I wonder what kind of personality Jay is going to have. Good luck to him if it’s anything like mine – it’ll be a battle of wills! Haha! That being said, you should see us already fighting over the bottle, the spoon, the bowl, the washcloth, his clothes, his toys, Rocco’s ear and so on. Haha! I’m just kidding – I know that right now he is just learning a whole lot of new things and so he wants to touch, grab and do a whole lot of things on his own. When I was young I used to love scratching the speakers because of the nice scratchy sound they made. Well, Jay just loves to scratch his Snoopy carrier and cushion as well. Scratch, scratch, scratch!
On Tuesday night after Stella left it was much later on and I went into the bathroom. The baby bathtub was there, but the yellow seat thing he sits on was bone dry. I immediately jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that he hadn’t been bathed. I sent Stella a message asking her why because he really does need a daily bath. I wish I’d thought then of checking the towel to see if it was damp before I’d sent her the message, but at least I didn’t make it sound like I was upset. She called me right away and insisted she had bathed him. She asked me why I’d thought she hadn’t. When I told her about the yellow thing, she sounded so relieved and said she was so sorry she hadn’t mentioned it to me. She said that he kept trying to pull himself up, so she’d stopped using it and just let him sit in the bath while she held him. I apologized for questioning her and said it was fine if she did it that way as long as he was totally safe. When she arrived on Wednesday I once again apologized for the misunderstanding. She was fine and, to be honest, I think she was just relieved that everything was okay and she hadn’t done anything wrong. Since then I’ve seen how she baths him and it works well. He loves it because he sits (she holds him) and he grips the side and splashes about with his legs. I must say he is super calm when he is with her. I don’t know how she does it! When he sees me his eyes automatically open wide and he gets all active.
He has been a busy boy again this week. He sat up properly for the first time unaided the other day. He didn’t get into a sitting position on his own, but once we put him in a sitting position he could just stay that way. He even lifted both his hands up and didn’t fall over for quite a while. He has been gurgling a lot, too, and he has really been laughing a lot this week which is the cutest sound. He had laughed before, but it was more of a shout/screech. It has turned into a definite chuckle which Greg and I just adore and can’t get enough of (yes, even at 3am in the morning)! He also had his first real solids this week. We just felt it was time because every time we eat, he wants to grab the spoon or grab what’s on the plate or bowl and now when we eat he cries even though he doesn’t want a bottle. If I put the food near his mouth, he opens his mouth wide so I’m pretty sure he wants what we’ve got. On Friday we had some Baskin Robins and I swear the little dude already has a sweet tooth (sweet gums?) because he was so excited and kept trying to get close to the bowl and then he’d open his mouth wide like he wanted to eat it. Of course we never gave him any, but he does LOVE eating. Only thing he has a problem with, is that sometimes it’s too slow for his liking. I’ve shown Stella how to feed him because it’s better he eats before his bath. The reason? He gets the food EVERYWHERE! He loves it, though, and opens his mouth wide for you to put the spoon in. He also loves to stick his fingers in at the same time or just try and eat right out of the bowl when we’re taking too long. We’ve only given him rice cereal which is exactly what we put in his bottles to help with the acid reflux. Now you just add more of the rice cereal to the water so the consistency is thicker and then when we give him a bottle afterwards, we don’t add any rice to it and he is totally fine with it. Next on our list is banana, but I’ll wait a week or two before introducing that. He has tasted apple, but only by gumming a piece from my fruit salad that I held out to him and let him taste. It was the only way to keep those little fingers out of my bowl! There’s no turning back, though. Now that he has had his taste of solids, it really is what he wants.
On Tuesday Greg didn’t have to go in to work until 5:30pm and I didn’t start until 5pm either so we decided to go out for breakfast. We took a walk as the weather was beautiful. It’s still really hot here during the day and it’s only at night that I need a sweater when I drive home. I’m pretty sure that it’ll happen the way it usually does – one week it’ll be hot and the very next it’ll be ice cold and you’ll be like “What happened?” Anyway, we took a walk with Jay in the stroller and then we ate there. A colleague of Greg’s came by and sat with us for a while, too. We had a lovely time.
And on that note, let me be off.
Lots of love
Em x
snippets from November, 2009 (4 months)