Full Term!

After almost two months, Ethan is finally a full-term baby.

The expected due date according to various cyclical “wheel” tools based on thousands of years of finely-tuned human evolution was May 21, but the obstetricians somehow came up with May 23. So for the next 2 to 3 years, we will have two answers for “how old is he?”, depending on what kind of doctor or person is asking the question:

• Age (chronological age): Age outside of the womb.
• Adjusted Age: Age from expected due date. Because Ethan was about 2 months early, his adjusted age will be less than his chronological age. So when he is 6 months old, he might appear to be 4 months old in various developmental metrics.

He was so tiny when he first came out. He seems so huge now, but he is actually simply within the normal range of weight for children at his gestational age:

The primitive reflexes on an infant can be interesting to play with. Here we have the “fencing reflex,” named for its resemblence to a fencing posture:

En Garde!

It is pretty crazy to read about the swimming reflex – somebody discovered that placing a baby face down in water would evoke paddling and kicking motions …

The current anti-SIDS thinking is that infants should sleep on their backs. However, supine sleep (sleeping on back) is associated with temporarily lower social- and motor-skills development (through 18 months). Infants are to be given “tummy time” to avoid developing into a socially-inept, fumbling person, and to practice learning to lift their heads and crawl around.

Today was Ethan’s first “tummy time”:

Ready!

Set!

No!

Ethan enjoyed his first Mother’s Day with his mom and our moms:

Ethan and Grandmother

Ethan and Mom

Ethan and Grandmother