Half Year Old

Today marks 6 months since we welcomed our little guy into the world. How time has flown! We really do intend to catch up on picture posting (and filling out our baby book and several other things we had hoped to stay more on top of). Life got a little crazy for awhile, but we think we're getting a handle on things. It helps that he often sleeps from around 7pm to 4 or 5 am, and then goes right back to sleep after nursing until around 7:30 or 8 (sometimes 9!). It would probably help even more if we went to bed earlier, too!

Our little guy is now 15 pounds 10 ounces! He has more than doubled his weight at birth, and has grown in length to 26 inches (though we've observed at the pediatrician's office that measuring a baby's height is an inexact science). This picture is him playing with his buddy from the Wolf pack. If you look back in the blog, you'll see that our little guy no longer looks so puny next to his 10-week-elder buddy!

What else has changed in 6 months? Well, as you can see from this picture, he can sit unassisted (though doesn't sit himself up yet). He is also very interested in other babies and other people. He watches people when we're out, and when they make eye contact, he breaks into a big grin. This results in many conversations with complete strangers.

He picks up objects, from baby toys to dog toys to remote controls (luckily he hasn't realized that the remote turns on the magic box that he's not allowed to watch), passes them hand-to-hand, and loves grabbing hair (and fur, much to the cats' dismay). Our pediatrician thinks he may be on the verge of crawling. He definitely wiggles himself around and flips back to front and front to back, often ending up a few feet away from where we put him down, but he has yet to break out into a full-blown crawl.

Everything goes in his mouth. It makes us laugh when we hold him facing us and he opens his mouth, tilts his head back a little, and then plants a big open-mouth kiss on our face. It's as though he's trying to fit our heads in his mouth to check us out. A friend gave us an exersaucer and he loves to spin himself around, playing with the various Baby Einstein toys (and putting as much of them in his mouth as he can). I'm a little tired of hearing "Moo...Cow...Vaca" but I hold out hope that the batteries can't last forever.

He loves being sung to and bounced. "The Grand Old Duke of York" is his favorite song to be bounced to, and this song often can stop him mid-meltdown. He won't keep socks on his feet, so the leather dino shoes I found at a consignment sale are getting lots of use. He can't get those suckers off! His feet are growing, though, and we'll soon be getting bigger shoes!

The weather has gotten colder, so he's enjoying the beautiful hand-knit sweaters Great-Nanan made. We get lots of oohs and ahhs when we tell people they are handmade. He's wearing one of them in this picture!

He doesn't have any teeth yet, but we can see the outlines and we think they'll break through any day.

That's pretty much the update - no teeth, lots of slobber, approaching mobility. I'm sure the next 6 months will pass sooner than we think, and we'll be looking back at his baby pictures and really really not believing he was ever that small.