Up until a few days ago, there wasn’t much of a personality in Leo. Communication was limited to crying, and we were only able to read his needs from his little whines and squeaks, but then….it happened. We got a real smile, and supposedly a week ahead of the earliest expected time. The smile looks a bit wonky, but it is definitely a smile. He opens his mouth really wide, looks you in the eyes, and opens his eyes. Our reaction was to say “hi!”, make high pitched noises for him, and laugh quite a bit.
There had been a few flukes before that, but he is repeating his Leo-smile multiple times and getting reactions from us.
He’s getting slightly better at sticking his own hands in his mouth when he is hungry. In previous weeks, his arms were still on auto-pilot and moved randomly. His fingers are moving more as a group as well.

In terms of personality, there isn’t really much going on in his head at the moment, but it has become very clear that he is attracted to a few points in Yuki’s folks’ house which have high contrast. Supposedly, newborns aren’t too good at viewing colors, or even focusing on anything during the early weeks. As their eyes get better, they are drawn to things that exhibit high contrast, and Leo’s favorite things to stare at are the corner of a door frame, and a sliding paper door. He really, really enjoys looking at these two places. He enjoys other windows, but the two aforementioned spots are certainly his favorite.

I would like to change topics and talk about shit for a little bit. He started out making what looked like stone-ground mustard, which was digested milk mixed with bits of digested amniotic fluid which turned into little specs of black.
He is now at keema curry, and has absolutely loaded his diapers on a few occasions. Thank God for the tensile strength provided by Pampers!
Also, I cannot fathom using cloth diapers. These Pampers diapers change color when wet, have some sort of elastic built into them, and use something similar to velcro to fasten them! They are amaaaazing.
Oh, so back to shit; after doing some reading on how to handle a gassy baby, I saw a recommendation of brining baby’s feet up to his/her chest. I tried it out and Leo blasted like a little whoopie cushion. He calmed down after we let a bit of air out.

Leo’s coming to stay with us from Saturday, June 6th! I won’t have as much room to walk him around and point things out, but I am looking forward to having him around. I am trying to drive home a small set of words based off of the needs that we have encountered so far. These words are “food”, “wait/can you wait?”, “mama”, “Leo”, “light”, “poopoo”, “peepee”, “feel better”, and “hands”. I don’t think he is really retaining any of it, but hopefully we can reach a point where we say “food” and he calms down.