It's Nick's 6-month birthday today! We (Xander, Erik, and I) had chocolates tonight after dinner and sang "Happy Half-Birthday" to Nick. He had his well visit at the doctor's today, too, and got three shots and one drinkable vaccine. Unfortunately either that or his pushing teeth are bothering him. He wouldn't even do his before-bed nurse tonight. I gave him Tylenol and then in desperation, one hour later, gave him Motrin. From what I've read, this is okay to do in dire circumstances but important not to do regularly. I hate to feel like I'm overmedicating a child, so I regret doing it. However, he has been comfortable since.
I tried giving him shredded pieces of bread tonight while the rest of us ate dinner. It was a big hit. I told Erik it doesn't seem like the right road to go down because it puts control in Nick's hands...but that's exactly why he liked it so much. Sigh.
We also put him down on the bare floor in his birthday suit to watch his crawling progress. He can get up high on his knees and go really far in one scooch, but I haven't seen him quite get up off those elbows yet. So I don't think I would call it crawling yet, except I wanted to say he started crawling on his 6-month birthday. :) He can definitely travel places. From What to Expect the First Year, I guess I would call it crawling. They define creeping as getting around on the belly and crawling as getting around on hands and knees. So what is it when he gets around on knees and elbows?
He has thinned out to percentiles like the ones Xander used to get: 25th percentile weight, 75th percentile height. (Now Xander's at 10th percentile weight and somewhere over average height! He's shot up like a weed in the last few weeks.) I wouldn't be surprised if he had teeth tomorrow. But I guess I've thought that for a long while now. The doctor even saw the bumps. Nick also started saying the syllable "ma" more often. It's just like I remembered with Xander: They like to yell out "Ma!" whenever something's really wrong, as the start to their cry. Daddy gets all the smiles. Nick stares at Erik like he's looking at Bono or the pope or something.
One of Nick's absolute favorite things to do is to stand up from lying down. Every time I finish changing his diaper, I take hold of his hands and say, "Time to get up!" and pull him up to sitting. From there he always pushes up to standing with a huge grin on his face. He laughs and everything. Every time.
Yikes. By the end of this month, What to Expect the First Year says baby may even be able to walk holding on to furniture. Although it would be exciting, I hope not! I'm not sure I'm ready to have two kids that know how to walk. On the other hand, it would be really interesting if he did that over Christmas at Leslie and Jeremy's because that's where Xander first did it, during his first Christmas. Of course he was almost 9 months old then.
And now turning to the other boy...Xander says he's going to show Santa Claus his dinosaur toys. He doesn't get that he can actually ask for toys. I'd like to keep it that way for a while. ;)
He likes to argue with Erik and me a lot. "Yes, but..." Or, "Mommy, don't say no to Xander!" I've found that if I keep him to a pretty strict schedule during the day, he is so much more obedient. Then if he asks for something that I don't want to allow, I can just say, "It's not time for that. It's time for _____." It's a lot of work to keep him moving from activity to activity, but it pays off big. We do chore time, room time when he plays with (usually) building toys in his room, table time when he does things like puzzles at a table, outside play time, free play time, TV time, learning activities time, and even Quiet Bag time when we practice silence and playing with his bag of quiet activities that are meant for things like doctors' offices and meetings. Now I just need to get the basics down!! We have to work really hard on bathroom stuff, meal times, and sleep times. Double sigh.
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