11 posts tagged “firsts”
Just a quick post to share some photos from ReRe's first camping trip.
I haven't posted lately about many of lil'ReRe's firsts, and I have a lot of catching up to do. But today was a really significant first - it was the first time that we were in a song circle, and he left my lap to stand in the middle and dance and clap with the other little kids. I was in awe, watching him do that dance where he just shakes his head and claps his hands and moves from one foot to the other, and I'm thinking, he's feeling the music. It was so fantastic to watch. Every once in a while he'd come back over for a reassuring hug, but then he was back in the mosh pit with the rest of the babies, trying to maintain his balance when one of them would start to fall, as they all teetered around like little bowling pins ready to drop.
I'm really hoping he grows up to have a love for music. The other day, they were playing a country waltz on the CBC, and I started dancing around, exaggerating the steps, just to entertain him. His face lit up, and he toddled over towards me and leaned up against my legs, not wanting to be picked up, just to sway with the song.
I put my hands on his little back, and we danced our first waltz.
As if sensing my employment ambitions, lil'ReRe has been impressing us every day with new feats of physical dexterity. I think he's trying to convince me that I don't want to miss one minute of his strong man side show. Over the last few weeks, he has:
- learned to get himself into a seated position from lying down. Before this, we could put him down seated, but he couldn't do it himself. But one morning we found him sitting up in his crib, his blanket clutched in his little fists, with a look on his face that seemed to say "don't look at me, I'm not sure how this happened either."
- learned to get himself into a kneeling position. This is too cute, because most of the time he does this to look at a book he rests on his knees, and always has a very serious look on his face.
- pull himself into a STANDING position. We didn't realize he could do this until we heard this strange noise over the baby monitor that sounded like someone in jail dragging their metal cup across the bars. We joked that he was banging the bars of his crib with his pacifier. In fact, it WAS his pacifier bouncing against the bars as he leaned against them. We're now greeted with this sight whenever we go to get him out of bed:
- rode a wheeled toy for the first time. I take him to the playroom at the Y, and there is this cute little zebra there that he likes to sit on. While sitting on it by himself for the first time, I was able to film him on my cell phone, and also caught him;
- waving for the first time ever. I was talking to him while filming, and he just put up his hand and waved. He then looked at his hand, as if he was surprised himself. Check out the clip:
- figured out how to turn on the stereo, and change the volume. I'm not sure whether these were lucky hits, but he seemed pretty darned pleased with himself. Needless to say, the coffee table is now in front of the stereo until we move.
-wowed his father by opening his laptop. This was especially remarkable because it's a 2-hand operation. ReRe then reached the keyboard and pulled off the spacebar. I'd be posting a pic of it, but my husband won't let me.
This is all very exciting, but it has also led to lil'ReRe taking a couple bumps and bruises along the way. With all these new skills, it's also getting harder to get him to chill out before nap time and bed time, since as soon as he's in his crib, he's pulling himself up to stand. The thing is, he is just so freakin' excited every morning when he wakes up, like he knows it's Christmas in Disneyland or something on the other side of his bedroom door. That little face and a cup of coffee are all I need to face the day.
I can't believe I'm already thinking "Ok, with the next kid, I'll do this differently...", but I'm realizing I've already made some mistakes on the transitions to solid food. The first was not starting out with homemade baby food. I think I was just too exhausted, and not up to the challenge of making homemade baby food when he first started making signs that he was ready to try something other than breastmilk. Now I know that it is really no trouble at all, and takes no time, but for some reason I saw this as a huge challenge, and instead bought jarred baby food. Sure I bought organic, but still, I could have bought organic vegetables and fruits just as easily. Unfortunately, now that I am trying to feed lil'ReRe homemade pureed veggies, he's having nothing of it, and will only eat the stuff from the jars. I've been
cutting the fresh stuff with the jarred stuff, and able to get some of it in his mouth, but it's slow going, not the way he used to munch it down. I'm getting worried that he'll be just like his dad and hate vegetables, so I need to stick with it. If he doesn't like something, he puts both his fists up to his mouth and rubs back and forth, resulting in the following:
I'm also seeing why it is recommended to hold off on the sweeter foods, like fruits and flavoured yoghurts, etc., until they are eating their veggies. lil'ReRe will outright refuse his veggies if he thinks he'll get something sweeter, like pears or yoghurt. In fact, if he thinks there's yoghurt to be had, he'll refuse everything else until he gets that creamy, sweet stuff. Again, another mistake, I bought yoghurt at the store that was sweetened with fruit juice, thinking it wouldn't be terribly sweet, but now he won't eat the unsweetened stuff unless I mix it with fruit and/or juice.
I'm going to a workshop that Whole Foods offers on making the transition from purees to finger foods and other solids, and will hopefully get some good advice to get us back on track. I know this is going to be a life long struggle.........
Show us something you made yourself.
This is the first scarf I ever knit. I taught myself to knit (and along the way, remembered a few things my grandmother had taught me) with the Complete Idiot's Guide to knitting and crocheting. The pattern is from that book.
The pattern uses two yarns knit together, so you can create a unique look to the scarf. I used Needful Yarn's Kelly yarn no. 99 in a verigated pink and green. Kelly is actually a loosely woven braided yarn, you can see what it looks like up close here best. It is a cotton/acrylic blend. I mixed this with Estelle Mystik DK, which is a cotton viscose blend, and very silky, in a light green. On line I can only find an emerald green, but I'm not sure that's the one I used.
Well, I was tagged a couple days ago by Anya's Mom to post five things few people know about me. After trying to think of 5 things I actually want people to know and that won't have my mom calling me in the middle of the night from BC saying "WHADDAYAMEANYOU...........WHENYOUWERE16????!!!!!!", I came up with the following:
1. I am part Huguenot. Kinda a kick in the teeth to these ancestors that I was raised Catholic.
2. I sleepwalk. I have woken up twice while doing this; once by my father as a teenager, and once when I was on a business trip and turned on a lamp in my sleep in my hotel room, the light waking me up. My husband has seen me sleepwalk when I didn't wake up, and the fact that I don't know whether I have done it any other time scares me to death.
3. I have three scars on my left hand, all inflicted by knives in my right hand. The last one was a classic bagel slicing injury which I did in my haste to get ready for work one morning, and it required stitches. I'll always remember when this happened because it was September 11th, 2001.
4. When I first started university, I was considering getting a degree in Astronomy. I was the only girl in my grade who completed advanced physics in my high school, so I thought it was incumbent on me to continue in the field. But once I was in university, I realized this wasn't where I belonged.
5. As proof that I remained a nerd, however, I once had a cat named Schrödinger. Nerds, feel free to roll your eyes. He was a marmalade cat, and had a brother, who I also adopted, and named Umlaut.
OK, I now tag:
junkii (both of you!)
lex (and I'll answer your meme soon!!)
We finally went out last night, for the first time since lil'ReRe was born, to see a movie. We went and saw "Stranger than Fiction", which is a lovely little story about an IRS agent with OCD and a woman's voice narrating his life. We've found ourselves to be Will Ferrell fans, surprisingly, because I really didn't like him on SNL, but I've enjoyed quite a few of his films. The humour isn't as tragic as Punch Drunk Love, and the bizarre points aren't are crazy as Being John Malchovich, but it's still funny and strange and has great actors.
Show us an unforgettable memory from 2006.
The past week has been a reeeally long week. lil'ReRe has had a cold, which then passed on to his father, and then to me. He has slept terribly, and in a few ways, digressed a few months: whenever he feels me about to lie him down in the crib, he arches his back in almost a spasmodic way, forcing himself awake so that he can fully witness and protest the coming injustice, rather than just accepting it and drifting off to sleep on his right side, clutching the blanket, as is his new habit. But in other ways he's progressing quicker than we realize: he has starting rolling over and squirming around in the crib without making much noise, so that by the time he cries for us, he's already done a lap of the crib, and has the blanket and soother wrapped about him, and a limb or two caught in the slats. Last night, I turned on our video monitor at around 2:30am to see if he was awake, and nearly jumped out of bed at the night vision image of my baby's face looking right into the camera. Damn that was creepy. Then, this morning, he somehow managed to pull himself up in his crib, reach over and grab the baby monitor off the little shelf next to his crib, and wrestle it into the crib. My husband found him lying on his side, his arms and legs wrapped around the monitor, as he gnawed on it. Either he really needed something to teethe on, or my baby was making a comment on the invasion of his privacy. They are supposed to start demonstrating preferences at 8 months.......
I swear he said Mum, a few times, like mumumumumum. That counts, right?
