December 27, 2001. I have now caught up the backlog, and we are back on an exact two-year delay. The next entry won't be until Jan. 18. Guess I was slacking a little back then!
Eric is seven months old today and doing all the typical seven-month-old type things. I'm just getting ready to start him on two solid-food meals a day instead of one, and if he can't be said to be crawling, per se, he can locomote quite effectively and with intention by scooting. In fact, yesterday he lay on the floor in the dining room and looked at Scott, having lunch at the table in the living room, and thought seriously about heading over there to visit. But I think he decided it was too far. It won't be long, though, and he will be doing it. Last night David and I would put a toy he wanted a couple of feet away from him, and he would go get it. Also, if you show him something and he wants it, you can put it a couple of feet behind him, and he will spin around and go after it.
He had his six-month check up a couple of weeks ago. He is no longer in the 50th percentile for weight, but somewhere in the 80s. Mari said, "No wonder your arms get tired! Babies are supposed to get this big gradually! His growth curve is supposed to taper off and get less steep, but his is just a straight line up!" He weighed 19 1/2 pounds. Highly chubbified. But Mari said he looks good and not to worry, although she did add, "Most mothers who are just starting on solids, I remind them that the baby will continue to get its nutritional needs met through formula for the whole first year, and so the solid food should be additional, and not replace a milk feeding. In Eric's case, though, I would say that if he wants to drop a bottle, that would be fine." We make two quarts of formula every 36 hours for Eric, and so far he shows little inclination to drop a bottle. I make him a meal by heating a bottle and using some of the formula to mix up a little rice cereal; in the other compartment of his two-compartment bowl I put some fruit or vegetable puree. He will eat pretty much as much of the solid food as I will give him, and then he usually finishes the whole bottle.
He loves to eat solid food. So far he has liked everything, though when you first give him a new food, he closes his mouth on it, frowns, and gets very still for a moment while he thinks about whether it is good. Then he decides it is. I use the highly messy Baby Assisted Two-Spoon Feeding Method, in which I put some food on a spoon, hand it to him, let him suck the food off it, put some food on another spoon, trade with him, and so on. Periodically I have to wait while he sucks overflow off his fingers and hands. I haven't yet been brave enough to just give him a little bowl and let him eat with his hands; I'm not up to the clean-up challenge. It's bad enough now. When he's done eating, I grab one of our big burp cloths and wet it. Then I study Eric for a moment to try to guess whether I should start with his face, his hands, or the high chair tray. It doesn't matter, though; whichever I start with, he will re-messify before I get to the next segment. So cleanup goes like this: off comes the bib. Wipe the face, wipe the hands, wipe the tray, wipe the face, wipe the hands, wipe the tray, wipe the face, wipe the hands, wipe the tray--getting a little closer to actual cleanliness with each circuit. But even so, I will almost certainly, half an hour later, have to go after him with a damp cloth again to get the last of the peaches out of his hair or pea schmoo out of the crease at the side of his nose.
Many people recommend undressing the baby from the waist up for feedings at this stage. I don't do that, though I do often time feedings for when I think he's going to need a new outfit anyway. And I do often take my own shirt off.
At his check-ups, you have to fill out forms that include developmental information. Last visit, one of the checkboxes was "sits up on own." I had to check "No." But then he did it for the first time on the exam table! I wanted to get my form back and change it. He's had good control for a long time, but hasn't sat alone on a flat surface. Now he can, but he generally chooses not to. I think he doesn't yet see what is good or useful about sitting up, when all his toys are flat on the floor.
I told Mari that I thought he would be crawling soon, and she said, "Oh, don't expect it for another month, at least." But when I was checking out, I set him on the floor next to me, and she happened by and looked at him and said, "OK, maybe he is about to crawl."
We finally bought a baby monitor last week and started putting him upstairs in his crib for naps. It was taking me forever to get him to sleep down here, because there's just so much going on, and then if he woke up at all, he would stay awake to check out the activities. But he goes down in his crib and stays down for a couple of hours twice a day. This is a lesson I have to learn over and over about caring for a baby: if you are lazy, you will cause yourself more trouble in the long run. For instance, if I feel too lazy to take him upstairs and spend five minutes putting him down, I will end up spending an hour rocking in the living room with a baby who is fighting sleep because he wants to watch the cats. It's just the same with his 7 a.m. feeding. If I lie in bed listening to him start waking up and hoping he will go back down, I can be awake for 20 minutes before he wakes up completely, and then another 15 to heat the bottle and feed him. But if I leap right up and start the bottle, 12 minutes later I'm dozing off in bed with a sleeping, full-tummied baby on my chest.
Since my period started again after Eric was born, I have felt, from various physical signs, that I could tell when I was ovulating, in a way I never could before. The other night, I was experiencing those signs, and when I went to the bathroom, on a whim I got out one of my leftover ovulation predictor kits and did a test. Sure enough, three minutes later I was staring at two purple lines, indicating that I was experiencing a surge of leutenizing hormone and would therefore ovulate sometime in the next 24 to 36 hours. I was elated. I ran out into the living room waving the little stick, saying, "We should call Dr. Sauer's office in the morning and go inseminate!" Never mind that it was Christmas Eve.
Anyway, I've decided to stop pussy-footing around the issue, and just admit to everyone that I want another baby. I don't know if I'll get it; David does have some say. I'm just not going to continue to pretend ambivalence where I feel none.
Did I tell you that Eric had his first real sickness a couple of weekends ago? Complete with vomiting. I had been dreading that kind of thing, wondering how I would handle it. Turns out it was just fine, although it can be helpful to have two people around: one to put a clean outfit on the baby while the other one gets a bucket and works on the floor. Eric didn't suffer too much; he would get fussy for awhile, then throw up, and then seem fine for a few hours until he did it again. I think he suffered the most from our refusal to just let him have a bottle after he had emptied his stomach; he would throw up, and feel perfectly fine and hungry, and instead of feeding him, we would make him wait at least half an hour, and then give him an ounce, wait fifteen minutes to see whether he kept it down, give him another ounce, and so on. He was not pleased with us.
Eric had a good Christmas. We exchanged gifts at home this year, having decided on a $20 limit. After David, Scott, and I exchanged our presents, Scott disappeared for a moment and re-emerged with a teddy bear at least twice Eric's size. "We didn't set a price limit on gifts for the baby," he said. I said to Eric, "Eric, do you know what 'doting' means?" Eric loves Big Bear, as I have creatively dubbed the stuffy because it is Big and it is a Bear. He likes it because it has a face, a nose which can be sucked on, and a great deal of very soft fur. Yesterday afternoon I let Eric lie on the bear's lap for a long time and he just petted it and petted it.
We have been noticing that great strides have been made in the synthetic stuffed animal fur industry since we were children. They're so soft now!
At Grandma & Grandpa's, Eric got lots of fun stuff including a Fisher Price Crawl-n-Cruise Playground. I had been lusting after the Crawl-n-Cruise Playground, but it is the kind of extravagant, elaborate toy no baby really needs. Perfect, I figured, for the grandparents to buy him. It is a circular enclosure with an opening for the baby to crawl through; once he's in there, there's a spinning mirror, and a face with a spinning ball for a nose. Also a big ball hanging on a string for him to bop. When he gets big enough to cruise ("cruise" being a technical term for babies walking while holding onto furniture), he can activate lights and [obnoxious] music by spinning disks. There is also a complicated system of chutes that balls can roll through and shoot out onto the floor; there's one place to drop the balls into and you don't know where they're going to come out! The cats love the ball-chute feature. The thing also has a sensor so the baby can activate the lights and [obnoxious] music just by crawling into the Playground. Oh, and when he can stand on his own, part of the top of the thing lifts up so he can stand there and do things with it. He loves it. I put other toys in there as well, and it serves to contain him somewhat so I don't have to watch him quite so closely while he plays.
He is into manipulating objects. He has one rattle with things that spin, and he can hold it in one hand while spinning the things with the other. He also likes to hold two things and bang them on each other. He started clapping a couple of weeks ago, and at first he did it by holding one hand still and hitting it with the other one, but within a few days he was moving both hands. Now he loves clapping games and patty-cake.
I can hear Eric on the monitor right now, blowing raspberries in his crib. I think he will go to sleep in a few minutes. Yesterday I sang him a song, and the whole time he sat in my lap and blew raspberries at me. We tell him, "Say it, don't spray it," but it does no good.
I've been on anti-depressants for almost two weeks, and it seems to be helping, although I do have this strange feeling that at this point I couldn't cry if I wanted to. So I don't feel exactly like myself, but this is way better than depression, I must say. Therapy is helping, as is my PPD support group. When I saw my therapist last week, I told her everything I was doing to take care of myself, and she said, "you're doing well." Later, I mentioned my PPD support group in passing--I hadn't mentioned it before--and she said, "You really are taking good care of yourself!" I said, "I don't feel good," and she said, "it's like that sometimes."
Last week one of the challenges for me was not to try to do too much. I felt just like you do when you're recovering from, say, a sprained ankle--there's some stage when you feel normal but you know the ankle is fragile. I've been that way. Almost normal, but I know I'm still a little fragile, so I'm trying to take it easy.
Posted by Su Penn at December 27, 2003 09:53 AM | TrackBack