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2006-12-15 - 12.50am (crikey!) previous entry next entry
Matthew is 6 months old today!
It's craaaazy late and I'm tired out, but Matthew just went back to sleep after a feed and I had this stuff ready to post, so I wanted to just bash it off and get it posted on the day it was relevant!
It's Matthew's half birthday today! Happy 6 months to my tiny boy! I can NOT believe it has been 6 months. Seriously. Here's my six-month-old boy this morning!...
I have no time for chat tonight, but I wanted to write that Matthew was weighed and measured yesterday by my own lovely Health Visitor, who was not in the least bit worried about his weight at the previous weigh-in, and thinks he's healthy and doing great! I heart my health visitor! I wish I had been making appts with her all along instead of going to the drop-in clinic. Oh well. Anyway, Matthew weighs 15lbs 7oz, a better gain since last time, and it puts him at the 12th percentile - going up again! :) Also, my clever boy has managed to double his birth weight EXACTLY (well, 1oz over!) at 6 months old, so he is 100% ready ready ready for solids! He measures 67.5cm long (26.5 inches) which puts him at the 50th percentile, so he's long and lean!
And today he is 6 months old, so the waiting ends, and the mucky fun begins! If I had been remotely organised, his first solid food would have been an organic banana or sweet potato. But I have been ill since the weekend (the boys' cold but it seems to have affected me differently, and worse) and yeah. Oh, I never got chance/I forgot to mention that we decided to do baby-led weaning this time round. I started to do that with Arthur but chickened out and it never happened! The only thing baby-led we did with Arthur was let him wait when he didn't want to start solids at 6 months. He chose 8 months, thank you very much! With Matthew, if he doesn't want solids now, we'll let him wait.
The main thing with BLW is giving them no purees, just FOOD. I like the idea of slightly altering that idea, because I want Matthew to experience new textures and flavours (since that's what weaning to solids is supposed to be about, not getting food into them! Did you know that 95% of a baby's intake should still be breast milk or formula till 12 months?! Apparently, anyway). And purees are another type of texture, especially the grainy ones. Plus, adults and children eat all sorts of foods, not just solids hunks all the time. We eat sauces and smooth things too. So I plan to do a bit of spoon feeding too. Mostly I just want to be able to hand Matthew a piece of prepared food and have him choose what he wants to eat of it, and how. It's a messy way of doing it though!
I have been reading this GREAT website about baby led weaning, and also this FAB article on guidelines for baby led weaning. It totally finalised any thinking I had on the matter!
But today's rather disorganised start was home made apple puree - a braeburn apple, as it's a taste Matthew already knows from the touch tastes I've been giving him, and a few days ago when I was holding him in one arm and the apple for his touch tastes (that I'd just sliced for Arthur) in the other hand, he grabbed the hand with the apple in it and rammed it to his mouth! He started sucking on it for dear life, and once I'd checked that it had no bits flaking off, I sat him down to suck on it all he liked! I swear he nearly sucked that apple dry! Arthur wanted to sit next to him while they "eat appoo!" together:
I have to admit, he grabbed the same apple about 2 seconds after I took a bite, and before I could wrestle his strong little baby grip, he had sucked off a tiny chip of apple about 3mm by 7mm. He gagged on it a fair bit but didn't vomit, and then to my surprise, instead of working it out of his mouth, he swallowed it! I found it in his otherwise-breastmilky poo 2 days later, unchanged, hehe!
Anyway, today it was slightly grainy-textured smooth pureed apple, with the cooking water. He made faces, but didn't seem as repulsed as Arthur was with his first solids (anyone here remember Arthur's "pear face"?!! Hehehe!). He wasn't ultra eager, but he definitely didn't reject it. I never tried to put the spoon in his mouth, just touched it to his lips, and if he opened then I moved it over his lip a couple of mm to let him suck it. Otherwise I just put some on the tray and some on two spoons and let him at it! He definitely swallowed some and gagged very briefly, but didn't seem to have a huge issue with it. Arthur was very excited!
Part of the excitement was the new highchair that arrived yesterday! After MUCH researching online, etc, I got a Chicco Polly Double Phase Highchair. Cheap on eBay, but new in the box still. It's so versatile and adjustable, and the tray removes so he could sit at the table with us. Anyway, here he is - Matthew's first solids!
And 3 video clips of the same session - trust me, you would be bored with the whole 20 minute movie! So here are 3 much shorter clips! They are from YouTube which always seems to have a sound delay, so that the sounds don't tally up with the visual, tsk. But oh well. It gets worse at the video goes on, but these aren't too bad for it.
Of course Arthur was upset that the feeding had finished and then when it came time for his lunch (about 10 minutes later) he INSISTED on having it in "Ma-Ma's beeb boy tair"! He climbed in it (I had it on low setting, nearest the floor) and tried to strap himself in, so I gave in and let him. But, I really want him to stay in his big-boy booster seat at the table, and for this highchair to be Matthew's, as they'll start eating meals together soon enough and I don't want a big fight over the chair then! Here's Arthur getting to be in the new chair for his lunch:
Matthew started making new vocal sounds in the last couple of days, but today I am REALLY noticing it. He's SHOUTING "day-day-day-day!!" and "lay-day-lay-gay-gay!!" and stuff like that, just exactly like Arthur did at 6 months. I have him on video (see his video clips link over there on the left!) doing just that. Matthew's voice, when he says those same sounds, is absolutely identical to Arthur's. It's like I'm hearing Arthur's voice. So weird! I can't get used to it! Maybe that's one thing they WILL be alike in?! Their voices :) I have a video of Matthew making his new sounds, but YouTube hasn't got its act together yet to make it viewable, tsk. Next entry, then.
Oh, I do have a couple of video clips of Matthew and Arthur jumping and dancing (ish!) to Blame it on the Boogie this evening before bath time! Matthew lately LOVES to be held standing and shove and kick and jump with his legs. He could jump for EVER, waaaay longer than my arms can take the strain! He loves to be held near Arthur, and if Arthur turns to him and jumps with him, Matthew gets this adoring happy gaze on his face and just stares into Arthur's eyes, and he shrieks and squeals with excitement! He LOVES his big brother! Here they are, my sweet little boys!
The other new thing to mark 6 months, unfortunately, is that Matthew fell out of bed at bedtime this evening :( It was awful! I was about to put him in his cot when I noticed his sheets could do with a change. I had a change with me so I put him on my bed (right next to the cot) and started to change his sheets. That is fine because I always stand against the edge of my bed while I change the sheets, and I turn my head to Matthew every couple of seconds to keep track of him on there. Neil had taken Arthur downstairs from his bath, to get him dressed. Suddenly he shouts upstairs, "Oh NO! Where's the potty!" (hehe, it might have been funny without the incident that followed!), and then, "ALICE! Where's the potty!" with a kind of tone that just irked me (since I had no more idea than he did where the potty was and I was busy with Matthew). That was the distraction that did it. I took 3 steps towards the bedroom door and yelled back that I didn't know, maybe it was on the sofa under stuff, but I didn't know. That is literally all I did, and then I turned back to the bed, and said, "OH MY GOD!" because Matthew was head and shoulders off the mattress and in motion, and I knew that even a few steps away I would not get to him in time. I moved fast and I think I got there in time to catch his bum and legs as his head hit the floor :( My poor poor baby. It's his first real bang, and such a shock too. He really did hit the floor head first from bed-height, on a not-so-soft carpet, and then as I caught his lower body, his face smooshed on the floor as he tried to turn. He cried sooooooooo much, I never heard him cry that much before, and I felt AWFUL. I also felt so piddled off at Neil for distracting me, even though it wasn't his fault at all, it was mine. I shouldn't have allowed myself to be distracted like that. Ugh.
Matthew cried for a while but he calmed down when I walked with him and held him reeeally close and talked soothingly in his ear. I wanted to see his head and face before I breastfed him, to see if he had hurt himself badly. He has a red mark on his head but no swelling, and a sort of friction mark with a little swelling on his top lip and nose :( Poor lambie-boo! He breastfed for a long while and after that he was chatty and reachy-for-my-nose-y and happy, so that was a relief! I am never NEVER leaving him on the bed again. Though, I don't know what I'll do the next time I need to change his sheets... hmmm. Anyway, it was horrid.
I have SO much else to write about, and I have been meaning to write this week, to make an entry before Matthew turned 6 months, but I haven't felt well in the evenings and there just hasn't been time. Today is the first day I'm starting to feel a tad better, just very tired. Which makes me stooopid for sitting here typing when I should be catching up on sleep! So I'm going. But I will write other stuff soon! Thanks for the comments after last entry! :) They brightened my day!!! And thanks to Sarah for being wonderfully generous and sending your old Buggy Board! And Jemma for sending all those fish oils (and the treat, mmm!) for Arthur! He has taken about half a tube of one today, but that took allll morning, gah! He didn't go for it direct from the tube, and he isn't a big drinker (other than my milk!) so the rest of the tube mixed into 1/3 of a cup of orange juice took all morning just to consume half - which is all he took in the end. So I'll try again tomorrow! Thanks so much! I hope they help him!
Back soon! :)
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