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2005-09-05 - 9.50pm previous entry next entry
General Arthur update and photos :)
Arthur is napping, so I have a moment to update. He napped 2 hours this morning!! I think maybe he is teething, because he's biting like CRAZY on everything, and still drooling loads. And he seems a bit out of sorts these last couple of days. It is horribly hot and muggy and humid though - it's been building up for big thunderstorms over the weekend. We had some great thunder last night, but not for very long. Anyway, it's fresher today which is nice! But I don't know how much the weather might have been affecting Arthur.
He has slept a lot more in the day. And sometimes he just looks tired and pale and puffy. He had one episode of diarrhoea yesterday. But none other than that, and he has had some NEON pink nappy rash in conjunction with it, so I think he is teething. His gums have deep pink patches on them here and there, mainly over the bottom two "fang" teeth. I don't really see any sign of new teeth in there, except maybe possibly a little more of a bulge where the fourth top tooth will be, to finish that lil set he has up there! His other teeth have grown in so well now. He looks very "toothy" when he smiles now! He enjoys biting things with his new teeth, and I'm relieved that he is not grinding his teeth as much as he was. I read on a parenting board online that it's pretty common for babies to do that when they have new top and bottom teeth to grind against each other, and test out the new sensation. Most of the mothers said their babies stopped doing it after about a month. Arthur does still grind his teeth, but maybe only a couple of times a day now, whereas it was like every few seconds before! I guess he has had his new top teeth a few weeks, so that fits with what the other mothers are saying.
His new thing is putting something in his mouth and then crawling off with it sticking out! Yesterday he sat chewing a clean bra from the laundry pile, and then set off to the kitchen door with it trailing out from between his teeth like a lil retriever dog! Hehe! Of course it tripped him up once it trailed under him and he started crawling on it :) After lots of effort to fix things, stopping and sitting to reposition it lots of times along the way, he just let the bra go and continued on to the kitchen! He's so funny :) I'm kind of nervous about him falling onto his face and then having a major problem with whatever item was stuck in his mouth, but I take big solid items away from him before he crawls off, like bricks:
And car keys - a big favourite at the moment!...
See the lil man's teeth?! He is so toothy these days! Sometimes it still seems strange to look at his face and see alllll those teeth smiling at me! He looks so grown up in some ways, with a mouth full of teeth. Of course, he still only has five, but they are top and bottom, and they happen to be the ones that fill out the "smile" area. It's so different somehow to those cute first two bottom baby teeth. Babies still look like cute lil babies with those, but they change somehow when the top ones come in and start looking like ROWS of teeth!
Let me see, what things did I want to make sure to record about Arthur since last time?
Since watching Jaya climb the stairs at her house, Arthur has become a stair-climbing expert!! He was already pretty good at scaling the whole flight, but he has become really good at it now. He used to climb them - left knee, right knee, left foot, right foot, pause, hands on next step. Then repeat the whole process. Sometimes if he didn't get his knee on the next step far enough it would slip off and I would have to catch his bottom as he slipped, so that he didn't hurt himself.
Now he is suddenly climbing fast without any help. I am always sitting a step or two behind him, all the way up, incase he does fall, but he never requires any help. He now climbs - left knee, right FOOT, left foot, pause, right knee, left FOOT, right foot, pause, etc. Much more smooth. Yesterday I saw him climb TWICE without using his knees at all!!! Wow. He just raised his foot right up and plonked it sturdily on the next step, then brought his other foot up beside it! Yesterday he seemed to have his peak of interest in climbing the stairs. He climbed them nine times, all the way up from the bottom step, including the corner bend :) Clever boy! We don't use stair gates, so I am going to have to be ultra watchful when he gets near the stairs, as he's fast now once he decides to do something. Here's my lil Boo yesterday, peeping through the corner of the stairway at his daddy after he climbed all the way up there without a a pause. I was right behind him with my arm under his chest to keep him safe. He looks kind of worried in this photo! He wasn't though. He was babbling like crazy to his daddy, and he makes such funny expressions when he babbles. He adds all sorts of emotive faces to get his point across! Anyway, here he is:
He tries to climb a LOT these days. He can climb into the dishwasher. Yes. Obviously I am watching him way more carefully these days, and he doesn't get to help me so much in that dept now! He can climb onto the sofa if he has something to boost his height a little, like if I left a thick book or a box of tissues next to the sofa, or even if I'm sitting there and he stands on my leg first. He is up there with no trouble, but then he climbs onto the arm straight away and yeah that's gonna lead to bumps and tears, so I take him down pretty much as soon as he gets up there. He finds this annoying of course!
Lately he can crawl at a sort of "run"!! Especially if he's on a mission somewhere and he hears one of us coming up to grab him as we tell him it's time to change his nappy, or that he mustn't go wherever he's heading to. He just suddenly crawls at double-speed!!! That boy can move! He can move so fast that it's hard to grab him sometimes when he is crawling that fast.
Hmmm... anything else new to report?... I'm sure there were lots of things. I should write them down as I think of them! It always bugs me so much that I forget things by the time I am actually sitting here to write about them!
His food is going great. He eats half a jar of organic baby food for lunch, but I am starting to try to wean myself off the jars, hehe! I always wanted to cook for Arthur. I feel so lazy using jars. I know that's what they're there for, and there's nothing wrong with making good use of them, but still. It's not quite how I wanted to be doing things. It makes a ton more sense for Arthur to be brought up, even at this young age, on the foods that we eat, and the recipes we eat. Otherwise how weird is it for him to suddenly wean to "table food" as I keep seeing it called on US parenting sites (?!), having had this marvellous jarred stuff all his life, and suddenly be expected to eat a completely different type and taste and style of food?! I remember that really hit home when we went on that picnic a couple of months ago, and there was a lady recently arrived from China with her beautiful 17-month-old daughter. The lady had made this fantastic Chinese food for the picnic, just stuff they always eat at home, she said. While we ate, this lady was shoveling huge spoonfuls of Hipp Organic Chicken and Vegetable Casserole into her reluctant daughter's mouth, and I couldn't help thinking how crazy that seemed! There is no way that child would be eating chicken and veg casseroles with the family once she was off the jars, since they never eat anything but their normal cultural cuisine. I know it's on a waaaaaaay milder scale than that, but it's still the same thing for Arthur. We don't really eat the stuff he gets in jars very often. I want him to eat what we eat. It's the most natural thing for him, and it makes the most sense.
Soooo this week he has had some home-made roast chicken, mashed potato, broccoli and carrot, buzzed up in the blender. I gave him two ice-cubes of it and mixed it with an ice-cube of sweet potato. He ate the whole lot, and loved it! He had that for lunch today actually. I think he would almost eat the same again if the portion was bigger! He seems to love it, and that makes me happy :) It's OUR food, yay!
On Friday Arthur ate with me at the kitchen table (well, in his highchair). That's another thing I am working on now. I want Arthur to be used to eating WITH us, like family meals. I have always had a big thing about doing this, but have just been so disorganised so far (and had such a messy kitchen) that it hasn't worked out. Visiting Jemma and Stu and Jaya was a good kick up the bum for me on this subject, because we ate a nice family meal together at the table. Just how I want to do it here. It was so nice being able to see in person how another family does things with a baby a little bit older than Arthur. Such a great eye-opener, and also good reassurance on the things that we already do the same.
It will be hard for us to eat dinner as a family, because Arthur's bedtime routine starts around 6pm with his bath, and that is right after Neil gets home. No time for a meal. Neil is never home for lunch. The only meal left is breakfast. I really want to work on us eating breakfast as a family at the table. At the weekend we ate lunch at the table together, and that went great. I eat breakfast with Arthur anyway, but sometimes just "on the go" while I clear up in the kitchen or help Arthur eat his breakfast. We often eat lunch together but never because it was planned that way, only if I am hungry while I am doing his lunch.
So on Friday Arthur had a 2.5 hour nap (!!!), during which time I discovered what the mothers who have babies who SLEEP do during the day!! :) It was soooo great. I had time to put my feet up for 30 minutes (normally the most I get with Arthur), then check my messages and stuff on the internet, THEN I actually reached the stage where I could start cleaning!!! Woohoo!! The house is such a tip, because a) I'm disorganised, but mainly b) Arthur never ever gives me long enough to clean anything. I am always so tired from the nights that I either need to nap with him, or flake out somewhere for the 20-40 minutes that his naps usually last. When he's up, he is my sole focus. I do get things done around the house with him, but they are things like laundry and maybe emptying the dishwasher. Unless he is pinned down somewhere - like in his highchair - I can't get the cleaning stuff out. And he will usually barely tolerate the highchair for the length of time it takes to eat his food! He likes to be on the go, this boy, and he likes his mummy with him :) It's hard work but I wouldn't have it any other way!
Anyway so while Arthur napped, I cleaned the highchair big time, did some washing up, cleared and cleaned the kitchen table (hooray!), wrote a shopping list, tidied up in the living room, and decided what to have for lunch! I neeevvvver get the chance to do those things normally. So by the time a little "Ah?" alerted me to a bleary-eyed cutie boy sitting bolt upright on the bed (swaying slightly though, bless him!), we had baked potatoes nearly ready to eat for our lunch!! We both sat at the table and we had the same lunch. We buy mostly organic stuff now for ourselves so Arthur can have organic whenever he eats some of our food. We had baked potato (Arthur's mashed without the skin), baked beans and grated cheese - all organic :) Arthur had his in a bowl on his tray, and he fed himself quite a lot with his hands, but most of it got smarmed everywhere of course! After that he had yoghurt, which he liked a lot! And then I gave him a rusk. This boy likes his rusks! I personally LOVE rusks! I used to buy boxes of them in my late teens! Mmmm.... I don't know what it is about them. I buy reduced sugar for Arthur, and they are still really nice. Of course I prefer the really sugary ones, heh. He likes the banana ones too, but I'm not so crazy about those. When he has a rusk I always have one too, or we have half each. Is that naughty of me?! ;)
Arthur has noooo trouble with biting and chewing things anymore. He munches and crunches his way through pretty much any finger foods that I have tried him on. Rice cakes and rusks are his favourites. He has toast for breakfast. I cut him three toast fingers and spread them with butter and a trace of marmite. He tucks right in and bites the end off the first finger straight away. He chews them up really well before swallowing too. There is still plenty tucked down inside the highchair or on the floor at the end of the meal though! One time last week, I changed his nappy about an hour or so after breakfast and found a hard piece of marmitey toast tucked under his willy! Why does that word always look/sound so daft?!! Anyway. Funny boy! He didn't seem sore or anything, and I have no idea how he got it there! His nappies fit him nice and snug, so it's just weird!
Here are three photos of Arthur crunching big bites out of his rusk at the end of that lunch. You can probably see the layers of previous courses on his face (the potato/beans/cheese layer, and the yoghurt layer!)!
He really does like rusks! :)
Arthur is currently really big on reaching up for things, and he loves brandishing items in one hand while he's standing up, Statue of Liberty style (except twisting his torso round to see us at the same time), looking for approval! Sometimes he just wants acknowledgement of what he's found, and other times he wants one of us to take the item and be extremely excited about it, etc! ;) It's so cute. If we are chatting and don't see him doing it, he can get pretty irate, hehe! He just keeps holding his arm as tall and straight as he can stretch it, with the special item in his hand, with increasing yells or screeches until we notice, bless him!
If he finds a toy in his toy basket (whilst standing at it), and takes it out with both hands, it takes him a little while before he realises the fact that he is holding the toy with both hands means he is not using either hand to hold onto anything! When he realises he sits down immediately (without holding anything). I can also do a little trick on him (how mean, hehe!) whereby if he is standing up and reaching for my hands to walk him somewhere, and I go to give him my hands, he will let go of whatever he's holding onto to take my hands. If I then move them a little so he has to change his aim and find my hands again, and then do it again (just a few inches back and forth in front of his hands), he can stand unaided following my hands for maybe 5-10 seconds, and not wobble despite having to watch something moving and move with it. So I know he is getting good at standing. He just prefers to hold onto things!
He cruises walls and flat things now, and pulls to standing on walls too, without any difficulty. He reaches for things a LOT these days, while he is standing up. His balance has improved so much for him to do this. He used to wobble like crazy when he reached up, as it made him arch his back which threw his balance off. Now he can reach up for something out of his reach, and even go right to standing on tiptoes to try and grasp it! He does this a lot with doorknobs at the moment:
I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but for a couple of weeks now, Arthur has been crawling over things. I mean, without a big problem. I love watching him crawl. He's just this little creature roaming around on the floor, it's too cute! Since a couple of weeks ago, when he crawls and his knee hits something like a toy, he doesn't pause in his crawling at all, he just lifts that knee for a full crawl or two until he is past the object and then puts it back down again! He is now using that manoeuvre (wow, American Word did not like that UK spelling, hehe!) to climb over my legs if I am sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me, and other larger objects like floor cushions. It's funny to watch him crawl perfectly on three limbs and then seamlessly continue as before. I find if fascinating to watch how a baby learns to move about. I know it's going to be just as fascinating to watch him learn communication and other major things. When I think how he couldn't even crawl at 8 months, and here he is not even 10 months and doing all this! It's amazing how babies go through stages where they suddenly learn stuff and change so quickly.
Talking of the big one-oh (!!), I can't BELIEVE Arthur will be TEN months old in just four days, on Friday. How could I possibly have a ten-month-old?! That's just so old. For a little baby! ;) Seriously though, I remember when I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, the thought of a 10-month-old baby made me think "older baby", or "baby who eats finger food", or "very mobile baby who gets into everything", or even "baby with lots of hair and teeth"!! I didn't even associate those things with my mental image of "a baby", which was a much younger babe-in-arms who cried and maybe smiled and cooed, and needed feeding and changing a lot. I just can't believe I am actually a mummy to that older baby I used to picture in my mind. It seemed soooo far out of my reach. It seemed so far beyond just getting pregnant and having a baby that I never even got as far as contemplating it. And here I am. Amazing. I know I will just not be able to fathom the concept of having a toddler who walks everywhere and talks to me about things! But that's the next stage. I will cross that bridge when I come to it!
Okay this diary entry has stopped and started a lot today! Arthur woke from his nap, then we played, spoke to Nana on the phone for a while, had tea (banana pieces - v. messy! - and yoghurt), then Daddy came home and there was lots of giggling and horsing around, and then bath time, and now it's 9.30pm and Arthur has been asleep for a couple of hours :) We just ate our dinner and I am back to finish the update. I added bits here and there before this.
This afternoon I opened a packet of rich tea biscuits - I LOVE these! Arthur's eyes went wide and he cruised two sofas and a table practically at a RUN to get to me, hehe! He isn't usually that interested in me eating biscuits (which I don't usually do that often in front of him anyway), and if I ever offer him something I'm snacking on to taste, he ALWAYS just lets it touch his tongue before dropping it in disgust! Or a crumb will go in his mouth and he'll make a disgusted face! So when he approached me, cruising the last few steps with eagerly outstretched hand, I gave him my biscuit to examine. He put it STRAIGHT in his mouth without a pause, and crunched a big piece off!! He chewed laboriously while I rescued my biscuit and ate it, and then held his hand out for the next biscuit on my little pile! I offered it to him, and CRUNCH! He bit a big chunk out of it again! Altogether I ate five biscuits, and he had a big bite out of each one! He was very pleased with himself. He kept pushing his face right up close to mine and smiling a big toothy smile with biscuit in his teeth for me to see! Funny boy :) Once he was nice and thirsty, he did a dive for my breast and got my T-shirt nice and biscuity, so then he got to have milk with his cookies ;) He nurses standing up a lot now, if he's just having a lil snack or stopping for a thirst-quencher while he's playing or cruising around. I love the "on-demand" thing.
Lately Arthur seems to like nursing to sleep lying on his TUMMY!!! Clearly I have elastic nipples, or so he thinks! Oddly enough, if I am lying right up close to him on my side and feeding him from the bottom breast, this doesn't seem to hurt me. He turns his face well to the side, and sort of rests his cheek and hand on my breast like a pillow :) I like when he does that pillow thing. He does it when he's nursing standing up too, just turns his head to the side. I'm so dual-purpose! And proud :) The pain I was getting from his top teeth is abating now, just like the other mums on the breastfeeding forums said it would. His top teeth have been in for maybe 3 or 4 weeks now I think, so that's about the same time as they all had before the pain started to go. Breasts are just so amazing. They nourish, they comfort, they are pillows (!!), and they adapt and toughen where necessary!
Well I think that is it for tonight. Oh but I almost forgot! Neil was snacking on some melon the other day when it was hot hot hot, and Arthur pulled up on him to try some. He had some from Neil's spoon, but he preferred to sip the juice from the spoon rather than munch on actual pieces. He did enjoy it though! After a while he figured it was much easier to just bite into the thing rather than wait for Daddy to get another spoonful ready:
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