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?

Warm and Fed, but Still Waking Up

Gavin has already changed so much in the short 4 months he's been around. Just a few months ago he was a floppy little critter who barely opened his eyes. Now he's an alert, "talkative", scooting and rolling little person! It seems that there are still fairly major milestones each week - rolling over, tolerating longer and longer periods of tummy time, laughing, and now this week... he is eating cereal! We picked up some organic brown rice cereal to try since we thought he might be ready to try "solid food".

He had consistently been sleeping through the night (8-9 hours) for about 2 months, beginning in January. Then, about two to three weeks ago, he started waking up during the night. He had a couple of colds, so we thought maybe those were the reason he was waking. After his 4 month well baby visit with Rita, we decided he was ready (or perhaps we were ready for him) to try cereal. We thought he might just be waking up because he is hungry. Now that he has grown so much and is so active, the milk he drinks before bed just might not be quite enough to get him through the night. So, we tried a bit of the cereal on Monday night before bed. Gavin didn't hate it. He also didn't exactly know what to do with it. Much of it just came right back out of his mouth and ended up on his bib, and some of it did make him gag a little, but some of it did actually get swallowed. He probably actually swallowed a total of about a tablespoon and a half of good old rice cereal made with fresh, warm, momma's milk. What better treat for a little guy?? It went okay. He didn't love it. We didn't push it. After trying the cereal, he had some milk and went to bed.

The next night, we tried again. Huge success! We ended up with more cereal on the bib, but he also ate more cereal than on Monday and seemed to like it. He sort of opened his mouth when the spoon got close and he actually seemed to be learning what to do with it once it was in his mouth. He happily ate somewhere between 2 and 3 tablespoons of cereal. He had also just nursed about an hour earlier and nursed again after the cereal. He still woke up during the night. The cereal though, went really well. We sort of have a system now. Daddy holds Gavin while Momma feeds him. We'll see how tonight goes.

We were on a mission last night to try everything to get Gavin to sleep through the night again. He was very well fed, his diaper was clean, and he was dressed warm. Each night when he wakes up, I notice that his hands feel like little ice cubes, so I thought maybe he was waking up because he was cold. Our room isn't cold at all, but I figure we're sleeping under a sheet, a down comforter, and a bedspread and we have eachother to keep us warm. Gavin doesn't sleep with covers and he sleeps all by himself, so I was sure that if we just dressed him warmer, he'd sleep through the night. No dice. We had him in a soft, short sleeved onesie, a lighter-weight fuzzy sleeper, AND then in a thick, warm, sleep sack. After all that eating, I laid him in his bed and he soothed himself to sleep. He was completely content in there, talking to himself and sucking on his sleeves. He was out like a lamb by 9:30... and then up at 12:30am like the morning sun! That was actually perfect timing, because after feeding him it was the perfect time to call and check to be sure my sister made it home safely from our house in the snow. She had just pulled in her driveway when I called! Thankfully she made it home without falling asleep while driving or sliding into a ditch on the slippery roads. She did have a good amount of snow at home though and didn't make it all the way up her driveway. After checking in with her and getting back to bed, Gavin was up again at 5:00am. So much for the idea that he just wasn't warm enough! Even after all he ate before bed, he still acted like a baby bird when he woke up. You would have thought he hadn't eaten in days, although, I wonder if some of that isn't actual hunger, but rather the expectation that I'm going to feed him since that's what I do when he wakes up during the night. So, if he's eating a good amount before bed, he's burping, his diaper isn't too wet, and he's warm enough, what's waking him up and keeping him from go back to sleep again until I feed him? Any other ideas?