It’s been nine months since I wrote the last “Elijah Update” post! I’m not even going to attempt to recap what has happened since that last post, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s going on in his life recently.
Tyla and Elijah keep pretty busy throughout the week. The main scheduled activities are Parent/Baby group, Stroller Strides, and Little Gym. They’ve also started swimming a little bit and will be starting swim classes later this year.
He’s gaining new motor skills every week and on Sunday he took his first steps! Tyla’s family happened to be at our house when Elijah let go of his little push toy and took about 5 tiny steps toward the grill. That’s my boy! You can see him thinking really hard about each movement to take a step and he still needs to build up his confidence, but I bet he’ll make rapid progress in the coming days and weeks. Lots of people says “Keep him as a crawler as long as you can” and stuff like that but I’m excited to have my little man walking! Yes, it’s more work, but by now I’ve figured out that being a parent isn’t something you do because it’s easy.
Elijah was really quiet for his first few months but now he’s always making some kind of noise. There was a period of shrieking which (I hope) is passed, at least for now. He loves to babble and make seemingly random noises and will sometimes even imitate our coughs and achoos. When he’s really excited, he kind of turns his tongue sideways and makes a sucking sound.
Milk is still the main food of the day but he’s experimenting with other foods that Tyla and I eat. He sits in his high chair for most of our meals and does some combination of smearing it on his face, dropping it down his bib, and putting it in his mouth. I don’t think he’s quite made the connection that this type of eating will also solve his hunger pains.
Night times are still a battle though we’ve kind of settled into a workable truce for now. We’re going on 11 months of not sleeping more than 3-4 hours in a row except for a couple somewhat random stretches when he was very young. This is probably the single most painful part of parenting for me (and I’m not even the one who has to stay awake to feed him!) and I’m praying that we get to a better spot soon.
We’re very blessed to have such a wonderful child in our home!
Having a child has made me realize that I have way too many hobbies. Or rather, I have too many hobbies to sustain. When we transfer to new groups at work, the tradition is to send out mail introducing yourself and talking about your hobbies and interests. I included skiing, hiking, motorcycling, target shooting, phone and Win8 development, wood-working and RC airplanes. Even then I felt like I left some out! If there are 52 weekends in the year and a big chunk of them are taken up with family plans, there’s not nearly enough time left to devote to all of those.
We’ve gone through lots of books and Amazon reviews trying to find the right products for our home. Here are a few of our favorites:
Our little man turned eight months old a couple weeks ago. It’s fun to look back at the photos from just a couple months ago and see the tremendous amount of changes. He’s still a very happy kid with lots of smiles no matter what’s going on. When he’s happy he loves to talk and roar, and if he’s really excited he lets out an ear piercing squeal. He learned to crawl recently and then almost immediately started pulling himself up onto whatever he could find. He’ll grab onto your fingers and happily walk around the house. I wonder how long it will be before he’s doing that on his own?