Kaden loves grunting. I'm convinced it is because he is a little self conscious of being a slightly smaller, premature baby and he thinks it makes him sound manly. He squeezes his face together and does a constipated Grrrr. Still not entirely sure what it means.

His signals are changing rapidly enough that it's hard to establish a pattern of exactly what he is trying to say. First, he was kind of squeaking when he needed people, then he moved on to to these grunts right about the same time he had a stuffy nose. Based on the timing we assumed it meant "Hey, I have a stuffy nose. And since I'm an obligate nose breather this grunt is trying to tell you I feel like I'm suffocating."

But, now the stuffy nose has subsided, and the grunting continues, largely replacing the squeaking. So apparently what he meant was, "I just figured out a whole new noise that I am fond of using to tell you I need something."

An example of how this rapidly changing communication method can be confusing is how we understand he is hungry. At first, there was the aforementioned "squeaking," as well as smacking his lips and beating himself about the head (trying to get his hand in his mouth I presume). That's your pre-warning that in 60-90 seconds he will cry if we do not present milk.

This weekend, however, the "cue" period unceremoniously went away. On Saturday Kaden was fast asleep on my shoulder, not a peep, when he just suddenly up and started wailing in my ear. Not so much an "I'm hungry" wail, but more of an "remove me from this boiling oil" wail. Impossible to figure out if this was because he was sick (no temp), clogged nose (nothing in the aspirator), or just impatient (yup).

This poses a problem to my natural way of dealing with a new start-up. I am compelled to understand this new adventure by establishing my own set of methodologies, practices, and beliefs that surround properly managing a baby. However, every time I seem to have been able to conduct the proper double-blind study to ensure that my method is correct, he up and grows out of it.

Grrr.