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?"