Baby Leone is three months old today.

Three months already but it feels like she was just born.

She likes to gurgle, look at her hands, and she has almost found her toes.

She’s social and she smiles a lot but beware the friendly soul who wants to hold her: she almost immediately starts to cry with people she doesn’t know.

I think she can tell by the way that they smell that they’re not me, or her dad, or her siblings.

One of the only times she didn’t cry right away was when the PBS producer, Kate McMahon, held her. Kate is a lactating mom (she has an almost 12-month-old) so she probably smelled familiar to Leone, like breast milk.

The baby is also an expert drooler and an expert spitter-upper.

Only, the spit up, now that she’s so grown-up, no longer happens right after she nurses. Since it’s not fresh, it comes out curdled, like yogurt.

The drool and the spit-up get into the folds of fat around her neck, which smell yeasty, like baking bread. It’s so hard to get to her neck to clean it. The drool keeps it wet and the fat keeps it warm, so some of the skin in there looks red and irritated.

Her belly button is also irritated. At Baby Yoga on Monday I noticed it smelled funny, like fish. We cleaned it and put some golden seal powder on it and it seems to be better.

She’s such a calm, patient baby. Etani and Hesperus were that way too. I know it’s no prediction of her future personality so I have to remind myself to enjoy the quiet and serenity for as long as it lasts.

Happy three month birthday Baby!

Photo by Christopher Briscoe

Tags: drool, infant, infant care, neck fat, spit up, stranger anxiety, three months old

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 10:35 am and is filed under milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.