I am sorry for the lack of posting these days. Mama has been busy. When the weather turned cold and rainy (yes,
dadgummit, the house is 60 degrees when I wake up in the morning!), I decided it was time to transform our family room, the only room in the house with a fireplace, from a tools, ladders, and paint storage facility into something warm and cozy. As this room adjoins the kitchen, it just made sense. Little P could play in there while I did laundry, cooked dinner, or unloaded the dishwasher. I could even put in a little table desk in order to work from my laptop or listen to Pandora. No stairs. No wine bottles. No bathrooms. And the whole room could be
babyproofed - no open outlets or cords.
And, the fireplace. Did I mention how much I love having a working fireplace?
But guess who had to do all the work? Mama. Because Papa is so
dedicatedly going in to work elsewhere on behalf of our humble family. (And I am grateful...for that's what allows me to stay home with my baby and work on the house.) I took down the ugly plastic vertical blinds and installed those wood roll-down shades. I painted the french door and the trim. I took out the eyeball light and installed a more attractive trim on the
downlights. I replaced all the outlet and
switchplates as well as the really tired lampshade on the dorky wall sconce.
Then I moved most of the furniture from the living room into the family room. (We do not have the budget at present to actually buy a complete set of furniture for both rooms...though I did find a really cool trunk-coffee table on
Craigslist for $30. Score.)
As if that wasn't enough...I decided to take on some writing assignments. Ah, ha, ha, ha. And Papa had to work a week of 12-hour days (a temporary, seasonal condition...now past), leaving me to total baby duty in the evenings when I prefer to let Little P have Papa time.
Ah well. The Pod has been abuzz...humming like a hive..busy, busy bees we are.
That is a dumb thing to say.
So you're looking for updates on Little P, not me. I understand. He's a lot cuter, and he's busy growing vertically, while I am growing horizontally (to my chagrin) which is not as much fun to write or hear about. Let's get on to the point of this post.
Benjamin is on the move. He's really smart. You have to be careful what you let him see you do, because if he sees it once, and he's motivated, he'll figure it out. Case in point. He loves the dog kennel. While Papa thinks it's hilarious to put Little P in the kennel, I don't feel like monitoring it. So when I get ready in the mornings and Benjamin is playing around in my room and our extraordinarily large master bathroom, I close and latch the kennel. I've been careful to position my legs between Benjamin's eyeballs and the kennel so he could not see how the latch operates.
That worked, for a while. But yesterday he managed to open the kennel on his own. He crawled in with a maniacal sounding "Ha!" (the sound of excitement when he accomplishes or discovers something).
Stinker.
He also likes to get into trashcans, piles of cords (can't there be a more efficient way to hook up all one's office paraphernalia?!), outlets, toilet bowls, bathtub faucets, wine bottle storage units, fireplace screens, cookbooks, dresser drawers, closets, and the shower. He likes to chase the dog (still on hands and knees), and if you leave the back door open, he'll bolt straight for the great outdoors.
Fortunately he is not a naughty child. He does have the typical baby impulsiveness, but we are working on "uh-uh" and "leave it" and "let go" and "one finger touch." He's clearly coming along in the following directions department. At the very least, he stops in his tracks, sits down, and turns to look at the speaker. Now whether or not he resumes his business is another story. My unscientific guess is that he obeys on the first or second admonition probably half the time. If he doesn't obey, I just pick him up and move him far, far away from the temptation. Occasionally he protests...but mostly he finds something interesting about his new environment.
Benjamin is developing a real sense of humor. He is very observant and will frequently watch until something tickles (metaphorically-speaking) him. He lets out a funny, squeaky laugh that just melts Mama's heart. Auntie
Bek said yesterday that he seems like he's got a very
mischievous spirit about him. I have to say I'm to blame for some of that. We play a lot. I sneak up on him and let him anticipate tickles (literally-speaking) which is always more fun than actually tickling him. He gets so amped up with the anticipation!
For entertainment, Benjamin is into his blocks, peek-a-boo, scooting his toy table around the house so that he can walk, and making faces at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in our family room. Oh, yes. He can occupy himself for up to an hour. Any such session inevitably ends in him making a dart toward the stairs, the seven stairs which he has pretty much mastered in ascent. Descent will take a while because he does not like to turn around and hang his toes off where he can't see them.
He is still a pretty good eater, though he usually does not like something I'm feeding him until he can put it into his mouth himself. Asserting his independence, he is. He eats, in roughly cut chunks, stuff like
cantaloupe, bananas, grapes, dried apricots, prunes, raisins, bread with cream cheese or avocado on it, leftover Thanksgiving turkey, cucumber, red bell pepper. He's not too keen on cheese - and I have tried several mild forms of it. I would love to turn his eating over to him completely, but I can never tell how much of the food is actually making it down the esophagus until I move the tray and examine the pocket on his bib. If I am to be sure he ate enough to ward off the
crankies, I usually have to feed him something myself - applesauce or yogurt or pumpkin or something just to be sure he consumed a minimal amount of food.
Benjamin is trying his
darndest to walk. He proficiently pulls himself up, cruises the furniture, and walks holding onto our fingers. Now he is working on the balancing part. Grandpa likes to help him get steady and then to take his fingers away to see how long he can stand. It ain't long, but there is the passage of a few seconds before he lands on his tush. We're thinking he'll take his first unassisted step around Christmas.
Travelling is pretty easy with Benjamin (not plane travel, mind you). He likes the car seat (or at least likes that it leads to adventure). He's happy cruising around in a stroller or a grocery cart. When we're in public he is a charmer. Older women always think he's flirting with them. I dunno. Is it the smile? The eyes?
He is starting to sign and to wave. Unfortunately, the sign he makes for "milk" and for a wave is the same. I generally tell the difference by the amount of whining that accompanies the sign - no whining = wave, whining = sign for milk. He appears to understand "food" and "water" and "all done." I need to get cracking on more signs in case he actually is going to use them to communicate. The whining is getting on my nerves - it seems to have really, really, REALLY picked up the past few weeks and this needs to be curbed before Mama pulls out all her hair in order to stuff it into her ears.
Seriously.
The funny thing about the whining is that he usually does it just for me.
Sigh. I'll be at home in the late afternoon, his crankiest time of day (and, yes, he still gets two naps a day so don't tell me he needs a nap) he'll be crawling all over the house whimpering "ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma" in the most pathetic, and loud, tone. Or sometimes it's just a long, drawn out "
waaaaaaaaaaa,
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa." And then, my mom decides to stop by on her way home from work.
Well, let me tell you, he is pleased as peaches to see Grandma. And Grandma looks at me like I'm such a wuss, and I'm so dramatic, and she says things like, "Maybe I should take him. He doesn't whine for me." And then she smiles a mushy smile at Little P and feeds him pear juice. Because Mama doesn't give him juice yet.
Now I love my own Mama and exaggerated just a little bit in that last paragraph. But just a
little.
The thing is, he really does prefer other people over me. I'm boring, day in and day out, which apparently causes this whiny whimper that so makes the back of my neck creep up to the part on my scalp. He does prefer other people, until he doesn't, and then nothing but a dose of Mama-love will do the trick. It's just a matter of his whim, and at ten and three-quarters months of age, that whim is fickle indeed!
His vocabulary at this time is still "mama" and "
dada". We say, "Say Papa." And he replies, "Dada." Every time. The p-b sound is a hard one right now. But he is aware of the beginning
consonants that he hears. So, "dog" or "Buckley" is also "
dada" (the d stand for p-b sounds as well). Milk gets "
mamama." He knows exactly what he's talking about. I can ask him (when I get him up in the morning), "Where's Papa?" And he'll go crawling down the hallway to look for Brent in the bedroom, muttering "Dada" all the way.
He's also playing with vocal expression. He will mimic high and squeaky, long and drawn out, low and
growly, sing-
songy. We play little games where we repeat the same thing,
dada, in a bunch of different tones and styles. He says them right back at us. It's hilarious. But maybe that's just because I'm a mom.
Benjamin loves Grandma and Grandpa. My dad makes a clicking sound (like what you would do to a horse) and Benjamin knows that's Grandpa when he hears it. You can also see the wheels spinning in his head as he tries to figure out how to make that sound. He's spent enough time over there recently that he knows and has bonded with them. It's really cute.
Stranger fear - Benjamin doesn't have it. He doesn't throw himself at people, he just responds. I think that's pretty healthy...but he may yet go through that phase (don't kids do that more like between 18 and 24 months? I don't know.) He genuinely enjoys people and attention, but he's equally as content observing his surroundings. In public, so long as he's not hungry, he's a truly pleasant kid.
I'm sure there are other things I could say, but my head is ready for bed. Let's do this...
if you have any questions about him, add them to the comments section of this post. I'll follow up this week!
