Faces of Zeph

At five weeks old, last week Zephyr started making eye contact. Not just the odd cross-eyed drive-by, he actually looks at us and reacts, with adorable results. He smiles and laughs, too - a stuttered cackle that follows a rapid panting. His smiles aren't just for passing gas anymore, and he has an excellent sense of humor. These days he's thoroughly rapt with his friend The Light (any lamp, window or television) or his friends The Birds (the black-brown silhouettes of birds in flight that I painted across our sloped, attic bedroom ceiling). His friends The Owls (his mobile of heather-blue and brown raptors) also crack him up, but I'm leery of calling The Owls out separately from The Birds lest he think that owls are not birds. He also grins at the mounted insects that hang on the wall above the TV room couch. A budding Attenborough, he is.

That's not to say he's all smiles, all the time. Oh, no. His sleeping and eating schedules are slow to evolve, and though he occasionally makes it four hours between feedings (at night, this is a blessing), he usually sticks with his clockwork three hours and fuss for boobies. You can set your watch to it. And instead of sleeping on and off all day, now he will often only take one good, long nap and wake the minute we're about to sit down to dinner. Besides that, he just nurses every hour and falls asleep when I try to burp him. If I try to put him down in his crib at this point, he wakes after ten minutes or so. Repeat ad nauseum. Some days, though, I get lucky and he just needs to recharge his little battery, in which case I might be afforded enough quiet time to say, get a latte, finish making birth announcements, or go visit our friends Tanya and Sigga.

His birth announcements were fun to make. I had the negatives from Justine's photos converted to a CD of jpgs, and used a few of my own photos, and came up with a couple options that I really like. Here are a couple of my favorite of Justine's portraits of Zephyr:

Look at that tiny hand and chubby arm. Couldn't you just eat him up? He is such a handsome little baby! I know everyone thinks that about their baby, but I'm pretty sure mine really is particularly and uniquely attractive. I can't believe how much he's grown in the four weeks between these photos and the ones in the collage at the top of this post. He's been consistently putting on about 10% of his body weight every week, and now he's already up to about 14 pounds.

His belly button is also pretty well healed up. Enough so, anyways, that we gave him his first real bath in the sink (instead of just a sponge bath). Here's Zephyr, looking uncertain in fluorescent light (hence the poor white balance and unfortunate skin tone of the photos) and our tiny bathroom sink:

I love that last photo where he's holding onto my thumb for moral support. Once his little legs kick reflexively into the warm water, he gets this look on his face. That "oh, this is really something - this is a Thing" look. But when we immerse him in the soft suds, he looks like he's just not sure what to make of everything, and he wears this adorable little furrow on his brow. Then we pull him out to dry him off, and the rapid temperature change makes him pee all over the place. Yay!

He looks so much like Scott right now. It's wonderful (especially wonderful for reassuring Scott, whom I suspect is getting a bit frustrated with Zephyr's recent unwillingness or inability to be comforted by him). We have a picture of Scott being held by his dad at around this age, and I plan to recreate the image with Scott holding Oosch to make a diptych. Should be a fun project - I am completely in love with the subject matter.