I Call Her Chompy

2-weeks-old infants are good at three things: eating, filling up diapers, and sleeping a ton. If you're lucky, that is. Most are overqualified in some department and not the others.

Fae is pretty solid at all three, if you count 2-4hr stretches as good sleep. I do, given Mara woke up every hour for her first year of life. But the one thing she truly excels at is eating. Well, nursing. She's a total champ at this and takes significant pride in her skill, to the extent that she'll show you her moves anytime. And we do mean anytime... Pick her up? Fists in mouth, right away. Diaper change? Grunt and chomp on fingers! Try to burp her? She grabs your thumb and sucks on it with all her fluttering-tongue tricks. 

She'll even do it from a distance! After a looooong and thoroughly sweet diaper change (Greg turns every single one into a story-telling special time), Fae will gauge Mommy-distance either by smell or hearing and project a sharp, loud "Aaah!" across the room, followed by a deep base "Hrumph" as she chomps on her fist. It's somewhere on the thin line between promise and threat: "Once I get to mommy, I'll do this! ... and this! ... and this!"

I call her Chompy. Chompers will also do.

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I've also declared her to be our Little Gluttony Dragon due to her huffing and puffing sounds as she busily nurses. This is a reference to an impossible-to-buy board game that was a Kickstarter limited edition made in Taiwan. Our friends brought it over for a play date and both Gaius and Greg fell in love with it. The trouble was that there is no place to buy it, not even on eBay and that says a lot!

The only chance is to find a person that had backed them on Kickstarter two years ago and is no longer interested in the game. It took me 1.5 months of active research to find such a person - and he was so kind to ship it across the US! 

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Last but not least, last night during one of those frantic show-offs of chompiness I figured out the proper Latin name for this darling baby: Fae Nursium Furiosa! She chomped extra hard when she got her chance at it, in full acknowledgement.

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Some of her skills are not very apparent. She's got some hidden charms that got revealed one night when Greg was holding her trying to buy me some extra rest time. She was hungry, and calling out for me judiciously, when Greg tried to calm her down by giving her his thumb to suck on. She went to work right away, earning yet another nickname: Our Faer Lady of the Fluttering Tongue.

But don't let this fool you, Fae is a sweetheart of a baby, and drizzles us with sweet glances and gurgles and cutie pie sneezes in-between throughout the day, that she's had us convinced she is a perfectly adorable and properly mannered infant.

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Now that she's past the one month mark she's gotten more delicate, even coy, as she glances up right before latching. In fact, she started making good eye contact again after an entire week of not caring one bit about who was wearing the "milk factory", as long as the milk was flowing.
I was ok for a bit, but after multiple days of this I filed an official complaint with Daddy. This really couldn't go on, Mommy feeling unappreciated is probably one of the reasons that would contribute to post partum depression. Luckily we narrowly evaded that...

Greg had a stern but thoughtful eye-to-eye with the tiny culprit during the next diaper change - that's when the two of them discuss the vital things of the day.
It worked immediately, when she returned to my arms: big blue eyes met mine candidly, with new and sustained focus, and we had a whole silent staring "conversation" for several moments before starting to nurse. As usual, Greg solves everything.

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A week later, Fae has grown enough that her nails are actually solid. We hadn't needed to clip them so far, and it caught me by surprise in the middle of the night. It happened smack during a growth spurt night, one of those when she becomes a Little Thug, grabbing my shirt with her two cherry-sized fists and calling out furiously for milk. I imagine she's a fearsome pirate named Two-Fists Evie, who's intent on shaking me by the collar till I drop the booty.

But this night it went beyond that. It didn't help that I had a collarless shirt on. Little Baby Wolverine started slashing at me with her sharp claws and in the darkness I could have sworn her keratin nails had converted to adamantium. They were sharp and vivid, crisscrossing at my collarbone and slowly scraping the shape of what felt like the Manhattan Subway Map, tilted by 15 degrees. I had the red scratch lines to prove it the next morning, but luckily they healed fast. That's what I called Nurse By A Thousand Cuts.

So don't let this cute sweet face fool you, she's adorable while well fed but she can be a girl of many faces...