Current Population: Three

The Wonder Baby is nearly 8 months old. What should I say about him?

I suppose I should write about his personality.

He is possibly the funniest baby that ever lived. It seems like everything he does is funny, from screaming with joy for no apparent reason to breaking wind in my face when I’m trying to bond with him.

He puts everything in his mouth. He really loves charging cables and TV remotes. He puts live charging cables in his mouth and sucks on them. I tell people that’s why he has so much energy. I just ordered a new remote because after he got done chewing on the old one, it didn’t work.

He loves people. He makes eye contact with anyone who talks to him, and he smiles and giggles at them. He trusts everyone.

Enjoy that while it lasts, my son.

He sleeps between us, and he wakes up before we do. He stares at me and waits for me to wake up. When I snore, he thinks I’m talking to him, and it makes him happy.

He has learned to reach over and scratch my shoulder to wake me up.

He finds my attention overwhelming. When I look at him and talk to him, he opens his mouth in a big, toothless smile, and his whole face lights up. He gets so excited, he has to turn away and bury his face in his mom’s shoulder.

At some point during the last month, he decided he wanted to stand, so he grabs things and pulls himself to his feet. He can’t walk yet, but he loves standing, and he will do it for long periods.

He crawls a lot, and he takes off suddenly, so if we’re both on the bed, I have to hold onto a leg or something to keep him from launching himself over the side like a depth charge. He has started crawling out of the bedroom and into the hall.

He holds his own bottles, and he holds his sippy cup and drinks water from it. He’s a big eater. It seems like his mom is shoveling food into him all the time.

He eats and drinks ferociously. He gets very agitated when his bottle doesn’t come immediately, and he screams and cries. Then when he gets what he wants, he sucks like he just crawled out of the desert.

When he poops, he growls like an angry Rottweiler. He likes to poop at the table, during meals. We can pretty much count on hearing that growl when we sit down to eat. He also likes to poop when he sees Dad.

He adores his mother. Sometimes he gets very upset because she has left the room. He will stand in his crib, facing the door, and yell until she returns.

He can’t stop scratching his crotch. I keep telling him we’re not Italian, but he does it anyway. When I change his diaper and put zinc oxide on his crotch, he shoves both hands into it and smears it on other parts of his body. I try to restrain his hands, but it’s impossible.

He pulls his mother’s hair. He thinks it’s wonderful. He especially likes pulling it while she’s trying to sleep.

He likes putting his mouth on his parents and making gross noises. He thinks this is fantastic.

He screams when he’s happy, but he also screams when he’s upset, so sometimes we have to try to figure out which it is. Overall, he is a very happy baby.

He is fascinated by everything. He is extremely aware of his surroundings. He looks around constantly. If he sees that something interests us, he wants it. This is why he likes chewing on remotes and phones. He has a rubber baby remote, but he has figured out that it’s not the real thing, so he doesn’t have much interest in it.

We took him to Costco, where they have enormous ceiling fans around 15 feet across. We noticed he was leaning back in the cart, looking up, and my wife realized he was staring at the fans.

He thinks Costco ice cream is the best.

He hasn’t spoken any English yet, but he babbles in his own language all day. He talks to us, to himself, to the windows…he is not picky.

He likes being tickled, and he loves it when we rub his belly with our heads. He pulls our hair and shrieks with joy. He never gets tired of it.

He’s still very strong. The other day while I was in bed, I felt someone grab my arm and move it. I thought it was my wife, but it was him. His hands are thick and muscular. He has what millennials call “core strength.” When you hold him horizontally, he is as straight as a board.

He loves the shower. His shower is our utility sink, which has a special plastic seat and a sprayer on a hose. He loves having poop hosed off of him and being washed with hand soap. He likes lapping at the hot water as it comes out of the sprayer.

He takes things apart, so he is definitely male. He unscrewed a knob and removed it from a drawer. He has learned to remove rubber caps from doorstops, so we had to get baby-safe doorstops so he wouldn’t choke on the caps.

He gets tons of affection. He is with his mother most of the time, and she sings songs to him and holds him over her head. The “Changing Baby’s Diaper” song. The “Baby and his Mommy, They Love Each Other” song. There are others. He can’t get enough of this stuff.

I had to tell his mother he would like having his hair combed. I didn’t realize she didn’t know. It’s easy to run a comb through most types of Caucasian hair, but it doesn’t work for most Africans, so they have no idea how it feels. When I was little, my mother used to sit me down and comb my hair slowly, and I loved it. Now my son loves it. His hair is curly, but a comb will go through it.

This is a great tip for black parents of biracial kids.

We squeeze him and rub him and toss him around. He likes being thrown on the bed over and over. He’s a rough-and-tumble kid. He prefers being thrown around to being handled gently.

He likes making music. He has a little keyboard, and he likes to bang on it and stare at it.

He has a crew of stuffed animals that keep him company when we’re out and about. Mr. Bear. Mrs. Cow. Mr. Polar, the other bear. We have three Mrs. Cows because they get dirty and because we don’t always know where they are.

Mrs. Cow was originally Mr. Cow, but my wife changed her name because she was concerned about the consequences of misgendering.

I don’t know if women who don’t raise their own kids know what they’re missing. My wife wants to be with her son all the time. They’re always busy together. She shows him numbers. She takes him for walks and shows him the trees and birds. She puts little outfits on him. She shows him to her relatives on video chats. She sings her songs to him. He always wants more; he seems to think they are parts of one creature. The thought of getting a job is abhorrent to her, understandably.

It seems wrong to me, too. I can’t believe any woman would prefer a job to her own children. I think we are doing things the correct way.

We pray with him. I tell him Yeshua is God, and I tell him Yeshua loves him even more than we do. I speak blessings over him in the name of Yeshua.

We don’t work on Sundays any more. Sundays are for God and family.

Whatever his future holds, he will be better off than his mother and I. My mother rarely took my sister and me to church, and she taught us almost nothing about Yeshua. My dad either slept late or played golf on Sundays, and I never saw him pray until he was 87 years old and dying from dementia. I grew up in a house that was empty of purpose and hope, and we were all miserable. My son lives in a house of love and God’s favor.

He will be walking at talking soon, and that means we will be able to tell him about God.