Climbing

Jonah's climbing on everything these days.  Testing his limits, so to speak.  Here are some examples:

Blink, and you might miss it.

Tired as we are these days, it's surprisingly easy to let many of Jonah's latest mental and physical achievements go more or less unnoticed, or at least unacknowledged. Yet achieve he does, every day.

Today, then, I'm going to fill you in, faithful readers (yes, all you three!) on some of Jonah's less-sung heroics. For though not every day can be filled with those eagerly awaited milestones like crawling and walking and saying a first word, what does fill our days nevertheless makes us very proud.

In the past month, beyond what I've mentioned in previous posts, Jonah has mastered these exciting new skills:

• Poking with his index finger
• Clearly understanding more and more words or phrases, such as "bath", diaper change", and "are you hungry?"
• Voluntarily releasing objects from his grasp (he's been doing this for well over a month, in truth)
• Picking up and feeding himself solid foods, which now include Cheerios, cheese, cannellini beans, bits of kale, grapes, and whole blueberries
• Giving hugs
• Kissing his mom and dad

Jonah's also making fast progress towards mastering these additional skills:

• Scooting around on his belly using his arms and legs
• Lifting himself from his belly into a crawling position
• Moving from a seated to a crawling position
• Standing up on his own, using inanimate objects for support
• Understanding the word "no"
• Understanding that a string of "ma" sounds tends to grab his mother's attention faster than strings of other sounds
• Spoon-feeding himself
• lifting his arms and legs as needed when getting dressed

There are certainly others I could list here too, but those are the skills that I've remembered off the top of my head at this moment. In any case, the point is we are so, so very proud of this little boy each and every day. Such a determined and adventurous spirit, and so bright to boot! Shucks, I still just can't get enough of our baby marvel.

Jonah practices hugging on an only slightly wary cat.

Wherefore art thou, Somnio?

Jonah's not been sleeping well lately. It's been at least three weeks now, but we're still not sure what the cause is.

At first I thought he might have an ear infection, but the evidence didn't favor that theory: he hasn't been sick recently, there's no fluid drainage, he has no temperature, he's been eating just fine, and he's perfectly happy while it's daytime.

Then we thought he might be teething. But there's not a lot of strong evidence for that possibility either. And three weeks later, we still don't see any teeth.

For a while I considered that he might be afraid of the dark. We slept with a nightlight on, but the sleepless nights continued.

For several nights in a row, I found myself waking up no less than every hour to sooth an unsoothable baby. He'd wake up howling, and, though he might not even open his eyes, his howling would persist unabated for as long as half an hour before he settled back into a too-short sleep again. I thought it must be night terrors, and I focused on getting him to take longer, more numerous naps through the day to ensure he wasn't overtired at night. Alas, the night wakings decreased in number, but 1am, 3am, and 5am wake up calls stubbornly persisted.

Maybe it was gas or constipation. The introduction of more and more solid foods, shared at more and more regular mealtimes might do that to a baby. We drafted infant gas relief drops into our war, and we supplemented Jonah's lunch and dinner with purée of prune. We saw marginal progress, at best.

And now our napping system has fallen apart. What used to be a consistent 2-3 naps a day, totaling about 3 hours, has suddenly and without obvious explanation turned into one heartily-resisted nap lasting no more than an hour. As a result, Jonah's bedtime seems to have moved up about three hours in the evening (without affecting his morning wake up routine), but the night wakings persist. Last night he was up from 1:00 a.m. until 2:30 a.m., then again for a while at 5am. (So he skipped his 3:00 a.m. waking, but only after being up an hour and a half in the middle of the night.)

I guess we can still hold out hope that he's teething, but, otherwise, we seem to be getting nowhere. What's wrong, Jonah? What can your parents do for you?

If something good has come of all
this trouble, it's that we got to see
Jonah's face post-prune consumption.

The many faces of Baby Jonah

When taking pictures of Jonah, I often snap shot after shot, hoping to catch the missable moment when he's looking at the camera and smiling but not so animated that all his features are a blur. Sometimes, this leads to fascinating series, in which you can watch his expressions or moods change over the course of moments. At least, they are fascinating to me, his mother. In any case, I thought I'd share an example this once:

Very busy playing with my
pajama pant drawstrings.

Surprised by the click of the camera.

Now curious.

Bringing on the silly.

Hilarity ensues!

Love it!