Chewy McChewerson

As Zane approaches ten months old here’s a quick status report.

Sleep

He’s mostly sleeping through the night. “Mostly” as in how a newspaper horoscope might seem to be mostly about you. Some nights there’s ten hours of non-stop sleep, other nights he may wake up a couple hours after falling asleep or before sunrise. Some of it we figure is teething, a few times it’s because he didn’t eat much that day and his body finally realized what his parents had been trying to convince him of.

Nap wise he has been taking a big two hour nap in the middle of most days and then sometimes a short nap later in the afternoon. Don’t take this wrong, but Mommy and Daddy love it when baby sleeps.

Food

Faith is still pumping way more milk than our munchkin will ever eat. The chest freezer (boy, does that name have a new meaning now!) downstairs attests to this as it is FULL of frozen mommy milk carefully measured and documented and filed away for some imaginary day when Zane needs more milk than mommy makes. He’s perfectly content with his 15-22 oz per day while mommy nets 26-30 oz.

Zane usually has three solid meals a day. Over the last month he has been moving from pure mush to mush with lumps. Not only can he handle mush lumps but he’s getting finger foods with each meal too. For about a month we’ve been putting out a few O’s (rice cheerios) for him to pick up and play with. He’d sometimes accidentally get one in his mouth but mostly we’d pop a couple in so he got the idea. Faith also started popping in small chunks of rice bread. Perfect food to gum.

And then last night Zane started picking up chunks of bread, one after the other, and popping them into his mouth. La la la, look at me… He’s had the finger-picking-up part down for a while, it’s just been the getting it to and leaving it in the mouth part that’s been a bit off. Not last night, straight to the mouth. The sudden surge of coordination resulted in a new challenge: too much food in baby’s mouth.

Sitting

He sits a lot and greatly prefers it to laying down, but oddly enough hasn’t worked out the means to get into a sitting position himself.

Crawling

Ha ha ha ha…

Ok, he crawls a little bit and mostly backwards. Some rolling too. But what he really wants to do is..

Standing

Mr. Serious Standing Baby, thank you very much. Zane used to spend at least an hour in his jumper every day: total, madcap, jumping baby. These days he’s really not very interested in the jumper. Now, next to being toted around by mom and dad, his new favorite past time is standing up. He’ll stand at his alphabet-mobile for a good half hour, working the controls, shuffling back and forth, and side-stepping around the perimeter.

Last night he was standing for a while and eventually fell back into me and landed on my leg. I was thinking to myself that I ought to help boost him back up when he put out his arms, grabbed the activity center and pulled himself upright. Just to show me it wasn’t a fluke he repeated the whole thing a few minutes later.

Vocalization

Dada seems to be his main phrase these days, at least I hear it quite a bit, not sure if he uses it around his mom. There’s a bunch of squealing sounds that he’s been working on, some quite piercing. Sometimes Faith sings them back to him and catches him off guard. Raspberries are still pretty common. Once in a while he’ll let off with a stream of babble that sounds like it should have meant something. So he seems to be working on inflection.

Humor

When he’s not crying, which isn’t all that often, Zane is a happy guy. He’s a giggle head, really, it doesn’t take much at all to make him laugh and smile. As for the crying, well, as simple as the parenting checklist seems (i.e. milk, food, diaper, sleep) we seem to get completely flummoxed by it on a regular basis. “He was playing and totally happy and now he’s crying. Why, oh, why?“ Luckily most times the other parent comes along with a fresh bottle or a reminder about an overdue nap and saves the day.

Playtime

Place a pile of cups around Zane and he mostly ignores them. Stack them neatly inside of each other and he immediately grabs and takes them apart. We do this all of the time. It’s like he’s on a mission to ensure stacking cups are never left stacked. He never re-stacks or organizes them himself. I’m not sure what we’re teaching him or if we’ll regret this later on.

We’ve played ball a little bit lately. Toss the ball to baby (well, between sitting baby’s legs), baby picks it up, ball falls and sort of rolls towards parent. He seems to get the concept: smiling and repeating it over and over. We aren’t sure if he’s right or left handed, but at times have strongly suspected both of them.

For sure he prefers chewing on his left foot, whatever that is worth.

Fingers

Did you notice his fingers in the photo? Maybe he’s part Vulcan or perhaps double jointed?