Mornings are to me what evenings are to most people. The hardest work of the day is over and you're just ready to collapse. Lately, I've been taking The Bug to bed with me after Mr. Aran wakes up, because he can watch us to make sure I don't suffocate him or anything, but I can also sleep through a feeding or two. This is usually between 5:00 and 9:00 a.m.

So that's what we look like.

It surprised me that, even if it's totally dark and he's not particularly close, he can find my nipple. It reminds me of new puppies, all blind and rooting around for their milk.

He went through a couple days of annoying growth spurt and today he seems longer, and much more alert. There are new sounds, word-sounding things. He's almost too long for his tub now. I took this thirty-second mpeg of him splashing in the tub, so hard that most of the water is on Mister Aran. He's got this determined, serious look on his face, like he is learning, like kicking the water is his job and he'll damn well not be taking a coffee break today.

Yes. The Bug is an ear of corn this Halloween. Is that not the funniest thing you've ever seen?

Corn!

Everything I've read talks about the big three-month birthday, when the kid magically stops crying so much and starts being responsive and sleeping through the night and, I don't know, gets his own apartment. The Bug has issues, though, and he's not all that into being a grownup yet. Maybe he was just so easy during the first three months that I haven't noticed a huge change. He does laugh more, which just... god. There aren't words to describe that. Plus there's more words every day, and he's reaching out for stuff like toys and books.

I'm still doing that thing where I sometimes wake up a few minutes before he does, at night. How weird is that?

...corn!

1-2 Combination

The fatigue just slapped me in the face out of nowhere. When you've been this sleep-deprived for this long, you don't feel tired anymore, for the most part. It feels normal.

About the slap, though. It's like a bitchslap. And it tends to happen when I have shit to do. So I sit with shit piling up and stare. That's what I'm doing.

Naps are impossible the last two days. There are more important things to do, like talk. Everything must be discussed in detail. His dissertations are on subjects ranging from faces to toys, from loneliness to overcrowding. When he is not emphatically babbling in his own little language, he is gnawing hell out of his fists.

The other night, he put himself to sleep in his crib for the first time. I laid him there awake and he managed to wriggle out of his wrappings and gnaw himself to dreaming. It was a big moment.

There are new words every day.

He now attacks his kicky bouncy thing with the kind of annoyed despondency of an overeducated, single man in his mid-thirties in a cheap suit sitting in a cubicle farm. Dutifully, his legs kick; the lights go and the sounds chirp, but his hands ball up and stuff themselves into his mouth between yawns, his back arches. His entire disposition is so Office Space that I truly do feel bad for inserting him in the kicky-bouncy, but I do it anyway for the time it affords me. There's only so much you can do with a Baby Bjorn attached, excluding bending, peeing, folding clothing, cooking... you know, like everything I have on my to-do list.

So I'm teaching him about the futility of life. The good part, even if it is evil, is that when I take the offending toy bar away, he grins at me with such joy and relief, like a cat who, when sprayed with the water bottle, runs to the spray-er for protection.

He figured out his kicky bouncy thing, where the lights flash and things make noise when he kicks. He might have figured it out before this, but I have been a bad, no-battery-having mother.

So I set it up, and he just stared at it awhile, then looked at the ceiling. Then, quite by accident, he kicked and the thing sang at him. Startled, he watched it for awhile, then looked away again when it didn't make any more noise. Again, by accident, he kicked and the thing reacted and he gasped.

When he finally figured out that he was the one making it do things, he shrieked. It was a very big eureka! moment. Soon after that, he had all new words to go along with his feelings, which he expresses these days very loudly. One of them is definitely "Ah-Goo."

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Also, here he is with a frog on his belly.