Sometimes I want a little baby. A tiny little baby
to cradle in one arm and dress in newborn outfits. I want to marvel at
itsy-bitsy fingers and teensy toes. I want strangers to come up to me and ooooh
and ahhhh because it is not every day that you see someone so small. It’s not
that I’m still waiting for my first baby. I have two young boys. The thing is,
though, they were only tiny for a week. Jacob was 8 pounds when he was born and
Liam was 9 pounds. With each of them, I reveled in their sheer smallness at the
time of their births. I remember holding Jacob’s newborn foot up to my
husband’s size-13 shoe and feeling like it was almost impossible that a person
could be so small and still have all the necessary parts for life. When Liam
was born, I cupped his head in my hand.
Neither boy
was content to stay in the single digits of weight for long, though, and by
their first pediatric visits, only a week or so after birth, both were a solid
ten pounds. By the time they were two weeks old, newborn-size clothes fit like
sausage casings. Some babies have trouble learning to nurse. Not my boys. Both
latched on efficiently in the hospital and sucked their way to the top of the
size range for babies their age. When I took Jacob in for his six-week check
up, I undressed him and put him on the scale. His chubby arms and legs kicked
furiously and his belly quivered.
“What a
giant baby,” the nurse said as she tapped the scale to fourteen pounds. “What
kind of formula is he on?”
“No
formula. Just breast milk,” I said.
“This is
all breast milk?” She sat Jacob up and rolls of baby fat settled above his
diaper as she fastened it. “Usually breast fed babies are a little smaller than
average. He’s in the 99th percentile for both length and weight.”
Jacob kept
growing at this clip and was toddler-sized long before he could toddle. Since
he didn’t take his first steps until he was almost 15 months old, and didn’t
grow a full head of hair until even later, he had an unusual look.
“It looks
like he’s pretending to be a baby,” a friend said to me as we sipped coffee at
a mothers’ group one day. The other just-turned-one-year-olds, all smaller than
Jacob, were cruising around the room, holding on to furniture or taking a few
running steps and falling. Jacob was crawling after them in delight.
“He is a baby,” I said.
It was
conversations like this which have made me want to slow down the growth of my
husky boys. Inside those big bodies are two little kids, and I don’t want
anyone to forget that. I am afraid that because Jacob, now 4, is taller than
other kids his age, he will be expected to act older, too. Sheila, a friend of
mine with a 5-year-old who’s a little shorter than Jacob confessed that she was
surprised to see Jacob crying when his block tower fell down. It took her a
moment to remember that Jacob was a year younger than her child, and that tears
of frustration aren’t too unusual for the pre-kindergarten set.
It’s not
just the expectations that others might place on my boys which causes me to be
wistful, though. Some of it is simply about size. A couple down the street have
a 17-month-old girl, Tyra, who is smaller than our 7-month-old Liam. Little
Tyra stretched out her time as an infant; it seemed to me that her parents had
a newborn for five or six months, rather than a week or two like we did. Even
now, she seems more like a baby than a little girl. A couple times a week, I
see the family taking a walk together, Tyra snug in a pack on her father’s
back. By the time Liam is Tyra’s age, the baby backpack will be a distant
memory. He’s already almost too heavy for it now. And while I am, of course,
thankful that Jacob and Liam are growing into robust, healthy boys, I cannot
erase that tinge of sadness that my husband and I are only getting a glimpse of
their tiny selves while Tyra’s parents receive a long gaze.
Despite the
constant predictions from relatives and friends about pro-football in our
family’s future, I am trying to remember that my boys, big as they are, are the
smallest they will ever be. And knowing this, I am taking the smallness where I
can find it. I kiss Liam’s chubby cheeks and marvel at his nose, still no
bigger than my thumbnail. I lift Jacob up and hold him, just to prove I still
can. I buy clothes in primary colors, trimmed with animals and ABC’s and
anything else which says “I’m still little.”
The other
night, after I finished nursing Liam, Jacob climbed on my lap, and for a few
minutes, they were both quiet and relaxed against my body. As I closed my eyes
and rocked them, Jacob whispered in my ear, “You’re not going to stop doing
this are you?”
I shook my head no and hugged them tighter.
Because on my lap, rocking in the darkness, smelling like talcum powder and
baby shampoo, they didn’t seem so big at all.