Open Letter: 4 months, 2 weeks and 1 day
Dear Avery,
You have truly come alive developmentally this month. Everyday you amaze your daddy, your lola and me with new milestones you are meeting. It seems to all have come from nowhere! It seems just like yesterday when the only movement you made was turn your head towards your bottle’s nipple. Occasionally, you also threw in a slight kick here and there. But now, you are doing all sorts of cool things.
Just last weekend, you amazed your lola by lifting your upper body up from a 45 degree position. You also have started laughing out loud, especially when I play peek-a-boo with you. And just yesterday morning, you rolled over on to your stomach.
And let’s not forget about your communication skills. You are quite the chatterbox, lil’ man, just like your momma! The only time you’re not blabbing is when you’re asleep.
Aside from meeting your developmental milestones, you are also physically right on track. Well, sort of. At your doctor’s appointment yesterday, Dr. Dilloway said that you were in the 97th percentile for height and 92nd percentile for weight.
For full-term babies!
Which means that you are off the charts for preemies!
I mean, I guess that’s ok, right? Your daddy is tall afterall, so are both your paternal grandparents and your paternal uncles. I just have this crazy fear that you are big for your age not because of genes, but because of some pituitary gland-related disorder.
And you’ll grow and grow and grow, eventually turning into a giant.
And you’ll be famous not because you were the first black and filipino president, but because you surpassed this dude as the tallest man to have ever lived.
Yeah, so now you know. Your momma tends to worry incessantly. About everything. I also expect the very worst to happen most of the time. This is why I never learned to swim (fear of drowning), or ice skate (fear that I’d fall and crack my skull open), or do drugs (fear that I try something once and be addicted forever) among many, many things.
This is also why I’ve already told your daddy that we cannot allow you to play in the woods out back (ticks = lyme disease) or jump around on a trampoline (C2 fracture = quadraplegia) or drive a car until they make one that is accident-proof or I die, whichever comes first.
In all seriousness though, I’m glad that being born 6 weeks early does not seem to have affected you at all. I hope that you continue to develop physically, mentally and emotionally as close to normal as possible.
Love,
Mommy