4 months!

Well, last Friday, Elliott hit 16 weeks!...which is truly amazing to me. He seems like he just arrived, yet at the same time, its hard to remember life without him now. His body continues to be a source of amazement to him and everyday we can watch him fine tune his, well, fine motor skills. He can now lie under his play set and touch each of the toys...not just the ones on the sides. And last night I saw him touch the middle toy, which means he was able to not only deliberately lift his arms up in the air, but bring them together over his face. His movements are also now more calculated rather than the random jerky movements of a couple months ago. So his play set and the excer-saucer thing have become favorites :)

Playing Einstein

He's still on a solid mama's milk diet, but we are starting to prepare for solid foods...or at least mama and daddy are by acquiring the necessary equipment. We've purchased a couple sets of Baby Cubes for storing pureed veggies and I'm looking into a food mill (Can anyone recommend one?). A splat mat and soft spoons are also on the agenda. Unless his doctor recommends anything differently, we plan to start him on solids at 6 months...which is pretty much all we 'know' about feeding solids to babies except for starting them on veggies before fruit. So we have some homework to do in that department as well!

Playing with Errol

As for sleeping, he is completely swaddle-free. This was actually harder for mama than it was for Elliott. I (still) have a mental block about how to dress someone for sleeping when they don't have sheets and a blanket. What do you wear? Needless to say, I went overboard and he was in full PJs as well as a fleece sleeping sack. Elliott was also waking up several more times a night. I now think it was because he was too warm. He (randomly) fell asleep on his own one night without the sleep sack and ended up having one of his best nights ever. So since then, I've (mostly) just trusted that the PJs are enough and that he'd let us know if he got too cold.

One thing in the sleep department that has been a step backward, however, is Elliott's going to bed routine. Ever since I've been back to work, he's been waking up again after we put him down to bed. And over the last 4 weeks, the time between when he goes down to when he wakes up again has shortened from 1 hour to literally as soon as his head hits the mattress. We are still experimenting with different scenarios, but nothing has seemed to provide consistent results. Our latest theory is giving him a bottle on top of nursing before bed to fill up his belly - he's a bit of a snacker, which means my milk supply is also snackish (around 3 oz total each 'both side' meal), so when he needs a good meal, I don't really have enough. We think these extra bites are the reason for his recent marathon sleeping sessions we've seen lately.

One of my new favorite things is his discovery of his voice. He's making clear consonant sounds and we are hearing g's, n's, and m's pretty regularly. He also likes to punctuate what he is saying with a good 'pthhhhh' and if he can get some good spit in it, even better! He often times tells me about his day when I get home from work and its so much fun to listen to him talk. This morning he said 'an nan' and not in mooshy sounds, but clearly articulated. And by the time I got home from work today, he had discovered his tongue. He kept twisting it in his mouth then popping it under is lower lip. He was using his tongue to make different sounds and you could tell he thought this new tool was pretty cool. I've been trying to catch some of his discussions on video, but of course he gets distracted as soon as the camera comes out...and I end up getting something like this:

Not Talking

This is pretty much how he used to vocalize. Anyway, I know its just a matter of timing and soon I will have more for you to hear.

Finally, the fact that he can now hold up his head had been WONDERFUL. It is so much easier to carry him around and the other night I was able to bounce him on my lap while we ate dinner at a restaurant. Before, there wasn't much we could do to keep him entertained while we were out if he wasn't sleeping, so I would usually just feed him and hope he'd fall back to sleep. Well, now he can look around easier and be entertained more by what's around him. I know this sounds kinda stupid, but its like we have a real baby now! When we take him places, he's experiencing them now rather than just sleeping through most of everything. In fact, we took him to the zoo last Monday and he was awake and looking around at everything and everybody almost the entire time. It was so much fun!


This is just one photo from that zoo day, but there are a few more I'll post in an album eventually. I guess that's it for now. I wanted to also talk about me and where I'm at, but this post has already been a week in the making and painfully long as it is, so that's going to have to come at another time.