I’ve had some requests to know how Socks and Button are doing. My blogging about Socks was meant to only be me following her pregnancy from a long-distance viewpoint, along with our initially shared view of ‘babies? no way!’

What? You want to hear about meee!?!?

If you want to read along from the start, go to the links below. I did them in order from oldest to newest. Please do read a few: it was a lotta damn work. The first two links talk about why I love her, how I felt about my best friend’s decision to have a baby, and some things that were hard to write, especially about her miscarriage. The rest are my somewhat weekly pregnancy updates. With those, I tried to be both funny and informative, because I know sweet fuck all about this sort of thing, but I like funny and science.

Back story: go here, then here, and the updates: one, two (sweet pea), three (blueberry), four (raspberry), five (olive), six (prune), seven (lime) (the next post freaked her out, it was a bit of fun inspired by the drawing in seven: HAHAHAHAHHA), and eight (pick a fruit, any fruit). Nine (avocado) (I still get weekly searches for this photo. Y’all are weird). Ten (mango). Now we know! Eleven (melon/banana). Twelve (pomegranate), thirteen (eggplant), fourteen (rutabaga), fifteen (jicama), sixteen (melon, for sure this time!), seventeen (pumpkin), eighteen (WATERMELON!!!), twenty (a bigger damn watermelon!)

Then my massive freak out when she was in labour…

I love that gal to bits!

Sheeeeit, I’m almost too tired after all that to write anything new. Well, I did spend a lot of time writing all those posts…but not nearly as long as making all those links, so I need to ‘woman up’ and continue! (Don’t you just hate the term ‘man up’? As if one gender has a monopoly on getting shit done?)

So! Everyone is healthy and happy and growing and learning (Socks is about to embark on reverse-growing, however, as she’s tired of the leftover baby-bellah). There was a pretty bad health scare at first, involving way too much time spent in the natal intensive care unit, but it was a problem entirely able to be solved, and Button is no worse for the experience. Socks won’t forget it anytime soon, but she’s doing great at not being over-protective.

Button is not called Button any more, however. ‘Monkey’ is a common endearment that I hear. Along with ‘Little Squirrel’! But her real name, which I’ve been given permission to share, is one we talked about for months. Let me introduce, at the age of almost five months, Saige! Isn’t that just beautiful?

Saige sleeps well, eats well (they are just beginning to experiment with solid food – apparently the new idea of ‘flavour’ shocks her quite a bit still). She’s very active and wants nothing more than to walk, the sooner the better. Socks has been telling me for months that her daughter seems clearly frustrated that she can’t make her limbs do what she intends them to do, and she is fascinated to see Saige’s progress.

Saige has already given her first neck-hug combined with a sloppy kiss, and this was verified by Bear who just happened to be there at the time. ‘ Did she just…?’ ‘yeee-eee-sss…’ Mommy=melting, of course.

My darling niece (by love rather than by blood) seems very, very interested in technology, too:

And I’m dead impressed how a child under six months can attend to an iPad so well. As an aside, my sister’s daughter can use an iPhone quite well and she’s just a few months over two years old. Interesting! Why is it so easy for someone so young, even really, really, young – to grasp but older folks have difficulties? Is the software so very user-friendly and intuitive that we older folk over-think it and cause our own problems?

Ah, that’s another thought for another day. Here’s Saige trying to nom Socks’s first baby, Beanie, instead.