Another goofy thing Eric does is suck on his lower lip. Last night, in his Uncle Scott's lap at the dinner table, he sucked his lip while making heroic efforts to grab Scott's roast beast and diced potatoes. Thinking this might mean something, we decided to offer him a little rice cereal (the first solid food of choice for modern babies) and see what happened. So I mixed up a packet of cereal, and we offered it to him. Since we don't yet have a high chair, and the booster seat we bought earlier this week had to be returned, feeding Eric was a three-adult process. Reminds me of a "how many does it take to change a light bulb" joke: how many adults of normal intelligence does it take to feed a five-month-old two tablespoons of Gerber rice cereal? Three: one to hold the baby, one to feed the baby, and one to stand by with a damp cloth.
Eric surprised us by taking to this whole eating thing as if he'd been secretly practicing. Seeing the spoon approach, he opened his mouth wide, like a baby bird. Upon spoon insertion, he clamped his mouth shut and sucked the cereal off. This was followed by a brief period during which he mashed the cereal against the top of his mouth with his tongue, swallowing some and ejecting some inter-labially. We were astonished; we had expected our first effort to consist of poking the spoon of cereal against the confused or recalcitrant baby's closed mouth, or dumping some on his tongue only to have it all come pouring back out. We didn't expect him to actually eat any. But he liked it, getting fussy only when it suddenly dawned on him that this process was filling his belly much more slowly than a bottle, especially now that he's graduated to fast-flow nipples.
Once we gave him his bottle, he ate almost non-stop for two hours before finally going to sleep. Then David fed him at 2, and I fed him at 6. He's our growing boy.
Oh, speaking of nighttimes, he does something I find very funny. A couple of weeks ago, Eric was in bed with us and got fussy toward morning. Nothing seemed to help: not his pacifier, not being cuddled. I guess David finally decided to try feeding him, even though he had eaten very recently. David and Eric got up, and David popped Eric into his crib while he (David) went to the bathroom. When David came back, Eric had gone peacefully to sleep. So we left him there and went back to sleep ourselves.
Since then, we have had many times, usually towards morning, when Eric gets fussy and the only thing that will settle him is to be put in his crib. We joke that we have the only baby in the world that fusses to get out of bed with its parents.
Posted by Su Penn at December 17, 2003 11:54 AM | TrackBack