caleb grows

Caleb now weighs 3.59 kg's - nearly 100 grams above his birth weight, so he is growing fast... he has also grown a cm in height. I have now bought a webcam so I can check up on him and his mom from work :) He is a little angel, sleeping for 5 hours straight (which is great, the average for other babies seems to be between 2 and 3 hours!) and only crying when he's really upset - so we're tired, but not insane. God just keeps on giving us blessing after blessing! I never thought I'd be happy to bounce a baby around the house at 3am... and apart from one sense-of-humour failure incident I seem to be handling things mentally too, and seeing him happily checking out his new world when he's content is wonderful and makes everything worthwhile. There is no way he is simply a bundle of automatic pre-programmed responses - he is obviously curious, an intelligent little human being. This is the first time I wish I lived close enough to work to make a lunchtime visit home.

According to the hospital literature (which I spent some time thinking about - I mean we can surely never really know how a newborn perceives the world), Caleb has no concept of persistence - once he can no longer sense something, it doesn't exist to him. He also hasn't integrated his senses yet - linked them up - so he doesn't know that something he can see or hear can also be touched for example (which explains why he doesn't yet turn his head to look at something he can hear). Still, he definitely tracks bright objects moved close in front of his face - and seems to track our eyes when we look at him close-up (as well as my tongue when I stick it out and wiggle it from side to side :-) He also seems to be deliberately trying to reach for objects sometimes - and he tries to lift his hands up when exposed to a bright light as if to cover his face. He also dreams - lots! I wonder what he dreams about...

The Mind of a Newborn
Excerpt from The Mind of Your Newborn Baby
by David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D.

Also The Baby's World (Lois Barclay Murphy and Colleen T. Small, Edited from the Zero to Three Journal, December 1989) is fascinating.