The Enemy

You see it there, proud and defiant. Sometimes it teases you, playing its game of hide and seek - out one second, in the next. It is the booger, and there is no safer haven for it than in a baby's nose.

 

Your child is being adorable and you quickly grab you camera. You have the makings of the greatest homemade portrait ever created, except there's a big green nasty sitting in the middle of your child's face. You think you can just flick it away, but your little boy has studied Kung Fu in his free time and can deflect your attempts at getting at his nostril with the greatest of ease. You grab a tissue to try and get at it, but your son contorts like a Chinese acrobat and his nose gets buried behind the back of his knees. And even if you're lucky enough that the kid is asleep, you find the booger is actually made of some polymer epoxy concrete substance that would have held the space shuttle together in re-entry had NASA realized the gold mine that is the infant's nose.

 

And so thus it is that Peter's mom can complain that in all the parenting books she's read, not one has made any mention of dealing with boogers. Oh sure, you can use saline drops and a turkey baster jammed up the schnoz when you're dealing with a newborn. But Peter is not a newborn, and he makes Bam Bam Rubble look puny in comparison. Thus, we are stuck.

 

 

 

And did I mention he really can spray out a lot of spit when he sneezes?

Oh yeah...

The top 2 front teeth have broken through the surface of his gums. He'll squirm out of any attempt to lift his lip to see the teeth, but he loves being held upside down, and when I have him dangling he'll smile. That's when they're visible. Getting a picture of them will be tough, though, until they become more prominent.

The Off Button

Yesterday we went to Peter's Grammy's house to celebrate Grammy's birthday (one day late) and watch the Packers lose. Early in the afternoon we fed Peter his lunch, and like a good boy he ate it all. It must have been a lot for him because he tapered off at the end and could barely eat the last little spoonful. But once he was done eating and we cleaned him up a little, I picked him up and held him in my arms, at which point he began to fade. In no time his head started leaning over and his muscles went limp. It was as if he came down with narcolepsy all of a sudden.

It's pretty much out of character for him because getting him to fall asleep is usually something that takes some work. He has an active desire to remain up and to interact with the people around him. Granted, he hadn't had a nap earlier in the day, but for him to go from awake to deeply asleep while I was holding him like that is uncommon. He wouldn't even go out that fast when he was a newborn. Frankly, I'm looking forward to him doing it more regularly (just as long as he doesn't, in fact, have narcolepsy).

In other news, Peter & his mom went to the children's museum on Friday afternoon. Peter observed at first, but once he felt he understood the situation he pretty much took over his surroundings. He was in a padded area with a lot of toddlers, and he was his normal dynamic self, crawling, talking away, and reaching out to touch other kids. He was complimented for being such a handsome lad, which he is, but it's still nice to hear that from others. He also was measuring out to be about as tall as a good deal of the older kids who were walking. We measured his relative height against our own, and he comes up to almost the top of his mom's thigh and about the middle of my thigh. We did an imprecise weighing of him a couple weeks ago using a bathroom scale, and he came out at 21 1/2 pounds. So he's tall and he's got weight, and we know from carrying him that he's mostly muscle. He’s big kid now, and strong. Oy.

Proto-toddling

Peter hasn’t been crawling for very long, but already he’s working on standing up. Whether it’s a toy, a piece of furniture, or someone’s leg that he’s using as a means to climb upward, he’s wasting no time in trying to get upright. It makes us nervous when he does that because every so often he’ll lose balance and wind up bonking his head on the floor, but for the most part he’s doing that on carpeting. He’s taken a header a couple times on the kitchen floor, but most of the time he doesn’t even notice. It helps that his head is made of the hardest and densest substance known to man (or, that’s what it feels like when he butts his head into my nose every so often).

 

He’s also starting to mimic people more frequently. You can make faces at him and he’ll do the same, or you can carry on a back and forth conversation of grunts and squeals. Speaking of grunts and squeals, he woke up the other day and started making sounds that were very word-esque, and his mom thought it sounded like Vietnamese. I asked if she was teaching him Vietnamese and she said she wasn’t, but I wouldn’t put it past him to pick it up when she speaks to her parents on the phone.

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Mobility and Choppers

I know that I’m a bad dad for not putting anything up in the past couple weeks, but I haven’t had a lot of time lately to write much.

Peter is now a full-time crawler. While it’s a good development, he is now excelling at doing it, which makes him able to cover 30 feet or so of floor in 15-20 seconds. I practically feel a breeze at my ankles whenever he goes past.

He also has his top two front teeth about to poke through his gums. Teething hasn’t been too much of a problem for him so far, but he has shows signs of irritability the past couple days that aren’t like him. He also has been making faces due to him playing with his tongue and smacking his lips while the teeth come through.

We’ve also been giving him little food items at meal time that he can put in his mouth on his own, like little mushy carrot bits, little mushy banana bits, and a few Gerber Graduates here and there. I’m not positive what the percentage is of things that actually make it into his mouth (as opposed to just being stuck on his palm, or smooshed into his hair, or smeared out on the tray of his highchair) but I’d guess it’s around 33% on a good day.