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2005-07-09 - 11.45pm previous entry next entry
Arthur is 8 months old!!! (billions of photos!)
First of all, thank you so much for the lovely messages and notes and to Julie for the sweet email (I am going to reply very soon!). You guys are wonderful, and I feel so uplifted. BUT I feel so released about messages now, and if I had had none at all I think it would not have mattered to me. I felt so much better for writing all that yesterday, and today I still feel kind of clean and lovely for it! Yay! I read my Bible before I went to sleep last night, even though it was 1am and I was tired out. I just couldn�t resist. I STILL can�t find my Bible!! Boo-hoo. I want my Bible. I think it is buried under a ton of clutter. My Flylady stuff is not going too well. But that will change once Julie and I buddy up, I�m sure! :)
Okay, I have THE biggest entry of all time to write, complete with like 50 photos, since I have so much to catch up on! I hope I can finish it in the next couple of hours so that I am not too crazy late in bed. I want us to go to church tomorrow � yay!! I am really looking forward to it. We haven�t been in a good while. Two or three months I think, and that time was the only time since another few months. I want to siiiiiiing praise to God with lots of other people doing the same. I want to raise my hands while I sing and when I open my eyes I will be able to see lots of other people doing the same, and praising God! I want to praise him with joy for his goodness, and pray with other Londoners about the terrorist attacks this week. I want to let his presence wash over me in the quiet moments and hear the beautiful music as the musicians play. Yay, I can�t wait!! :)
Well, first of all, my baby boy is EIGHT months old today!!! Wow. Happy eight months to my lil Arthur-Boo. Thank you Julie and Mo for wishing him a happy 8 months! See my proud new blinkie for my 8-month breastfeeding milestone?! (and a replacement cloth diapering one that I liked!) :) [edited to add - ooh oooh, I found a FLYBABY blinkie!!!] Of course I have endless photos to show you! Here is Arthur today on his 8-month birthday, wearing a rather bright stripey sleepsuit that Neil�s mum sent us (size 12-18 months!):
Although these days if he is on his tummy, he is almost always found more like this:
He isn�t crawling yet, but ohhhhh he�s soooo close!! He now finds it so easy to pop up onto hands and knees, whereas he used to only get his knees up under him by accident. Now he can pull them up in a second, whilst playing with toys and things. He loves to get on his hands and knees and rock. Sometimes he just stays still like that and looks around. Yesterday for the first time he lifted a knee off the ground and sort of waved it about (!!) as if he wasn�t sure where he might like to put it back down. He balanced fine on the 3 other limbs. Today he brought one knee and inch forward and then the other knee the same, but he didn�t go anywhere. It feels like he really could take off at any moment. I feel anxious about looking away when he�s on his tummy, in case I miss the first crawl!
Another new thing is that he likes to be �walked� places. Lately he likes it when I am holding him under the arms and sort of lift him up on one side so that his leg swings forwards, and then he puts it down, and I lift the other side of him up so that his leg swings and so on. He gets very excited about this! Today we had a bigger breakthrough. I was kneeling behind him, holding him in a standing position under his arms like I do a lot now, and Neil went into the kitchen. Arthur started lunging towards the kitchen as if he would like to follow his daddy, so I held just his little hands with his arms out and up from his body, and he literally did the walking himself!!!! I was so amazed! He just picked his foot up and raised the knee good and high as he leaned forwards (more than 90 degrees actually, almost up to his tummy!), then put it down again, and immediately raised the other knee the same. I think he was motivated by wanting to go where his daddy was, because he never took his eyes off the kitchen, and his whole body was leaning forward the whole time. It made it very easy for him because all he had to do was keep picking up his feet and off he went! I provided all the stability so he didn�t have to worry about that one! He literally went, step, step, step, step, step, step, step � seven or eight rhythmic steps without any pause in between! They were large ground-covering steps too. I was so surprised that his lil stumpy legs could stride like that! I called out to Neil to come quick and see after the first two or three, and he stood in the kitchen doorway amazed at Arthur walking so purposely towards him with a big smile on his face! Of course he got lots of applause when he reached daddy and I let go his hands and he got swooped up in a big bear hug by daddy :) He loves applause!
Of course he would not have gotten anywhere if I hadn�t held him upright, so it�s not like he�s really walking, but anyway we were so excited! He does walk like this in the bath too, when Neil holds him in a standing position. I think it�s the buoyancy of the water that makes him want to step out. One time he moved his legs up and down in a forwards motion so fast that it was like he was running! It was funny :) He sits on Neil�s leg in the bath and then he spots something that he wants, like the yellow rubber duckie on the end of the bath, and push, he�s up on his leggies in the nice easy supportive water! Then Neil just holds him securely around the torso and Arthur just walks the length of the bath to reach the duckie. He is super pleased when he gets to take hold of it! Today, later on than the �walk to Daddy� incident, I was holding him standing again and he was just sweeping the room with his gaze, and then suddenly he focused on a toy that he wanted, and started moving his legs up and down to walk there! All I had to do was support him and lean him forwards so that he could let his legs do the rest. I love the look of absolute focus on his face when he does this. For some reason it�s the cutest thing. His little legs pump up and down so importantly, it�s so cute! We took some video footage of it today, but it didn�t come out too well, so we�ll try again tomorrow. Unfortunately my memory card for the movie clips is full so I need to fix that (or get a new one) before I can put any more movie clips online. I will try to do it soon though, as I want to show you his first crawling and stuff as soon as he does them!
I took Arthur to the baby clinic yesterday to be weighed, and he weighs 21lbs 11oz! He has put on exactly one pound since he was last weighed. This puts him at the 80th percentile, which I think means he has dropped a little in terms of his percentile on the chart, but I am not worried. The health visitor who weighed him was really pleased with his weight and said everything looked very healthy. He does not need to remain up above the 90th percentile after all! She also measured his length and he is 72cm (28.5 inches), which puts him just above the 75th percentile so that is good. He is 3cm longer than his last measurement. I think it has to be all on his torso!!! He is soooo long in the torso, and soooo stumpy in his lil short legs! Sweetie boy :) He is currently wearing dungarees that are sized for length: 80cm! So his torso is super long. It fits them perfectly, but the trouser bits are too long for his legs ;) He does make up for lack of leg length with girth though! He has such chubby lil legs. I love his leggies :) His TODDLER sized Stacinator So-Simple wraps are too tight on his thighs now. Crazy! I am just waiting for when he starts to crawl, because I know they will slim down like nothing else when that happens. I will miss his chub though.
Things have been happening lately with Arthur�s food. I wish I had been updating about it more regularly, because every day is a new thing at the moment and now I have a huge load of catching up to do here! Let�s see, last time I mentioned his food, I think he was less than excited about banana, whole or mashed, and we had just tried him on mashed sweet potato which he gagged and retched on. At Grandoug�s birthday gathering, he ate a fairly good meal of mashed banana and chewed on an apple and cinnamon rice cake for a while. I think the distraction helped him eat. Since then he has seemed more and more gaggy with food, the instant it�s on his tongue. So I am sure it has to be flavours that he is bothered by. With this in mind, I decided to go back to purees for a while, to eliminate any other reason for him to gag by having something totally smooth and runny, but with different flavours for him to get accustomed to. One day when I was at the supermarket, I went to the baby food aisle to get more rice cakes, and pondered a while in front of the organic pureed baby food. I always wanted to make my own, but I figure there are lots of very easy and convenient (and organic) little packs of different flavours for Arthur to try, so I might as well be trying him on them for now. I spent ages reading all the ingredients, and in the end I chose a single pot of Heinz organic pureed banana and apple from the �simply fruits� range. It had nothing else in it but organic banana and organic apple. Except a dash of lemon juice as an anti-oxidant (organic as well). He had already tried apple and banana separately, and I could see through the packaging that it was a perfect smooth puree, so I figured I would give it a whirl.
That afternoon I gave him a little bit warmed up, and he took it really well! He wasn�t 100% crazy about it, and he gagged and made a couple of sour faces with screwed up eyes at the flavour, but I think it is the strength of flavours that he has trouble with, not that he necessarily dislikes them. So I kept offering him more, and he took about 5 tiny baby spoon-tips full of it, till he had had enough. He even opened his mouth for it and leaned forwards once or twice! That is more than he has done before, so I was encouraged. He didn�t have more than a spoontip-full or two the next day though, and I ate the rest to save throwing it out after it had been open for the maximum time. Yum! :) So one way or another he got it, because then it was in his milk for later, hehe!
Yesterday we went shopping again and I bought one of every one of those Heinz simply fruit (and simply vegetables) range that they had in stock. I am glad to try him on so many different things so easily because now he gets to try banana and passionfruit; nectarine and mango; broccoli, cauliflower and parsnip; strawberry and apple; blueberry, apple and banana; pumpkin and potato, to name but a few, and I don�t have to go scouring the supermarket for pumpkins or passionfruits and find out how to cook and puree them to perfection and then store 50,000 ice cubes of them in my freezer! This way I can hopefully help him get over his taste issues and also find out which foods he likes and which he hates, and then I will be able to start buying and making his food again. I really want to, it�s fun!
But in the meantime, I also bought an organic avocado and an organic mango during the week. I figured I could try him on those pretty easily myself, since they would be easy to prepare and not take up a ton of freezer space if I chose to puree and freeze them. I wanted to offer him slices of these things as finger foods, but mash or puree them as a back up if he didn�t want to hold them. He seems kind of squeamish about holding messy or slimy things! Soooo the first thing we tried was the avocado, since it was ripe and the mango needed a few days to sit and delici-fy! I don�t like avocados myself, but I know the texture is smooth and buttery, so I figured maybe he would go for it. I peeled it and sliced it, but every slice I handed him gave him that disgusted �ewwww, slimy!!� face and all he wanted to do was squish it hard in his fist so that it oozed out off both ends and then he dropped it on the tray in a sorry heap. He did this with six slices in a row! After that I thought, oh well, I will mash them up and see if he will taste his fingers. So I mashed them up. I was amazed at how smooth the texture became just with mashing. There were a few lumps but lots of it was just like puree. I spooned a little of it up and offered it to Arthur and he took it, made tasting faces (interested ones!) and opened for more! So avocado was a definite success!! :) After that he just wanted to �paint� with it. I know all babies paint with their food if they get the chance, but Arthur just seems to love it! He gets this lovely calm expression of intense concentration and actually seems to work hard at smoothing out the textures on his tray. He is right-handed when he does this, I notice. My mum thinks he is going to be an artist, hehe! So, of course, here are the avocado photos :) Feedy-facey ones first (he is pretty good at feeding himself with the spoon) and then the artist at work!! ;)
Isn�t he gorgeous?! I know I am biased, but�.
Okay then I hit on another idea, and boiled and pureed the remaining organic sweet potatoes that I had bought last week. I pureed them extra smooth and then I froze 9 ice-cubes, and kept about 2 teaspoonfuls out. I got out a carrot puree ice-cube that I made a while back, and thawed it and mixed it with the sweet potato. It was just THE most perfect puree! I was so proud of it! But Arthur did not like it one bit. I just don�t think he is a fan of sweet potato. It was lovely and sweet and tasty though, just for the record! Every spoonful I put in his mouth, he would get on the tip of his tongue and just hang it out of his mouth till it slopped off onto his bib! He gagged and made horrible faces if it got too far back in his mouth, and basically didn�t really swallow any of it. He just didn�t like it. So eventually I dumped it out on the tray for him to paint with. I don�t mind him doing this � I know I won�t tolerate it when he is four years old (!) but right now meal times are meant to be fun, and supposed to be messy, and he likes to paint :) So then once he was able to actually have fun with it, he was happy again. THIS happy!...
Isn�t he cute being so excited about painting with his food?!! Hehe! See his new cover-all bib? It�s the best thing I ever bought, seriously! The avocado clean-up took me HOURS, literally. It took me a whole naptime to clean the highchair alone, and he needed a serious bath afterwards! I had to put the highchair harness in the washing machine. Ew. Sweet potato and carrot clean-up was much easier with the bib, but there was still a lot to do, and lots in Arthur�s hair!
Today the mango was finally ripe, and I tried giving him a slice to hold, but he gave me THE most disgusted look (hehe!) so I pureed the rest. He made lots of sour faces at first, but didn�t seem to absolutely hate it, so I persevered. In the end, I think he really likes mango! He made lots of interested tasting-faces and sucky lips when there was mango in his mouth, and he was extremely keen on tasting his fingers after painting with the slice that I mashed roughly. He actually ate a whole ice-cube worth (two heaped teaspoons) of puree! I froze 10 more ice-cubes of mango puree. Here he is tasting his fingers (note the mango hair!) after painting:
So tomorrow we get to choose a pot of something yummy for him to try, and see what he thinks of it! It�s quite fun. The health visitor yesterday said he is �behind� on solids. That was a bit annoying because I don�t think it�s fair to call him behind, when it doesn�t really matter like that. Most 8 month olds are eating 3 meals a day (and in fact there was a (gorgeous!) 5 � month old baby girl in there with us who was already on three meals a day! But that doesn�t make him �behind�. It just makes him different to most 8 month olds. Poor Boo. It is okay that he still mostly has my milk and doesn�t really take many solids. He is thriving, a fantastic weight, healthy as anything, and developing at an exciting rate. But I did ask the health visitor if she had any tips on ways to gently encourage him with food. I made a follow-up weaning appt for the health visitor to visit me at home in a couple of weeks. I just don�t want to ignore their advice, but at the same time I know Arthur is healthy and doing just fine, and I don�t want to be persuaded that he is not getting the best he could get because he isn�t that interested in solids yet. So we�ll see how we go. I have stepped up the frequency of offering him solids now, like I planned to around 8 months, and I think he will take to it better from now on.
Oops, he is awake and ready for a mama-milk top-up! Back in a few minutes�.
Asleep again :) He barely wakes for this feed, the one he takes about 3 hours after his bedtime, and it�s usually a shortish one.
What else can I update about, with Arthur? He is teething again/still. Still no teeth! His gums are so red and swollen, poor love, and he is biting on his hands so hard that his gums go completely white and he marks his fingers. I give him teething rings and frozen grapes inside the Baby Safe Feeder (which arrived during the week AT LAST!! � thank you again Michelle for alerting me to their existence!) but he doesn�t use them for long before he tosses them aside and goes back to frantically gnawing on his hands. We have been giving him Bonjela and teething powders several times a day but they aren�t quite so effective at the moment. He does open his mouth so wide and put his tongue out for the powder though, and seem really eager to take them, so they must help him.
Oh my goodness, he did the world�s most enormous poo the other day, which surpassed even his previous record (!!), and it was so disasterous! A deadly combination of big boy poo and breastmilk poo, and by the looks of it, at least 3 months worth all saved up for one poo!! Crikey. All the foods he has ever eaten seemed to be represented in that poo. You are not enjoying this narrative, are you? ;) There was so much of it that it came right up out of the back of his nappy and got on his clothes, and urrrrgh, when I took the nappy off, he (of course) put his hands on his bits, and when I instinctively let go his ankles to rescue his hands� yup, you guessed it, THUNK went his hard little heels in the mushy poo-poo in the open nappy! Ew. Ew. Ew. Lots of washing and laundry for mama. He wriggles soooo excessively these days when I change his nappy. I can�t keep him steady for anything. Sometimes when am having a no-patience day, and on occasions like when he has done a poo that has got everywhere, I get exasperated and use my stern voice to tell him to stop wriggling while I get rid of the poo-poo. This is how I have discovered that Mummy�s stern and slightly-louder-than-usual voice is one of the funniest things that Arthur has ever heard before! He does immediately stop what he�s doing, but only because he has to put his hands on his tummy for laughing so hard at me!! He even laughs so hard that he gets watery eyes!!! Funny boy! It�s most frustrating when I am truly out of patience, because I think, �How will he ever take me seriously?!� but mostly any exasperation just melts away to hear him giggling so breathlessly and infectiously like that :) He�s such a sweetie!
Today in the kitchen, Neil was holding Arthur, who was all miserable and frantic over his poor gums, and I was shoving four frozen grapes in the Baby Safe Feeder to give to him for his lil gums to bite on. They were watching me do it. Just as I was about to screw the handle on, one of the grapes popped out and bounced like a marble all over the highchair tray. I was slapping at it trying to catch it, and without thinking I was making punctuated, �Oooh! Eeeh! Ahhh!� sounds as it kept bouncing out of my grasp. Well all of a sudden Arthur started absolutely cracking up, from absolutely nowhere at all! It was so funny, Neil and I laughed so much, because his laughter is just soooo infectious! He laughed a real belly laugh, not just his little cute giggle, and it made him gasp and get watery eyes again! He seems to find me funny quite a lot, especially when I am not trying to be! I love him so much. He is such a complete delight to me :) I love it when his eyes shine like that after laughing so hard. He is just more beautiful than a jewel. I love his happy humorous personality. He is such a precious little boy.
Look what a fun thing he discovered to do this week!...
What a pickle! He found a box of tissues, and immediately set to work pulling them all out! He concentrated so hard on it, and got quite a rhythm going � grab, pull, shake-shake, drop�. grab, pull, shake-shake, drop�. grab, pull, shake-shake, drop, etc, etc! Each tissue got exactly two shakes in the fist before it was discarded and the next one grabbed! I could have stopped him after the first few, but I just couldn�t help but sit smiling at him and watching him have fun. He was very pleased with himself when he was all surrounded by tissues! Especially when I got the camera out :)
What else can I write about before I go to bed. It�s midnight so I should go really. Oh but I was going to say that the London bombings thing is feeling more surreal and distant to me at the moment, I don�t know why. We went out on Friday (yesterday - it happened on Thursday) for the first time since the attacks and I almost wished I had made it out on Thursday too. Everywhere I looked there were people talking to each other in the street about it. I felt such a sense of community, and unity about it, like I could just walk up to any group of people and join in the conversation and it wouldn�t be weird. We all have it in common and it brings us together. I like that feeling of unity. One thing I didn�t like yesterday though, was when I was stuck in a traffic jam with one of those red double-decker buses directly behind me, and two of them directly in front. Not that I thought there would be a bomb on one of them, but you know. I had a moment of panic about it, because the bus that exploded really was just any old red double-decker bus that you can see around London. Just the number 30 bus. The people driving directly behind and in front must have felt no different than I did in that traffic jam yesterday, moments before it exploded. And my precious baby boy in the back of my car�. Too awful to contemplate. But I am not planning on letting it make me fearful or anything. I�m just noting how it made me feel the first time after the event. I can�t avoid buses � they are evvverywhere where I live, like in any other part of London! Life will start to feel normal again and people are already getting on with things. I hate that people had to die and get hurt though, it�s so awful. I just pray that God will protect me and Arthur when we go places, and Neil too, and keep us safe from all harm. Then I feel safe and ready to go again. He is my shield and I trust in him. It will be okay, despite terrible happenings and people who hurt other people.
Ooh I don�t want to end on that note! What else can I tell you that has happened lately? Ohhh I have a fabric addiction. Seriously. I need professional help or something! I just can�t help it when I see lilac satin in a remnant box in the haberdashery dept when I�m shopping, because now I�m thinking, �Oooh a special nappy or wrap for my new little niece!� *sigh* I don�t know WHAT I will do if I ever have a baby girl. All the nappies I�ve sewn (except for maybe 9 or 10) were for my little boy, and I don�t mind girls wearing nappies with fire trucks on, but you just KNOW I am going to want to sew cute nappies with pink princesses and glittery stars on them! Neil is very tolerant of my addiction, though he does roll his eyes if I sheepishly admit to having �maybe possibly just purchased a tiny little bit of fabric�. He says we need to move house just for the fabric to have a room of its own, hehe! So I did buy the lilac satin. Oh my goodness, it will make the most girlie-cute outer for a PUL wrap, if I bind the legs with matching microfleece or something! I can�t wait to sew it! And I bought a nice leafy print cotton remnant too. I don�t know why though. Ohhh the addiction! It�s a terrible thing. I finally replaced the twin needles that I broke on the Cuddlebun I was making a while back. I also bought a replacement so that if it happens again I don�t have to wait 2 weeks and then go shopping for another one! Now hopefully I can finish that Cuddlebun and get started on the next one. I LOVE sewing nappies. They are so much fun!!
Okay I am all typed out, whether or not I have missed things out, and it�s too late so I must go to bed. I will update again as soon as I can. I love writing my diary! :)
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