Week of Wonders

. . . on a very small, yet important-to-us scale.  Just lots of new feats for the little guy--he's changing so fast.  We pulled out the walker the weekend before last.  We'd bought it for the girls, but for them it ended up mainly functioning as another toy station, because our rooms in the old house were small without much space for scooting around, and our doorways were narrow, and the walker was designed not to fit through them so that children would not tumble down staircases (as I hear happens--right, Prin?).  The new house, however, has the now-popular open floor plan, and is generally less crowded (a nice way of saying that we haven't bought furniture yet).  Also, this guy seems to want locomotion so badly that we thought he would enjoy it.  The first few days, as with the Jumperoo, he mainly sat in it in his listing way.  As he got stronger, he could sit for longer, and he loved when Gillian would push him around the house. "I'm his favorite pusher," she confided happily to me.  This was probably true, since she's the right height to push it around and therefore doesn't tire of it the way the rest of us do.

Then, he discovered that if he straightened out his legs and pointed his toes, he could just barely paddle a bit and push himself around.  It was very slow and involved some straining at first as he figured out the mechanics of it all.  But one night I was clearing the table after dinner, and I turned around in the kitchen, and he had drifted slowly and silently into the kitchen and come up behind me.  I think he was as surprised as I was.  He'll sometimes be playing with the buttons on the walker and drifting into one room and then he looks up to find himself in another room and seems to wonder what to do with himself.  Something about his general solemnity and his big eyes gives him what Sam and I have termed his look of perpetual surprise.

He also has this great smile--very wide and toothless, until Tuesday.  Gillian loves his smile.  When she hears him wake up from his nap, she'll race you up the stairs, and I have this mental image of her making her quick, uneven steps up the stairs, because each step is a little too high for her, so she kind of rocks as she's going up, lifting each foot waaay up, but really hustling because, as she's calling back to you, "I want to be the one to open his door!  I want to be the one to make him smile!"  And she reaches up and turns the knob and goes in to peek into the crib and calls back with real delight each time, "The baby smiled at me!"  They have a very special relationship, and when he first sees her in the morning, he smiles, wiggles his arms and legs, and now even grunts his little "Come closer" grunt.

So, as alluded to above, he has also, as Allison Clare says, "grown a tooth."  He had been drooly and chewing on things for a couple of months, and it had been somewhat more intense in the last week or two, but I didn't know if we were really headed for a breakthrough or if he could just feel it under the gums.  I'd gotten out this raspberry pacifier thing--it's nubbly for teething gums, and he loved it.  And on Tuesday, I felt around in there, and there it was: the little translucent squiggle, a tiny hard ridge.  Allison Clare said, quite sincerely and deeply moved, "I'm so happy for Little Guy" and gave him a hug.

He's not talking with words, of course, but he's learning to communicate.  He makes happy grunts when he wants something, usually one of us.  He works up to crying when he's too long in one position (especially on the playmat, which he has less patience for these days), or if he can't manipulate a toy in the way he wants.  He's gotten used to my being gone, likes the babysitters, and even takes his bottle with gusto, the first of my children to condescend to do so.  We had never even progressed beyond the newborn bottles with the first two, but we will need to buy some bigger ones for him because he occasionally drinks a whole one and then part of another.

But he's also ready for solids, I think.  At mealtimes, he usually sits in his walker in the dining room and entertains himself with the musical buttons while we eat, but if he gets fussy, he sits on my lap.  And when that happens, he reaches for my plate.  He hasn't quite figured out how to grab it, but he flings his arms toward the plate and slaps at it and then can sometimes latch onto it with his fingers.  He'll lean his head toward it, or if I'm eating with a fork or spoon, he locks his gaze onto the utensil and tips his head back to watch each bite.  This all happened with in about a week--he'd previously seemed not that interested.  So, I think we'll probably start him on some cereal soon. It's earlier than the girls--they were a full six months--but he just seems really ready.

He's been rolling over more and more too.  He doesn't really roll all the way (360 degrees) very much, but he'll always roll from tummy to back, and he can roll from back to front.  He mainly will roll over onto his side to get a better view of something, or to nurse--it's really sweet how he'll roll over to face me when I lie down next to him on the bed.  His method is amusing too; as he was first getting the hang of it, and still occasionally, especially when playing on his mat, he'll lift his feet up in the air and throw them over to one side to get his hips into place and then roll his shoulders.  This whole thing is accomplished with great seriousness.   He has the most lovely smiles, in part because he does seem so serious much of the time.

We all love his laughs.  I was tickling him on the changing table and I heard Gillian hurrying up the stairs, saying, "What's making his pretty laughs?  I want to hear his pretty laughs!"  Allison Clare tells everyone that he's "the adorablest baby ever." I've had to tell her not to tell it to other people with their own babies.