Eats, Sleeps and Grows

When she was much younger B and I used to say about N that it seemed you could just sit her down and put food in front of her and she would eat all day.  There were times when it really seemed like that.  Provided it was something she liked, which was basically everything except strawberries (strange girl), she would just munch and munch and munch and never be filled.  This was an attitude that I was very familiar with seeing as it is the way I feel most of the time as well. 

It turns out, whatever gene is responsible for my constant hunger and N’s ability to eat and eat is definitely not recessive.  S has been alive for almost 13 weeks now and his personality is very clearly demarcated already.  He likes faces, and chatting, and more faces, and having his clothes taken off, as long as it is by arms that are connected to a face somehow.  He is particularly fond of his own reflection, which is probably a by-product of the joy he extracts from people’s faces.  But above and beyond all this he enjoys eating.  The little flashes of ecstasy that wash over his face when he realises that he is going to be fed are extraordinary.

This delight in feeding has had certain side-effects, the main one being a startling and extended growth spurt.  At birth S was a perfectly respectable 52cm.  Not massive but around the top 25% on the chart that is given out, (the list of things that I am surprised that babies come with extends to hats and books, hats I can understand, very little hair on your average baby and they have this tendency to get a bit chilly but a book, really?  S seems to be a pretty average baby and I keep trying to get him to look at it but all he wants to do with the book is eat it, which I’m fairly confident isn’t recommended, if only there was a little red book to tell you these things.) Back to where we were.  S was around the 75^th centile in terms of his length when he was born, but by around week six that figure had gone all the way up to the 98^th centile.  Though he is just entering his third month he is already busting out the bottom of his 3-6 month sleep suits.

I understand that baby eats and grows is hardly the sort of discovery that is going to get me published in the Lancet or Science magazine, but it has led to one of the child’s more enduring nicknames.  Coined by his mother, S is known affectionately around our house as Voratio, (pronounced, as you would expect, like Horatio) a name which he continues to live up to on a daily basis.  It’s just a shame basketball isn’t a bigger sport in this country as I think S has his sights set on heights normally only attained by the very tallest of giraffes.  As they say, ‘shoot for the stars’ now how do you explain metaphor to a 3 month old?