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Tag Archives: crawling

Babby Update: 9 months and pointing. With videos!

24 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Vids and Vlogs

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

9 month old, babies, baby sign, child development, crawling, milestones, motherhood, pointing

Time tends to meld when you spend every day at home, like a hamster in a cage (although, as a nervous sort of hamster, I actually appreciate my cage and find it cozy and protective).

Going on vacation really helped put a time-stamp on a lot of Babby’s developmental progress.

I went to Nova Scotia with a baby who was 8 months old, clapping, but not pointing, who was not crawling, and only interested in standing.

I came home three weeks later with a baby who was pointing at everything while making little “ah!” noises, dragging himself around the house on one knee, and pulling himself to standing on every vertical object he could find.

The pointing thing gets a little funny. He points at everything that interests him (his favourites are lights, red things, knobs, and switches) but he won’t identify a named object by pointing.

Also, while I automatically name everything he points at, he’ll continue pointing, and then I’m not sure what to do.

“Fire extinguisher! That’s a fire extinguisher!

…Yep, that’s… still a fire extinguisher. It’s red! It’s… a fire extinguisher! Can you say “fire extinguisher”? Nice try, “gah” is close…

…Okay, that’s… still a fire extinguisher…”

If I can take him over to touch it (i.e. it is safe to play with and reachable) I will. But honestly, it’s like living with the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come the way that unwavering finger is always pointing, pointing, pointing.

He discovered the dimmer switch at my mother’s house, and is now obsessed with light switches. I can always make him smile by picking him up and letting him flick the switch up, turning his bedroom light on, and then down, turning it off. He grins and chortles with delight every time.

He has figured out the sign for milk (opening and closing his hand). I captured the behaviour by sticking a booba in his mouth every time he did it, and after a few experiences of this nature, he began to do it more deliberately. When his little experiments worked, by producing booba, he would nurse with his eyes wide, staring at his hand, opening and closing it thoughtfully.

So now he makes it ALL THE TIME while staring at me expectantly as his hand opens and closes, opens and closes.

Thing is, I’m not sure he really understands that it means milk.

I think he thinks it means Mommy.

Although since he probably percieves me as nothing more than a giant milk sack to begin with, it may simply be that the distinction is too fine at this juncture. He hasn’t picked up any other signs, and he doesn’t try to imitate what we do, either. He thinks it’s awesome when we imitate HIM, though.

I’m glad he’s finally crawling.

He totally figured it out the day after I made the post about how he had no intention of doing it.

It was clearly an accidental discovery.

He was trying to figure out how to stand up and walk, but discovered that one foot flat on the ground could propel the rest of his body along, and so that is what he does now. He treats his left knee like a skateboard and pushes himself with the right foot. It works, although when he gets going he begins to resemble a rampaging gorilla.

My life immediately got a lot easier.

He is now quite happy to move around a room, examining toys, putting dog fur in his mouth, playing with the knobs on his dresser and so on, for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Since he was already scooting around backwards anyway, things haven’t changed much in the watching-him category. The only difference is that now he gets where he wanted to go, and doesn’t end up screaming in rage from the other side of the room.

He wants to be clear, though, that he doesn’t consider this to be an ideal form of locomotion.

He loves to walk around the house while we hold his hands (although he’s still convinced that he would be perfectly capable of doing it himself if we would just let go of him) and he WOULD be cruising around the furniture if he didn’t keep letting go of the couch/table/parental pant leg and attempting to walk off on his own. He invariable falls over, which thankfully he usually finds hilarious.

In fact, after one failed attempt at walking away from the coffee table, he will often pull himself to standing and then let go again and again, for the sheer joy of landing on his butt and then laughing over the funniness of it all. I laugh too, and he thinks I’m laughing with him, but it’s also AT him a bit.

His top teeth are starting to come in, which is not helping the booba-biting situation. The problem with his nipping me at the breast is that every time he does it I yelp. He finds this hilarious and it actually encourages him. I always remove the breast and often plunk him unceremoniously on the floor afterwards, but until I manage to keep my mouth shut he’s going to keep nipping when he gets bored. Meanwhile the skin under my nipples is starting to flake and my boobas itch insanely all the time, probably from sheer irritation.

Itchy boobas aside, I am finding this kid increasingly entertaining with every passing day, and it’s killing me that soon I’ll have to leave him with someone else…

Cute but Ineffective

16 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

babies, crawling, funny, videos

We’re starting baby proofing this weekend, because Babby is starting to figure out how to wriggle forward. So far, it’s a matter of inches, but we feel that the end of stay-put baby days is nigh.

But in the meantime, I’ll continue to be amused by his repeated attempts to do the butterfly on dry land.

Babby Update: “I EAT IT” Edition

07 Thursday Apr 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

babies, baby led weaning, baby proofing, crawling, milestones, object permanence, parenthood, seven months, solid foods

I can’t believe he’s seven months old.

The first three months lasted an eternity, and the last four have winged by. My mat leave is more than half over. How’s that for a scary thought? Maybe I should, like, look for daycares and a job and such.

Most of the time, Babby is happy, occasionally fussy, and continually sleepless. His good napping fell apart a week or two ago. I won’t dwell on the sleep thing, though, because I have a sleep mega-post coming down the chute, so stay tuned for that.

He has also been fussier this week. I think his teeth are starting to come through – when he opens his mouth, I can see two well-defined nubbins on his bottom gum. He still bites everything in sight.

As far as milestones are concerned, he’s fine. He can sit up (although he still thinks the best way to stand up is to arch his back, so when he’s had enough sitting, he flollops onto his back). He hasn’t figured out crawling. He’s still working on the theory that lifting his hands and feet off of the ground so he’s balancing on his belly and then waggling his butt energetically like a stranded dolphin is the way to propel himself forwards. This works great in the bath/the pool. Not so much on land.

SCOOT!

When he props himself up on his hands, he pushes himself backwards instead of forwards. The more he tries to creep, the more he just ends up scooting away from the object he’s trying to get at. Then he gets frustrated and wails until I come and rescue him.

I haven’t been looking forward to him becoming mobile, and when he started flipping over at 6 weeks old, I thought I was doomed to an early crawler. However, I am relieved to realize that I didn’t factor something in: when a baby can flip onto his back before two months of age, his tummy time becomes drastically reduced, through no fault of the mother. So that slowed things down, I think.

This is probably good because we haven’t babyproofed in the least – the house is a death trap. Electrical sockets without their plates on, let alone protective covers. Plastic bags on the floor (PH pointed out the irony of the fact that there is a big plastic bag in Babby’s room… filled with baby-proofing equipment). Toothpicks and elastic bands in unexpected places. Man-eating tigers under the bed. That sort of thing.

However, I’m not thrilled with him getting bored and fussing to be moved every five minutes. I’m starting to wish that he would get crawling so he can stop complaining about it.

It’s not a strength issue, that’s for sure. He’s been able to support his own weight practically since birth, so he likes to stand on the ground while one of us holds his hands. Then he tries to walk, but it’s really just a controlled wobble forwards. It’s not walking.

Also, when he’s pissed off he arches his back and he ends up doing this weird thing where only his head and his toes are touching the ground. So strength? There. Finesse? Not so much.

He definitely has object permanence.

Peekaboo, once his favourite game, no longer holds any surprises for him, although he still enjoys the occasional game of it. Hidden objects don’t faze him – he immediately tries to lift off the lid/move the blanket to reveal the toy.

He especially thinks it’s hilarious when I hide behind a blanket and then, when his fingers come thrusting underneath to find me, I bite them. HILARIOUS.

Also worthy of big belly laughs: dolphin kicks in the bathtub, having adults imitate his noises with excessive dramatic flair, tickles, being held upside down, and anything startling.

The biggest thing this month has definitely been the food. This month, for the first time, he has taken in energy which I did not provide. Up til now, every molecule in his body came from my body. Now he is taking in food that I did not make for him. *weeps*

Of course, I’m still the primary source of food. Solids are just supplemental at the moment. All he ate today, for example, was an arrowroot biscuit. But yesterday he gobbled a hunk of soft chicken and masticated a big piece of chewy steak. I try to make sure he gets something with iron in it on a regular basis, like red meat. The paediatrician actually told me that they are thinking of changing the recommendations, and listing meats as ideal “first foods”, because of the iron.

At first he just played with food – it was something new to put in his mouth. But around the middle of the month he really got the idea. I noticed that he was actually eating when I gave him some pork gyoza, two, and realized when cleaning up that there wasn’t nearly enough scraps left over.

Then he sucked the entire pulp out of a slice of pickle and we knew he had the idea.

He has eaten: apple sauce, squid, shrimp, pork, beef, chicken, carrot, green pepper, orange pepper, red curry (actually, he didn’t enjoy that much), spicy thai chili sauce (he did like that), potato, cauliflower, broccoli, gyoza, pickle, lemon sorbetto (just a taste), tomato, oatmeal, arrowroot cookies, saltines, and probably more.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

NOM NOM NOM

Got anything that needs eating? Babby will eat it for you.

Nom.

*No cats were actually harmed in the making of this baby.

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