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...

Copycat

Jesse has recently learned to mimic our actions pretty well. He will shake his toys when we do, and today James got down on the floor with him to do some push-ups. I am loving this stage!

Where's Jesse?

This video was taken nearly a month ago, but you can see that Jesse loves playing this game. Sometimes he gets pretty wound up.

Introducing Solids

We decided to wait until the six month mark to start Jesse on solid foods, so about a week and a half ago, Jesse got to try his first "real" food. I've been excited about this milestone for a while now because 1) I love food, 2) I love cooking and have been looking forward to making my own baby food, and 3) I've been really curious how Jesse will respond to solids. I will say that starting solids was a little anti-climactic, though. For some reason, I was expecting Jesse to embrace his first spoonful of rice cereal, but he actually eyed it somewhat smugly and refused to open his mouth for it. When we finally got a little bit into his mouth, he looked like we had just done something awful to him.


The first three or four days we gave him brown rice cereal and then the past several days I have given him some sweet potatoes. Until today, he basically showed no interest and I had to nearly pry his mouth open if I wanted to get anything in him. I was expecting the same response today, but he opened up his own mouth for the first bite, and for several bites after that. Then he was no longer interested, and even though he would open his mouth, he would just blow it all right back out, causing it to splatter all over his high chair. Even though he still looked somewhat baffled by the food in his mouth today, he swallowed it well and gladly accepted more, and he didn't really seem to thrust any of it back out (except for when he started to play with it), so that was good.

We've also introduced the sippy cup now that he's begun eating solids. I don't think he gets very much out of it, but he knows what to do with it, and he especially seems to like the water on hot days like today. This afternoon we walked over to Sonic for Happy Hour and Jesse really liked sipping on some water when we got back inside from the heat.