Cerin Amroth

Reporting from West Michigan, where Ella is a roving celebrity, with Suanna and I as her diligent support staff.  Pics 34-42 on the pictures site.

The big news of the past couple of weeks is that Ella’s fundamental adorability has been tragically marred. Mind you, she’s heart-stoppingly cute, but our pediatrician’s prediction from her last appointment has come true: Ella has baby acne. A cluster of pimples have been migrating around her upper face for quite a while now, varying in intensity but ever-present. So she’s not going to be starring in any commercials any time soon, though they don’t seem to bother her any.

Very few things bother Ella. She sleeps happily in the middle of crowded parties or even when surrounded by noisy children. She doesn’t care _how_ you hold her, as long as you hold her. She’ll cry if she’s hungry, or if she’s working on passing a particularly trenchant bit of poo, during which time she prefers to be sucking on a pacifier or finger while her face goes red with the effort. She’s making the shift from regular, moderately full diapers to sporadic, cataclysmically full diapers. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to care for a baby without the benefits of twenty-first century diaper technology.

I just burped her. She’s wearing a green spotted outfit with fuzzy bear heads on the feet and “I Love Daddy” printed across the front. I never would have guessed that such a thing could please me this much.

Because we don’t usually dress her in pink, lots of people assume Ella is a boy. After we corrected one guy at the holiday party, he pointed to a bit of blue on her multicolored outfit and said “Well, I saw blue, so I figured it must be a boy.” Ridiculous. First of all, you can just _look_ at her face and tell that she’s a girl. (Well, OK, I can.) Second, why should any baby without a pink signifier of some sort be assumed to be a boy? Why should the girls’ wardrobe be limited so? Ella _hates_ pink. (Well, OK, I hate pink.) I’m going to make my stand against the cutesy ubiquity of pinkness foisted upon our unsuspecting daughters — I don’t care if I have to correct every single fawning stranger from here to the Moon to do it. In fact, on those occasions where Ella _does_ wear pink, I’m going to correct people and tell them she’s a boy, just to challenge their assumptions.

Maybe that’s not so productive, though. If I’m going to launch any sort of campaign, I’m going to need Suanna on my side. So here’s my idea:

ORANGE IS THE NEW PINK

That’s right. Rather than letting pink get all the fun, with Ella we’re going to start a crusade to make the color orange (and we’re talking a good, solid autumn orange or a bright fruit orange, not a pasteled-out peach) into another color that clearly signifies ‘girl’ to the public at large. The next time a stranger on the street asks if she’s a boy or a girl, I’ll wrinkle my brow and point to her orange onesie. “Uh, she’s a girl, _duh_. Can’t you see the orange?” Except I’ll be more polite than that, but you get the idea. Vive l’Orange!

Several days ago, I caught myself unconsciously engaging in a bit of ridiculous behavior. While walking down the street in Arlington, with Ella snuggled up against my chest in the Baby Bjorn, I found that I was constantly scanning the faces of everyone we walked past to see if they noticed the baby. It was exactly the vain sort of search for self-affirmation that you might feel as you walk into a crowded room wearing what you hope is a stunning new outfit, except the whole desire for attention was transferred over to Ella. I was annoyed to realize that the vast majority of the people we passed could care less that we had a baby, and the few people who piped up with a “Cute!” or an “Oh, look!” were mostly little old ladies.

I kicked myself as soon as I realized what I was doing, and have been diligently censoring such behavior since. I should care less whether people at large notice Ella; certainly _I_ was oblivious to strangers’ babies until a few months ago.

But while strangers may ignore her, Ella has brought us unprecedented fame and popularity among another group: casual acquaintances. As Suanna indicated in her last entry, Ella made quite a splash at the Taft Towers holiday party, and suddenly all these people with whom our relationship had never gone beyond the nod-in-the-elevator stage were introducing themselves and admiring Ella and offering to babysit or establish play groups. A part of it was the parent club phenomenon, since there are only a handful of families with kids in the building — but only a part. Our new notoriety extends beyond just the circle of ‘other people with kids.’

What motivates this newfound popularity? Is it purely Ella’s adorability? Or is it instinctive behavior having to do with species preservation: a kneejerk positive response to the fact that we’re helping to perpetuate the human race? Who knows . . .

Last night, Nate and I took Ella to our building holiday party. It was probably the loudest environment that Ella has ever been in, but she took it all in stride. There were at least 40 people crammed into the lobby, and they were all eager to meet the “youngest member of Taft Towers” – as our building manager announced her.

At first, Ella was wide awake and studying everyone carefully. In about 15 minutes, she was sound asleep in the center of all the noise. She slept for about 20 minutes, and then she was awake for the rest of her time there. She carefully examined everyone that stopped by to say hello. We got more than a couple offers to babysit because she was on such good behavior! Way to go, Ella!!

I don’t remember much of my early childhood, but there are a few memories that stand out in my mind. One of them is my mother rocking me to sleep. My parents have this great wooden rocking chair that creaks rather loudly when you shift back and forth in it. The safest place in the world for me was being rocked in that chair with my ear pressed against my mother’s chest. I loved to listen to her heartbeat and the creak of the rocking chair. If I was lucky, she would be talking to someone while I was sitting there, and I would hear her voice from the inside of her chest.

When my parents came down to greet Ella on her first day home from the hospital, they brought with them a beautiful antique rocking chair. Nate and I have been so grateful for this cherished gift. As I rock Ella and listen to the chair’s creak, I am transported to my childhood. I can only hope that Ella is feeling that same sense of security on my lap and that one day she will have similar memories – perhaps as she is rocking her own child.

The other strong memory that I have is sitting in church next to my mother as she held my hand in hers and rubbed the back of it with her fingers. Again, it is a moment of safety and soothing for me. Touch is such a powerful indicator of warmth and love. My mom told me during one of her first days with Ella that Ella seemed to like it when she rubbed the back of her hand. I didn’t think until later about the fact that I took the same delight in my mom’s soothing touch. What a wonderful gift to revisit the security of my childhood while simultaneously creating memories for Ella.

See pictures 25-33 on the pictures site.

Yesterday, the remainder of Ella’s umbilical cord fell off. It served as a reminder that the intimate connection I have had with her since the beginning of March is coming to an end. Nursing continues to be a wonderful connection, but that too will have an end.

In its place, Nate and I are forming intense bonds with Ella that will be even more important throughout her life. These bonds go far beyond the physical to the emotional and spiritual realms. We have demonstrated to her from the very beginning that we are always there to respond to her needs and desires. It is wonderful to think about how something as simple as touch can stimulate her growth. And she has also been very attentive to sound, even within the first hour of her life outside of me. She listens very carefully when someone talks to her. In fact, if you are holding her and not talking and establishing eye contact, she will get fussy to remind you that she loves building bonds.

I continue to look at her with amazement and awe. It is miraculous to think that Nate and I created this new life. While she is fully dependent on us now, every day she is further developing her own identity and personality. Our love created her and will help sustain her as she grows, and every day she will give us back more and more of her own love. It’s a wonderful circle of love and life that will only get stronger.

I periodically check my old, spam-riddled email address, just in case anything interesting comes through on it. Usually it’s just spam, but I don’t know whether to call this one spam or not. All the signs are there: a gobbledeegook freemail address as the source, and a long string of earthlink addresses with similar spellings visible in the “CC” field. But there’s no subject line, and here’s the entire body of the message:

brusque story slavonic admire midwinter asset delve incongruous
drain pistol beckon mangel dolomitic metallurgy corrodible clot elsie
lithic addend parsonage clinging pilferage tenneco wipe yin

How can it be spam if it’s not sending a message? Unless the message is _subliminal_. That could be it.

Or maybe it’s an ad for the OED.

UPDATE: D’oh! As Jonathan suspects down in the comments, I have posted this entry to the wrong blog.

Something tells me that this isn’t the last time this sort of thing will happen . . .

We should count ourselves lucky that our main problem with Ella, such as it is, is that she sleeps too much. We sometimes have to wake her up for feedings in the wee hours. Often, after just five minutes of nursing, she’ll slip into a blissful, milk-induced stupor and hang like a wet-lipped rag doll in Suanna’s arms. This is fine once in a while, but when she perks up hungry again less than an hour later, it can get a little overwhelming for Suanna. Nursing mothers are busy enough already.

Thus the job of Official Baby Waker-Upper falls to me. Early experiments (“Ella’s up hiiiigh! Ella’s down looooow!”) proved incompatible with her digestive processes. Friends recommended old standards like rubbing the back of the head and moving the legs in bicycle-pedalling motions, and these achieve modest success. The ol’ raspberry on the bottom of her feet also works pretty well. I have been known more than once to cavort madly (to the sounds of “Squirrel Nut Zippers”:http://www.snzippers.com/) about the room with her in my arms. Earlier this morning she was particularly lethargic and we resorted to the as-yet untried Cold Wet Washcloth Treatment. It was extremely — almost disturbingly — effective: clearly something to reserve for truly dire soporific circumstances.