Half a year

Storm is six months old. That’s half a year! And how he’s grown in that time. So much so that google photos has started spontaneously presenting me with ‘now and then’ features with matching pictures of Storm now and as a newborn. I haven’t decided if that’s creepy or cute.

But anyway, let’s talk about the past month. It felt to me like Storm became a whole new person at around 5 months. Probably just because he became able to put together a number of the skills he’d been working on, but it felt like he went from passive observer to active participant. All of a sudden he was leaning from our arms, reaching for things, touching and exploring and interacting with his world in new ways.

Water play at the park.

Mission accomplished.

And then, as it always happens, we got used to this Storm, and it seemed like he then stayed the same for the weeks that followed. Perhaps he did, but it’s probably also that we adults are poor at recognizing incremental (and sometimes non-linear) improvements in development. For example, Storm cannot sit by himself yet, so that is the same as it was at the beginning of this month. But when I concentrate, I can see that he needs much less support now than he did before. To wit, he took his first turn in a swing.

He smiled once. Withholding judgment on the swing-thing…

And he is able to sit up rather well in the bathtub (although we keep our hands on him at all times anyway – this is not the sort of environment where it’s fine if he falls over…)

But towards the end of the month, something happened that was clearly a change; finally, finally, after rolling over from belly to back at 2 months, and then forgetting how during most of months 3, 4 and 5, Storm can now roll both ways. He still gets an arm stuck from time to time, but now, instead of getting frustrated, he just rolls back again.

We’ve been having some fun with rolling at bed and nap times for the past couple of days. One night, Storm rolled over from back to belly about 30 times. Each time, he would roll, turn his head to make sure I was looking, grin at me, and then, when I told him ‘sådan’!, ‘way to go!’, he would erupt in a laugh-squeal, and promptly roll back. And then immediately start the sequence over.

So Storm can roll now, and is generally so much more mobile. The way he’s moving his arms and his legs makes me excited for when he will take that next step and start crawling. Well, that will likely be a while yet, because he has yet to figure out that his belly can come off the floor.

While we’re waiting for Storm to physically inhabit more space, we’re enjoying how he already fills our home with sound. Lots and lots of babbling with clear differentiation depending on this mood.

In addition to all this, we ticked off two purely physical milestones. The first was Storm successfully getting his feet in his mouth, something that I had doubted would happen.

Not quite there…

Ah, here we go…

The second milestone was that Storm’s first teeth emerged. We suspected as much a couple of days before the first one emerged, a sharp little front tooth, because of his sudden interest in gnawing on everything in sight. When it did break trough the gum, we got a couple of chew-free days, an intermezzo of sorts, before the next little neighbor tooth started making its way up. So far, a little fussiness seems to be the only additional challenge related to teething, so we’re counting ourselves lucky not to have experienced any sleepless nights on this account.

I had written a lot about sleep at the beginning of this month, because the 4 month sleep thing wore off, and I was excited about getting a decent night’s sleep again. But I’m also coming to see that it’s easier not to focus so much on sleep, so I’ll say much less than I had intended. Storm seems to be getting enough sleep, and I’m as rested as can be expected; as I’m able to get some work done and don’t feel like I’m suffering from new-parent-brain, I can’t complain. At the four month check-up, our new pediatrician encouraged me to start sleep-training, you know the kind where you let your baby cry until they fall asleep. That’s not for me, – I’m happy with my baby snuggles at night (although more and more snuggles are getting replaced with kicks as Storm gets more and more mobile) and my 8 pm bedtime. Most days, I don’t even take a nap when Storm naps. And this even though he has started extending his usual 30 minute naps. Lottery style, I might add: you never know when a nap will be long, nor how long it will be. But the somewhat unstructured life works for us at the moment.

Is he sleeping?

On the joys of co-sleeping…

… and on the challenges

The final exciting thing from the past month is that we started offering Storm some solid food. He had seemed eager to participate in meal time for weeks, but I was holding back, though for what, I’m not quite sure. When he was teething and chewing on everything, he managed to lay hands and gums on my water bottle. It has a silicone spout thing, and I think he liked the texture of it, and perhaps the cold water that he managed to get out of it was soothing for his gums. In any case, he has loved that bottle since, and whenever I drink from it, he stretches out his arms towards it and makes a panting sound. It is too cute to be denied, and so it was that he started having some water. This then translated into him being interested in other beverages, especially the red berry tea that we have been drinking cold because of the heat. He’s not getting any tea yet, but we include him in the drinking by letting him lick the condensation off the glass or feel the texture of the rim.

Gimme, gimme, gimme!

Fell asleep playing with the bottle.

Red wine is interesting, too.

And then, about a week or so before his six-month birthday, he started doing his panting sound at the sight of our plates and our food as well. So we decided to go for it. His first ‘food’ was avocado. Well, actually, his first food was some napkin that I had let him play with and then forgot to pay attention to until he started coughing and I noticed a corner of the napkin was missing. Perhaps not my proudest parenting moment, but so it goes. Since this was blog was really meant to be about food, however, I’m going to do a separate post on our adventure with solid food.

And because we were getting a bit bored after having lived in the same place for an entire month, we decided to take a 48 hour trip back to California. Yes, I’m joking. But we did go to California. Storm did great both with the air travel, the time difference, and all the car travel (thanks, California. I don’t miss that at all).

Airport napping. One of the last naps in the now-outgrown infant car seat.

The cartoons are just ok. I mean, you can’t even grab them?

World wanderer.

Visited the Tim Cully company while we were in California and saw ALL THE TOYS!

Bought many Stanleys. Storm approves.

California Starbucks. This was right before the Napkin Incident.

Exploring his native foods: the California burrito.

Also this month, it got so warm, and we hung out outside, and we explored all the local haunts, and many friends came to visit and we went to lots of restaurants, museums, parks and hotel rooms. And we practiced body coordination in all of these places.