, and some on ours. Already your Dad and I look at our world differently. It is in some ways a more interesting place, and in a lot of ways a much scarier place. As you mature you will learn how both your father and I are obsessed with being good - being good to you, to each other, to other people, to this world. Being good at what we do, at what we are. Sometimes, we know, we will miss the mark - but our intentions are pure. We want to be good parents - the very best - and we talk a lot about what this entails. So as you grow up and go through phases of loving and hating us, of appreciating and resenting what we do, of thinking we're the coolest thing and of being in a perpetual state of mortification, at the end of your story you can know that we didn't take our parental duties lightly, that we have made all of our decisions very deliberately, and have always had your very best intentions in our hearts.