It’s a Girl

By the numbers, Delphine is a pretty special baby. At her four-month checkup this week, the Plumpster was off the charts for weight, busting the scales at 17 pounds, 6 ounces. She already has the distinction of belonging to the select club of breech babies; we jokingly call this the Five Percenters, since only 3 to 5 percent of full-term babies are breech. And now she’s put her mom into another unpleasantly special category: the up to 12 percent of pregnant women who develop (or develop problems with) gallstones during pregnancy. Like Groucho Marx, this is not a club you want to join.

The culprit? Pregnancy hormones that slow down the gallbladder’s usual functioning, increasing the risk of developing stones. But while 12 percent of pregnant women sounds high — and the complications of having gallstones, once they start passing out of the gallbladder, can be fatal — nobody in the maternity world seems inclined to put that PSA out there.

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A few years ago, a friend from elementary school who’s now pursuing a high-pressure career in medicine and public health started moaning about Atul Gawande. “He’s so perfect,” he complained. “He’s a successful surgeon, a popular writer for the New Yorker, and he’s apparently happily married with well-adjusted kids. I hate him.”

Much the same envious argument could be made about Jill Lepore, a female counterpart to Gawande. She’s a history professor (at Harvard, natch), another one of those New Yorker staff writers, and a mom.

Gawande doesn’t write about his family in his New Yorker pieces, but Lepore occasionally does. And in her most recent article for the magazine, “Baby Talk,” she essentially declares parents who worry about parenting to be — gasp! — navel-gazers.

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In the past week or so, Delphine has finally — finally! — started to look at books when we read them to her. Sure, OK, she’s probably not getting much out of the exercise besides pretty pictures and the sound of our voices. But still, it’s nice to have a new activity to do with her.

Most of the children’s classics we grew up with are available these days in board-book format: Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Goodnight Moon. These books are classics in part because they’re satisfying for adults as well as kids. One hand-me-down board book, however, made me cringe: Nippy the Speedy Dinosaur, by Janet Allison Brown. There’s good reason why this book isn’t a classic.

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Unlike us, Baby D. is often at her perkiest first thing in the morning. Here she is doing her best flirty smiling for her dad.

Around the seventh month of pregnancy, we borrowed two baby items from our friends Rachael and Stan: an automatic breast pump, and a cosleeper. Both items turned out to be essential parenting tools, but not necessarily in the ways we expected.

The breast pump — a misnomer if there ever was one, since the device deflates instead of inflates — has proven most useful not as a machine that allows Mom to resume the daily office grind or have an evening out, but as a gadget that solves the problem of excessive milk production. And the cosleeper served mostly as a gargantuan nightstand for the first couple of months before getting shoved into a corner of the bedroom and turned into a bassinet.

As most of our friends who’ve used a cosleeper told us, you might start out with the baby in the cosleeper, but you’ll end up with the baby in your bed. This has turned out to be true not just over the course of the past four months, but over the course of each night. We might get Delphine to sack out around 9 or 10 p.m. in the bassinet-cosleeper, but by the wee hours, after middle-of-the-night nursing, she usually joins us.

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Being a first-time parent means having baby on the brain pretty much all the time. Even when I’m not thinking consciously about the baby — usually when she’s asleep and I’m trying to catch up on the life I used to have — I’m still thinking about the baby.

Take the recent memoir The Unheard, for example. Several people recommended this book to me because it’s by a deaf guy — I’m hard of hearing, he’s hard of hearing, so we must have lots in common! OK, sure, the author has thoughtful things to say about being deaf. But what really broke my heart while reading this dark, hilarious, sad book was its constant reminders of Africa’s ongoing health-care crisis and how it affects, most grievously, its children. A two-year-old baby that only weighs five pounds? Knowing that a third of the kids you meet under the age of five will die before reaching that birthday marker? Grim.

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