What I know about Charlotte as of October 2013

-- Charlotte thinks humans communicate chiefly through raspberries and shrieks. Under our current schedule, I feed her at night. Most of the time, she's pretty groggy, but by the time I change her diaper, she might blow some raspberries. It's nice that she can be cheerful even right after she wakes in the middle of the night.

The tables turn in the morning. After I've slept in about half as long as I'd prefer, Sarah brings Charlotte onto the bed and points her at me. My daughter spits all over as she says good morning. I do feel a little bad that my wife needs to use our baby as a shield from my grumpiness when she wakes me.

-- Charlotte is surprisingly dexterous. I've mentioned her long fingers before, but it still amazes me how she can use them. She's now picking up little snacks and putting them in her mouth. When we feed her bottles, she often fully extends her arm in the air and looks at her fingers, tilting her hand as if admiring a diamond ring. Then she slowly rotates her hand to look at the front, then the back again. Her specialty, which she learned in the NICU, is grabbing wires and waving them around. During feedings, she'll often pull out my earbuds. I bet some old-schoolers will tell me that's a message.

-- Charlotte gets cabin fever. For those not familiar with the expression, cabin fever, or stir-craziness, is when you can't stand being stuck in your house any longer. Our kid will sit in her Super Activity Play Seat Baby Gundam Mobile Armor for about five seconds before she's sick of it. She loves her Baby Bjorn carrier, and she'll seldom complain on walks.

-- Charlotte loves new faces. She will sit and stare at a stranger quietly for minutes on end. This is very handy in church. Sometimes she's scared by glasses and sunglasses.

-- Charlotte is not easy to impress. With some kids, you throw them in the air or tickle their stomachs a bit and they laugh their heads off. Charlotte laughs for about five seconds, and then she just smiles like she's humoring you. The only times I've ever got her really laughing, she was pretty tired.

--  Charlotte's eyes are currently blue and green. By which I mean one is blue and the other is green. Of course, any predictions about her eye color I make now will end up being completely wrong, but I bet they'll be green or hazel.

UPDATE: Charlotte's trick poops were a result of the Enfamil Gentlease formula the NICU sent us home with. Once we switched to Sam's Club Brand Members' Baby Chow or whatever, her poops got a lot less interesting. She doesn't have blowouts nearly as often as before. Side note: Sarah believes the term "blowout" refers exclusively to baby poop escaping a diaper. Every time she sees an ad for a blowout sale, or hears an anecdote in which a car's tire explodes, she giggles uncontrollably.

Control is mostly (definitely) an illusion.

Silly me. I assumed once I figured life out it wouldn't change again. I could finally rest my weary head and, I don't know, smoke a pipe? But don't worry, it never came to that because I have learned one thing over and over again in life: control is mostly an illusion.

It's a real nice illusion though. Real nice. It's a bit like a low-hanging cloud scuttling around the middle of a mountain range. When I was younger I always had a dream of taking a jar up to those clouds and bringing some of it back with me. It was a tangible goal; I could get a jar, maybe wear a jacket and hike up to the unsuspecting cloud and snaggle some to take home. Then I think I realized that you couldn't catch a cloud in a jar. Well, technically, sure you can, but it just condenses to water droplets. This reminds me of control. You work to get to it, plan for it, but you can never quite have it, just the illusion of it in a wet jar.

I'm not sure why this is a lesson I've had to re-learn so many painful times in life. I thought I'd figured it out on so many different occasions, it's actually quite funny looking back. Silly me. Nothing has brought this lesson home further than marriage and motherhood. I know, I know, these are pretty much the only topics I write about but you have to admit, they're pretty major ones.

She's the best baby. Worth every moment of crying, spit-up and blow-outs.

Six pounds 11 ounces. Small, snoozy and dark-haired. My precious baby girl helped remind me of my jar full of water droplets. She was beautiful, of course, from day one. She had a crazy entry into life and then she demanded I give it all up for her. And I did. Steve did too. I didn't try to control all that much for the first six or eight weeks, but then as I started feeling more myself I started looking for my cloud-catching jar. Boy, oh boy, did that ever backfire. I had to relearn how to feel in control of the simplest aspects of adult life (ie: brushing my teeth or getting to take a shower). I felt completely out of control. Very luckily, I had a superstar husband and family to help remind me that this is how every new mother feels.

Hottest husband? Check.

But I've learned. I've adapted. Not always gracefully or with any tact, but I'm slowly getting there. I felt so confused for the longest time because I couldn't seem to get back that elusive control I'd so lovingly cultivated before all of this. I was doing all of the same things that brought it before -- why the flip wasn't it working? I'm going to wax quite poetic no,w but I think when I'd climbed the mountain with my jar, I looked out and saw that the mountain had changed, as well as the cloud and the jar I would need. I'm pretty sure that's happened every single time I've felt like "Aha! I've got the secret control formula now!" 

It's never going to be the same as before. That's just a fact of life. Doesn't mean it's a nasty, gross fact, like taxes or death. It can be a really cool, interesting and liberating fact, like you can eat dessert before dinner if you want. Control is an illusion, I'm pretty sure I've never been in control in my life. My jar always comes back with water droplets, not a cloud. But I learn and grow every time I try and find control, and there are things I can control in my ever-changing life. Whom I love (like my hot husband and beautiful baby),  my attitude toward all this change, which at best is grudgingly and at worst is full of tears, and if I want to eat lots of chocolate at 7 a.m. instead of a waffle.

So I'm going to try and remember that even though I can mostly control nothing and life will keep slapping me in the face with the red herring of change, I can control what I learn from it and a few small but really important aspects like love, perspective and chocolate consumption.