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2005-07-16 - 11.29pm previous entry next entry
Water play and teething and video clips!!
Thanks for the lovely guestbook entries again! :) It�s nice to know that other people have the same feelings about having another baby. Phew! I guess it will be fine, whenever I have another one. Thanks Liz for reminding me that God is in control! :)
Okay I have been busy busy! Well, not that busy, but busy for me, y�know?! Neil is a lot better with his cold. He has had to work late two nights running and then today (Saturday) he had to go in to work this evening to check something was working right. It�s his first week in his new role and he made a couple of errors on something computery, so he worked extra hours to try to fix it. He�s so good. He always works hard and they never even know the extra hours he gives them (they don�t pay overtime) to meet one of their not-doable deadlines. Tsk. Anyway. He is home again now and it�s nearly time for bed. He says he has to go in again for maybe 2 hours tomorrow and then it should all be fixed. Poor Neil.
Arthur is getting a tooooooooooooth!!!! This mama is so relieved!! I wanna dance the congo round the house every time I think of it or see his lil gum!! Yay!!!! We have been waiting long enough for this toothie, with all his pain so far! It�s the left one of the two bottom middle ones. I can see it clear as anything, white and ever so slightly wonky in alignment (nothing to worry about), just under the surface of the gum. His gum over the two bottom middle teeth is red and swollen, and just over where I can see the white toothie under there, the surface has like a brown dip in it. Sounds weird, I know, but I happen to know that means that tooth is RIGHT about to burst out triumphantly! Teeth don�t �cut� through the gums, there is some sort of enzyme release that causes the gum cells immediately in FRONT of the rising tooth to die, and so the tooth moves into a space without any sort of cutting. The pain is from the jaw bone. And that kind of pain is naaasty. My poor boy. But he is doing okay. He is hurting a lot on and off, and he did a particularly nasty poo yesterday, and he has a bit of nappy rash when he NEVER gets nappy rash really (except sometimes in the heat) because of his cloth nappies. He has needed a lot of Calpol these last two or three days, and I have not worried about giving it to him when he�s upset and won�t be consoled, and it�s obvious that his tooth is hurting him. When he�s like this, the other remedies seem to do nothing at all, and he is obviously in pain so I will give him the necessary pain relief till he no longer seems to be in pain. I think it can�t be long before the tooth comes through. Every morning and afternoon it looks different, so every few hours it is making more progress! Anyway, the brown dip is the last layer of gum cells that have been zapped before the surface, so yay!! After they die and the tooth moves through that area, it will be out!! I can�t wait to see his first lil gleaming white toothie! I got so excited today because he was biting on my elbow (?!) and I felt this terribly sharp sharpness, but it turned out to be a fingernail being bored into my elbow next to his mouth! I cut those shortly afterwards!
Anyway, yay! The tooth is coming!!! I am so excited, after all this time! I will take a photo of the new toothie when I can after it�s through.
Talking of photos, I have quite a few to show you, of a new thing we did today, but I�ll post those in a minute. Arthur has had the best day! He has been happy and smiley all day. This is normal for Arthur, but I just know he has felt especially happy. He had both Mummy and Daddy around all day, and he got enough sleep in his nap times. He got medicine which took away his pain when he was having toothie trouble, and now that Neil is no longer germy, he finally got to take a whole week of pent-up raspberry blowing and rib-munching out on poor Arthur!! So Arthur has spent much of the day squealing and giggling :) I LOVE to hear my little one giggling and happy so much of the time. He is the most lovely baby, and we are so blessed to have him. He�s an absolute delight. He laughs all the time, not just giggling and smiling these days.
I sorted out the camcorder memory card and now I can upload video clips again, yay! Which is good because I have two great ones taken today to show you! The first one is of Arthur having his first taste of broccoli, cauliflower and parsnip puree! We�re still on this experiment with new flavours, using the Heinz organic fruit and veg purees to get him used to a wider variety. I am not sure what he made of today�s combination � I don�t think he liked it, but at least he is much happier taking food into his mouth, munching it a bit and swallowing it, which is the idea. Anyway, his faces were so funny! Neil took some footage of it, and I made this one minute clip for you guys to see :) These clips are also on Arthur�s Video Clip page. Here is the first one:
Arthur and the broccoli-and-cauliflower puree! 
Poor Arthur! We just found his faces so funny that we couldn�t help but laugh! He didn�t seem to mind though :)
Okay, the next one is the one I am sooooo glad to have captured! It�s a good example for you to see of how much Arthur is laughing these days. He laughs like this alllll the time, he is the most lovely happy baby ever! Arthur was playing happily on his tummy with a load of his toys out around the floor, and Neil got one of his squirty bath balls and started bouncing it on the floor as hard as he could to see if it would bounce off the floor and hit the ceiling � for his own amusement, I might add! Anyway, we had no idea Arthur would find this funny, or even pay attention, but suddenly he was absolutely cracking up, and it was soooo cute that Neil kept going and I rushed for the camcorder! Of course he got the hiccups, laughing that much :) Here is the one-minute clip of my precious cutie-boy laughing at the bouncing ball�
Arthur laughing at the bouncing ball!
Soooo precious. I love him so much, I can�t even describe it. He�s just infectious. I will never recover! :)
Okay so he had lots of lovely giggly fun today. I played Ruff with him twice and Neil nearly ate him right up several times, so he used up lots of laughing energy, which is nice! :) I held him a lot more than usual today. I did yesterday too. I don�t know why. I guess I just want him close to me all the time. I can�t cuddle him enough these days, it seems. I just want him squdged up in my arms all the time and his little soft head close enough for me to kiss it a hundred times, any second that I feel like it. So I hold him. He loves to be held, and just leans or reaches for where he feels like going in the house, or for something he wants to explore. Yesterday my friend Michelle (from school) and her husband came to see us, and they LOVED Arthur and complimented me on him tons (which I always love!), and I held him most of the time they were here, which was a couple of hours. He was on his tummy on the floor for maybe 10 minutes in total, on and off, and Michelle held him for 15 minutes maybe. He enjoyed the social contact and gave them lots of big smiles and chatter! They seemed very taken with him. Michelle is pregnant!! She is 12 weeks, but said she couldn�t tell me any earlier because they had a rough start. At 6 weeks she bled heavily (needed hospitalizing) and when she had a scan it showed an empty (miscarried) gestation sac, and another one with a baby in it! So she was pregnant with twins and lost one. All seems well with the other little bean but she is still on some restrictions with her activity until her scan next week. I think it sounds awful what they have been through, but they are so positive and just say how blessed they are that there was another baby in there. I have a strong feeling that everything is going to be fine for them with this little one. Twins run strongly in both sides of their families so it�s not too surprising!
Anyway, so I held Arthur nearly the whole time, and he eventually went to sleep in my arms, which I always love. Better still, when I took him upstairs and lay him down in the bed, he opened his eyes to look at me, smiled, and then they drooped shut again and he slept for 40 minutes :) That was lovely! Of course he was HUNGRY when he woke, because he was due to nurse and he normally always nurses for naptime!
Anyway back to today. So he has been held and cuddled a lot. I think he has been a very happy boy today! He got a little bored late in the afternoon between a nap and bathtime, as Neil went food shopping and Arthur seemed kind of bored with his toys. I phoned my Mummy to chat, and she said I should go and have some water play with Arthur on the plastic/sheet mat I sewed him! So that�s just what we did! And he LOVED it!! I sat him in front of a washing-up tub of water, and put a few plastic toys in there, and all his stacking cups � which are great because they have holes in the bottom to let sand or water fall through. And after we played with that a while, I added a squirt of baby bath bubbles to it, and blew bubbles in the water with a straw! He loved the bubbles. I packed him round with a lot of thick towels because even though he was on a waterproof floor-cover, he was lifting cups FULL with water out of the tub and dumping the water on his lap! And although it is hot today, there is a nice breeze which was fluttering in through the open window, and I didn�t want him getting chilly with extended water play. I wanted to keep playing as long as he stayed interested, which could be a while! We played for about 30 minutes, and he loved every second of it! After that, Neil was home and then he got tickled and eaten some more, and after that he was sleepy so it was bathtime and then time for bed. He has had a nice day and I feel so great to be able to give him happy times!
Here are some photos of the water play! He liked to watch me hold the cups up so that he could see the water fall through them. He loved to reach out and touch the water too:
Here he is enjoying the bubbles that I am blowing for him (after he noticed that�s what I was doing, anyway!)...
And this is why he needed all those towels over him!...
But there was not one single drop on the carpet after I cleared everything up! :) I am really glad I sewed that plastic/bedsheet thing.
Arthur has started saying things that sound more and more like proper talking. His babbling sounds very different to how it used to. He uses tones just like we do when we�re talking, that vary greatly depending on what he�s commenting on. It�s so interesting to watch and see how his vocal stuff is developing. He comes out with individual words that are not actual words at all, but which he is using to specifically convey some meaning or other. Like the other day, he was fussing as I was putting him down for a nap, and I lay next to him and nursed him. He nursed all gulpy and fast for a minute or two, then suddenly came off the breast with a huge slurp, as though he�d just suddenly thought of something to say (!), rolled over onto his tummy as fast as anything, lifted his head, looked me right in the eye, and said, �Neeg?� Then he waited, with a serious expression and raised eyebrows, head slightly on one side, I guess for some sort of response to his question (or statement) that obviously was packed with meaning that he expected me to understand!!! So I said, �Neeg!� And he gave me THE biggest smile ever! It was so cute :) I don�t know what he said, or what I said, but I obviously gave him the right answer, hehe! He�s such a cutie :)
Today he said, �Howyadoin�?� when Neil greeted him hello! Hehe! Well, that�s exactly how it sounded, but it was really just coincidental babble! This afternoon he said, �Don� do it!� when Neil was about to tickle him, but again it was babble that happened to sound exactly like the words, it was funny! But this is how his babbling is changing. It sounds so much like words that we speak, but it doesn�t make sense.
He is showing signs of understanding a word other than Mummy and Daddy! Well, and other than medicine and milk, which he knows from signing. He seems to be understanding the word �kisses�!! We kiss him all the time, and if we ever go to kiss him on the mouth, we prepare him in advance (so he doesn�t get the shock of his life, hehe!) by saying, �Kisses�� and leaning in to kiss him. The singular form seems to have become �kissie� and he seems to understand that too. He gives us kisses all the time now, usually by grasping our face in both hands and dragging it towards his open mouth! Arthur�s kisses are nearly always big open-wide ones at the moment! He can purse his lips and kiss though, but he doesn�t usually. He has started to show more affection with us in recent weeks, just in time for me to read in my latest Babycentre email that my baby will start to show more affection and emotional understanding around now :) He spontaneously gives us kisses, often when he�s had a particularly close moment with one of us, like after he nurses or after he has cuddles with Daddy or gets half-eaten by him! ;) It�s so lovely. Today he was sitting on Neil�s lap having a cuddle, after his water play, and he was happy as anything and chatting away. He was facing away from Neil, but all of a sudden he twisted his head round and planted a big open kissie on Neil�s mouth, the lil cutie :) Then I said, �Arthur, give Daddy a kissie!� AND HE DID! And then looked back to me, and I said it again, and he turned and gave him another one! So I think he is really starting to understand �kisses� now. He does look like he understands what we�re saying when we use the word and go to kiss him. He knows what�s coming.
Ahhhhhh he�s just so precious. I loooooooovvvvvvvvve hime. Love him. Love him. Love. Him.
Here is a photo of Arthur giving Daddy a kissie, one of those times when I asked him to:
And now he is in bed sleeping, and I wish I could snuggle him up and kiss him all over, but that would wake him up so I can�t! I just have Arthur-fever at the moment. He is all I think about. I can scarcely breathe for how much I love him. I can�t believe it is only going to get better and MORE love will happen. How can that be? I never felt anything like this in my life before. I wouldn�t change him for the world. He IS my world!
Well, I am going to get another glass of water (sooooo thirsty today!) and maybe snuggle with my hubby if he�s not watching something violent on TV (tsk!), and then go to bed I think. It�s late and I want to go to church again tomorrow. In fact, I�m really looking forward to it! Will update again soon :)
[p.s. Megan and Julie, I am soooo sorry I haven�t emailed you guys back yet. Will do so very soon. Sorry to leave this message here, but have run out of time tonight. Love you both! :)]
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