January 27, 2026
Dear Sophia,
You made a sound tonight that is one of the worst sounds I have ever heard. I have heard something like it before, from a yowling cat, a cat in terror. It’s a high-pitched screech and it sounds like your lungs are being ripped right out of your little body, or my heart out of mine. I just wanted it to stop. I could see how unwell people could do stupid things to make such a sound stop.
The sound started when I snatched you up perhaps a little too fast to get you rocking through the air. You were already crying pretty hard at this point, flat on your back on the bed, in the swaddle I’d experimented with to calm you down (it had worked last night to quell your restlessness and let me lay you down in the bassinet to sleep for three hours). So I picked you up to send you through the air – which reliably works to calm you every time, within three swings – and you YOWLED so pitifully, so painfully, about three times, a terrible sound, until the swings did their work and you just stopped and gazed into space.
* * *
“You have the tiniest butt! It’s a fraction of the size of your belly. It’s even smaller than your cheeks! Who has a butt smaller than their cheeks?”
Overheard.
* * *
January 28, 2026
How quickly you calm down once you’re set into motion.
I pick you up, heave you with both hands to the other side of my body, and you get all quiet. My biometric ring is giving me Movement scores of 100 out of 100, vastly higher than the scores I got before you came along. It thinks I’m running or dancing or doing something with my whole body.
Your eyes tick with the motion: I swing you toward your feet, your eyes close, and when your head leads on the way back, your eyes open. You also widen your arms a little with each swing in an abbreviated version of your startle reflex. Your legs keep a sort of balance too.
You’re like a human gyroscope, moving your own body to accommodate motion in any direction.
You are eating a lot. That said, you are also spitting up a lot. Two steps forward, one step back.
ChatGPT advised me to figure out which motion did the trick before buying a rocker/glider — side to side, small up and downs, or gliding through the air — but it seems that all motion works for you. Plus I got a model that swings in six different ways, just as your dad does on the dance floor.
[Update: its motion is far too anemic for you. It moves about the way people playing chess move. Gave it away.]
When your mother puts you to her chest, even when you’re not feeding, you are calm. You fall asleep.
On my chest, you often fuss. You bang your face against my chest like a heavy metal fan, looking for a breast I don’t think you’re even hungry for. You struggle and squirm and try to climb up, as if there’s some place higher up you want to be. You grunt and groan with the effort, your little hands clutching at my shirt. It all looks so effortful.
I take you off my chest and lie you on your back on the bed and all the struggle stops. You just lie there, looking off to your left. I recently read that when people wander, they tend to veer left, and thus wander counter-clockwise. This will be useful to keep in mind if you ever get lost in a forest, or in the Negev Desert of Israel, as your Uncle Adam and I once briefly were.
Your mom has been experimenting with having you sleep in the bed, but with protections like rolled-up towels between you and the edge, or her own body in the recommended c-shape around you. The logistics of a miniature person govern our lives now, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Over and out,
Dad
