There is one thing Berith hates more than anything: the booger sucker. (If you want to be fancy, you can call it an aspirator, but I don’t know anyone who calls it that.) Sometimes she needs to have it done before nursing. Although she’s usually a pretty calm baby, as soon as I start doing that, she screams bloody murder.

She’s grown a lot and it’s very exciting, but it also makes me kinda sad. When she was born, she fit on our bathroom counter (where I change her diapers) with extra room at her head and feet. Now she’s just barely fits when she stretches out. She’s even grown out of newborn diapers and needs size 1 diapers. In no time at all, she’s going to grow up and marry some computer geek and move to the ends of the earth. *sob*

She has started smiling a lot and trying to talk, too. No words are distinguishable yet, though, hehe. She’s also started imitating sounds and facial expressions of the person holding her. And in her sleep, she makes all kinds of sounds accompanied by smiles or frowns or contortions of grief and anguish. I wonder what she’s dreaming about.

For the first few weeks after she was born, she would scratch her own face when she flailed around. Some of the scratches were pretty bad. Whenever that happened, she would suddenly freeze in shock, stop breathing, and then scream. I noticed last week that even though she still touches her face, she doesn’t scratch it anymore. She’s also started grasping things with all her might. I think this means she has recognized her hands as her own now.

Her neck is getting stronger and she can hold her head up by herself. When I put her on her stomach she does some air swimming. Last night, she spent some time in front of the mirror touching the mirror and looking surprised whenever her reflection did the same thing. I don’t think she knows that it’s her own reflection. Man, I need to take more pictures.

Ben noticed about 3 weeks ago that she doesn’t like the dark. She cries when we turn off all the lights. When she’s awake, which is generally between midnight and 7 AM, she doesn’t like to have her face covered either, because it interferes with her looking around. She is really interested in everything around her and you can tell her eyes focus on and follow things that you show her.

Now, if I could just get rid of the mystery breast pain that plagues me ’round the clock and makes nursing exquisite torture, my life would be bliss. So far, I’ve been told it could be cracked nipples, Raynaud’s Syndrome or an infection or allergy of some sort but my symptoms don’t completely match anything. Argh.

And speaking of torture, I’ve been reading Lemony Snicket’s An Unfortunate Series of Events to her while I’ve been nursing her. For the last few years, I’ve been waiting for the whole series to be finished and sold as a boxed set. When Ben found out, he bought me the whole boxed set for Christmas. Yay! I need to watch the movie again. I remember I liked it, even though it wasn’t too faithful to the books.

I was going to read her the Bible while I was nursing, but it’s too big and floppy to hold with one hand. The Lemony Snicket books are small and hardcover so they’re easy to handle. We’re finishing about a book a day at this rate so I went hunting for smaller size books I can read to her while I nurse. Next up will probably be the beautifully illustrated out-of-print pretty little boxed set edition of George MacDonald’s fairy tales.

I’ve been reading this blog (Arwen/Elizabeth) for a while now. Cute Camilla (aka Muffin) was born 10 weeks before Berith and it’s helped me with knowing what I have to look forward to. And then, of course, there’s Rick and Rachel’s blog, an old favourite. I’ve been reading their blogs from before they were married. They have a beautiful little girl. Rachel writes about a lot and takes lots of pictures of her. I’ve really enjoyed watching her grow up in all the pictures. Her name is Kyrie, which is a name I really like. Too bad it’s already taken … twice, actually. There’s a girl in my church in Tokyo who is also named Kyrie Eleison. She’s 9.

There are a lot of fascinating, beautiful, smart, artistic, literary blogger mamas out there whose blogs are a constant encouragement and help.

• Arwen
• Dawn
• Kristen
• Moriah
• Rachel
• Sarah

And he went in unto her and she conceived, and bare a daughter, and they called her name Rinah Berith. And lo, her mother got a breast infection last week, and she was down and out with fever for a few days, after which it subsided. And on Tuesday, her grandmother departed from the city of Tokyo and came unto Kennewick in the land of Washington, and her great aunt Sally from Chicago came also. OK, never mind. We’ve been reading Genesis out loud and it got to me.

Some people ask me how to pronounce her name. It’s pretty straightforward. REEEE-nuh beh-REEEETH … simple, eh? Technically, it’s not an “uhh” sound but a schwa, like the first “a” in “banana” or the “u” in circus or the … you get the idea.

Berith drinks milk desperately, day and night, and poops heaps and heaps. Her whole life consists of eating, pooping, and sleeping. Actually, that pretty much sums up my life as well. She smiles after pooping and smiles in her sleep, too. She giggled in her sleep this morning. I wonder what she dreams about. Probably milk and poop.

She is such a good baby. She usually only cries when she’s hungry or when her diaper is dirty. But even then, she gives fair warning with grimaces, which over the next five or ten minutes work their way up to warning whimpers, before she actually starts crying. And it’s not that obnoxious yelling that some babies do but heart-broken cries of wail and woe. It makes me want to cry just to hear it.

She likes baths and her little sighs of contentment after her diaper has been changed are hilarious. I’m so glad she likes to keep clean.

She likes to make faces. She has several faces in her repertoire, including monkey-face (which cracks me up to no end), disapproving-old-lady-face, I’m-a-boy-face, and I’m-thinking/pooping-really-hard-face. Mostly, she has the sweetest earnest little girl face.

So far, the one thing she seems to hate is the car seat. I don’t like cars either. *three cheers for public transportation* Like I said, such a good little baby. She screams and yells when she gets put in it, expressing the all those pent-up feelings I have about having to spend so much time in cars.

Her first soak-through-three-layers-of-clothing-poop-explosion happened today. *sigh* It was really gross. See?

At least breastfed babies have soupy poop that washes off really easily. Here endeth the pooping pictures. I will spare you the milking pictures.