18 Months Later…

Tags

18 months, babies, child development, milestones, parenting, toddlers

Owl is a year and a half old, as of a couple of days ago. Wow.

I ran into a volunteer from my old work that day – she spotted me at my new work, while buying pet medication. There was a lot of hugging and catching up to accomplish… and we realized that we hadn’t seen each other since I was 5 months pregnant… and now I have a one and a half year old.

1 hour old

I remember when he couldn’t even hold up his own head. Now he hands us heavy packages from our grocery bags at the end of a shopping run.

Where d'you want this 3 lb steak?

We have officially lost count of how many words he says either with speech or sign, usually both. He not only knows where his nose is, but also his feet, toes, eyes, eyelashes, elbows, knees, bum, back, shoulders and pretty much every other external body part (although he is still learning “thumb” and “scrotum”, both of which he confuses with “tongue”).

He also enjoys making animal noises, which he picked up on his own from books we read him. I always wondered why parents spend time teaching their kids animal  onomatapoeia. Well, it turns out, it’s because toddlers think it’s HILARIOUS.

He can do everything listed in the 18 month section of What To Expect The Toddler Years (although our copy is a Value Village edition from 1996, so for all I know, nowadays kids Owl’s age are expected to have discovered cold fusion by 18 months), including the “may even be able to” section (which includes “identify 1 picture by naming” – are they kidding?).

When Owl was born he would stay up for 8 hours straight, screaming and fussing and clawing at the world.

WHY AM I ALIVE??

Now he still stays awake for 8 hours straight, and he does his share of fussing still, but mostly he spends it climbing on things, taking things apart, and saying “Mama? Dada? Hiiiii! Byeeeee! Der ba da. Da! Mama? Mama? Malk? Mo? MO? MALK!!!!”

THIS PLACE IS AMAZING!

A friend of mine just had a baby and PH and I are baffled by this child. He SLEEPS. Like, most of the time. Like, they have trouble getting him to stay awake long enough to nurse. He sleeps with people in the room. He sleeps when being carried around. He barely wakes up for a cold wet wipe on his bum.

We can’t help but wonder what a baby like that would have been like. A baby who didn’t wake up if someone sneezed half way down the street. A baby who could be taken to restaurants and just slept through the meal. A baby who didn’t seem to wildly resent all moments spent off of the breast, and half of the moments spent on the breast.

A baby who wasn’t born fighting everything.

But then, we wonder if such a baby wouldn’t have grown up to be very different from the toddler we have now:

Pass the BC Rolls, please.

A toddler whom we can take to any restaurant because he happily eats and looks around and flirts with the waitresses for as long as the meal takes.

A toddler who never even looks back when I drop him at daycare every day.

A toddler who never cries when strangers talk to him or pick him up.

A toddler who makes other parents at daycare say “I hope our next one is more like Owl”.

A toddler who finds the shyest, more introverted toddler in the room at the community jungle gym and tries to get her to look at him.

A toddler who does stuff like this:

and this:

and this:

Owl, you still don’t sleep well. Your father and I are very, VERY tired.

But dear lord, how we love you and your ridiculous, overconfidant, extroverted ways.

We have no idea how we made a right handed extrovert, and there are days when you wear us down to our last nerve.

But you are so. much. fun. You make us laugh every single day.

It makes me sad that you will grow up and leave us, someday. But PH is looking forward to your being a teenager who refuses to leave his bed.

Because your tiny little 23 pound body WEARS US OUT.

We’re so tired.

Little Owl: 16 Month Omnibus Edition

Tags

16 months, babies, development, language development, milestones, nursing

Two years ago I was newly pregnant, very freaked out but also hoping that I was on the verge of something awesome.

Boy, was I.

Today, Owl is 16 months old.

I’ve never been big on toddlers. Little babies are good because they’re so simple to interact with. Hugs and tickles = good. The end. Kids are fun, too, because you can play imaginative games and read stories with them and listen to their peculiar world views.

But toddlers are just sort of… in between. Especially the 1-2 year old set. They LOOK like little people. They walk like little people. They have strong opinions like little people. But really… they’re babies. They can’t have a conversation with you, they don’t understand English all that well, and they certainly have no capacity for reason.

And they always seem to have baked beans on their face.

So I always saw the toddler stage as something I would just suffer through.

But actually? It’s been SO MUCH FUN.

Watching Owl’s language capacity expanding day by day is frigging awesome. Before you have kids, you wonder how someone can get so excited just because their child learned where his own nose is. But when you realize that you MADE something that can identify the location of its own nose, you can’t help but get really excited.

Especially when you remember the days when this self same person couldn’t even hold up his own head.

It’s hard to keep track of language milestones when you’re doing baby sign language, because it isn’t mainstream enough to provide a large enough statistical pool. 

That being said, I think that Owl is about average for his age. When it comes to actual spoken words, he says “mama”, “dada”, “da” (which means dog, cat, duck, and several other things), “nana” (meaning my mother or a banana), “brr” (meaning book or bear or bird or boat), “ho” (horse), “ball”, “down”, “uh” (up), a strangled “ggraaghhh” which is his attempt at “cracker”, “uh-oh”, and today he developed “awa” (whale or water).

But when you add in his signs, his vocabulary is much larger. It is thanks to the signs that we know the difference between dog, cat, and duck, or between bird, book, bear, and boat. The vast majority of his words are beyond his sad little attempts at pronunciation. We find it hard to keep up with him, but we estimate his total vocabulary to be around 40-50 words.

Sounds impressive, but really, since he only has 8 or 9 spoken words, I think he’s bang on average for his age.

It’s still fun to watch. He is hungry for words and will turn through a book obsessively, identifying nouns, and studying us closely when we show him a new sign.

Do you mind? My book and I are having a private moment.

In fact, he largely ignores all other toys, choosing instead to identify things in his books again and again and AGAIN.

His walking is pretty good now, and he’s almost running. He does a funny little  waddle run, which is usually ended by a tumble and a little voice going “uh-oh…”

This seems totally safe to run on!

He’s just full of giggles and silliness (my in-laws complimented us on his “advanced” sense of humor. Not sure what that means considering that he still thinks that being dangled upside down is the height of comedy, closely followed by me pretending to be scared of him).

Daycare Lady still praises his easy going and cheerful nature, which should be hilarious to anyone who remembers his newborn days. 

I’m not sure I’d really call Owl easy going. He’s… INTENSE. When he’s happy, he’s very, very happy. When he’s upset, he’s VERY LOUD ABOUT IT. Thankfully he is confidant and generally disposed to be happy most of the time.

The only thing that he really has tantrums about is nursing.

He is still a savage nurser, insisting on milk constantly when I’m around, although he happily goes all day without it at daycare. If milk isn’t delivered the second he starts signing ‘MILK, PLEASE, PLEASE, MILK, MILK, PLEASE?” he starts to freak out – getting clingy and whiny and then I need to talk him into a calm state before I will actually let him nurse.

If I’m holding him and he wants to nurse but I need to put him down so I can, say, take off my coat to expose my boobas, he pulls his legs up to his belly and clings to me like some kind of simian.

He’s a little crazy about the boobas. 

I know that if I cut out all nighttime nursing he’d probably be sleeping through the night – we cut down to just one nursing at 3-4 AM and he started sleeping from bed time (the earliest we seem able to get him down is 8:30 pm, which seems late, but he JUST WON’T GO DOWN earlier) until that early morning nurse.

The last few days that seems to have gone to hell, but I think he’s teething again.

I should probably work on getting him off of that 3 AM nursing session, and then I’d have a baby who sleeps through the night, probably, most nights. Some nights any way.

But it’s so hard to stay conscious long enough to put him back down any other way. This is my failing, not his.

The nursing demands cause so many problems that I think I would consider weaning if it weren’t for two things:

1) Clearly he’s not ready to wean, and I can’t imagine what forcing him away from the booba would be like. VERY LOUD, no doubt.

2) He’s still tiny. He’s 9.5 kg, according to the scale at daycare, and that’s in light clothing, including his cloth diaper. Now, he hasn’t dropped his percentiles much (for a while there he slipped down to, like, the 9th percentile, but as you folks predicted, he has regained that lost weight.) but still – he’s wee.

I’m okay with his teenyness, but right now the last thing PH and I want to do is deprive him of any possible extra calories because clearly he needs them. His enthusiasm for food rivals the average Labrador Retriever.

Last month Daycare Lady handed him a piece of cheese, and he was so excited that he fell right out of his chair and knocked his face on the side of the table. He then screamed until he ran out of air and contiued to scream silently for a while BUT NEVER ONCE RELINQUISHED HIS HOLD ON THE CHEESE.  He then proceeded to continue to cry for the next 5 or 10 minutes – a long time, for him – WHILE DEVOURING THE CHEESE.

No, I don't beat my baby. There was just an incident with some cheese.

Today I fed Owl several mandarin oranges, some waffle, some crackers, and then two bowls of spaghetti with meat sauce and cheese. Then we want to a friend’s house where he spent the next THREE HOURS eating grapes, strawberries, nuts, pretzels, carrots, brocolli, and more NON-STOP.

This is NORMAL for him, and still you can see the knobs on his spine when he bends over.

Wee Owl

In fact, since we’re afraid that giving him cow’s milk will bring back the diarrhea, and since I can never seem to pump more than two or three ounces in a day, we’re seriously talking about buying him some formula for daycare, because I have forbidden juice, and water just doesn’t have enough calories.

We have to keep up his calories, because clearly he’s burning them somewhere.

Either that or he has a tapeworm.

I wish I had this problem.

10 months and not imitating?

Tags

10 months, babies, baby sign, development, infant development, language, milestones

Some of you will read this and roll their eyes. For those of you who do, please understand: I HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER. I worry unnecessarily about things. I’m working on it, really, I am.

Babby is ten and a half months old now. 

I haven’t done a full update, because besides the biting, nothing really amazing has happened since the nine month mark. He was still pointing at everything, pulling himself up, signing for milk constantly, handing me objects, making me bleed and so on.

Yo. Boob lady. Book me.

He is pointing at pictures in books now, and if possible is even more obsessed with them. As soon as I put the book down he is practically throwing it at me with impatient “Ah! Buh!” noises.

So really, I shouldn’t be at all concerned about anything.

But I’m me, so I am.

Here’s the thing: Babby has learned how to wave, which is fun.

But the sign for milk disappeared.

This baby was signing for milk CONSTANTLY. It wasn’t always to get milk. I think he knew it would get my attention.

"MILK NAOW PLZ?"

While we think that to him “milk” and “mommy” were the same thing (since I am just a big booba to him, clearly), he did know what it meant because if I said “milk?” he’d start signing away, and if I signed it back he’d get all excited and start pulling at my shirt.

"BOOOOBS!" - Babby's maniacal response to me signing "milk" a week or so ago..

Then he picked up waving, and now he doesn’t sign for milk at all. 

He doesn’t react if I say the word, he doesn’t react if I sign it at him. If I try to withhold the breast until he signs it (which he was doing with alacrity a week ago) he just stares at me. He is getting very frustrated and starting to scream a lot, because I no longer know what he wants when he gets thirsty.

PH says that regressions happen and the sign will come back. But of course I’m catastrophizing all over the place.

Especially since both signs, the milk and the waving, were captured behaviours. I mean that he happened to make them on his own, and we made a big fuss over it, so he did it again.

They weren’t imitated behaviours.

He doesn’t imitate us if we wave at him, or do other hand motions. He likes the waving thing, but it’s hard to get him to initiate it, because he does it randomly, not when we demonstrate waving or tell him to “say hi!” or “say bye!”

Should he be imitating us by now? He doesn’t imitate facial expressions, or try to mimic the words that we say, either. Meanwhile, an acquaintance on facebook has posted an adorable video of her three month old girl imitating sounds.

He enjoys watching itsy bitsy spider, but he doesn’t try make the motions himself.

He does SOME imitations. Sometimes, if I clap, he’ll clap too. He also watches how we interact with objects and then tries to do it himself.

We just had a fun little session today where I was showing him how to put his block IN a cup, and he was trying to do it too.

He also enjoys the “it’s on Babby’s head!” game, invented by PH which involves (cleverly enough) putting stuff on Babby’s head. When it falls off, he’ll try to put it back on.

So that in itself tells me that I’m being a little crazy. 

But seriously. Where did “milk” go??

Babby Update: 9 months and pointing. With videos!

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…

Two thirds of the way around the sun…

Tags

babies, child development, eight months old, first foods, milestones, motherhood, parenthood

Eight Months on Mother's Day!

I can’t believe how the time flies. I have to find a daycare, and a job, and rejoin the working world in a few months, but I just want to stay home and cuddle my baby.

Must learn how to control time. Am putting that on the to-do list.

Watching Babby discover life is amazing.

There was the day he learned how to open his own hands. He was dealing with the constantly aggravating problem of trying to get at the remaining bit of food clutched tightly in his fist after gnawing off the bit that was sticking out.

One day, he opened his hand, pressed it flat against his mouth, and gobbled that last bite. He chewed in triumph as he stared at his hand, opening and closing it again and again, marvelling at his new-found control.

That last bit of food never bothered him again (although that last bite tends to be a doozy, and he usually ends up chewing it for half an hour like a wad of gum until I stick my finger in his mouth and sweep it out of there while he protests loudly).

Then there was the day he discovered clapping. He was waving his hands around and they happened to hit each other, and I burst into a round of applause. He grinned at me, and stared at his hands, and tried to repeat his performance. It took a couple of tries, but he managed it again, and PH and I clapped back at him, telling him what a clever baby he was. He did it again, and again, and he loves the attention he receives.

We still can’t prompt him into it, though. He doesn’t take requests, yet.

He figured out how to wave this week, and he spent many minutes doing it enthusiastically while I cheered and waved, too.

Unfortunately, he will only wave at one person: his own reflection. While he now lifts his hand in joyful salute at the sight of “Babby-in-the-mirror”, he still just stares at us with a polite smile if we try to get him to wave at us.

He will give a high five, though, if he’s not too distracted. While high-fiving us is a fun game in the house, he tends to leave us hanging when there are other people watching.

I still love his relationship with food. 

Lettuce? I EAT IT

So far, he has not discovered food that he won’t eat.

He has gobbled salmon (I hate fish), and spinach, and chickpea curry, and guacamole, and a zillion other things.

We had to warn some friends who were babysitting him a couple of weeks ago not to eat anything in front of him that they weren’t willing to give him, because when he sees food come out he clenches his fists and starts screeching like a dying velociraptor until the food is delivered safely to his pudgy fists. It’s really charming.

What I can’t figure out, though, is how he knows what food is.

I mean, this kid puts everything from dog fur to wet diaper covers into his mouth, so clearly his idea of “food” must be vague… and yet, if I walk into the room with a strange object, he doesn’t react. He only does the argh-you-have-food-i-eat-it screaming when it’s food.  He does it with food he has never seen before.

He did it when he spotted PH buying corn dogs at the midway. How did he know that those corn dogs were food? Corn dogs certainly don’t look like anything edible. So how did he make that mental leap?

Brains. They astound me.

That’s the most amazing thing at all – Babby is a living, breathing, thinking person.

Sure, he thinks that things like Daddy walking into the room and Mommy making fart noises are funny, and that a piece of plastic wrapper is the last word in entertainment, but he is thinking about the world, and watching it, and processing it, and trying to make sense of it all. He’s trying to discover this body that he was born into, and watching what the people around him do, and thinking “so this is what people do.”

He is constantly trying to get at books, trying to figure out what I find so endlessly fascinating about them.

He watches us brush our teeth with fascination, although he’s still not thrilled when we try to brush his.

He wants to eat what we eat, be where we are, and touch what we touch.

In short, he thinks he’s people, and it’s adorable.

THEN WHY AM I DRESSED LIKE A RABBIT??

And I keep marvelling and thinking:

We made you, but we don’t own you.

We gave you your body and your name, and that was our divine privilege, not our prerogative. 

We must care for your body until you can do it yourself.

We must teach you your name until you can speak it with pride.

We must show you the world until you can explore it yourself.

We must give you what you need, but not always what you want, until you learn the difference.

You owe us nothing.

We owe you everything, and it is the most joyful debt we could ever owe. 

In Which Canada is Shocked and Dismayed, and Babby Gets Teeth

Tags

babbling, babies, bloc quebecois, Canada, Conservatives, election 2011, electoral reform, Green Party, Liberals, May 2 2011, milestones, NDP, politics, teething, voters, votes

So, remember how I said Canada was going to end up with the same government as before?

I eat my words OM NOM NOM.

Watching the election was a bizarre mix of pure elation and rich horror for people on both sides of the fence.

Now, this is Canada’s government as of 2008:

Dark Blue = Conservative, Red = Liberal, Orange = NDP, Light Blue = Bloc Quebecois, Green = obvious

This is how Canada was polling before election day in 2011:

Dark Blue = Conservative, Red = Liberal, Orange = NDP, Light Blue = Bloc Quebecois, Green = Obvious

So you can see why I didn’t think there would be any surprises. It should be noted that for the Conservatives to get a majority government, they would need 155 seats, so the projections were showing that they would be at least 10 short of their goal. The NDP were expected to make a big gain, because the leader was campaigning in Quebec and getting a lot of interest there. So the Bloc Quebecois were expected to give up some votes.

This is what happened:

For the first time in history, the Liberals placed third in the popular vote

Despite recieving 40% of the popular vote, the Conservatives win a sweeping majority (12 more than the required 155 seats) and the NDP become the Official Opposition

Not only did the Conservatives win a majority somewhat unexpectedly, but the Bloc Québécois (the Quebec separatist party, which usually holds most of the seats in Quebec) has been virtually eradicated. Even the party leader, who has been in Parliament for 20 years, didn’t get voted into his seat. Technically, the Bloc is no longer an official political party.

The Green Party leader got a seat in Parliament for the first time, which I think is largely a success that can be attributed to vote swapping.

Embarrassingly for the Liberals (who have been either the Federal Government or the Official Opposition for 150 years), not only did they get booted into a dismal third place, but their own party leader didn’t get elected into Parliament. I feel bad for Ignatieff. I always thought he was a bad choise for Liberal leader, but he didn’t deserve that.

Anyway, basically, no one is happy with this government:

The left-wing voters are horrified by the Conservative majority. Now Mr “Harper Government” has the power to make changes against the advice of the left wing Members of Parliament, despite the fact that he only has 40% of the popular vote.

The right-wing voters are horrified by the NDP opposition. You have to understand, this is totally unprecedented. The New Democratic Party puts a strong emphasis on social programs and support for the poor, the blue-collar, and the elderly. They want to put caps on trade, increase taxes on large corporations while giving cuts to small businesses, and increase the old age pension and cut taxes for the old and the poor. They aren’t total socialists or anything – on a provincial government level, as I mentioned before, they actually have a fantastic track record when it comes to handling money responsibly. But you can’t convince the right-wing folks of that, who are sure that if the NDP get into power they would just run around naked in the streets throwing hundred-dollar bills to the homeless and then shredding the rest of the national coffers for confetti.

And now they are opposing our most right-wing faction. Interesting, no?

In a way, it’s a good thing that the Conservatives have a majority. The last few years the Conservatives have blamed everything that went wrong on the fact that they were hobbled by the left-wing Members of Parliament. Now they can’t use that excuse, and we have a strong spokesman for the Everyman keeping him honest.

I think once everyone gets over being horrified, they’ll realize that this government might actually work. And if it doesn’t, maybe it will convince people to go out and effing vote.

Or at least, do some electoral reform.

Jeez.

Meanwhile, in (to me) equally important and world-shattering news, Babby has started babbling again. I haven’t been posting about this because I know I’m a nervous nelly, and I could just see you guys rolling your eyes at me if I started going “So… Babby used to babble, but he hasn’t for a couple of months, now, and now I think he may be autistic because it runs in the family y’know etc etc etc.”

I knew that babies often put one skill aside for a while when they’re working on something else, and Babby has been very focused on learning how to move. He is now capable of dragging his body in counter-clockwise spirals as well as pushing himself backwards. He doesn’t move with great purpose or speed but he moves. We went out and bought a baby gate. Baby proofing is in the offing.

So now that he has started to work that through, he has returned to other skills, to my unspoken relief. In a matter of a day or two he want from NO babbling for weeks to yayaya, wawawa, babababa, dadadada, blah, blah, blah, and so on. He also gives high fives and has discovered clapping.

All in one weekend.

Oh, and he has two teeth.

TEEF. I HAS DEM.

Babby Update: “I EAT IT” Edition

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.

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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.

Five Months, Fussy and Fabulous

Tags

5 month old, babies, classical conditioning, milestones, no-cry sleep solution, schedules, sleep, sleep associations, sleep log, Sophie the Giraffe, teething

 

Babby was five months yesterday. Time flies when your baby is waking up screaming in the night multiple times every night. I took him to the doctor the other day to see if the fussiness and tendency to screech like a kettle while holding one ear was due to an ear infection. It was not. His ears are fine. Must just be teething.

Getting big!

It’s been a big month for Babby – he has perfected his ability to locate sounds, so he is very good at turning his head to catch sounds. The last couple of weeks he has been causing a fuss when we take away something he is playing with – a mile stone I really could have done without for a while longer. He can sit by himself for a little while if we sit him forward propped on his hands like a frog, but after a while he’ll start to topple sideways. Babby also achieved a long-desired goal this month: he has, on several occasions, successfully gotten his toes in his mouth, after months of trying and failing. We were very proud.

His grabbiness has increased and he likes to yank my hair and take off my glasses and turn them around so the earpieces are pointed directly at his corneas. He bites everything, including my chin and his Daddy’s nose. He has met a squeaky toy named Sophie the Giraffe, and he now plans to marry her. He spends a significant chunk of the day making out with her.

"Do you mind? We're kind of having a moment."

 

He has discovered his penis, which has added a new challenge to diaper changing. Obviously we don’t want to discourage him from exploring his own body, but diapers still have to be changed. We try to give him a bit of time with himself before prying away his hands so we can actually fasten his diaper. I live in fear of the day when he will grab his penis before I have had a chance to wipe the poo off of it. So far I have always beaten him to the punch.

We are going to start our no-cry sleep training, so I followed the author’s advice and took a log of his sleep patterns/daily routine. I’ll take another in 10-14 days and we’ll see if there has been any change.

Let’s Call It a Mile-Pebble.

Tags

4 month old, babies, exersaucer, family, infant development, leaning forward, milestones

Around the time that Babby turned 4 months old, I hauled the exersaucer that a friend gave us out of the storage space. I was desperate for new Babby entertainment. I took some of the gewgaws off, so Babby wouldn’t get bored of the toys all at once, and plunked him in. He loved it. He would spin and spin and spin the spinny toy while squealing with glee.

Then he would stand up in his excitement, and… topple backwards.

Once he had leaned back, he had no idea how to reach the toy, and he would make a few futile arm-stretches before bursting into frustrated tears.

For the first little while, I would have to repeatedly come back to the seat and prop him back up against the front of the saucer, so he could reach his toys.

Then, one day a couple of weeks ago, a lightbulb went on inside his head.

There are some milestones so trivial that no baby book logs them, and no internet resource advises you about it. They are so trivial that you don’t even think of them as milestones, unless you are a first-time mother watching her baby figure it out for the first time.

These milestones are so trivial that you can’t very well call your friends and start bragging about it, because they’ll think you’re totally batty and spend too much time alone (both are probably true).

There are only two people in the world who will share my excitement about something this ridiculous, I thought. So I picked up my cell and sent Perfect Husband a text message. Then I picked up the land line and called my mother.

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“Guess what? BABBY JUST FIGURED OUT HOW TO LEAN FORWARD!”

He’s not THAT strong, you know.

Tags

babies, milestones, out of the mouths of babes, reflux, strong baby

We took Babby  to the pediatrician yesterday, and we were much reassured. He thinks that Babby does have some reflux, but that his weight may be levelling out. To be sure, he booked an appointment for next month to make sure he continues along the same line and hasn’t continued to drop through the percentiles.

In essence, his attitude was pretty much “any kid this strong can’t have much wrong with him. Shame about the screaming. Keep up with the Zantac.”

People keep telling us that he’s very strong for his age. I knew the rolling over was early, but I didn’t realize that the other things he does, (like hold his own head up or standing himself straight up on my lap when he’s in a rage) were unusual for his age. But it seems like every time I take him somewhere, some woman comes over to coo, asks how old he is, and then startles.

“Really? Only 12 weeks? He’s very strong for his age!”

“Oh, is he?” I ask weakly, “well, he was overdue when he was born, so maybe he’s a couple of weeks ahead…”

I was hoping for one of those babies who is talking away but not crawling yet by a year. I figure those are the best babies because they can tell you what they want but can’t go tumbling down the stairs yet. But I may have the opposite. My neighbour the lactation consultant, who has six kids of her own, warned me,  “if he can stand now, he’ll probably be walking by the time he’s 10 months.”

Well, that’s just great. We haven’t even baby-proofed yet.

Luckily, lest we become overly proud of our herculean infant, our friends’ ever-honest four year old was quick to bring us down to Earth.

“He’s not THAT strong,” he said sullenly, staring at his Wii game dismissively. “He can’t LIFT anything.”

Thank heavens for small mercies!

Member of the Charles Atlas school for babies: a weakling, weighing under 12 pounds