And Griffin is seven month’s old today! Yesterday we went down to South Wayne to spend the day with my family. Griffin is very interested in his cousins, you can tell he wishes he could already run around and play with them. Next year at Christmas there will be two new cousins! Very nice to see Chantel and Carrie both starting to look a little pregnant.

Today we had snow that stuck to the ground for the first time this year, so it’s a beautiful white Christmas out there. We’re having a lazy day sitting and playing in the middle of lots of wrapping paper and boxes.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Today I was doing some last minute shopping at Happy Bambino and ran into Arlinda. Arlinda was one of the people who helped us right after Griffin was born. She’s a lactation consultant at Meriter who helped us with pumping that first night and who called us afterwards to follow up and see how we were doing. She gave us advice like to have lots of skin-to-skin contact with Griffin and to take him to bed with us for 24 hours. I was surprised and happy to hear this from someone at the hospital. Arlinda also teaches an infant massage class we took when Griffin was a few months old. Now she’s teaching classes at Happy Bambino, too.

It was really nice to see her again and catch up. We talked a little bit about parenting when she raised her son. She said back then you couldn’t tell anybody you were co-sleeping or baby wearing and she talked about how powerful it is that we have such a strong community now. We are very lucky to be in Madison and to know the group of parents that we do. We’re also very lucky that there are people like Arlinda who paved the way for us. Even now she’s kind of like a guardian angel for babies, teaching parents how to read their cues and take good care of them.

I am very grateful for all these wonderful people we’ve met since Griffin was born.

Griffin got his first tooth today, the bottom left one! It’s just barely poking through, I noticed it when he was chewing on one of my fingers and something felt scratchy. We’ll try to get a picture of it tonight when Julian comes home.

This weekend there were two big milestones for Julian and Griffin. On Friday Julian stayed home with Griffin and I went into Madison to go Christmas shopping. It took longer than I thought so I was gone for almost five hours, the longest I’ve ever been away from him. I was anxious about being gone for so long and engorged and uncomfortable by the time I got home but Julian and Griffin were fine. Griffin took two bottles of thawed breast milk from Julian and they had a great day together.

Then Friday night Griffin didn’t sleep much so on Saturday I was very tired. And Julian took Griffin grocery shopping, just the two of them! Julian said after a few miles Griffin was anxiously looking at him in the mirror like “I’ve been kidnapped!” and he almost turned around but then Griffin relaxed and they had a great shopping experience.

I knew Julian would be an amazing father, and he is. Watching him play with Griffin sometimes I wish I could freeze time and just stay here, the three of us, like we are now. This past year has involved some of the hardest but also some of the most intensely happy moments of our lives.

I knew Julian would be an amazing father, but I also marvel at all the other great fathers we know. I think expectations have changed a lot for fathers in our generation. I don’t know any men who are having children and don’t expect to be changing diapers. But most of the guys we know go beyond the basic expectations. My cousin’s husband carefully picked out the book he’s reading to their baby in the womb. My sister and brother-in-law are staggering their family leave time so she’ll stay home with the baby the first three months and he’ll stay home the next three months. One of our friends had a work situation where he got to stay home with their baby for the first five months and he cried when he had to go back to work and leave her.

I think these new expectations are lucky for the moms and lucky for the babies, but lucky for the fathers too. How sad it would be to miss out on such an incredible experience.

A person close to me has been insisting we need to “let” Griffin cry-it-out in order for him to sleep better. Ironically I was awake for hours last night upset about the ensuing conversation.

This is something I feel strongly about and I’m still riled up from the conversation so I’ll be on a soapbox for the rest of this post.

Many years ago Julian and I had a roommate who had spent several years in Africa. We both remember her telling us that babies in Africa don’t cry. This isn’t something she was told, it’s something she noticed. Babies everywhere, none of them crying. Her theory was that it was because in Africa babies are held all the time and this made sense to us. I’ve since seen studies that show that her observation was accurate, in the US pediatricians measure babies’ crying in hours per day while anthropologists in other countries measure it in minutes per day.

Julian and I are doing attachment parenting. We aren’t doing this because we read it in a book, it’s what what we were planning to do before we knew there was a name for it. This is the best description I’ve seen of attachment parenting:

Attachment parenting, aka instinctive parenting, recognizes that children are dependent by design and that their eventual independence depends on a foundation of security, trust, empathy, and respect. This requires AP parents to respond promptly and compassionately to their children’s cries and other communications. Attachment parenting may include breastfeeding on demand, responding promptly to your baby’s cries, and welcoming your baby into your bed.

For me the most important, critical part of this is that you don’t “let” a baby cry without trying to help. Especially in the early months there are times the baby will cry and you can’t figure out what to do about it, but you at least need to hold them and try to comfort them. It’s all they’ve got to communicate with you.

The thing is that crying-it-out works, and there are lots of experts making lots of money telling parents to do this. It works by making the baby give up. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to back this up, it creates a psychological condition called “learned helplessness” in babies, and babies that are left to cry don’t grow as well and can end up under medical care for “failure to thrive”. Beyond the science, though, it goes against all your instincts to not respond when your baby is crying.

Attachment goes both directions – you want your baby to feel attached to and trust you but also you need to learn to understand your baby’s cues. If you tune out the baby’s crying it’s harder to do this. I recently heard about some parents who thought they just had a fussy baby and left her to cry-it-out only to find out later that she had such severe reflux that she needed surgery to repair her esophagus. They didn’t realize because they just ignored her crying.

One comment we get all the time is that Griffin is such a happy baby. Even the person insisting we should “let” him cry-it-out says he’s the happiest baby she’s ever known. I don’t think this is a coincidence. A friend of ours goes to two mother’s groups, one near where she lives and one at the the birth center. She was telling me she didn’t like going to the one near her house because the babies are always crying. Which got us thinking – the mother’s group at the birth center has up to thirty babies and we’re there for an hour and a half every Thursday. All of the parents there practice attachment parenting. And the babies don’t cry. They nurse, they sleep, they look around, the older ones play. And we had just taken this for granted.

So anyway, yes, I think I could get Griffin to sleep through the night by letting him cry-it-out. But it would be at the expense of his happiness and it would betray the trust he has in me. And if that’s the price I don’t care if he doesn’t sleep until college.

Last week at the birth center we all were asked to think of a Christmas memory. When I was growing up my parents were very generous every Christmas. Every year the four of us would sneak downstairs in the early morning and every year we were amazed at all the presents.

But when I think of a Christmas memory I can’t remember a single present we ever got. What I remember is thousands of glass jugs. My dad is a glazier, he works on everything from car windshields to house windows to stained glass. Every year for at least a month before Christmas he would stay up until all hours of the night making thousands of glass jugs cut down the middle with a wood divider for the Swiss Colony. I think they used them for some kind of gift package. It’s only now as an adult that I can make the connection between all those late nights and glass jugs and the presents we would get every Christmas. I’ll have to remember to thank him this year.

I hope we can do the same thing for Griffin. Not necessarily give him tons of presents, but leave him with the absolute certainty that he is loved.

Kathy took pictures of the whole family this weekend, here’s one I really like of Griffin:

This week Griffin:

• Continues in his unrequited love of the cats.
• Wants to crawl, from sitting he lunges forward onto his stomach and then rolls to the right. The end result it that he moves around kind of like a knight in chess.
• Is really, really close to getting teeth (I think). He has swollen lumps where his bottom two teeth will be.
• Has a bit of a cold. We took him in to the doctor’s office yesterday because he sounded rattle-y but it hasn’t spread to his lungs.
• Laughs and laughs if I sing “How much is that doggy in the window” to him.

There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it.
- Chinese Proverb

We took Griffin to Next Generation today for his first haircut. Normally I’ll cut his hair but since I have no clue how to do it we thought it’d be good to have a professional do it the first time. It turned out cute, we didn’t get a lot taken off so it just looks neater.

The most common comment we get about Griffin’s appearance is “What crazy hair!”. He does have crazy hair, it stands straight up in back like a half-mohawk. He was born with a full head of dark hair that’s been getting more reddish as he gets older.

Another comment we get a lot is “He doesn’t look like a baby!” or “He looks like a kid already!”. I think this is because of the full head of hair, and also he has really defined eyebrows.

Finally a lot of people ask us “What color are those eyes?”. They’re an amazing blend of brown and blue. We expect that they’ll turn brown eventually, Julian commented one time that they’ll have to turn because “No human has eyes that color”. I was trying to think what they remind me of and finally got it, the mix of colors makes them look like the pictures of earth taken from space. We tried to take a picture to document the color and this was the best one we got:

Griffin has his dad’s dimples and cleft chin. He has my lips, when he was born we thought that was the only thing he got from me. Although Julian’s mom thinks he looks more like me than Julian, she said when Julian was little he was so dark he looked like a little Arabian boy. Even though Griffin isn’t that dark I’m always marveling at how tan his skin is, when he’s older he won’t have to hide from the sun like I do.

One of the first things we noticed about Griffin was that compared to the rest of him he has really big hands and feet. He still does, we have to get size 12-18 month socks and shoes for him. Sometimes I tease him that either he’s going to be really tall or he’s just going to be short with big feet.

And yeah, we think he’s gorgeous.