Hands On

Baby turned four months old as of yesterday. He's been sleeping through the night for over a month now, but since he falls asleep between 6 and 7 pm, that means I don't see him when I get home after work. So my new sleep schedule is to get up an hour before I normally do so I can hang with Baby and also feed him, to eventually ween him onto the bottle.

So yesterday morning, like most mornings, I sit in the rocking chair and give him his bottle. I cradle his head in the crook of my left arm, and hold his bottle with my right. This time, he grabbed my pointer finger with his right hand, and the my pinky with his left hand. And then, my ear started to itch. Having both hands occupied, I twitched my head in an attempt to scratch my ear with my shoulder. That was only making it worse. I wiggled my right hand free from Baby's Kung Fu grip, balancing the bottle on my forearm, while contorting my neck to get my ear within reach of my fingers. To my surprise, his little hands squeezed the side of his bottle, and he was actually holding the bottle all by himself. I pulled my right arm entirely free, and yes, Baby was now an independent!

Immediately, I imagined all the things I could do with my free hand: I could scratch my other ear, and even my head, maybe my leg. I could eat a sandwich with my free hand, or snap my fingers, or press some buttons. At this point, Baby was kind of looking at me and my flailing right arm in a funny way, and was too distracted by my gesticulations to drink. So I resumed holding his bottle and decided to save my aspirations for another day.

This morning, I tried it again, just in case that self sufficient feeding was a fluke, and Baby again held his bottle on his own. I was smart this time and got my camera. But by the time I positioned it, he refused to hold the bottle again. So imagine what you see below without my hand, and you can imagine what new feat he had accomplished for his birthday.

" Hold on... why do I need to hold the bottle by myself again?"

Thinking A Head

We walked out of our last visit to the Pediatrician with Baby's latest measurements. It's funny how one's baby is always being compared to the rest of the babies in America. That's probably something we continue doing as adults, but our doctors stopped reminding us of how above or below average we were while we were too young to be psychologically scarred by this information. So according to the charts, our boy is a taller than average (25" long, 75th-90th percentile), average weighing (13.5 pounds, 50th percentile), with a below average head (40 cm, 25th percentile).

Speaking of his tiny head, our biggest concern so far is Baby's case of plagiocephaly, or more commonly known as flat head syndrome. Our boy was used to leaning to one side when he was born, and with the insistence of sleeping on his back to combat SIDS, there was little we could do to keep his soft baby skull from being indented by gravity.

The Pediatrician referred us to a "Noggin Nest,"which looks like a really soft hemorrhoid pillow for your head. Having the baby sleep on this velvet donut allows the pressure on the back of his head to be more evenly distributed, ensuring a round-headed baby once more!

Abnormal Output

There will be many a time when you panic as a parent. In most cases you distress over a very normal situation, which you probably never would have learned about unless you really had to, like opening a beer bottle without a bottle opener. Our first time for baby-related panic was on the second day Baby was born, when the doctor told us he lost weight and needed to be held for observation. What the doctor didn't tell us was that it was typical for all babies to lose weight, not just ours. (They're generally not getting the right nutrition over the first few days of birth, because mother is producing milk which is mostly water and non-fattening nutrients at this point.)

Our second day of baby-panic happened this past week, when Mommy called me and told me (stop reading now if you're eating, especially if you're eating chocolate) the baby had some blood in his poo. Such a symptom as an adult after years of Hot Pockets and crunchy fried Gorditas is never good, so you would expect it to be proportionately worse for a little person who is eating nothing but mommy-milk. After a call to the pediatrician and some research online, we found the most common cause to be simply an allergic reaction to dairy, from the mother ingesting milk, ice cream, grande caramel mocha Frappucinos, etc. We found another source that claimed multi-vitamins may also be the culprit, so we're currently experimenting with refraining from one or the other, since it seemed to start after he started taking those infernal multi-vitamins.

So far his poos have been as normal as baby poo can be, but we know this won't be the last of times we'll be panicking, calling the doctor, and eating Gorditas with Frappucinos. At least we can all sleep soundly knowing everything is normal, for now...

This has been a fun week for me as a parent, but I suppose pretty fun for Baby too. We heard him laugh out loud (that's "LOL" for all you young 'uns) for the first time this week. It's kind of like a cooing, gurgling laugh. He also started using his hands a lot more, to bat and grab at things around him:

"Having... too much... fun..."

Last week, if you put him on his stomach for what is known in the pediatric circles as "tummy time," he would just kind of suck on the mat, and eventually start to cry. This past week, he was able to pick his head up a bit, and can hold it up there for quite a while...

"I've finally got you, purple kitty..."

...before tiring out completely.

"Foiled again! Maybe I should start taking those extra vitamins..."

He also took up some light reading of "Good Night Gorilla:"

"This repetitive storyline is riveting!"

And made a few friends, big..."OK, big guy... you stay on your side and I stay on mine..."

...and small.

"There's only enough room in this crib for one of us..."

Everyone tells me it gets better as he gets older, and I can't disagree - that must mean it'll be a blast when he starts potty training.