His name is Leo.
He was 3128 grams at birth.
He was 50cm at birth.
His eyes were very dark blue, but are changing weekly. We’ll know the final color around a year from now.
Newborns are an interesting creature. He’s human, so he is learning and adapting quickly, but at the same time, he is incapable of expression beyond expressing discomfort and does not react to much of anything.
Significant changes;
He can bring his hands to his mouth on accident now.
He is capable of focusing his eyes on things.
His goddam titan legs can push him all over the place when he is freaking out, which is about 2% of his existence at the moment.
Little mullet action happening in the back. He is getting some hair in, but still no eyebrows that are visible by the human eye. They may exist at the molecular level.
Surprising points;
The amount of power in his legs! He can rotate himself all over the place or push his body up if it is on an incline. He typically only does this when he is crying.
How oblivious he is to most things. Words don’t make sense to him yet, and I have been doing an admirable effort to do some Pavlovian training. I have said “wait” and “food” a few hundred times by now, but to no effect. He does seem to associate being lowered to a certain pillow with feeding time though.
He can be tricked! Sometimes it gets really annoying when you are trying to change his diaper and he is kicking all over the damn place. He always comes so close to planting his foot in his own “stone ground mustard” that I typically take action by tricking him. I put some of his clothes into his mouth to calm him down because he thinks it is food.
His eye color is not definite until he is 1 year old, but it may be something between blue and gray. This excites me, because I was under the impression that blue eyes were like red hair, and genetically lost out to anything darker every time.
His poop looks like ground mustard and he smells like buttered popcorn. In fact, I ran into an ex-coworker who jumped ship and went to the company that I jumped ship and went to, and he laughed at the poop situation and simply said “buttered popcorn”. He believes that newborns are nothing more than butter factories – they only ferment the milk that is given to them.
I am rather pleased that the poo isn’t smelly. Another awesome ex-coworker described the smell of child poo after they are eating solid foods as being “Satan’s taint after eating a[n Indian meal]”…..Only the dead may know peace from such stench.
The name Leo reflects the birth month of my sister, my stepbrother, and my sister’s boyfriend. This was a delightful realization when it was pointed out. We looked into Leo as a name early on because it satisfied a semi-tranditional requirement of the sound “oh” or “yu” being in the name, but it also was a recommendation from family. Other names we were looking at were “Sora” (pretty cool), “Masshu” (Japanese version of Matthew), “Ryuho” (pretty cool), and Liam (pretty cool).
We actually tried Liam out for a day after thinking that Leo didn’t fit. Yuki heard that all of the nurses were calling Little Guy Leo, Leo-Kun, and Leo-Chin, and felt that it fit. It does now. It’s weird that how you use a name long enough and it sounds correct. We had a weird transition away from Clumpo after calling the little clump of cells “Clumpo” all the way up until contractions started.
So, little Leo’s name in Japanese looks like 理煌, which combines characters which mean “logic/justice” and “gleaming, glittering”.
He is now capable of sleeping for more than 2 hours at a time. I mean, when I first showed up during Golden Week to help out, he was waking up and blasting shit all over the place constantly. I would jerk away in a retarded stupor and try to figure out what was wrong, and more than once stomped on something important, even crushing Yuki’s foot on one occasion.
It would always be in the pattern of “hunger”, “diaper change”, “general malaise”.
But now, he is sleeping after gorging himself and allowing his parents to get adequate rest required to take care of him. Holy Jesus, Mary in Heaven, thank you for allowing this little creature to grant us 4 hours of respite throughout this trying period.
I am really looking forward to the steady improvements that he exhibits. He is an unprogrammed human at the moment, and it is Yuki’s and my job to make sure that he is well cared for, but also has the appropriate amount of stimulus to keep him growing and improving.
It’s difficult caring for something that has no way of showing thanks. Investing in something so thankless is a weird experience, but I know that once we hit the 1.5 month mark, we are going to start to see actual smiles that represent actual emotion (he smiles now, but it is completely random. It still makes us happy though).
I am thinking that language queues are going to be pretty easy. I have no qualms talking at him, after working at the Berlitz English school for so long, talking *at* people is a walk in the park. Repetition is no big deal either, and I can repeat the same word to him until he looks away in disgust, and then continue on for a few more minutes.