Archive for August, 2008

Books


28 Aug

Look! The Story of the little mole who knew it was none of his business. Such a cool poo book!

What else is here…what’s this one?

Moo. Very cool.

But look what else is here…Roar and Ten Little Ladybirds….

Oh, heavy book!

Eh, who’s ever heard of a duck on a bike!

Oohhh, Hairy Maclairy!

Hi Mummy, I’m making a mess for you to tidy up!

Is there a Wocket in your pocket?

Nathan pulled out half the books on the lowest shelf of the bookcase, one by one. He was surrounded by books. This seems to be a favourite past time of his lately!

6.5 months old


24 Aug

Nathan is loving his food! I am amazed at how big the bites are that he takes out of peeled pear!! Foods tasted to date (new foods during the last fortnight in bold):

Apple (uncooked, sucks the juice where I take bites), banana, corn (on the cob, he does manage to chew off some kernels I leave on the cob for him), carrot, cantaloupe, pear (ripe and stewed), chicken (bone to suck and shredded breast in soup), pizza crust, a very small quantity of cous cous and an equally small quantity of rice, pumpkin soup, potato and garlic soup, and roast pumpkin soup (pumpkin, tomato, sweet potato, carrots and chicken stock), broccoli, avocado, risotto, porridge, lamb chop, fish, watermelon, yellow baby squash, peas, chicken and corn soup, mashed potato, grapes (cut into quarters), chinese broccoli, small amount of duck, chinese BBQ pork, beef stew and prunes.

We bought Nathan a seat that attaches to dining chairs so he can sit at the table instead of on the table in his Bumbo. The next step is to get something to protect both the table and the floor from mushy food!

Nathan nearly has the knack of sitting unsupported. He can do it for short periods, but then gets excited about something and pushes himself over backwards! Crawling is coming along…he can creep forwards now (instead of always going backwards) and can get onto his hands and knees. We are waiting for that to progress to actual crawling.

Swimming classes are still on Mondays, but the instructor asked if we could get to his midday class instead since he says Nathan would be better off in the next class level. His class is actually full, but Sam said it would be ok if we joined…unofficially! lol.

We turned the carseat around this weekend so that Nathan is now forward facing. We had planned to leave it rear facing for a while since Nathan isn’t 8 kg yet which is the minimum weight suggested by the manufacturer for the forward facing seat, but the RTA say it is ok from 6 months, and we are hoping that Nathan will be more settled in the car if he can see what is going on. We have a 3 hour (at least) drive on Friday and we hope this will make the trip bearable. I was very excited that Nathan actually fell asleep in the car seat on Saturday with only my hand on him and while I was singing (10 green bottles, of all things). The photo below shows Nathan sleeping in the car seat, this time he was put in already asleep, and the straps have been adjusted now to fit him better too.

New booster seat Sleeping in the forward facing car seat

Preparations for my return to work continue. Andrew has now got Nathan to sleep on numerous occasions, which has given him a lot of confidence. I am still working on getting Nathan to go to sleep in the cot, but Andrew will probably have to take over that goal. Nathan’s sleep patterns seem to be changing, and he has slept 1.5 hours for one of his day naps on 3 days in the last week.

Andrew is happy with his pouch to carry Nathan in, and I have started carrying him in the back position in the Ergo which is really comfortable. I find it hard to get him in the Ergo, though.

And finally, just because I like this photo…

Crawling….nearly


19 Aug

Nathan has been desperate to crawl for such a long time now, but it’s only in the last week that he’s worked out how to get into the crawl position. He now gets onto his hands and knees and rocks backwards and forwards, not knowing how to move from this point. When he tries to crawl he generally face plants the floor! It won’t be long though.

The hard poo


17 Aug

I’m not obsessed by poo, really I’m not! But when you see every one of your baby’s excretions, you certainly know what is going on in that department!

We started Nathan on solids seriously about a week and a half ago, just slowly, slowly. Before that we just let him suck on things he couldn’t really eat, but he obviously enjoyed sucking out the flavours. Now, as stated previously, I’m used to waiting for the 7 – 12 day poo, but I did think that those days were over with the introduction of solids. Yes, we did start with only small amounts of solids, but the days ticked by and no poo. I was starting to think about constipation: In Robin Barker’s book ‘Baby Love’ it says “Breastfed babies often get a little constipated when they first start food from a spoon”. Yesterday, day 6 since the last poo, found the poor little tyke pushing and pushing and only managing one small little pellet. And this morning, a week since his last proper poo, found me holding Nathan over the bucket while the poor kid pushed and strained to no avail. I gave him a nice warm bath to see if that would relax his muscles a bit, and though he strained in the bath as well there was no output. Then later in the morning with lots of straining, screaming and crying, he managed to push out a short, fat, hard sausage that did some damage since he was bleeding a little after that.

A trip to the chemist and supermarket found us with prune juice and Coloxyl drops. We gave Nathan a single dose of Coloxyl in a small amount of diluted prune juice, and then he slept for an hour and a half!!! He has NEVER slept more than 40 minutes in one go in his cot before. When he woke up I offered him the toilet as usual (I always offer after he wakes), and he started straining. We practically cheered as he forced out the offending hard poo! And that wasn’t the end of it…he then proceeded to do numerous small soft poos throughout the afternoon. Interestingly, only when I offered the toilet or potty to him. We have now gone a month without having to deal with a pooey nappy!

We will continue with the prune juice for a while, as a bit of an insurance policy. I hope we never have to resort to Coloxyl again.

Dum


16 Aug

Nathan regularly comes out with great, long renditions of mum-mum-mum, and so now Andrew is trying to get him to say Dad….

Nathan: mum-mum-mum

Andrew: dad-dad-dad-dad

Nathan: mum-mum-mum

Andrew: dad-dad-dad-dad

Nathan: dum

I couldn’t help but laugh.

6 months old


11 Aug

I simply can’t believe that Nathan has been with us for half a year now! Geez, at this rate his first birthday is just around the corner! Tomorrow Nathan gets his 6 month vaccinations and will also have his 6 month check. Edited to add: Nathan’s weight was measured to be about 7 kg which isn’t much more than what he weighed at 4 months, so the GP wants to weigh him again in 2 weeks to make sure he is putting on weight. I think that Nathan is doing just fine, he is growing, looks slightly chubby and is happy.

A lot has been going on in the last two weeks. Nathan’s gunky eye has finally fixed itself, so there is no more green gunk to clean off his eyelids on a regular basis. In addition to his fingers, Nathan now sometimes sucks his thumb in that classic clenched fist style.

Nathan isn’t crawling properly yet, but he tries hard to get there. Regardless, he’s definitely on the move and we are now seriously considering how to baby-proof the flat. So far we’ve just blockaded off the areas we don’t want him in.

We have made progress with Andrew getting Nathan to sleep. I made Andrew a pouch to carry Nathan in, and yesterday Nathan slept in it twice. We are now hopeful that day sleeps won’t be the issue for Andrew that we thought they would be when he starts looking after Nathan full time. I am going to make another attempt at getting Nathan to go to sleep in the cot rather than

Our day has 4 cycles of roughly 2.5 – 3.5 hours where Nathan wakes, is fed, has a play on the floor, he has a grizzly period as he starts to get tired (during which time we play together on the floor, sing songs, or read books or just gets carried while I do other things) and then he is rocked to sleep for his half hour nap while listening to Clare de Lune on his sleep CD. He is then put down in his cot and some 25 minutes later he wakes up and the cycle starts again.

Nathan’s babble has started to sound more like words, and he often says ‘mum’. He seems to know it means me, though it is hard to say for sure.

Our dabbling in elimination communication is going well. In 3 weeks he’s done 2 huge poos, both of which have been caught in a bucket. We probably catch about 80-90% of his wees, and we try to keep it up when we’re out as well. I love that we have dramatically reduced the number of nappies we use daily which, in turn, reduces the amount of washing we have. And I used to put thick night nappies on at night, thick enough to absorb 12 hours worth of wee, but with one toilet opportunity during the night we’ve now had 7 dry nappies at night in a row! So far it’s all based on timing in that I just offer the toilet (bucket) when I think Nathan might need it. The next step is to get him to signal his need to go.

Foods that Nathan has tasted so far…

Apple (uncooked, sucks the juice where I take bites), banana, corn (on the cob, he does manage to chew off some kernels I leave on the cob for him), carrot, cantaloupe, pear (ripe), chicken (bone), pizza crust, a very small quantity of cous cous and an equally small quantity of rice, pumpkin soup, potato and garlic soup, and roast pumpkin soup (pumpkin, tomato, sweet potato, carrots and chicken stock).

The long poo


03 Aug

Nathan tends to go long periods of time between poos. We are talking 10-12 days, and then when the poo comes it seems to be excreted over two days. Thus, in any fortnight we might have 12 days of just wet nappies, and then 2 days with big, messy poos. I’m quite surprised that our cloth nappies have contained these huge poos, but it is still messy cleaning up both the nappies and the baby after these events. Nathan obviously doesn’t like sitting around in so much poo, because he grizzles and lets us know that he needs a nappy change. He grunts and pushes for a while before the poo arrives, which got me thinking that if I’m quick enough I might be able to catch the poo in the toilet rather than in his nappy. This doesn’t seem such a foreign idea to me, given I know a couple of people who have used Elimination Communication (EC) to get their children out of nappies before their first birthday, and I experienced an entire country using this strategy when we travelled in China (with the exception of Shanghai, we saw disposable nappies there).

I have also started giving Nathan a lot more nappy free time. We used to give him a lot in Summer, but it’s been a bit cold lately so I had stopped. Nathan doesn’t really get nappy rash, but he does get a little redness every now and then and having nappy free time fixes that right up! So the heater has been turned on occasionally in order for nappy free time to continue throughout Winter.

Now, continuing along my train of thought, I figured that if he was getting all this nappy free time, then I may as well see if I can work out when he normally wees, and start making a ‘psss’ sound when he does so he would learn to associate the noise with weeing, and if I could get him to wee into the toilet (or bucket, which we currently use) then maybe I would have a few less wet nappies to deal with. And hopefully, with all this nappy free time, I would notice his big poo in the beginning stages and get him over the toilet quickly enough to catch it (this could end in tears!). Anyway, this was how I came to buy the book “Early Start Potty Training”, because I realised that I was starting on the road to EC (on a part time basis, which I believe is possible) and thought it might be an idea to read a bit about it.

The book was very interesting! It talked about the time frames in which other cultures toilet train their children, it talked about how we came to believe that babies are unable to control their bowels and bladders, and it also talked about the environmental impact of nappies (both disposable and cloth) and made the point that the earlier you toilet train your child the less washing/landfill is required. It had other statistics as well, saying that most children with on going toilet issues and bedwetting were toilet trained at an older age. It also said that we actually train our children to wee and poo in their nappies.

So, for about 10 days now I’ve been saying the ‘psss’ sound when Nathan wees…well, for the ones I see, anyway. At the start Nathan didn’t really know what was going on, and every time I said the noise he’d stop weeing. But he got used to it, and I got to learn that he generally wees half an hour after he wakes up from his nap (during which time I feed him). So I can now take him to the toilet and catch that wee there, which just means a dryer nappy for longer! First thing in the morning, though, he does a huge wee about 10 minutes after waking, and I’m now able to catch that one as well. I don’t know whether he’s holding it in now or whether I generally just changed his nappy after that first big wee, but his night nappies are now just a little damp in the mornings, instead of very wet!

And last night, after his last nap of the day and his subsequent feed, I held him over the bucket for him to do his wee, and the poo I had been waiting 11 days for arrived. I must say I have never seen so much poo come out of something so small. It was a long, skinny, snake of a poo followed by runnier stuff. I’m wondering if it was his 2 days worth of poos in one hit. Whatever it was, I was a lot easier to wash out the bucket than clean copious amounts of poo from a bare wriggling bottom, trying to keep his feet out of it and keep it off the change table at the same time. And even with the little squirt, it is still a messy procedure washing the poo off the nappy. So all in all, I’m actually very impressed with my little boy!

Hair


01 Aug

I’ve always had long hair, ranging from shoulder length to waist length, so I have always had to deal with fallen hairs getting places they are not wanted.  I suppose that people with short hair drop it just as often and in the same places, it just isn’t as noticeable.  I always get matted balls of hair on the bottom of my socks when I walk around without shoes on, always have to deal with matted clumps of hair accumulating on the head of the vacuum cleaner, and even the occasional clump of hair comes out of the washing machine with the wet clothes.  But what is happening now is ridiculous…there is hair everywhere!  Hair on Nathan’s toys, hair on our clothes, in our food (and I tie it back before cooking), in the washing-up water (urgh, I hate wet hair tangled around my fingers) and caught in Nathan’s skin creases.  It just seems to be everywhere.  Mind you, Nathan’s not helping, his hair is also falling out excessively, and he leaves hair all over his (and our) bed sheets!!  I’m looking forward to when we both stop moulting!

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