The Girl Who Ate Everything (2.0)

Say hello to Tilda! Since the end of January, she’s been blessing Kåre and me with yogurty milk blurps, crusty skin flakes, sneezes that hit us straight in the mucus membranes, and other bodily functions so potent that they fill me with a mix of pride and alarm. Her prolific diaper-quakening poops would make me worry whether or not she was absorbing enough nutrients if she weren’t so huge.

Or relatively huge. When I squeezed her out, she weighed just a hair over five pounds, a weight more appropriate for a preemie than her 38+ week old self. Her scrawny nuglet of a body looked less like a cross between me and Kåre and more like the standard baby mix of old man and alien. Now that she’s past the wizened age of three months old, she’s more than twice as chonky as she was at birth and has transformed from “old man-alien hybrid” to “who’s a squishy cutie baby, YOU’RE A SQUISHY CUTIE BABY, WEEEHEEHEE SO SQUISHY, SO CUTIE, BOOP BOOP!!!!”

Sometimes I can’t believe I made this plump dumpling/steamed bun/marshmallow/pork roast/uh I’m hungry of a baby. But then I didn’t really…do much. I experienced a lot—yo-yoing states of discomfort, increasing girth, a rainbow of anxieties in colors that until then were outside my visible spectrum—as my body dusted off whatever baby-making program had been lying dormant in me since I was born. But it’s not like I had to write any code. Otherwise Tilda would’ve ended up with, like, two bones or infinity bones. Luckily, the program worked just fine, allowing me to continue doing most of the same things I did in my pre-preggo state, like eating a decent diet and not rolling around in cat litter. The main difference in my preggo state was that every choice I made came with a little warning label that said, “Everything you do will affect your child and her child and that child’s child and so forth for eternity, so don’t screw it up, but don’t stress out too much either, just believe in yourself, except when you’re wrong, but don’t worry about it, except when you should.”

I have a bajillion more thoughts about being pregnant, giving birth, keeping a newborn alive, and my experience under the Norwegian health care system. And I plan to write them down. …At some point. …Before the sun engulfs the Earth. (Ooh, five billion years to go! I’m liking my chances.) My post frequency was pathetic before I had a baby, so, you know, just continue having no expectations. Thanks!!! In the meantime, maybe I’ll discover how to brew that potion all the mommy bloggers use to maximize their productivity. Except I won’t because that potion is just a mix of diligence and self-discipline and effective time management and I lack all of the above, whoops.

Anyhoo, I won’t say too much more or else I’ll never finish this post that is already months late. I just wanted to share the good news before waiting too long for the news to be reasonably shareable (“Say hello to Tilda! She was born eight years ago!”). I’ll just note that Kåre, Tilda, and I are doing totally fine during these pandemic times. And that we love our little fart princess and every squeaky poot she makes.