5 Months

Dear North,

The past month of your life has been the most challenging and the most rewarding so far. While your father and I are a little foggy with sleep deprivation from being up with you every hour or two through the night; you are wowing us during the daytime hours with all of your mad skills. Slowly, you are becoming more independent and interactive with the world beyond just us.

You hang out on your play pad and happily chatter at your stuffed animals as you play with your feet. I'd love to know what you are saying to them. You are probably telling them all about your awesome feet and how suckable they are I imagine.

If I had to guess what your favorite thing is right now, I'd say your big toes. Last week, I carried little naked you to your bath like a miniature yogi statue while you sucked on both big toes simultaneously.

You love to touch everything and put it in your mouth, not just your toes. Often, we carry you around outside to touch different plants which seems to calm you down when you're in a funk. I've never seen a child so fascinated by plants and we wonder if you will be a botanist or a landscape architect some day. But then, you seem to have a similar fascination with beer bottles too. So we're still narrowing down your career path at 5 months.

You enjoy spending your days drooling through clothes, giggling, smiling, squealing like a stuck pig, devouring oatmeal, petting Jake, pulling my hair, and beeping the horn of your Jeep walker as we push you around the house making traffic sound effects. Sometimes you even decide to take a nap.

We just got back from a trip to the Outer Banks over Labor Day. We arrived in Nags Head on Friday night hungry and frazzled after listening to you scream/cry for the last hour of the trip. I think you were just fed up with being confined in your car seat for so long. After we checked into our tiny room, I sat on the bed holding you in my lap and I smelled something unpleasant. Looking down at you, I saw poop had found its way out of your diaper onto me and the bed and you just sat there grinning up at me. Now that you only poop once or twice a week, when you do have a bowel movement it is a poop power explosion. And now that you're eating solids, they are stinky peanut butter consistency poops. They are very delicious to clean up when mom and dad are hungry.

So after we managed to get you all cleaned up, we decided I would get you to sleep while your dad went out and scrounged us up some food since it was already after 9:00 PM. He came back within 10 minutes carrying a pound of steamed shrimp and a huge container of rice and beans from Tortugas Lie. As your poopy diaper dried in the air conditioned breeze, we ate a romantic dinner atop our makeshift cooler table serenaded by the sound of you crying a few feet away. It was one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten and although it is absurd, it really was romantic to sit in such squalor and eat such fantastic food with the two people I love most in the world.