Chubbers

When we were living in Japan babies came in two sizes, newborn and fat. Once those kids left the maternity ward they would blow up like balloons as though each of them was training for Sumo stardom right out of the womb.  As non-parent opinionated Americans from New Jersey we regularly commented to each other how appalling it was that these parents were raising a generation of chubbers only because they couldn’t be bothered to sooth their little akai chyan (baby) when he/she was upset.  

Well ain’t karma a bitch.  Wouldn’t you know it, I looked back at pictures the other day of Ethan & Ruthie at two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight & nine months and they made those little Sumos look like anorexic runway models!


That’s just the thing, I had no idea it was happening when it was happening.  They would cry about every two hours and we fed them.  They would cry and we’d feed, cry, feed, cry, feed, cry, feed – you get the idea.  It wasn’t out of ignorance, the doctor said about every two hours; the books I read said the same thing.  But looking back, maybe we could have rocked, coddled and sang to them a little more and shoved a bottle in their mouths a little less.

Friends and neighbors would come over after not having seen the kids for a few weeks and I could never understand the look of shock and awe on their faces.  Everyone seemed to want to know how much they weighed all the time and what percentiles they were in.  I would confidently explain that Ethan was in the 92^nd percentile for height and Ruthie was in the 98^th.  But in hindsight, that clearly wasn’t the stat they were asking about and the reason they were probably so tall at the time wasn’t because of their Dad’s genes, but because of the two inches their chubby feet were giving them.

My little girl before
we fattened her up

Often friends would give us unsolicited comments about how, “they’ll lose all that baby weight once they start moving.”  “What baby weight?” I would ponder to myself, “they look just fine, Ethan is 20 lbs. at six months old because he’s so tall.” 


Then it happened, a month after crawling, rolling, standing, falling, standing, falling and constantly trying to walk, I was holding Ruthie and felt something strange on her side.  


They were ribs!


A whole rack of them, all around and that’s when I decided to look back at those pictures to see if it was my imagination or if I really hadn’t felt her ribs in eight months!