Learning, Eating, and Making Faces

It truly is incredible how much a child grows in a matter of just a few months - how their little brains develop and you can actually see them learning.

Gavin seems to have just recently realized that he is in control of his mouth. He has been making sounds for months now, but he now occasionally imitates you when you do something. He blows bubbles with his mouth and is most entertaining when he's laying on his changing table. If he does it and you respond with smiling, laughing, or mocking what he's doing, he will do it some more. He also mock-chomps with his whole mouth and it's pretty funny to watch! You can see it in the video below!

Just yesterday I caught Gavin twice studying his hand as he slowly moved it back and forth in a parade-wave fashion. He was laying on his back on the bed with his right hand raised up in front of his face, slowly turning his hand and his wrist and just watching it. Then he opened his fingers and closed them and opened them and closed them, all while studying exactly what was happening. I didn't want to interrupt this amazing learning moment, but we had places to go. I actually had to pick him up in order to disrupt his concentration. Talking to him and getting up close to him wasn't distracting him at all! It was pretty neat and I wish I had video taped it.

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about Gavin starting to eat baby cereal. It's going fabulously! He eats about a third of a cup of cereal each night now along with a bit of baby food. He had plain rice cereal for one week. Then, we started introducing applesauce with just about a half teaspoon the first night, then a teaspoon the next night, and after a week, he was eating about two tablespoons of applesauce with his cereal. Some of it we mixed in with the cereal and we gave him some spoonsful of it without the cereal. Those definitely made him make a face, but he did like it. He quickly learned to open his mouth when the spoon comes and is getting much better about not accidentally spitting the food all over. For a few days there, he was closing his mouth and blowing at the same time and both Cliff and I were ending up spackled with cereal! Now that we know the applesauce went over well, we're moving on to another food... this week is bananas! I do have to say that the babyfood bananas smell and taste nothing like real bananas, although the jar says bananas and water for the ingredients! It smells and tastes like banana flavoring or like dehydrated bananas - that overly sweet banana flavor. It makes me think of banana cream pie! I'll have to be sure Cliff doesn't try it - he loves banana cream pie! Next thing I know, he'll be eating Gavin's baby food! We're trying one new food per week, which helps us ensure he doesn't have any allergies or other effects from the new foods. This way if he reacts to something, we know what it is, rather than trying to think of all of the new foods he is eating, we just have one new food each week. Next week, its sweet potatoes! Yum, yum, yum. What a wonderful and powerful food. Cliff and I have been having sweet potatoes lately and I just love, love, love them. They contain a ridiculous amount of Vitamin A and much of our daily recommended intake of Vitamin C. What's best about sweet potatoes? They are naturally delicious, requiring no seasoning or preparation. For a quick side dish with dinner, I just give them a quick scrub (skins on), poke them with a fork, and plop them on a paper towel in the microwave for about 8 minutes. Then I cut it in half, scoop out the warm, sweet, fleshy inside, and voila! Cliff and I each have a nutritious and delicious side dish for the perfectly grilled steak or burger or a fresh summer salad! Yummo! Did you know that the sweet potato is ranked #1 in nutrition of all vegetables? It's true, see more information here http://www.foodreference.com/html/sweet-pot-nutrition.html and here http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=64.
Okay, okay, now I've gotten off track! Watch this video of Gavin eating his cereal and applesauce and making his chomping face! I apologize now for the quality of the video - I haven't figured out if there is a way to rotate it so that you don't have to crane your neck to watch it and I think we need to use the tripod! When cliff laughs, the camera does too!

Click to view video. (It has sound)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME1BLYCJVOk

Now, wasn't that funny?