My Baby is 14 Months, 15 Days, and 8 Hours Old!My Baby is 14 Months, 15 Days, and 8 Hours Old!

Why do all parents tell you the exact age of their babies in months? …or weeks? Instead of “My baby is 14 Months old last Monday,” how about, “My baby is a little over one year.”  Why are we so preoccupied with charting the number of weeks and months our child is, since baby was born?  You should know how old baby is!  You participated in his/her birth!

 What is the mystique of charting baby’s life to the day?  By the time they get to be teenagers, you will be asking yourselves, “Where did the time go?” …or “He’s getting so old?  You’ll then chart the stages of life by the year in school.  Did you ever hear the parent of a fourteen year old say, “My child is 168 months, 15 days old?” We don’t even say the number of years any more.  We say, “He’s a teenager!” or “He’s entering Freshman year of high school.”  Your teenager still has ages and stages of growth and development as a teenager, but now it’s more like you try your best to somehow make it through the teenage years –without losing your mind!  But for now, babyhood is magical, especially your first child!  You have that pile of “How baby grows” books on the coffee table for easy reference, or you have some app on your phone to give you appropriate activities to sync to baby’s stage of growth at 14 months.

 

 

There are charts of the “average” times. You know what I mean!  The average time it takes to…turn over from front to back and then to front again…average time to toilet train.  If it’s a boy add about six months more to the chart! …average time to read.  It used to be six years, six months, but now with Baby Einstein and competition to be weight-

 listed at Harvard, it’s more like six months, six weeks.  We go to the docs and the first thing we tell people is how our baby stacks up.  “He’s in the 82%ile for weight and 50%ile for height.  Against whom?  What are your babies being normed against? Who are they competing with, anyway, at 14 months of age?  So, if your child is only in the 50%ile in height should you be concerned since your baby is sooooo “average”?  Why not place him on a rack and stretch him for a couple of hours a day?  I’m just kidding, of course. But that’s how silly all this norming is.  If your child is in the 82%ile in weight does that mean you should be proud of him because he is fatter than 32% of the baby population?  …or should you place him on baby lock down and ration out his food until he gets back to that 50%ile? 

I do understand that there are guidelines or benchmarks by which we keep a close eye on baby.  But we, as a nation, have gone too far.  We live by the guidelines, forgetting that Baby is going to do and be just exactly what he/she is!  No more, no less.  And that should be fine with you as parents. 

Always challenge just where these benchmarks are coming from.  If it’s from doc, ask him when these guidelines were established?  Are they current, relevant to your baby? We in this culture are proud to be parents of babies who are taller than the average, even though height should be irrelevant, except if lack of growth is a danger signal for baby.  I am concerned at the amount of time parents spend in obsessing about height and weight and training time for pooping.  I am sure doctors are alerting parents to the average in the hopes that parents will use these growth benchmarks as a means of observing wellness in baby.  Sometimes benchmarks are just that, nothing less, nothing more.

Tip:  Live your life with your baby in wonderment of just how miraculous each day is.  No two babies are exactly alike in their age/stage growth and development.  It is possible to learn more through observing your baby and through your instincts as a parent than any chart gives as a barometer of health and wellness. After all, nobody knows your baby the way you do.  Use the benchmarks as suggestions, and use your own best practices to help baby develop into his/her own special self!

 

 

So, What’s in a Name? Plenty!

I have bought houses a lot quicker than new parents pick out a name for their  unborn baby.  Sure it helps if you know the sex of the child. That eliminates 50% of the stress!

 

You don’t want your child to have an acronym that spells out anything, so Fredrick Charles Kerby is out-FCK—too close for comfort!   Or Elizabeth Ann Sally (after your grandmother) Yarger, or EASY for short! Particularly when she goes to high school and there is already enough peer pressure to have sex as it is! With initials that spell out EASY, you just know she’ll be hunting you down!! And it doesn’t look good either, when she graduates from business school and you have her initials carved out in gold on her new, expensive, leather briefcase! Think parents before you leap! Elizabeth is a lovely name. Perhaps you could compromise with Grandma Sally and your mom, Ann, and switch the initials.  Then you can sleep at night. Who’s going to make fun of ESAY on a briefcase?  The worst that will happen is that everyone will think she can write an essay well!

And what about baby name books and baby naming websites.  Sick of all of them too?  Don’t want to give your child the popular” name of the year”? Now you can even check your own state to find out just how” in demand” your name choice is this year. Wikipedia will tell all! Let’s take Florida for the most popular male name.  That would be “Jayden” and number two would be “Jacob”, followed by Ethan, Michael, Mason, etc.  In 2012, the most popular boy’s name in all the states was “Mason”, so if you named your son, “Mason” and you wanted to discipline him in the mall for misbehavior, you’d say, “Mason Adam Divine” come here! Tricked you!  You forgot that acronym spells MAD, and that’s your first mistake! Your second mistake would be to call your child only by his first name, “Mason”.  In this case, most of the other little boys in the mall would come running to you—a very popular name, indeed! 

If you had a girl, and loved the name “Emma”, you’d have the same problem in almost any mall in the entire United States from Massachusetts to Mississippi—kid you not!  But it’s a great name. Actually, my great-great grandmother’s name was Emma, so was my husband’s Grandmother!  It does withstand the test of time! So, go bold, and popular, if you love the name.

How about if you wanted to name your child after a celebrity that you admired?  Jason Lee, a pretty funny dude, named his child “Pilot” after a song he heard by the band Grandaddy, called, “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot”.  And what about the name “Apple”, the child of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin?  At least they had a sweet reason (no pun intended), “because it was sweet and wholesome”, is the reason they gave.    And the list of equally ridiculous names goes on and on and on and on!  Look it up! Oh you probably did already! Please, please, please think before naming your baby.  The name may sound fine at the time, but long after you have departed this earth, that name will live on. 

And then there is naming your child after a family member or someone on your Ancestry.com family tree.  That would be best. Whenever you say, my child was named, “Stone,” for example, you can quickly lay a disclaimer on a person by delivering the deep roots in the family tree spiel! That, honestly, can be one of the best legacy’s you can leave your child.  The gift of connection… the gift of belonging… to a lineage of people whom you can then show pictures of and discuss stories passed down through time.  That name is the connection to your past… to his/her past… and to the future. 

 Parents, you should always have the last say in naming your child. I know you agonize about it and make the best choice you can.  You want your new family to be distinctive, so how about a nice compromise? For instance, choose the first name to match your new family’s needs.  So…you got pregnant at Deer Island, so you name your little girl, Deer.  Then, for balance, with such a different name, take the opportunity to honor your family tree, either yours or your husband’s or partner’s, and give her a middle name which reflects the connection and respect for someone special in your family. So maybe, “Deer Jane”—Jane, after grandma Jane.  I admit it is a bit weird, but with a name like Deer Jane Jones, at least the initials are respectable (DJJ)! And with any luck, her classmates will call her, D.J.! 

 Tip:  Names are treasures if we take special care of them.  Our children are branded for a lifetime by their names.  Parents, it is a huge responsibility to craft the best name possible for your little one so that when they have grown old, they will still smile when someone calls their name out loud!