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2005-07-12 - 11.58pm previous entry next entry
Changing boy, and back to church!! :)
Thanks for the sweet guestbook messages about Arthur�s photos! :)
My lil boy is changing so much, so fast! He is doing something new every single day with his mobility at the moment. Just little changes, but so fast, every day it�s something new. Today he spends most of his time on all fours, arms and legs absolutely like table legs, they are so vertical now, instead of out at an angle to the floor. He isn�t rocking so much anymore. Today he has been moving his knees back and forth one at a time, as though he is crawling and then putting his knees back where they were to start with. He can do the crawling motions with his arms, and now he has perfected the legs, but he seems to be all jumbled about co-ordinating the two! He spent a while pumping his knees back and forth in a sort of scissor motion on all fours, and then finally leaned himself way forward on his knees, and took a hand off the floor to place it down ahead of him (ie. crawling!) but that threw his balance and his face went thunk onto the floor :( Poor baby! He will get it soooo soon, he is so close! He can crawl backwards but that doesn�t interest him because he has other ways of moving backwards. He just seems so eager to learn to move himself forwards, as he doesn�t have any good ways of doing that yet. He can now lunge himself forwards at least a foot in one go, from a crawling position, if he desperately wants to reach something. Yesterday he wasn�t doing this, so he is changing each day! Every day I am sure he will start crawling. It really could happen tomorrow! But I think that every day. In some ways it would be good if he didn�t, because I am working on the living room at the moment and have a couple more days before the carpet will be nice and clear. Now that it is getting more clear, I am noticing how horrible it smells! Yuck. We need a serious carpet shampoo service. We hoovered (tsk, stop correcting that to �hovered�, Word!!) it but it still stinks. It smells like feet. One of the smells I hate most in the whole world. And mine don�t ever smell, so somehow the fact that it�s not MY smell makes it even more yucky to me! I am weird.
The other thing that Arthur is doing better and better each day at the moment is walking. I just loosely support him so that he balances and doesn�t crumple at the knees if he has a random moment of crumply-knees (!), and he now immediately gives the room a quick once over, selects the most interesting thing to him at that time, and sets off for it, lifting a very purposeful foot, raised up almost knee-to-stomach, and plonking it down a huge stride ahead of his little body! He really means business, hehe! He walks so purposefully and his legs make such huge strides and high-knees that it looks like he�s doing an exaggerated walk or something! It�s so cute and funny :) Once he is off (with my hands holding his or loosely under his arms), he doesn�t look down, but straight ahead at the target destination, and he makes those huge strides so fast and accurately! I am so impressed by my little man! His steps are like one or two per second, steady and regular, if he is eager to reach something or someone. If he�s not sure where he�s going, he�ll be more picky and irregular with his steps, and he might get distracted by something else on the way, and change direction (his latest thing � a huge sweeping swing of the leg to one side instead of ahead of him, followed by him pivoting on this foot once it�s down, so that he�s facing another way, then he just keeps going!). Or he might walk by a toy that attracts his attention so he changes his mind and lets his legs fall into a sitting position, and plonks down on his bottom next to the toy to play a while. Yesterday his steps were steady but sometimes wobbly. Today they are already soooo much less wobbly. He has always loved to stand, and it seems he is super keen on walking too. He gets places so fast and easily, and crawling is vexing him still, so he seems delighted when I hold him upright so he can motor off somewhere! We absolutely HAVE to get this on video sometime very soon. I want to show my parents in France and the only way to do that is by uploading a short video clip to the internet. And we should capture it now anyway. He will be so much better at it soon, and this lovely stridey cute walk will disappear and be just a memory.
Oooh ooh, and today on the bed after a nap, he tried and tried to go from all-fours to sitting! I never saw him attempt that before, it�s like he hadn�t even thought of it till now. But anyway. His torso was always leaning away from his butt at too wide an angle to push himself fully upright, even though he got his legs under him and onto his bottom. He fell a few times. Then I gave him the tinest nudge on one arm as he tried to push up, and he was up and sitting easily :) I know, I know, I should have let him keep trying by himself, but I couldn�t resist! He was sooooo pleased with himself once he was sitting! He slapped his legs with joy and beamed a huge open-mouthed smile at me :) Cutie-boy. Of course he can�t get down from sitting yet, so the only way is to launch himself backwards, and that means hitting his head on whatever is behind him. On the bed this doesn�t matter as it�s soft enough, and the carpet downstairs always has a doubled-up fleece blanket on it, but it�s still hard enough for him to cry if he hits his head on it. I don�t think he gets hurt as such, because there is no red mark or lump, but it must jolt him and shock him so he gets upset, poor boy! I hope he figures out how to get out of a sitting position safely soon! I watch him carefully and have my hand ready to grab him when he�s sitting, if he goes backwards. He never falls from sitting anymore, it�s just that he will keep launching himself in order to get out of a sitting position.
It�s so hot and sticky again. Today was lovely actually, though too hot. Blue skies all day, and a slight breeze to make it all worthwhile. But hot. 85 degrees I think. Definitely hot enough for me without air conditioning! The car has A/C though. Praise God for the invention of air conditioning! Arthur�s new car seat is fabulous. It seems so much cooler and comfier than his old boxy one. He looks so good in it! I must take a photo some time.
Which reminds me � yesterday we went round to the post office to post a package (my first big item to sell at eBay (a Wilkinet baby carrier) � yayyy!!) and it was hot and sunny, so I put Arthur in the pushchair with a ton of suncream on, a hat, a new summer romper, and his new Baby Banz sunglasses!!!! He looked so cool! :) See?...
He tried to get the sunglasses off for a while at first, but then I put my face right in front of his and made funny faces and waved and other silly things (!), and he started smiling at me like I looked reeeally weird through those glasses, hehe! He left them on after that. I am glad, because they are 100% UV protective, and I want him protected from the sun as much as poss when it�s this hot.
He is doing well on the food front, I am pleased to report! He isn�t that convinced, but we�re persevering and he�s taking it. He prefers to feed himself, and he is surprisingly good at it. He grasps the spoon well, right below the head, and keeps it the right way up. He gets it right in his mouth with the first aim, and seems to be able to control whether he has a little taste from just the tip or shoves the whole thing in to empty the spoon! I do keep hold of it as well sometimes though, because when he�s had enough, he just flings it roughly behind him, and that makes my clean-up job so much harder, hehe! If I see him about to do it, I can tighten my grip and prevent the spoon from becoming a sling shot!
The last couple of days he has had Heinz organic banana and passionfruit puree, which he seemed to like. He made lots of faces, but still accepted bits of it. He ate about a teaspoonful or two each time, which is pretty good for him. Yesterday it was so hot and he was so sweaty that I offered it to him right out of the fridge. I knew it would be icy cold, and I wondered if he would totally hate that (and let me know it!) or be glad of something to cool him down. He turned out to be glad of the coldness, so I�m happy I tried it out! He was much cooler after his meal :)
Today I opened a jar of organic butternut squash puree with potato and rice! A bit more �real thing�, and I didn�t know if he�d take it. It seemed a bit thick for him so I hand-expressed some breastmilk and stirred it till it was smoother, and then offered it to him warmed up. He made faces, as ever. But he did take it. He had maybe two teaspoonfuls in total. Then I was about to clear away and he was making lunges for the little plastic cup thingy that I had the food in. There was some left, and I thought he was going to turn it upside down and dump it out on the towel he was sitting on (in the living room, too hot for the sticky plastic-y highchair in the kitchen), so I was keeping it out of his reach, but then I thought he could touch it if I kept a good hold on it. When I gave it to him, he did the weirdest thing! He immediately held it like a cup (a pretty good hold too, especially considering he has never been offered a cup to hold before!), put his mouth on the rim, and tipped it up!!!! Funny boy! He just stayed like this, tipping it up and up, and I could see the contents rolling up to his mouth. I thought he would hate it when it reached his mouth, but it was almost like that was his plan, hehe! Once he had a mouth FULL, he took the �cup� away and gave me a very satisfied open-mouthed beam (food leaking from it like crazy of course!). Then he gagged a little on the sheer amount of it, and swallowed, then tipped the cup back up to his mouth again! After a while I stopped him, because, should he really be DRINKING his purees?!! And also he started to retch a bit after the third big mouthful, and I did not want to see it all rearranged on the towel after he�d ingested it.
Anyway, he was so funny with this! I took a couple of photos. Here he is �drinking� his butternut squash, potato, rice and breastmilk puree!!....
And here he is with the resulting food moustache a few moments later, absolutely thrilled with his achievement!!
Isn�t he so cute and funny?! My lovely boy :)
Okay it�s late and I need to go to bed. Oh but I forgot to update on a few things from last entry. Neil isn�t well at the moment :( He got a sore throat on Friday evening, and by Sunday he had started a cold. What is it with us and colds in the MIDDLE of the summer?!!! Tsk. It�s nothing to do with having little ones around now either, as this cold is not from Arthur, and the last one was a bit random too. Today he is really poorly with it and he had to come home from work early. I don�t think he should have gone in at all today because he really is poorly, but he said he had to finish some things off if he was going to go off sick. He isn�t going in tomorrow. I�m glad. He needs to recover. I really hope Arthur and I don�t catch it. It has only been a few weeks since we were ill with the last nasty cold. Maybe this one IS our last nasty cold � Neil didn�t catch it then � and it�s just doing the rounds and we have already had it so we won�t get it again. I hope so. We do not need to get ill again right now. I hope Neil gets over it quickly.
He wasn�t up to going to church on Sunday so I went with Arthur on my own. It was soooo nice to be there!! We were late for the service due to the unforeseen time-consuming details of going out for the morning with a baby (!!), so there were only 4 songs or so left to sing by the time we arrived, but I sang them with gusto and enjoyed it so much! I felt tired out holding Arthur, standing, singing and moving to the music all at once though! I had to sit down when it came time to pray. Which was very touching, incidentally, because we spent quite a while in prayer for the victims of the London bombings and their families. And anyone else affected. It was so moving, and soooo good to come before God with it all. So soothing somehow. People prayed aloud, one by one, as they felt moved to pray. Many people prayed in tears. One man cried as he prayed to God for his good friend who was still searching for his sister, missing in London after the attacks. It feels so close to home. The missing people thing is so heartbreaking. You just know they are missing for a reason, and not a good one at that. And yet the poor families can�t get the closure they need. Oh it�s so awful :(
But the service was lovely. After the prayer time I took Arthur to cr�che, because he started to get a bit vocal and fed up with the lack of interesting music after a while! He loves the worship time, but I guess babies do because it�s loud and bouncy music mostly. The quiet songs seem interesting to them too. Everyone is moving and singing and he just stared and stared around at everyone. I like that he finds it interesting. I want him to become really accustomed to seeing people worshipping God. He is pretty much accustomed to seeing me do that at home, but I like that he is getting some experience of being in a church service regularly. Or he will be, as I plan on going to church much more regularly now :)
Creche was quite good. Weird in some ways though. I feel so different from everyone else when I�m there. I�m the only one who stays with their baby without any intention of doing otherwise. There are other parents in there sometimes, but they are in and out, and the intention is to manage to escape back to the service as quickly as possible without their little one getting too upset. It�s a small cr�che and this week there were only six babies and toddlers, and two of them were absolutely hysterical for want of their mothers most of the time. One parent came back and stayed till the little one was distracted, then left again, and then had to come back when the screams got too loud for the service next door. The other was more direct about it, and said goodbye and went back to the service. The two mums who were running cr�che this week held her 16-month-old for half an hour while he sobbed till I was sure he would throw up and wailed, �Mummy! My mummy!� over and over. It was so heartbreaking. The one who wasn�t holding him would engage me in cheerful conversation over his wails, but I kept being distracted and missing things she was saying. Not because of the noise, but because my whole heart scrunched and ached for the poor little boy, longing for his mummy like that. Of course the process �worked� and he calmed down eventually, and the mums distracted him with a toy plane and excited tones, and then he played happily but for a few sobs now and then, although he did occasionally look at the door and say quietly to himself, �My mummy�� I don�t know. I can see why that works, and the mums were saying it was good for him because it teaches him that his mummy always comes back, even when she has to leave him for a while. But it did not sit right at ALL in my heart. Not one bit.
Arthur played sitting on the floor-mat happily, ignoring the noise and the crying, and chewing on various toys set in front of him. He graced everyone with beaming smiles and showed off his �walking� and nursed beautifully when the other toddlers and babies had snacks. He did have an apple rice-cake but gummed it twice before dropping it on the floor, uninterested. I knew it was time for him to eat something so I nursed him there and then. It�s so great to be able to do that. It�s so convenient and easy! I am always proud to nurse him in public :) At the end, the mums said to him, �You were SUCH a good boy today! Maybe now you know us, next time Mummy can go back to the service while you play here?� I just smiled, but I basically thought something along the lines of, �over my dead body�!!! I have no intention of ever leaving Arthur on his own, happy or not, for a good while yet. I am slightly nervous about that subject coming up in conversation, which it is sure to when they suggest I go back to the service because Arthur is happy playing. I DO want to hear the sermons, but that is not the point. I think people will think I am spoiling him, or overprotecting him, stifling him maybe. They all seem to think it�s vital to teach children independence by experience. I come from a very different viewpoint � a more �attached� one I suppose. My intention is to teach Arthur about independence by making him SO secure in my constant presence that he initiates his own independence from me at his own rate. I know that this works, from reading up on it, and from seeing other mums tell of it on attachment parenting forums. But I know nooobody at church who thinks like that in any way, shape or form. So I think discussing it or even just stating what I will do could be debate-provoking. And I hate debates. I hate the idea that people think I�m doing things wrong, or in a silly way. I know it doesn�t matter what anyone else thinks. But I still wish I had a few others at church who saw things from the attachment parenting viewpoint like I do. They all seem to be so busy trying to detach from their children � I�m sure that isn�t how they perceive it, but it�s how it is. Children grow up so quickly. I don�t want to rush it further by trying to speed up processes that would happen more gently on their own. I care much more about Arthur�s security in me than I do about hearing the next 6-12 months of sermons. If it starts to matter that much to me, I know Neil is happy to take turns in the cr�che with Arthur, and I can get the sermons on CD in any case. I know I can still ask somebody to pray for me after the service if I am missing the ministry time. Even if I were to miss all that, I would STILL want to sit out in the cr�che with Arthur rather than leave him on his own. He might be happy and not even notice I was gone. But I don�t care to test that out. I would rather he was happy with me sitting there nearby, even if he would still be happy with me out of the room. I don�t think he would be happy, but I want to be there anyway. Whether he�s happy or not is not a reason for me to want to leave him. I still want to stay if he�s happy!
I do slightly dread conversations at church, now that we are back for more regular attendance. I know people are already asking, �Oh how�s he sleeping? How�s he eating?� and I am already saying he is not sleeping so great and he�s just starting solids now. People go wide-eyed at the solids thing, but with the sleep thing the conversations haven�t been long enough to get into what we�re �doing about it� or what our sleep situation is. Not many people know we co-sleep. Sue does. On Sunday she approached me with a certain air and I thought, �Uh-oh�� Heh. A quick greeting and she launched into, �How�s he sleeping?� Not so great, said I. Cue negative tone and slightly condescending look with head on one side, she said, �Is he still sleeping with YOU?� I smiled confidently and said yes. She then informed me of the articles in the paper last week that PROVED co-sleeping was terribly DANGEROUS (emphasis, hers, on the capital lettered words) and didn�t I KNOW about it?! Ugh. I am so exasperated. Articles can be so biased. Which I said. She said oh no but this time it�s real research!! I said there is an awful lot of research to show that co-sleeping is actually safer in many ways than putting a baby to sleep in a cot. In any case, whether that�s true or not, there is definitely a TON of evidence to show that co-sleeping is not dangerous, so long as you follow safe-sleeping rules. Sue was so negative and her looks so belittling about it. She made lots of noises that let me know I was being irresponsible, and silly to have even tried such a thing in the first place (which I had already gathered from her previous conversations with me about it from before and just after Arthur was born). In the end I did something I never did before with Sue. I stood up for myself! I made my tone very definite and confident, and said, �Well, Sue, I am not going to stop co-sleeping.� And just returned her gaze without faltering till she went tight-lipped and huffed a bit before changing the subject. The whole thing left me feelings yucky inside, but I did feel proud of myself for finally standing up for myself on what I have chosen to do. Sue often makes me feel like I should be doing something about things, that I�m not doing yet, or that I�m not making the right choice, and I feel so small about it, and just respond so weakly and neutrally, rather than confidently declare my decision about something. Tsk. I have been annoyed at myself for this for a long long time over the years. But anyway, I stood up for myself :) GO me!! But I still felt bad and yucky after that discussion.
I asked online and found some things about that article. I don�t know what to think about it really. But basically the research was on babies younger than 11 weeks old, so it doesn�t even apply to Arthur anyway. I wish people would just butt out of other people�s parenting choices. It has nothing to do with anyone else how our family chooses to sleep at night!! Uggg.
BUT, I did enjoy Sunday at church :) It was lovely to see people again, and I had dozens and dozens of conversations with different people, all asking how we were doing and pleased to see us :) That�s so nice. Arthur got whisked away by a broody young lady (babies always are at my church!) and one minute I was handing him over for a quick cuddle while I said hello to the lady next to me around the coffee and biscuit area, and I literally looked away for 2 seconds, looked back, and they had gone!! Hehe! After a few minutes I figured he might get a bit antsy that he couldn�t see Mama, but then I spotted them over the heads of about 50 people on the other side of the church. He was still being held by Broody Young Lady (!) and they were surrounded by at least 5 more broody young ladies, hehehe! He was agog with all the attention, bless him, and they were all just mushy and goofy and making silly faces and high pitched voices at him! I felt so proud! I used to be one of the Broody Young Ladies at my church, and now I am blessed to have the little love that they are all desperate to cuddle! I watched one of them toss him in the air a few times, and saw him smile at them. My heart melted and my throat ached. I don�t know why that was such an emotional moment for me, but it really was. I could have watched them for ages. I wasn�t at all bothered that he was taken off my hands, it is so nice to have such a family feel at church. I love my church! :) Anyway, eventually he did start going, �Mmmm� MmmmMMMmm!!....� in uncertain tones, which is always closely followed by, �Mmmmama!! MAMUM!!� and then my presence was required :) I love that. Being wanted by my little one. It�s so wonderful.
Okay, it�s soooo late and Arthur is making stirry sounds, so I�m going to finish this for now. I am behind on emails these last few days, so if you are waiting for one from me then I apologise!!! I will catch up when Neil isn�t in the �sick� room (where the computer is) so much, hopefully tomorrow! I�ll update again soon!
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