Cheerios!

We gave Jesse some cheerios on his high chair the other day for him to play with. They entertained him for a while and kept him from getting fussy. He's pretty good at picking them up, but he doesn't even attempt to get them in his mouth. They might be the only thing he hasn't tried to get in his mouth. Since they dissolve so easily, I gave him one just to see what he would think, and you can see from this video that he had several reactions: perplexed, utterly disgusted, bored, and a short moment of anger (at least, that's my interpretation of his facial expressions).

Adventures in Eating

So far Jesse has tried 7 foods and now likes all of them. The first couple weeks of trying solids he acted like we were feeding him poison, at least for the first couple bites. He quickly picked up on the whole eating thing, though, and began opening his mouth for the spoon, and now he "helps" us feed him by holding onto the spoon and pulling it towards his mouth. The past several days he has gotten noticeably more excited about his food and will be upset if we are eating a meal and he doesn't get anything. We usually just feed him solids mid-day, but I think it won't be long before he is eating two meals a day.

These are the foods he has tried, in order of when we introduced them. Banana was love at first bite, avocado took three days but now he loves it, and he now likes brown rice cereal as long as we mix a fruit or veggie into it.

• brown rice cereal
• sweet potato
• banana
• millet cereal
• avocado
• carrot
• plain yogurt

In the next month I am hoping to introduce Jesse to oats, barley, green beans, butternut squash, peas, summer squash, and several fruits, like peaches and pears. I am definitely looking forward to getting settled in Chicago so that I can cook up some large batches of baby food and freeze it. I have frozen small portions of food for Jesse here, but I am afraid to make too much, because then I'll just have to throw it out before the move.

This week I decided to try my hand at making homemade yogurt, which actually ended up turning out quite well. Today I gave him yogurt for the first time and he loved it way more than I thought he would. I mixed it with some mashed banana and he ate it all up very quickly. Curious if he would like the yogurt all by itself, I then tried giving him some without anything in it, and he loved it like that, too. He always made a sour face in between bites (I think the tart flavor of the yogurt was a little shock to him), but always reached for more and gladly accepted it.

Eating yogurt today:


Eating bananas on a recent trip to visit family in Texarkana:

Here he is in my old high chair at my parents' house. He got very distracted by the nice wooden tray that he could chew on. I must have done the same thing as a baby because there were bite marks all over it even before Jesse sat in it.

Seven Months

I was waiting in line at Sonic this afternoon when I realized that today is Jesse's seven-month birthday. Time must really be flying, because I keep telling people (and myself) that Jesse is six-and-a-half months old, and for some reason I've been thinking that he'll be seven months next week, so I was shocked to look at the date on my phone and realize that he is now officially seven months old. I am really bad about taking a monthly picture (especially on the right day), so I came home and took one before I forgot. Since he has a one-month and five-month picture on the same blanket, I'll just continue to go with this idea.

What Jesse is up to at 7 months:

• In the past couple weeks (and especially this past week) he has really taken to solid foods. He hasn't met a food he doesn't like. More on that in another post.
• Still nursing about 5 times a day (or every 3 to 3.5 hours)
• Still taking 3 naps a day, but sometimes just 2. He takes a short nap in the early morning, a longer one around lunchtime, and a longer one mid-afternoon. He is getting better and better about staying up longer periods of time. I am looking forward to him dropping that third nap so that his daytime sleep will be more consolidated, which will make it easier for us to go places without me having to worry about him falling asleep in the car and messing up his sleep schedule. I can usually get him out of his car seat and into his crib without waking him up, but sometimes I can't and then he won't go back to sleep, which makes for a fussy day.
• Overall he is still sleeping well at night. He usually goes down by 7, but sometimes earlier if he's been up a long time or didn't take good naps during the day, and he wakes up around 6 or so. Because he is so easy to rock to sleep, we had decided to hold off on letting him cry himself to sleep, but we decided otherwise earlier this week because of some night waking issues. He used to cry out at night and we could just stick his pacifier back in and he would immediately calm down and go back to sleep (he never seemed to completely wake up), but recently he will be wide awake when we go in there, and he's also started crying out multiple times before we even get in bed at night. Since he doesn't seem hungry and since we don't want to get in the habit of rocking him back to sleep multiple times a night, it seemed our best bet was to let him cry. (I think he actually just wanted our company, because he was very content as long as we stood there over his crib with our hand on him, but as soon as we walked out he would cry). The first time we let him do this was rough, and he cried about 45 minutes, but the next time we let him cry it was just 20 minutes, and then when he woke up really early at 5 a.m. the next morning, he cried for just several minutes before going back to sleep until 6:30. We thought we'd just let him cry in the middle of the night when he woke up, but I was having trouble getting him down for the night several nights ago, so I let him cry and he fell asleep pretty quickly. The new routine is to sing him several songs before bedtime or naptime and then lay him down in his crib (assuming he's not asleep or almost asleep). So far, so good, and it seems that he is staying asleep all night again but I don't want to speak too soon since we haven't been doing this very long, so we'll see if he keeps this up.
• His favorite toys seem to be things that aren't toys at all. He will entertain himself for a long time with my make-up bag (he especially loves the tube of mascara and the mirrors...we will have to put this to a stop before too long). He also loves to sit by his big box of toys and take everything out. He is entertained much longer like this, whereas he gets bored really quickly sitting on his blanket with just one or two toys.
• I think he's going to crawl soon, because he is really good at getting up on all fours and rocking back and forth. I know he really wants to be mobile.
• We can tell that he is becoming more and more attached to us, and especially me. He has started crying a little when I go out the door, and one morning this week James watched him before work while I ran to the store, and I could tell he was so happy to see me return because he had the biggest smile and kept giggling when I walked back in. He will also reach for me sometimes when he wants me to pick him up.

Jesse's Crazy Faces

We were outside yet again in all this heat, and Jesse let me get some good pictures of him. I actually wasn't expecting to get anything very interesting, and I had already put my camera away, when out of the blue Jesse began laughing and making some really silly faces. I'm glad I could capture these. What a goofy guy! Any ideas for captions?

Almost Crawling

We think we may have a crawler on our hands in the near future. Jesse has been getting up on his hands and knees and hands and feet a lot lately and has even taken a couple "steps" (enlighten me if you know what to call these...a couple "crawls"?). Looks like we'll have a little "helper" when we start packing things up, although he might be more help unpacking.

Heat Wave

It may be a scorching 110 degrees outside, but sometimes a fussy baby just needs to be outside and everything gets better. Lots of days I take Jesse out on our balcony to sit in his seat and play with toys. The heat doesn't seem to phase him...he can be entertained out there for quite a while. Since the lighting is always good on our balcony in the afternoon, I snapped some more pictures of him out there. I don't really mind the heat all that much, but I am really looking forward to some cooler weather so that we can start going on walks again. We might have to wait for Chicago, though.

Play Time!

Jesse loves his new play group, and so do I! Actually, I probably enjoy it way more than he does at this point. It's great to get together with a group of new Moms each week and talk about Mom stuff. Jesse is the oldest, and the others in the picture are all fairly close to the same age (between 3.5 and 4.5 months). Starting with Jesse and going counter-clockwise, the babies are Jesse, Evalie, Isaac, Natalie, Emerson, and Ruby.

We are going to have to work with Jesse on his social skills (yes, I know he's just a baby...I'm joking here). He has recently acquired a VERY shrill scream that gives me a headache and makes his friend Emerson cry. And, he tried to eat Ruby and pinch her face at the first play group. Looks like we've got our hands full with this one!



But then they decided to be friends again and held hands. How sweet...