Faeces and Faces

I mentioned in a previous post the many faces of Max. There were colours and metals. They continue to amuse and baffle. They continue to make my life a mystery and a wonderful rainbow of emotions, colours and noises. We are trying to learn what each one means, the nuance of each and whether its long term effects are serious. Are we damaging his ability to perform higher maths by allowing that slightly constipated look to remain a moment or two longer? Are we pandering to his inner manipulator and allowing him run amok?

Well, the various books that we have read say that you can't spoil the little fellow yet. So we are just letting him do his thing. We are trying not to fix the weird looks, we are just trying to decipher them. It is hard not to want to stop him crying. But when the trinity of solutions has been completed; feeding, changing and burping, and he is still crying or making another crazy face then we learn the benefit of patience. There is nothing else we can really do. We can love him and squeeze him and hold him and rock him. It might work but he is more than likely going to make a new face and wait for a few minutes and start crying again.

It does appear that a two and a half week old's method of dealing with the millions of developments in its brain, body and all around it, is to cry. We have just got to get used to it. Apparently I used to cry for three hours each evening when I was his age, like father, like son. We will get used to it, we will get used to it, we will get used to it - do you think if I say it often enough it will happen?

Just a quick side-bar. Max's hands are a perfect compliment to his faces. They rest either side of his head when he is asleep, they fly out from his body when he is startled. There is a mix of hand in and hand out when he is doing anything else. It's like semaphore. It's like he is signaling to passing ships or planes that his parents aren't really treating him all that well and haven't worked out what his faces mean yet!

So he is a bit of a crier and a bit of a mystery, that's fine, we'll deal with that. Besides we have the comic relief of his nappies to keep us amused. I wrote before about his peeing and how funny that is. We have nailed that issue (it was getting boring). The solution is to use a piece of already dirty clothes as a pee absorber - full credit to forthelongrun for this! So where now is the comic relief? As the title suggests it's in the fecal matter. I never imagined that something so clearly based on an homogeneous input could have such a panoply of output conditions. Forty shades of dirty green, fifty shades of mucky brown and textures ranging from nutty surprise to smooth hi-gloss finish. The nappies are a god-send. They absorb everything and the remainder can easily be scooped up by the cotton balls. The cotton balls, by the way, stay together better when wiped in the same direction. What glorious systems inside the little fellow's gut convert lovely white milk into slurry coloured crazy glue? Well Lord bless those processes because they make me look forward to opening the nappy fasteners so that I can grin and grimace in equal measure.

Then after the nappy is changed, after the clothes are back on, when his eyes are closed and he is gently snoring. When the crying is over and when his mother is happy, then he is at his most beautiful. He is beautiful when he is crying but it is a terrible beauty.