When he is happy, William is very, very happy. Tonight he was as excited as I’ve ever seen him, when I held a mobile above his head that he hadn’t seen for a while. As soon as he saw it, he opened his eyes open wide, stuck his arms straight out from his sides and flapped then up and down wildly while kicking his legs manically. A squawk erupted from his mouth then he grinned hugely as he looked from it to me. He reached out his arms and pulled all the dangly bits to his chest then tried to open his mouth wide enough to eat them all at once. This is William heaven.
Of course, 10 minutes later when I left his side to try unpacking a box on the other side of the room he was in tears. I think he might be just starting to understand (perhaps even subconsciously) that he can use crying to manipulate us. Until now he seemed to only cry when something was up (tired, hungry, cold, hot, uncomfortable etc). But now he has a more niggly version of crying, and he looks to see if you have noticed that he is crying. On the other hand maybe it isn’t manipulative, but just that his needs have developed – now he needs attention, more stimulation, and challenges.
Physically he is still growing well. At last weighing he was on the 75% centile of weight for his age. He gets his third lots of vaccinations this Thursday so I’ll get an updated weight then. He has gained a lot of new skills in the last month but I think that over the next couple of months the increments of change might be slower. For example, he can fully support his own head now, and sit up when you prop him against the couch, but I think it will be while before he is sitting up himself. Another example is that he can hold things in his fist, but usually only if you open the fingers and thumb and put the item in his grasp. You can see that at times he wants to reach out and grab something in particular, but his arms tend to flail about and he probably only manages to grab the item through chance. But this is something that I think he’ll slowly develop over the coming months.
Feeding – hmmmm. We keep trying to get him to take a bottle, but he still hasn’t decided that this will be in his repertoire of skills. It would be very handy if he decided that he’d like to learn to drink from a bottle, but so far, no go. Andrew tried again yesterday and although William was happy to gum the bottle nipple, he didn’t suck at all. I’ll have to start some reading about weaning soon, as while we were in Lanzarote William became very interested in what we were eating/drinking and often avidly followed every bight as we ate. So we’ve given him a few things to try putting in his mouth. He isn’t eating them, but just exploring what they feel/taste like in his mouth.
Sleeping – well, ok, I guess. Some nights he only wakes up twice, and other nights 10 times. Some nights, he decides at 4.30am that it is THE MORNING and time to play and ‘sing’. This can be trying, but at least it happens less than once a week. We want to try and get him to sleep for longer stretches, so now that we are in our new home and back from holiday we’ll try and get back to a routine of bath-feed-bed at around 6.30-8.30pm each night and see whether he can get used to that. Then perhaps we’ll try and not feed him if he wakes less than two hours after his last feed in the night, to stretch out the gap between feeds. I am kind of dreading this, as I can see that I’ll get very little sleep while we try and adapt to the change, but hopefully it will result in us all being more sane and rested in the long run.
Overall I think William is a pretty good baby. We had a lovely time on holiday as a family last week and just wish holidays would last forever! (Not that we want Andrew to lose his job, touch wood!).
