The First Five Weeks

It is crazy how fast time can fly by.

It has been five weeks since Baby Rothfuss joyfully arrived in our lives. Five weeks! I am staring at the calendar and wondering how those weeks flew by so fast. It feels like just yesterday that my wife and I were taking a walk, discussing the personality of Baby Rothfuss. And today, as I sip my coffee and get ready for the day, I cannot believe how fast time has flown.

It is crazy being a first time parent, especially at an older age. As I close in on 40, Baby Rothfuss will still be learning to walk, talk, and be their sassy self. Well, that last one is just how I imagine their personality will be. Their astrology does point to them being quite sassy.

Now, at five weeks old, some of the things that awed or shocked me are starting to disappear. During the first two weeks, she had such jerky movements that it seemed like something out of a horror movie. The best way I could describe it was like watching an animated film with a low frame rate. Her movements reminded me of those horror movies where whatever is doing the chasing moves in strange, scattered motions.

And before everyone judges me for comparing Baby Rothfuss to a horror movie monster, it was only the way she moved, not the person she was. Though I do joke by calling them the Dark Lord, whose name, as we all know, could not be said.

Those jerky movements no longer exist. They move smoothly from side to side now. It is adorable, even though it is usually a sign they are about to be fussy. And even when they are fussy and you are scrambling to find any way to relax them, they are still adorable. Obviously, there is the panic that I am doing something wrong, or the feeling that I should understand what Baby Rothfuss is trying to communicate. But I keep reminding myself that Baby Rothfuss is just a baby, and their only language right now is crying.

Then there are their small, adorable smiles. I know that she cannot smile because she recognizes either me or my wife yet, but we can still believe those smiles are for us instead of natural reflexes.

Speaking of reflexes, when she first arrived in our world, she would move constantly in her sleep. Almost as though she was having a seizure. Being first time parents, it was alarming. We soon learned that it was perfectly normal as long as it happened while she was sleeping and not while she was awake. It was simply part of her nervous system developing.

That now seems to be fading as well. She lies almost perfectly still while sleeping, though she prefers to sleep on us instead of inside her bassinet.

When we first brought her home, I tried to make sure our day to day life continued as normal. We left the lights on, ran the vacuum, and did the dishes while she slept. Those sounds and settings now keep her up. Maybe at some point we quit doing those things and she fell into a rhythm of needing quiet, dark spaces to sleep. Or maybe, as she has grown, she has simply become more aware of everything around her.

And lastly, when she was uncomfortable or needed food, she used to build up her cry. There was a level zero cry, a level one, and so on until about level seven. Now she goes from zero to one hundred in a millisecond.

It is quite stressful to go from a happy, sleeping baby one second to a baby screaming as though they have not been fed for days the next. But maybe that is how Baby Rothfuss, otherwise known as the Dark Lord or Pumpkins, is training us. She has figured out that all those previous levels did not get her what she needed quickly enough, and starting at the highest level is much more effective.

It is crazy how fast all of these changes have come. I still feel like it was only yesterday that we were at the hospital and being introduced in person for the first time.

Or even before that, the day my wife took the test not once, not twice, but three times to make sure what we were seeing was true.

From the moment we learned she was in my wife’s belly to today, it feels like everything happened with the snap of a finger. And I am sure the years ahead will go by just as fast.

So I am going to treasure each moment with her. Even when she is crying, even when I cannot figure out what she needs, and even when she goes from zero to one hundred without warning, I know there will come a time when I look back at these days and wish they had lasted just a little longer.