Signs of Growth
The thing about children, and about babies in particular, is this: in the long term, their growth and development is nothing short of astonishing. Over the medium term, they learn and grow at a startling pace1. In the short term, however, watching your kid grow has a lot to do with observing the growth of your own fingernails: while you can detect change over the span of weeks, the changes are essentially imperceptible over the span of days, and you very quickly lose the desire to make the attempt.
Still, Olive is in fact growing, and while the milestones2 she's passing through tend to be things that as adults we don't even think about, she's still passed several. When you hold her, these days, she tends to lean in and bring her CG close to you; she almost never attempts to throw herself backwards out of your arms anymore. Her utterances are no longer purely vowel: while her consonants still seem more accidental than not, she's managed more complex words than at first: "reen", "quat", and so on. Most measurably, she's gained quite a lot of weight: at 4850 grams now, she's almost exactly √2 times her birth weight3.
What hasn't changed are the broad strokes about the ways she acts, and the ways in which we interact with her: she can still me modeled with a state diagram of only four nodes, with transitions between each: "asleep", "hungry", "hiccuping", "quiet alertness"4. When she's hungry, she lets us know by means of as escalating sequence of whimpers, whines, and cries; otherwise, she tends to retain an impressive level of sang-froid, even when going through brand-new experiences (a shower, a car-wash, etc.) which might cause other kids to wail.
She's no longer a newborn: she has sufficient neck control to turn her head from one side to the other when lying face down; we don't worry anymore about her shoving her face so hard into Christina's breast that she suffocates herself. Very plausibly, she'll become a toddler in just a few months. I can't wait. They say that the first social smile is very often the time that a kid grabs your heart for good—but we still haven't experienced that. I want to need more than four states to model her moods! I want to hear her giggle when I'm goofy at her! I want to be able to feed her when Christina isn't available.
All of this will come, of course. It's only a matter of time, and I'm sure that when the time has come and gone, I'll look back and be amazed at how quickly she grew. Right now, though, the wait is a bit tough5.
I think I've mentioned that my sister has several children, who I get to see every year or so. I have to consciously bite my tongue to prevent myself from greeting them with "Oh my gosh, look how much you've grown!" whenever I see them. I remember, as a kid, it being the most trite and obvious thing possible; a sure sign that the adult in question wasn't worth my time. The problem is that they really do shoot up with astonishing rapidity, and it's somehow honest surprise on my part every time.
"Milestones" implies something more significant than what she's been going through, but there isn't really a term for "200-meter-stones".
Somehow "my little hypotenuse" flopped as a term of endearment; I said it exactly once, and then stopped. Some things are beyond even me, it appears.
If I'd kept more detailed statistics, I could tell you the transition probabilities between those states, and from those you could tell me exactly what percentage of her life she's spent in each activity, but I simply haven't bothered with the necessary recordkeeping. What I can say for sure is that I ordered the states from most common to least.
Not quite as tough as seeing the 41st week of pregnancy arrive with no idea when we'd meet her at all, but very nearly so.