Surreal

My life is so weird.

On Wednesday, I fed the baby 600 calories of clotted cream (pure fat) plus 8 ounces of formula, 160 of fruit and cream, 200 calories of french toast with butter and cream, and some snacks like bananas in between. So that's... about 1,200 calories, mostly from fat. And he's still growing at about 4 ounces a week, hanging out around 17 lbs still, just a little over his rate when he was exclusively breastfed. Skinny, skinny baby.

I was watching some of the Babies documentary with B ("BABY!! BABY!!"). I can't wait until he can go to school and play with the other kids. I also got such a pang - longing? an accepting bittersweetness? something only the Germans can name? - whenever we cut back to the chubby Namibian baby. What would it be like to just feed the baby and have it be easy, then watch the baby grow and have that be easy, too? Because I am crazy grateful for what I have, but I hear that there is a whole other world out there.

Which adds to how goddamned surreal my life is. B has memorized all the words in his 'My Little Word' books - he's at over 350 words he can find, even if he needs to flip to the page in the book - and he's picking up new vocabulary and concepts all the time. His OT says she's testing him at a 2 to 3 year old level for cognitive skills now. He's getting bored again (dun-dun-DUN!). And since a bored baby is a baby who will not eat, I had to run out for a plastic photo album to fill with new words and pictures. He's a baby workaholic, rarely still, always happy. We're just trying to keep up.

My favorite book, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, features a mom trying to keep ahead of her brilliant son. I doubt B will be reading the Iliad in the original Greek at 5 years old, but I feel a surprising amount of empathy for her whenever she responds to criticism from strangers with, "I never meant for this to happen."

MPRE tomorrow, videos of Crazy Baby to come.