Storm is 10 Months Old

Storm is ten months old, so it’s time for another update. But, folks, it’s job application season, and time is in short supply. So it is going to be a short(ish) update.

Cool stuff has happened this month. At the beginning of October, we started noticing a new ability in Storm. He has started imitating actions. Not well, necessarily, but it’s amazing nonetheless. When we comb his hair, he can comb ours, if handed the comb. Or our eyes. And sometimes with the wrong side of the comb. And when we stick out our tongues, so does he. Oh, and we showed him how to hit buttons and switches, to great entertainment all around.

And he has started pointing at things. It started with the lamps. He’s been interested in lamps for a while, and usually salutes them with an enthusiastic ‘beh’.

And then he started pointing at them, too. Currently, it looks like the point and ‘beh’ combination has been extended to other things of interest, like books, doors, and certain people.

Also. You guys.  He’s crawling! Not your prototypical crawl, no, a one-leg-pushed, flat-on-the-belly army crawl. He is so fast! For the first time, Storm can enter and exit rooms of his own volition. And get to all the cables. At night, we often wake to the sound of a charger cable being pulled (‘babe, he’s got your phone…’). Even though he now sleeps in a sleeping bag because nights have gotten cold, because Northern Europe, he can still maneuver his way around at night. For the same reason, we’ve removed the bed frames and put the mattresses on the floor. Makes things easier.

While we’re on the subject, Storm has had some good night sleeps this months. Also some bad ones, but for the first time since he was little we’ve gotten several 3/4/5 hour stretches of night sleep within a month. Yay for that! On the other hand, his day sleeps have been all over the place. Just before we moved, we had gotten into a beautiful routine of two long day naps of more than one hour each. After we moved, that all went to pieces. Naps got short again, some days required three of them, and on extreme days, Storm just could not fall asleep in the afternoon, and consequently stayed awake for 5/6/7 hours in a row. Some of this, we traced back to coffee-fueled deadlines on my part. So I’m back to a more measured coffee intake. But for the most part, we think it’s due to all the changes in his life, especially the changing baby-sitters. Oh, right, there was also that round of  hand-mouth-foot virus…

A little bit sick, and just over it…

We’ve struggled to find child care where we live now, so Storm’s Opa came with us for a little while to help us out. Then we found a local person to baby sit for a week. Then my mom came to help us bridge the next gap. And this week a new babysitter started, and hopefully she can stay for the rest of our time here, except for the end of December where my mom will join us again. We are so fortunate that our parents were willing and able to help us out. I don’t know how it would have gone without them.

Some more teething happened this month, resulting in some biting while breastfeeding. I just unlatch him when it happens, and wait it out. Storm still nurses at night and when we are together during the day, and when I am working, he gets expressed breast milk. But he is enjoying solid food and takes much less milk now. Recently, he started showing interest in eating utensils. We tried the spoon before, without much success, but when my mom was here, she taught him how to use a fork. Which he adores. He will eat anything if it’s on a fork, and he very much enjoys trying to spear food onto its tines himself. Otherwise, there’s a hierarchy of things that are desirable to eat. Cheese is at the top. If we’re eating, and Storm spots the cheese cutter, he starts whining until he’s given a piece of cheese. Well, I guess it is one of his national foods.

Look, Look, there it is a again, that lamp.

Y’all, I’m done eating.

Storm is also increasingly capable of playing on his own. Which I encourage whenever he seems happy to do so, because he knows much better than I what he likes to do, and he comes up with all these creative activities that I would never think of.

But one activity we have started doing together with him is going to the playground. This fall has been amazingly warm and full of spectacular colors, so we’ve been enjoying lots of outside time. Storm has practiced standing and cruising all over the playground, and he’s tried the swings and the baby slide.

Now that he’s crawling, he has had many opportunities to stand with the support of different objects. He will crawl across the floor or bed to chairs, the stroller, the couch, our suitcases, or his toy box and then he will either pull to standing holding on to the object, or end up crawling over it, too. He easily gets from sitting to laying on his belly now, and we’ve also seen him get from laying to sitting a few times, so the next months are sure to bring more movement adventures.

That’s “all” for now. So much for a short(ish) update…

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