The one thing I will remember about this month is the drooling. It’s not like Adrian produces occasional dribs and drabs of dribble. No, it’s more like a river of saliva. He is never without a bandana bib while awake. There is always a row of them drying on the heater: each one lasts an hour, maximum, before it’s soaked through, almost so you can wring it out.

If he was my first child, I’d say “surely he must be teething”. But since Ingrid drooled for many months (although never quite this copiously) before any signs of teeth, I won’t. I think he just drools.

It’s no wonder he eats/drinks so often. He must get dehydrated from all this fluid loss. He still usually feeds twice during each awake period (more often in the evening) and about every 3 to 4 hours at night.

He also spits up a lot, so I try to always have a wash cloth within reach. There’s always a handful spread out in the house, and there’s one in most of my photos of him. In our changing bag, bibs and wash cloths are as important as clean nappies.

He falls asleep pretty easily in both sling and stroller, and in bed with the help of a little bit of nursing. But the only time he sleeps in bed is at night, or when I want to take a nap, too – otherwise I find it too inconvenient.

Quite often he interrupts his naps with screaming. Nowadays I can often get him to go back to sleep – usually I just need to pop in the dummy, and hold a hand on his cheek, and give him a finger to hold. The physical contact he gets from being in the sling is not enough: he wants skin against skin. He also likes holding our fingers when he’s awake but tired.

Lullabies also soothe him. I can see and feel him relax within seconds. This is something I never experienced with Ingrid – as far as I could see, she couldn’t have cared less whether I sang or not.

This past week he’s been sleeping very badly at night. At first it was (probably mostly) due to congested airways – after a few hours of lying in the bed he could barely breathe through his nose. Now he just seems to sleep very uneasily. He wakes more often than normally, sometimes with no more than an hour between wakings. He is hard to soothe, often screams and cries inconsolably.

He’s pretty good at using his hands now. He grabs toys (not with perfect precision but decent enough) and can turn them in his hands. A few weeks ago he would use this skill to stuff everything in his mouth, but now he’s as likely to just look at things. When there are no toys in front of him, or when they’re all out of reach, he complains pretty quickly. He is not so good at letting go of things yet: sometimes I can see that he wants to grab a toy but cannot because his fingers are griopping something else and he doesn’t know how to get rid of it.

His fingers also have a complicated relationship with the dummy and its clip. Frequently the hand accidentally hooks or grips the strap and pulls the dummy out of his mouth. But he’s also working hard at taking the dummy and trying to get it back in his mouth. The challenges are (a) getting it turned the right way, so he gets the teat and not a hard edge, and (b) not getting the fingers in there between the mouth and the dummy.

We’ve packed away both the play mat and the bouncy chair. He’s never been fond of lying flat on his back, asleep or awake, so the play mat got very little use. Now we just have a blanket on the floor where I can put him down on his tummy. He likes that somewhat better. And he doesn’t much like leaning back, either: he started doing situps in the bouncy chair, to the point where I thought it looked both unsafe and uncomfortable. Since he is totally not able to sit on his own, we bought a second highchair instead (IKEA’s Antilop), which is light enough that I can easily carry it with me anywhere in the house.

Carrying him with me is a frequent necessity. Adrian is not at all OK with being left alone. When I put him down and move out of sight, it takes just a few seconds for him to start making unhappy noises. So when I want to put away clean laundry in the bedroom upstairs, for example, I have to take him with me, or listen to him screaming all the while.

Or alternatively, ask Ingrid to entertain him. She enjoys that; his reaction is a combination of bafflement, enjoyment and mild fear. She heaps toys in front of him, or makes some stuffed animal walk and jump on top of him, or hangs rattles around his wrist, all the while singing nonsense words to some random tune. She’s not ungentle but she is quite loud and often very close to his face. She loves it when he looks or smiles at her.

He is also always very happy to see Eric. Eric gets big smiles when he comes home in the evening.