Her hundredth day happened to fall on Lunar New Year’s Eve. Since the photo studio would be closing for the holiday, we took her in a day early.
Once the photo session was scheduled, I kept worrying about it. I worried she would sleep through the whole morning shoot, that she would start crying, that she might get cold. In the end, none of that happened. For nearly an hour, she was wonderfully cooperative, lying there quietly while the photographer arranged her and took one picture after another. The only pity was that she still wasn’t really able to prop herself up on her tummy and lift her head, so almost all the photos had to be taken with her lying down.
Xiaomi Gua said, “She’s always such a good baby. The fact that she went through such a long session without crying is already impressive. You see toddlers a year or two old cry halfway through their shoots all the time. We don’t need her to laugh on cue. Our little one can handle a big occasion. Think about all those times we took her out to restaurants and she never made a fuss. Sometimes it even feels like she knows when we’re busy and just quietly falls asleep so everyone can get things done.”
On January 30, the actual New Year’s Eve and her true hundredth day, she was dressed in a red padded outfit bought online from Hillway. It looked wonderfully festive, her New Year clothes arriving at just the right moment.
I had always held on to the hope of exclusively breastfeeding. Whenever I heard people talk about someone with an abundant milk supply, I would feel discouraged and a little inadequate. None of the things I tried seemed to help much, so I thought I should probably go to the hospital. The doctor’s advice was simple: pump more, stimulate more.
I remembered how, when she was just over a month old, she would sometimes mischievously clamp down with her gums while nursing, and it hurt terribly. When there wasn’t much milk for her to get anyway, the idea of relying on her to “stimulate more” sounded like an invitation to get bitten a few more times. So I repeated the doctor’s advice to Hillway. He said, “Can I not do that for you? It feels weird. If I do, won’t it feel like I’ve turned into your son?”
So I dug out the long-neglected breast pump instead. As for the suggested treatment, I never followed through with it. The place was too far from home, and going back and forth twice a day just wasn’t realistic.
This month she started going to sleep very late, sometimes not until midnight or even one or two in the morning. When you’re exhausted and trying to coax a wide-awake baby to sleep, it feels like a special kind of torment. Still, after waking around seven or eight for a feeding, she could usually sleep again until about noon.
After the New Year, the weather, which had briefly felt warm, suddenly turned cold again, as if winter had only just arrived. It was bitterly cold. We worried that she might be too chilly sleeping alone in her little crib, and guessed that the low temperature might be part of why she had become so hard to settle at night. So for the time being, we let her sleep in the big bed with us. Hillway was afraid I wouldn’t sleep well, so he tucked her into his side of the covers.
What puzzled me was this: her tiny head pressed close to his large one, her little face aimed straight at his, no more than a few centimeters from that enormous source of noise—his snoring—and right in the path of his warm breath, which may or may not have included midnight bad breath. How could she sleep so soundly like that? If it were me, I would never be able to fall asleep. The sound alone would only get more unbearable the longer I listened.
Sleeping beside her also made me realize how restless she actually was. When she first drifted off, she loved rubbing her little head back and forth against the sheet, turning to the left for a while, then to the right. Small sounds startled her easily. In the middle of the night she would make soft grunting and murmuring noises. With her in bed, none of us really slept deeply. I had also grown used to waking in the night for feedings; even when she was sound asleep, I still found myself waking up several times on my own.
After she turned three months old, she became fascinated with saliva. She would blow little spit bubbles and leave them hanging on her lips as if proudly showing them off. Her bibs were quickly soaked, and I had to keep changing them. Even so, the skin on her cheeks, chin, and neck still ended up damp and red, which made my heart ache. There was no way to stop her from drooling, so all I could do was keep changing, washing, and drying bib after bib.
Ever since the full-month mark, she had often smiled on her own after eating her fill or after waking from sleep, and she would also smile now and then when we talked to her. Xiaomi Gua said that by day 102 she had started laughing out loud, and once I listened for it, it was true: “Heh heh heh heh...” She sounded genuinely delighted. Every time we saw her smile, we couldn’t help smiling too. No matter how bad a mood we were in, it would soften immediately.
Recently, a colleague at work became pregnant and also had to deal with signs of a threatened miscarriage. She was confined to bed rest and hardly dared to get up and walk. It brought back memories of my own pregnancy. Before becoming pregnant, it’s easy to imagine all sorts of things about your future baby—you hope the child will be especially clever, especially beautiful, and so on. But once you really are pregnant, those hopes are gradually replaced by worries. Sometimes I would see a child on the bus with some kind of disability and immediately start making anxious associations in my own mind. Later on, the list of expectations grew shorter and shorter, until in the end there was only one left: that the baby be healthy. That alone would be enough.