Friday, April 27, 2012

6 months

SIX MONTHS? Half a year? That was fast. And PB decided to get a lot accomplished in the past month. Meanwhile, everything's still crazy (good crazy! Very good crazy!) with job/housing stuff, so I am yet again late with this update. But here it is. He had a doctor's appointment on the day he hit the six-month mark, so I have real stats! 


Weight: 19lb, 9oz. (90th percentile)


Length: 27.5 inches (90th percentile)

Head circumference: I never pay attention to the actual numbers, but he's also in the 90th percentile here.

What he's eating: He started solids! On the morning of April 2, I was sitting with PB on my lap while I ate breakfast, which included a banana. PB was reaching like crazy for the fruit, so I broke off a small piece and held it in front of him. He nabbed it and popped it in his mouth immediately. I couldn't really see his face, but DH said he looked very thoughtful for a moment. He s-l-o-w-l-y chewed it, and we kept expecting him to spit it out, but nope!

Since then he has tried oatmeal, pears, pineapple, green beans, a crust of bread, and red bell pepper. We're doing this Baby-Led-Weaning style: we put food in front of him (the fruits and veggies are cut up in to easy-to-grab stick shapes) and let him play with it, basically. Sometimes it winds up in his mouth. So far he seems to like everything he's tried.

All his actual nutrition is still coming from breastmilk. The solids, at this point, are basically a fun toy, and we've been getting him used to sitting in his high chair with us when we're eating breakfast. That's given us a fun preview to family meals in the future.

Physical skills: He is SO CLOSE to crawling. He now rocks on his hands and knees all the time. Even without formal crawling skills, he's really getting around: he'll get himself across the living room in under 2 minutes, especially if something dangerous/electrical is in his line of sight. This is correlating with an increased difficulty in the diaper-change department, because now about half the time I try to change him, he flips over on his tummy and starts trying to make quick with the getaway. It's becoming a wrestling match. 

NEW CATEGORY! Teeth!: He has two teeth now! April 2 was a big day - first the banana, then DH called me at work that afternoon and said he felt a tooth coming through. Over the next few days, we started to be able to see them. PB handled them pretty well - he mostly kept chawing on everything. There was one night when he woke up abruptly, screaming (very out of character for him), and looking back we think that might have been the night when they actually cut through his gums. It was a bit scary for me, as he generally just makes enough noise to alert us that he's awake, but he was really hollering, even after I picked him up. He didn't really calm down until he was nursing. But I think that was because his gums hurt.

As DH has pointed out, we're spoiled: if PB cries for a half hour, we're both freaked out that something's really wrong.

Favorite toys: Blue car, anything made of paper (he has attempted to eat at least one library book), sock monkey, O-Ball, the toy from his high chair, food.

Verbal skills: He babbles all the time now: "mamama" and "babababa". He does this cute thing where he babbles while chewing on something, which is handy when I turn my back and he scoots over to DH's slippers and starts gnawing on them. (Yes, sometimes we're convinced we managed to produce a puppy).

Social skills: Happily, he's still a really sociable little guy. One of my dearest friends and her husband were in town for a few days, and PB took to them right away: all smiles and babbling (and drool! He likes to share that, too). The day he turned 6 months old, he got to spend a little time with his 10-month-old cousin. I think he's not entirely sure what to do about other babies, but neither is she: she kind of bapped him in the face a few times, I think to see what he would do. He mostly took it in stride, though he looked a little surprised.

Sleep: Still generally waking up once, between 4 and 5am. We've made an attempt at not getting up, to see if he'll just settle himself back to sleep, but the result of that has been that I'm awake from 4:30am until my alarm goes off, sitting in bed, just listening to him make noise in the other room. And then he's crazy-tired when his normal morning nap time comes around. And I'm getting even less sleep than I would if I got up with him. So this is perhaps not the best solution. Beyond that, though, he's sleeping pretty consistently: bedtime by 7:30pm, sleeps through to that one wakeup, otherwise (if I get up when he does and change/nurse him) he sleeps until 6:30 or 7am. Two to three naps per day, not on any kind of real schedule.