That Big Head Must be Good for Something

I thought I would keep a private diary about my baby son, and I failed utterly, so here I am again, keeping track of him on the web.

I started moving web material about him to the private diary, so I guess this is good enough.

He is past three months now. We are told he is supposed to double in size between the day of his birth and the four-month mark, and he is on track. He can’t fall short by much because he is so close already.

He is fat. He now has two baby rings on each arm. His head, which was not small to begin with, seems to be as wide as it is high.

He is developing very quickly. He is remarkably strong. I used to think babies were like rag dolls full of suet, but he feels like there is spring steel under the fat.

Every morning, I lift him up by his hands. I saw a doctor do this, and he said my son had four-month strength at one month, so I figured I should keep doing it to keep him strong. I lift him almost to a sitting position, and then I lower him again, and I push his arms back down against his chest so he gets resistance on the down stroke.

His arms used to straighten as I did this because it was hard work for him, but now he’s so strong, he doesn’t notice the strain at all. He keeps his arms mostly folded on the way up, effortlessly, for 10 repetitions. I find it a little shocking.

He loves being lifted by his ankles. The wife said to lift by his calves so I wouldn’t hurt his ankle joints, so that’s what I do now. It gives him a thrill.

I use this to distract him sometimes. When he’s whiny, I lift him up and let him hang upside down, and he giggles with joy.

He can’t get enough of math class. By “math class,” I mean I hold my hand out in front of him and show him numbers while saying their names. I’ve mentioned it before. I make a circle for zero, I extend a finger for one, and so on, up to 5. This way, he gets exposure to 6 numbers, which is the best I can do with human hands.

When I started doing it, I wondered if it would make an impression on him. It certainly has. He stares at my hand and grins, entranced. It consumes him. Truthfully, it can get tiresome. I can go for pretty long sessions with no decrease in his interest. I didn’t realize a baby could focus attention on anything for 10 minutes or more.

I also show him the numbers in random order. Seems like a good idea. My wife gives him math class, too.

We got him some plastic letters and numbers, and we will be showing them to him in a day or two.

Sometimes he looks so mature it’s hard to believe. When I hold him to feed him, he looks like a smart, dignified, attentive little boy. Like he has shown up to join me for an important job for which he is well prepared.

He has started to hold his bottle now. Sometimes he holds it for quite a while. He often needs help, though.

Pooping is less traumatic for him than ever. Sometimes he still cries, but generally, he just growls and shoves it out. Unfortunately, he likes doing this while feeding or, worse, while sitting by the table in his swing while we feed.

He is now interested in solid food. He stares at it while we eat. If web sources are right, he might take some at the beginning of his fourth month. That will be a bittersweet milestone. Bitter, because solid food will make his poop stink and take all the humor out of dealing with diapers.

It has gotten harder to take candid pictures of him because he is interested in phones. Sometimes he’ll start grinning and giggling in a way that would make for a great picture, but when I take the phone out, he turns serious instantly, staring with great intensity.

He still has a lot of blowouts. The other day, he blew out before I got up. I showered and changed him. I fed him as soon as I changed him. He had a blowout while I was feeding him.

He liked lying on his belly when he was younger, but my wife got the idea that it would hurt him, so she quit laying him on his stomach. This appears to have set him back. We started doing it again, and for several weeks he screamed like he was on a hot stove, and he was no longer able to hold himself up well. Now we make him deal with it, and he is holding his head up very well and complaining much less. I put him on a firm surface when he’s on his belly so he can get traction to work on crawling.

The back of his head is flat, and it worried his mother, but the back of my head is flat, too, and I slept on my stomach a lot. I think most people’s heads are flat in the back. I’m not deformed or anything. My head is about like other people’s, only bigger. My wife thinks he has a flat area on one side, but the web says these things correct themselves fairly well eventually. And like I told her, we can always buy him a hat.

I think he has a great personality. He may be a little high-strung, which is what every parent who has a brat says, but he seems to try to behave. He soothes himself by sucking his fingers. As I have noted before, he very clearly tries not to cry. I think he prefers to be happy, which is definitely not true of everyone. We all know a lot of people who aren’t happy unless they’re upset and sharing their misery.

Crying is a way to manipulate others, so many people would much rather cry than calm down. They know that if they stop screeching, people will be less motivated to do what they want. I think it’s wonderful that my son doesn’t enjoy crying.

Interacting with him gets more rewarding all the time. It’s a blast. Sometimes he seems noticeably more advanced than he was the day before. He recognizes us from across rooms. He knows what a smile is, and he reciprocates. My wife says he can tell what kind of mood she’s in. I guess she would be more sensitive to that, since I’m nearly always in the same mood.

He’s very jolly when I play with him. He loves being rolled and tossed around. He loves playing with my fingers. He even likes having his cheeks pinched gently. He lights up when I’m with him, so now I miss him more when he’s not in the room. Back when he spent most of his time screaming, there was somewhat more duty and somewhat less enthusiasm in my heart when I went to spend time with him. Now I live having him around just for the fun.

As I told my wife, the peaceful, productive intervals between crying fits, diaper changing, and feeding are getting longer and longer.

He still gets very, very excited when we’re playing. This is something I can’t explain. There is some quality I have that allows me to connect with other creatures and get into their bubbles, like we have everything in common. They get excited. It’s like we’re caught up in a strange, private celebration.

It happens with animals. It happens with people. Now it’s happening with my son.

I don’t do it all the time, and it doesn’t work universally, but it’s real. My wife has seen it many times. I do it with her, now that I think about it.

Maybe it’s rooted in the way I have been rejected. I have an instinctive desire to show other creatures they’re accepted and understood.

It doesn’t mean I’m nice all the time or to everyone, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

I have certainly rejected a lot of people.

He is still very pink. I don’t know what kind of white genes I have, but they must be super strong white privilege genes, because he is not nearly as dark as most biracial kids. His hair is a very dark brown with no curls. His eyes are a strange color between brown and blue. He isn’t as dark as most Cubans.

I don’t know what’s happening with the hair. My hair is not far from straight, but when I was his age, it was curly. His mom’s hair is obviously kinky. Where did his straight hair come from?

His palms and the soles of his feet are considerably brighter than the rest of him, so his mom’s genes didn’t just roll over and play dead.

We are starting to look into ways to seat him at the kitchen table. High chairs are standard, but some people prefer portable boosters that can be attached to dining chairs. We are also going to have to get him a playpen, because he will be ambulatory to one degree or other very soon.

I wonder what his capabilities will be. I have long wondered if “genius” just meant “smart kid whose parents started developing his brain and talents on time instead of waiting until it was too late.” Is it true? Can’t say. I know I’m not going to wait until my son’s potential is mostly gone to get him started on learning. Whether he turns out to be a genius or not, there is no reason why he shouldn’t speak 4 languages and sight-read at the piano when he’s 6, and he should be able to do calculus at 12. He should have his potential tapped, unlike the vast majority of American kids.

It’s clear to me that we teach high school sophomores things we should teach 4-year-olds.

I really, truly hated school. It was indescribably boring, and while I didn’t dislike other kids, I found it frustrating that a lot of the other children couldn’t understand things I understood. Classes were necessarily retarded to the point where the least-capable students could keep up, so nothing ever challenged me except the climbing rope in phys. ed. class. My mom taught me to read when I was three, but other than that, my parents taught me nearly nothing. They thought teachers would do it. All I learned was to look forward to weekends and summers.

Cramming should not work. If a class really requires three months, it should not be possible to master it in three days prior to an exam. Because cramming works for smart people, it is clear that we are teaching many kids way too slowly.

Cramming worked for me in law school, which is supposed to be difficult. I always say I learned I could work hard all semester and usually get an A, or I could work really hard for three days and get a B. I chose to drink a lot, I had a great time, I graduated cum laude, and my average was 3.something. I knew summas, and I was smarter.

A physics student can’t do nothing for 11 weeks and then study hard and get a B on a test. Physics is hard, and less-gifted students aren’t around to slow everyone else down, the way they are in liberal arts and law classrooms. By the time you get to second-semester university physics, everyone around you is at least pretty smart.

Here’s a horror story. Someone taught me multiplication when I was in kindergarten. Not well, but I knew what it was, and I could have memorized my times tables. I can’t remember who taught me. It was in a classroom.

I was ready to do 4th-grade math, but no one cared. It was 4 years before my school taught me the times tables. During that time, should have been moving into algebra. I did as close to nothing as possible without getting in trouble, but when I took a test in the 6th grade, my ability level was still grade 11.5, so obviously, I could have been learning more during those dead years. The only kid who beat me was David Sedaka, the Jewish kid whose responsible parents made him study. He made 12.4. And he shouldn’t have been in retarded classes, either. There was no algebra at my elementary school, so I guess he was stuck. Maybe he had other classes at Hebrew school.

He’s probably a neurosurgeon now. And sight-reads.

It’s amazing that we raise kids who don’t speak at least 4 languages. A human being who isn’t smart can learn 10 languages and never be confused, and we pick languages up very, very fast when we’re small.

My son will not have his potential poured down the toilet like mine was, so while he may not be the next William Sidis, he will be much more capable than kids with the same potential and ineffective parents. He won’t say “liberry” and “I could care less.”

He’s going to read the Bible, and we will explain it to him. We will tell him about the Holy Spirit, and unless his free will prevents it, we will baptize him with the Spirit and teach him to speak in tongues. He will know he has to have at least two sessions with God every day. He will be taught that God is a person who knows him and loves him, and he will be shown how to spend time with God. Every revelation God has given us will be passed on to him. If he blows it, it will not be because his parents failed at their most important job.

I don’t know if I want him to be a genius, but I want him to be fully developed. I will be the first parent in my family since my great-grandparents, at least, who will make a responsible effort.