The first month my son Max was around he did four things: eat, pee, poop and scream. That's it. He didn't play. He didn't smile. He didn't coo. He just did the bare necessities, and he did each one of them quite well.

Unlike most babies, Max didn't lose much weight right after birth, and almost immediately he began packing on the pounds. On the average, babies gain about a pound a month for the first three months. They double their weight in the first six months and triple it in the first year.

Max is on target to double his weight in his first three months. And he entered the world with nine-and-a-half pounds to his credit. He is, without a doubt, one big tub of goo. Our doctor tells us not to worry. After all, his mom and I are two people who gain weight when they go to the gym and lose weight when we're couch potatoes. No one has mistaken either of us for someone who needs to have a personal chat with Jenny Craig. The boy will most likely drop down to a more normal weight (and shed his two extra chins) sometime after he begins to walk and run and generally terrorize the neighborhood.

But that first month we weren't worried about his physique. The kid was a champion screamer. There were days he'd go for hours on a single screaming jag. Sometimes he'd even try to cry while feeding. Add incessant screaming to extreme sleep depravation, and you begin to wonder why more people aren't going to jail after shaking their kids to death.

Yes, I'll admit it: I wanted to shake his little brain until it dissolved into jelly. Well, at least until he would shut up. I didn't want to kill him or give him brain damage. I just wanted that wailing to stop. For a minute. One minute. Give me a short break, and I could take another five hours. But I needed that respite. And Max rarely granted one.

Still, I'm a reasonably-educated man who's in full control of himself. No matter how much that demented corner of my mind wanted to shake the little guy, I didn't. I rocked him in the chair, I bounced him on my shoulder and I walked him around the house. The only thing that worked with any frequency was dancing with him. His likes? Ryan Adams and Ella Fitzgerald. Cheap Trick did okay. John Coltrane worked once (but only once). Miles Davis got a big thumbs down. The problem with dancing is that he'd break into a louder and more intense crying jag as soon as I quit. So while I might calm him for a while, it was a temporary break. And the withdrawal was a bitch.

But see, when babies are really young, all you can do as a parent is feed and comfort them, even if they don't seem to be appreciating your efforts. When the cute little baby you expected turns out to be a huge, wailing beast, and when that creature then refuses to follow any of the rules of civilized society, well, the mantra "it's going to get better" gets old.

Still and all, that saying is true. Right at a month, Max started to smile. He would stick his tongue out at me if I stuck mine out at him. He would give little hugs every once in a while. He even began to make contented noises instead of hollering nonstop. By the end of his second month, crying jags were a rarity that could be appreciated as a novelty. His parents were figuring out what he wanted, and he was figuring out how to tell us thank you.

Last Friday we took Max to the beach for the first time. We paid way too much money for a flimsy beach tent shelter and set up camp on windy Wrightsville Beach (smack dab in the middle of a beach replenishment project, which meant watching bulldozers move large pipes back and forth across the beach). Max slept, something he's been doing a lot more of lately.

I sat next to Max (he was safely strapped into his car seat, of course) on the way back home. Barbara's best friend from high school was in town visiting and accompanied us to the coast. She got the front seat, which was fine with me. While hauling up I-40 a fast-moving thunderstorm hit us head-on, lightning and thunder and huge raindrops pounding our little '91 Accord. I put my hand on his chest to try and comfort him as the storm raged. He simply sat there awake but calm and took it all in. I dropped off to sleep.

When I woke up, I saw that he'd pulled him arm out from under mine and placed his hand on mine, as if to say, "Don't worry, Daddy. It's okay." After two months of comforting Max night and day, he decided to return the favor.

Maybe I've been missing something. I know there's this whole sense of the future that is supposed to arrive when you have kids (this hasn't really hit me yet). But maybe part of the reason kids are around is to reassure the old folks. Not all the time, certainly. But every once in a while, when my notion of the world and how it's spinning needs an update, perhaps Max will point out how much I've been missing.

Jon Worley sleeps a lot more these days.