Baby quirks at three months

“You are three months old in this world. How do you feel about it?” I asked my daughter in the most journalistic fashion possible. All she did was blow saliva bubbles in my face. So uninformed, carefree and oblivious to the things around her, wish people of all ages could live life like that.

My wife and I live vicariously through our daughter and keep telling ourselves “This is probably how we were when we were three months old, just staring at everything around us, making incoherent noises and crying to get attention.”

At three months Z is no longer a newborn, she has now entered the infant stage. No longer do we hold a smooshed up bag of skin and bones; she is growing up into a fine specimen of a human being.

There are so many quirks that I would like to share that baby Z has developed over these three months and some of them are just downright ridiculous.

We love her hair. But she loves it even more, the first thing we noticed was that Z’s right hand is always preoccupied in grabbing the locks of hair at the back of the head. She has been doing this since the first week of her birth. Then we  decided to shave all of them on the tenth day (for religious/traditional reasons) but that still didn’t stop her from grabbing her skull. Eventually when her hair did grow back she went for it with the same vigour she did when she was just a week old. And then when she is feeling a little sadistic, she twists it till it’s almost uprooted from her scalp. It really makes us wonder this uncanny fixation with hair grabbing, it’s almost like she’s going to fly off and somehow finds anchorage and solace in that hair of hers.

Z was absolutely enamoured by the photo frames hanging on the wall right above our bed. Incidentally these are baby pictures of my wife and I. She literally has conversations with them and we have seen a range of emotions that she throws at those inanimate frames. One minute she is laughing and smiling at them and the next she is shouting and crying, almost seems like she’s going through a bitter breakup.

Once she is bored with the frames her focus shifts towards the ceiling fan, especially when it’s rotating slowly. Now this is very common amongst infants, but to have a dialogue with something that goes round and round in circles is stuff that I can’t even make up.

We have noticed that she is rather talkative and that’s why everyone in the family engages her every chance we get and our heart just melts when she starts responding. We indulge in everything from prattle to actual coherent conversations (I also read news articles for her… because… why not?). We can’t wait for her to start talking.

She loves guests, we think it’s a new face fascination, she will smile at them unstimulated. She will happily go to them and stare, it gets pretty embarrassing sometimes. I know this won’t last very long, when we really want her to go to people, she will not!

Now, she has started associating her crib with sleep, so instead of walking with her in order to out her off to sleep we dump Z in the crib and she drifts off eventually after a few forced crying bouts.

When she is left with the grandparents in their room she has an ingenious way to bully them into picking her up but she doesn’t try that with the wife and I because she knows we won’t service her.

I am sure these are very common quirks that every parent has experienced but it is a truly incredible and a humbling experience to watch another human being evolving right in front of your eyes.