Hold the presses, this baby is huge!

That last post is post-dated because I was wanting to add more eloquent and funny commentary on the "abandon cranky baby in crib, happiness is immediately restored" thing making us feel a bit like parenting failures... but then I realized that it was time to just rip the bandaid off and publish as-is.

That revelation is largely courtesy of the fact that in the week and a half since I started that post, RJ has managed to outgrow yet another set of sleepers.

He is now rocking 9-12 months cotton sleepers, in spite of being very much under their weight limits, and also under their height description. His torso is exceeding the capacity of the 6-9 month sleepers and they were getting both hard to button and it was starting to freak me out that the neck pulling down might restrict his airflow (he has a cold and thus is making all kinds of grunting and chortling sounds already).

Ephiny tried helpfully to explain this away with "maybe they've shrunk" to which I say, "they've been out of the closet exactly a week since Jolly last wore them as a 11 to 12 month old." She then asked, "Have you plotted his weight? Is he at least following a growth curve? Like, not exponential?"

I am obviously proud of my bosoms, Scylla and Charybdis (um, yes, your breasts don't have dorky literary reference names bestowed upon them at some point in high school?). Their fountaining output seems singlehandedly determined to make the NICU doctor eat her words about the calories needed by such a large baby being beyond my supply capacities. (Indeed, I'm pumping 10-12 oz during my one morning pumping session during/right after RJ eats. That's about a one third of a baby's daily intake beyond what RJ is himself eating, and I only stop at that point because I have used up two bottles and don't want to bother to get another one. And also because RJ might wake up again and eat soon so I don't want to completely empty things. I'm thinking I'd like to sign up to donate milk to the national breast milk banks so that preemies and other sick babies can get breastmilk when their moms can't provide it.)

Anyway, this latest growth spurt, in addition to making me no longer worry about my supply being low or RJ's weight gain being inadequate, is also cranky-making. Cranky-making because at the 9-12 month size, we stop having as many sleepers and start having darling outfits as the mainstay of the wardrobe, since 9-12 month old babies are sitting and crawling and having head control. It turns out that gargantuan 7 week babies have none of these things, but I can tell you what they DO have instead and that is an awfully enormous number of very runny, explosive bowel movements. That makes me not so inclined to want to deal with the darling outfits as I was when I was putting them on a 9-12 month old who was eating a lot of solid foods and thus not requiring being rushed hastily to the changing table about three times an hour.

We are sometimes changing outfits three times an hour as well, because it turns out that while Jolly won the high velocity peeing awards, RJ (who does not douse the wall and parents with his pee fountains, which stay discreetly confined to the changing table) managed to establish his own novel niche in the high velocity baby output realm. And the results are less well contained by diapers. Ephiny plaintively noted, "I think I prefer pee going everywhere instead," but as it turns out her opinion was not consulted. Perhaps our next baby will projectile vomit instead?

Also, 9-12 month old babies are by virtue of being less floppy more capable of preventing tops from bunching into their armpits and pants from bunching around their crotches, leaving the midriff and legs exposed. Did I mention that much of the 9-12 month clothing we have is summer-season appropriate?

So, yes, tomorrow we are doing some shopping, and trying to snap up any sleepers that are still being made for this size range, provided they are nonhideous. I really like the voluminous, wide sleepers with snaps which seem entirely to go away in this size range, so we may have to deal with the more fitted sleepers with zippers which I am less fond of.

And we just got a very sweet package for RJ, which included a really adorable sleeper... in a 0-3 months size. Well, there's always a future baby!

But seriously, I am still befuddled at the fact that RJ is wearing clothing at SEVEN WEEKS that Jolly wore when he was nearly a year old.

Upon hearing this, my mother happily googled more information about the Langen Kerls (aka Potsdam Giants, the exclusive tall-men-only army of German Emporers) and informed me that in a different time, RJ might have been recruited (even against his will) to serve in an elite military force consisting of the tallest men in the country. The wikipedia article is definitely worth reading for gems like the Emporer's quote:

"The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers--they are my weakness."

Well, in a different time I probably would have been forced to marry an unusually tall man in order to make more supertall babies for the service of Prussia, too. (This breeding program was stymied by regression to the mean and thus gets mentioned in genetics classes everytime quantitative polygenic traits come up.)