In just one month Adrian has gone from almost-crawling-but-not-quite-there-yet to very competent, pretty effortless crawling. He’s not quite racing across the floor but he has no trouble going from the hall through the old living room to the new living room. He can even crawl from the wooden deck into the living room, which requires crossing three steps and a threshold. That took some effort to learn; he was practicing hard for several days.

Because of all the thresholds and steps around the house, he’s modified his crawling style. Instead of the usual hands-and-knees, he usually goes around on his hands and feet, or perhaps hands and one foot and the other knee. I think he started doing it this way when he first learned to crawl in & up from the wooden deck. We have sliding doors there, and those slide along a rail on the floor, a sharpish strip of plastic. Going over that on your knees is not comfortable at all, I’m sure.

He has not yet shown any real interest in the stairs going up to the first floor – mostly because he has no reason to. We’re all always down here. Eric installed a gate at the top of the stairs; we’ll see whether we need one at the bottom as well.

He’s also very good at standing. He can pull himself to standing holding on with just one hand, to just about anything, even something as wobbly as my trousers. Occasionally he grabs onto something really unsuitable (such as a blanket lying on the sofa) and falls on his bottom but otherwise he rarely has accidents. Once he is up and standing he can look around, shift his feet, grab stuff, and shuffle along his support (sofa, step stool, myself etc.). This afternoon he actually let go with both hands to hold on to some toy. And he can carefully bend his knees and sit down again in a controlled manner, rather than fall.

And all of a sudden he is OK with being left on his own. He no longer needs to be within a few metres of someone. I wonder if it’s because he now knows that he can follow us when he needs to? Or has he simply understood that we do not disapper when we leave the room (object permanence)? On a few mornings when he’s woken me particularly early I have gone downstairs with him, changed his nappy and then put him down among his toys on the living room carpet, and then dozed on the sofa. He’s crawled around, explored the toys, then crawled into the hall or the adjacent room and looked through the stuff there, and only after 10 minutes or so does he call for my attention.

Adrian has now also reached the stage where every item is interesting and works as a toy – as long as it is new to him. Kitchen utensils, Ingrid’s toys (ranging from princess tiaras to toy stethoscopes), bike helmets, pencils, keys, you name it. This combined with crawling means that we need to be careful about what we leave on the floor or otherwise within his reach. Books in particular are very attractive. He sees me and Ingrid play around with them all the time and he really wants to try them, too. Right now there are still safe places in the living room, and he is not so fast a crawler that we can rescue the things he’s heading for. But I foresee a period of some destruction ahead.

We’ve introduced the concept of No, for pulling at people’s hair or Eric’s glasses, or chewing power cords, or trying to crawl from the bed to the bedside table (with its water glass, clock, lamp and other off-limits items).

He eats happily and a lot. He still likes starchy stuff like bread and pasta and cereal, but also meatballs, broccoli, and butternut squash. Most fruit is good, too: recently he’s eaten a lot of apricots and grapes, and some cherries. He now happily eats banana which he used to spit out in disgust. He’s just getting the pincer grip to work and can pick up sweetcorn kernels. Rice grains are still too fiddly for him.

Adrian watches with great interest when we eat, and seems to be very aware that sometimes we eat different stuff than he. Food from my plate is better than food from his plate.

He is lazy when it comes to fruit peel and often spits out the peel with lots of edible bits still stuck to it. We actually peel his grapes for him, because if we do, he eats them, but otherwise he spits out most of each grape. But this also means that I am not afraid to give him a whole cherry: he will bite on it, spit it out, I pick out the stone, and he puts the rest back in his mouth. Quite a lot of the fruit he eats goes in and out a few times. It took him a few tries to figure out cherries. First I had to cut them in half because he didn’t understand they were worth biting into. Then he learned that they were good, and now he’ll crawl across the lawn to get one.

He has a weird relationship with the sippy cup. When we hand it to him, he never uses it for drinking. He turns it in his hands, bangs it against his tray, or turns it upside down and chews on its bottom. Which leads to water everywhere and a gooey mess on the tray, so we usually don’t give him the cup. When he drinks, we hold it for him. And he knows not to pull at it then.

Adrian has become much more varied and clear in communicating with us. It’s not just happy sounds and faces vs. unhappy sounds and faces. He can reach for the sippy cup to tell us he wants a drink. He can “tell” us that he is not happy with the food he is getting and wants something else – and that signal is different from when he is done eating. He understands very well when we sign and say “all done” and readies himself for being lifted out of the highchair. He can look questioning, interested, irritated, bored, joyful, mischievous… A sort of “mma” sound for “emme” might be emerging. And the other day I think he may have signed “nurse” to me.

He totally hates nappy changes and putting on clothes, and screams as if we were torturing him. I’ve tried to change him standing up, and tried finishing putting on his clothes while he’s sitting, thinking that he just doesn’t want to be flat on his back, but it makes no difference. And he fights me so much that I often end up putting him flat on his back anyway.

He likes his swing, but usually for short periods only.
He likes to fiddle with my bra strap while he’s nursing.
He likes playing with cardboard books, opening and closing and turning them in his hands. No interest in looking at pictures yet.

This month’s big news is, of course, that I have gone back to work and Adrian is at home with Eric instead. After a rocky start (in part because he was ill the first few days) they settled into a routine and now it’s all going swimmingly. I express milk at work, and he gets it in his sippy cup. (Blue cup for breast milk, yellow cup for water.)

He is happy to see me and wants to nurse first thing when I get home – I usually run upstairs to change out of work clothes and into a nursing top, and then settle down with him in the sofa. He nurses frequently in the evenings but no longer stuffs himself until he throws up.

During the day he usually eats happily and well. Bread and cereal remain his favourites. Broccoli is no longer interesting at all; instead he eats black pudding and apricots and grapes.

Adrian is very very close to crawling but not quite there yet. First he learned to rotate in place and move backwards on his tummy by pushing off with his hands. He still does that at night – I wall him in with pillows and rolled-up blankets to keep him from falling off the bed. When I go to the bedroom I never find him sleeping where I left him. I’ve started teaching him how to get down from the sofa feet first – on his own he heads for the edge head first.

A few weeks ago he learned to keep his knees fixed while pushing, so he got up on all fours instead of moving backwards. Then he learned to get up on all fours by pulling in his knees under him rather than by pushing back with his hands, so he stays in place rather than inexorably moving away from where he wants to go. But he once he was up on all fours he couldn’t move, he just rocked back and forth.

Now he’s learned to reach and lunge forward from there, but as he does that he flops back onto his tummy so he can only do it once. But it is enough to get him marginally closer to the thing he wants. Sometimes, if the thing is close enough, he can do a few lunges and actually get there in the end.

He’s got a love/hate thing with crawling. When I put him down sitting he often turns and gets on his tummy immediately, but a second later he starts complaining loudly because he can’t get further.

Standing is much more fun. Give Adrian two fingers to hold on to, and he will pull himself up to standing straight away. A pair of hands is the best support for getting up, but if that isn’t available, he sometimes manages with a chair or a step stool. That way is harder because he needs to untangle his legs (whereas when he holds on to my fingers he can go straight forward from sitting so the legs aren’t in the way). He can reliably get onto his knees that way, but in the last few days he’s gone all the way to standing a few times.

He is confident and stable enough on his feet that he can let go of his support with one hand (or even two, and just lean his upper arms on the sofa table) and grab a toy. He’s also stable enough that I now leave him standing there without sitting right behind him to catch him. When he tires, he can sit down rather than fall.

Sometimes he slowly shuffles sideways along the edge of the table, with very small and slow steps. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing – he wills himself towards something and his feet naturally but unconsciously move in that direction.

I’ve found him hard to “read” in the past. Now he’s communicating much more clearly. He reaches towards the person he wants to be with; he reaches for the sippy cup when he wants to drink. He lets go of my hands and leans towards me when he’s tired of standing and wants to be picked up. He waves his arms in a certain way when he’s done eating, or start slapping the tray on his highchair. At night he turns on his side, facing towards me, when he wants to nurse.

He uses his crying more to communicate and less to simply express frustration. One day when he was crying I picked him up and walked around with him. I went to the hall, and he stopped crying. I went back into the living room, and he started again. He was very clearly telling me he wanted to go out. He’s done the same with the bedroom to tell me he wants to sleep. If he wants to go from me to Eric he makes happy noises when he sees Eric, and switches to crying when Eric walks past us.

We’ve started using a few signs with him but not as consistently as I’d like. We sign for “all done” (after mealtimes), and I sign “nurse”. Sometimes we remember to sign “food”, too, but often not. He definitely understands “all done” and we think his arm-waving might be efforts to sign back. When we sign “all done” he knows that he will be lifted out of his highchair so he prepares by holding his arms out. He also helps when it’s time to put his fleece jacket on for going out.

He is attentive and observant. He follows us and our doings with a very focused gaze. Especially at mealtimes, when we all sit together, close to each other and at roughly the same height. He stares when Eric opens a can of beer for dinner, or when we make particularly happy noises about eating strawberries.

Random small stuff: we tried bathing him in the kitchen sink instead of the small bathtub, and it was a great success. Previously his baths have lasted a minute or two, just enough to get him sort of clean. Now he was so happy there that afterwards Ingrid insisted on trying, too – if Adrian enjoys it so much then it obviously must be great.

As before: he very much insists on company and won’t be left alone. Sometimes it’s enough to be in the same room with him, but more often he likes to be within a metre or two.

Topmost in my mind right now is the fact that Adrian now stays at home with Eric and not me. This means less breastfeeding, the introduction of a bottle, and a general disruption of “how life used to be”. He also has a bad cold, and the days before that he was teething. With all this going on it is hard to say how he is taking the change – we will see in a few days.

When I was at home with him, he’d always smile at Eric when he got home from work. It is pretty nice to be on the receiving end of that smile. It usually takes him a few moments: when I get in he doesn’t notice me at first, and then when I call his name he looks at me, thinks for a moment, and then smiles and leans and stretches himself towards me.

His favourite activity is watching people do stuff. The best thing we can do in the afternoon/evening (now that both Eric and I are at home at that time of the day) is for one of us to cook and the other to hold Adrian so he can watch. When I did it on my own, I’d often have him on my hip most of the time, and put him down only when he was obviously incompatible with the task at hand (such as pouring boiling water). Often he will try to lean far forward, to get closer to the action and to try and grab whatever I’m working with.

It is much less fun to be sitting in a highchair next to us, with some kitchen utensils to play with.

Toys are generally of little interest. He can spend a little time chewing on a wooden block, or fiddling with the tag on some soft toy, or banging a wooden spoon against the table. But he tires of that quite quickly. The only “toy” he likes is paper that he can chew on, but since that ends with me digging out a gooey lump of wet, chewed paper from his mouth, I don’t like that activity very much.

Eating has gone from play to serious work. He seems to get less enjoyment out of food, doesn’t explore it with as much interest as he used to, but on the other hand he is very interested in eating it. I used to have him join in our meals – now I join him in his. If he doesn’t get food, he complains, and then wolfs down the first few handfuls he is served. Bread, pasta and dry cereal are his favourites, and he will usually eat some veggies, too. Kiwi fruit, sweet potato, grilled bell peppers, courgette. Liver paté was rejected and meatballs are not of much interest, either. He can pick up small cubes of about a centimetre or so, but cannot manage peas or rice.

When done eating, he will start rocking his body and slapping the tray. He usually doesn’t like to be removed from the community around the dinner table so I take him on my lap. He then proceeds to try and grab my fork, the edge of my plate, my glass or my food, so I have to move it all and eat from a safe distance. His arms may be short but his reach is long, because he puts his whole body into it.

This is something I still forget sometimes, which makes things “fun” at the supermarket for example – I have to take care to park his stroller far away from anything grabbable. He also likes to grab people’s hair when he gets a chance (which Ingrid isn’t enjoying much). He likes touching and exploring my face and my ears, too. And my nipples: after nursing he will sometimes sit in my lap and look at my nipple, poking at it and trying to pick it up, all the while making very contented noises.

Breastfeeding has become somewhat less important but he still gets much of his nourishment from breast milk, and nurses regularly and thoroughly. At some point he pretty much stopped throwing up milk. We used to always have a washcloth at hand to wipe him clean, and never put him down directly on a carpet. Old habits die hard – I still have a blanket for him on the living room carpet.

Last month he was fond of sitting; now standing up (holding on to someone’s hands) is the new thing. It is hard to put him down sitting; he will land standing instead. Sometimes he accepts being put down on his tummy, but more often he will hold out his hands and legs so that he lands on all fours instead. He doesn’t really know what to do in that position and soon lets his legs slide out from under him, ending up on his tummy anyway. He then pushes with his arms so that he moves backwards, or turns in place like the hands of a clock. Usually he gets frustrated with this pretty quickly, although some corner of a blanket or a carpet may entertain him for a few moments, but for some reason he can be pretty happy on his tummy in bed, just after waking. It’s not because the floor is too hard – I’ve tried putting him on his tummy on the changing mat but that was no better than the floor.

He sleeps from roughly 7 in the evening to around 6, plus/minus 30 minutes, in the morning. If he wakes before 5:30 I refuse to get up and keep him in bed until he falls asleep again, otherwise his daily routine gets too messed up. During the day he sleeps pretty well in sling, stroller or bed. He falls asleep most easily in the stroller, but the longest naps usually happen in bed. Most days he still has three naps. When he sleeps in the stroller he will spend a good while taking out the dummy and then getting all upset about losing it. The way around it is to either hold his hand, or to put his hand on the bar of the stroller that he can then hold onto.

He now has four teeth fully out (top and bottom middle incisors) and three more visible and palpable (that eye tooth that made its appearance a month ago, unchanged, and the next two top incisors). He grinds his teeth; it sounds awful. We’ve started brushing his teeth. At first he had no objections, now I make some token brushing movements for a few seconds and then hand over the brush to him.

He does not like nappy changes. He is ticklish, especially around the neck. He does not like singing games where I tilt him backward, like “Prästens lilla kråka” – instead he struggles to remain upright. He did not like the door bouncer I bought for him. (And he barely fit inside, because of his cloth nappy.)

As of this morning, his measurements were 9.4 kg and 69.7 cm.

PS: I just realized when preparing this post that I have no photos of him smiling during this month. Intense focused stares: yes, yes, yes. Crying: yes. Smiling: no. It’s not that he never smiles but it is definitely not his default expression.

“I think I will have the fish”

This was the month of teething. Adrian’s first tooth appeared just about a month ago. Now both bottom incisors are out, as well as the tip of an eye tooth, and (as of today) the tips of the top incisors. As a side effect there has been a lot of drooling and quite a lot of crying, too. I don’t remember Ingrid crying so much about teething. And then he blows raspberries so there is bubbly spittle everywhere.

Already he is learning to use those teeth on food. He can gnaw on a chunk of apple and scrape pieces off a bread stick. He is not very interested in the various teething rings and chewable toys. I think the only thing I’ve noticed him actually chewing on is his dummy. He has understood that our fingers are now off limits (he used to suck on them and chew them with his gums) and he’s not been biting my boobs either. He did it once, just to try I think, and didn’t like it when I cried OW.

While he was getting his latest teeth he completely lost interest in eating and has regained it only in the last few days. As a result I cannot really say what he likes to eat right now, apart from various kinds of bread (including home-made pie crust, and Havrefras). He really likes drinking water from his sippy cup, and will stretch towards him and make demanding noises until we help him drink.

He nurses often and happily. Usually he wants to nurse after waking (although not necessarily immediately) and again before going to sleep. Recently he’s been very distracted while nursing, so his most undisturbed meals are the ones before he goes to sleep in a dim quiet room, and those in the middle of the night. He likes to grip and hold my breast with both hands. When he doesn’t, his arms and hands flail around and look for something to grip. Most often they find my clothes.

“I think I will have the pink one”

He talks quite a lot more than he used to. It started with “bjäbb bjäbb”, then we had “höbba höbba”, then “däd däd däd” and now “mäm mäm mäm”. (Swedish/Estonian pronounciation for all the above.)

Mostly he talks when he is unhappy. Or perhaps all my mental images of him talking are with an unhappy tone because he is somewhat discontented much of the time. His is not a sunny disposition. He is bores quickly and loves company and new things to look at. (Sounds very much like a certain 4-year-old in this house, doesn’t it?) The absolute best way to make him happy is to either have guests, the more the merrier, or to go out. Just him and me in the house is a recipe for endless whining.

He very much likes to see what is going on. The hip seat I bought has been very useful, especially for when I’m preparing dinner.

He will not accept being left on his own for long – first there are mild complaints, then within a minute he will be crying, and soon all out screaming. It’s a good thing that he can now sit upright – I can just take him with me to whatever room I need to go to and plop him down on the floor. And really once he learned this skill, he was stable pretty much straight away: he may have fallen over maybe once a day in the beginning and very rarely now. We never had any need for pillows behind him or anything like that.

Now that he can sit, he will not accept lying down for more than brief moments, except when sleeping, or when he gets to be naked during a nappy change. He likes being naked. And the moment I take off his nappy, he will grip his genitals and pull at them. It looks like it should hurt but it obviously doesn’t.

He also likes standing. Often after a nappy change I pull him up to a seated position by letting him hold onto my fingers. Quite often he will keep holding so I can help pull him all the way up to standing. Other times he misjudges and lets go just a bit too early and falls back on his back, and we start over.

“I think I will have the pine cone”

Fine motor skills are not his forte. He can grip things and turn them in his hands and pass them from one hand to the other, but he quite often he drops them when he doesn’t want to. And he is not always able to let go when he does want to drop them. Still, he’s getting better: he can now get something like half a grape into his mouth, sometimes. He doesn’t quite seem to trust his hands/arms: sometimes he bends forwards with his body towards the toy he wants, rather than pull it towards him. He is becoming interested in smaller details like care labels on toys, but he cannot really manipulate them very well yet.

This month I also took away his dummy for nighttime sleep. He now falls asleep much more easily and sleeps so much better. It used to be that he had his best naps in the sling; now the bed is the best place. This is a very new experience for me! Usually we nurse, then I turn him over on his tummy (because he often needs to burp, still). Then he complains and refuses to lie down for maybe a minute or two (literally). Then he realizes that he is tired and sleepy, puts his head down, and I pat him for another minute or two. And then he’s asleep. When he wants to go to sleep and stops fighting it, he often makes a groaning/grunting/humming noise. At first I thought it was because he was somehow uncomfortable, but later I realized it’s his lullaby – often he will stop it when I sing for him or make a rhythmic shushing sound.

He wakes pretty regularly each night, two or maybe three times, nurses, and then goes back to sleep with no fuss. Except when he has a cold, or is teething, or in one of his must-poop-at-four-in-the-morning phases.

Just in time for his six-month “birthday”, Adrian learned to sit unsupported. Until now he sat very well in his highchair, but as soon as I put him on the floor, he’d fold forward or to the side and flop over within less than a minute. Then suddenly he got the knack of it and now he sits. As with most new skills, he likes it a lot, and much prefers sitting to lying down.

He also likes being pulled up to sitting from lying on his back: I give him my fingers to hold and immediately he lifts his head and starts working himself upwards, and as I pull he follows. In fact this is the best way to get him to sit: if I try to just put him down somewhere he will keep his legs straight so he lands on his feet, and then he refuses to bend his legs (or doesn’t know how).

At the six-month checkup (which he had about a week early) they enquired if he turned over yet, but that’s something he hasn’t figured out yet.

He’s found his feet and likes to pull on them when he’s lying down for a nappy change. He doesn’t do it often when he’s got a nappy on (too much pressure against his tummy I think) so now I often let him lie without a nappy for a while to let him play with his feet.

We have started serving him solid food. Mostly he gets finger food to keep him occupied while we eat. He usually enjoys it quite a lot, which gives us an extra five minutes to eat our food in peace. He hasn’t been too fond of spoon feeding, although he did make an exception when kiwi was offered. And I’m not too fond of spoon feeding him, either, because then I will have less time to eat rather than more.

Sucking on a broccoli stick

Adrian’s favourite foods are bread and broccoli. Cauliflower, cucumber and apple are also OK. Banana, carrot, melon, sweet potato and pear: not so much. The menu is quite limited because his grip is so strong and uncontrolled that he mashes most foods in his hands before he even manages to get them to his mouth. Bread sticks, crispbread, and crust from bread rolls are the best foods for him, because they are hard and won’t break in his hands, but by sucking on them he can nevertheless get flavour from them, as well as small pieces to swallow.

It’s been barely two weeks since he got his first pice of bread but already he has become much more skilled at handling food. He no longer misses the mouth, and is much better at grabbing the food in front of him. He can also get his dummy into his mouth more often than not.

He is often (but luckily not always) dissatisfied and hard to please. When left to his own devices, he bores quickly and starts complaining. When held or carried around, he wriggles and kicks. I get the impression that he wants – to move around, to do things – but cannot.

He likes people and will smile back at pretty much anyone who smiles at him or talks to him, as long as they’re not way too close or too loud. He still finds Ingrid’s antics very amusing; they entertain each other very nicely. When Ingrid has a tantrum he becomes very upset and won’t stop crying until Ingrid quiets down (or we take one of them to another room).

He still drools and spits up a lot but doesn’t burp quite as much as he used to. Which is nice, because I can now let him fall asleep on his back. Previously I always had to turn him on his front after nursing him at night, so he could let out all the burps – if I left him on his back he couldn’t fall asleep because of them.

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.

Holding fingers

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.

Adrian smiles and “talks” a lot more. The most reliable way of getting him to smile is for me to blow raspberries towards him. He did a bit of that himself, but then lost interest.

About 10 days or two weeks ago he became cranky and currently he spends a fair amount of time complaining. In part I suspect he is simply bored. It used to be that I could park him in his bouncy chair and let him watch me hang laundry, or put him on his play mat for a while and let him kick his legs. Now he won’t accept either. He is pretty hard to entertain right now.

He has become quite sociable and likes to have people around him. He is a lot happier on weekends when the whole family is at home, than on weekdays with just him and me, because then he can watch us talk, move, do stuff. He was most happy when I took him with me to visit my colleagues at the office: five people sitting around a table, all talking and smiling.

Another thing he really does like is going for walks in the pushchair. The seat has to be completely upright and the pushchair better be moving all the time so that he can look around. If I try to tilt the seat back, he will start pushing against it with his head or attempting sit-ups. He also falls asleep in the pushchair very easily now. His eyelids sort of just start drooping, and even if something then disturbs him, he continues to slowly slide towards sleep, until he just nods off. Very convenient. Usually he wakes as soon as the pushchair stops moving.

He can sit pretty well in the highchair as long as we stuff a few rolled-up towels at his sides to keep him upright. This way we can have him with us at the breakfast table, with a heap of toys in front of him.

He’s not yet very good with his hands: when I put something in his hand and curl his fingers around it, he can hold it, but he doesn’t really manage to grab stuff on his own yet. With the toys in front of him, he sort of just sweeps them towards himself with an arm. He does try to grab them, and sometimes he manages it, too, but not at all reliably. And even when he holds something, often he cannot get it to his mouth.

The hands themselves, though, make their way to his mouth pretty often. Sometimes he even finds his thumb and sucks on it. But when he’s going to sleep, he wants his dummy.

This baby definitely hasn’t read Gina Ford or Tracy Hogg (The Baby Whisperer). I started out with the usual sleep-eat-play rhythm, plus some extra feeds in the evening before bedtime. But nowadays he usually wants to eat more often than that, usually twice in each awake period. It took me a while to figure that out, but now I know that when he starts fussing about an hour and a half after waking, it’s probably more food he wants and not sleep.

He needs and wants more sleep than Ingrid did at this age. His takes about 3 naps per day, ranging from 40 to 90 minutes, and sleeps 12 to 13 hours per night. As long as we time it right and don’t try to put him to bed too early, he goes to sleep very easily. Also when he wakes at night, he feeds and then goes back to sleep without a problem.

He drools like a maniac, and we’ve invested in a bunch of new bandana bibs.

As of this morning, Adrian weighed 6.95kg and was 61.4cm long. Nice and chubby. (Impressive precision on the length measurement, don’t you think, given that it involves holding a wiggly baby flat on its back and then trying to straighten its legs while keeping the head still?) He is roughly a size 68 in bodies and 62 in trousers.

New skills: smiling (yay!) and cooing. A typical “word” sounds like ngaanh. He has found his fists and will try to stuff them in his mouth when he loses his dummy.

He has a strong neck and back and has no trouble holding his head upright and looking around in all directions. He likes sitting or even standing up (both with me supporting him under his arms) when awake and not tired. He will push with his head against whatever he is leaning against to signal that he’d rather be upright. Our favourite activity is cooing at each other, with him sitting or standing or kneeling on my thighs while I lounge in the sofa.

He is already quite sociable and curious. Generally he’d rather sit in his bouncy seat and watch the world, than lie on his play mat – I don’t think he’s ever accepted more than 5 or 10 minutes on the play mat. When left on his own, he usually gets bored & lonely pretty soon and starts making unhappy noises, so I often have him with me in the bouncy seat while I’m hanging laundry, eating lunch etc.

He is not too fond of lying on his tummy except when asleep. On his back he will flail, push with his head and definitely not go to sleep. If I nurse him to sleep and then put him on his back, he will inevitably wake within 15 minutes.

His eating and sleeping are becoming roughly predictable. He can stay awake for about a hour or maybe one and a half, and will then sleep for one to two hours. After around 3 or 4pm he will take one or two short naps only, maybe 15–30 minutes. So on a normal day he gets 3 proper naps and one or two brief ones. He wakes with us at 7am, and we put him to bed for night some time between 7 and 8pm. At night he usually wakes 2 or maybe 3 times, nurses, and then goes back to sleep without any fuss – except if he happens to wake and feed after 5.30, after which it is hard to get him to settle properly again.

He still likes his dummy but only for sleeping. Until very recently that was true for the sling as well: he falls asleep very quickly in the sling but does not like sitting there when he’s awake. He usually cries when I put him in, and often wakes crying as well. (If anyone sees me put him in the sling, they’re probably not going to become babywearing converts.) But a few times now he’s woken in the sling and been pretty content to just watch the world from there.

He has also been out in the pushchair a few times, and been happy enough as long as (1) it was moving, and (2) he was sleepy. But given the current road conditions (lots of mushy snow) and the difficulty of arranging our life around his not-entirely-predictable naps, I don’t use the pram except in rare circumstances. The sling gives me so much more flexibility.

He has a semi-permanent little frown. His mouth is more similar to mine than to Eric’s, but his eyes are not mine. He drools quite a lot.

He still has some sort of tummy troubles although not as bad as before. Still investigating as to the cause.

According to official measurements as of this morning’s two-month checkup, Adrian is 58.5cm and 6130g. He has outgrown most of his size 56 clothes.

His awake periods are getting longer but they’re not particularly predictable. Sometimes when I think he should be alert and perky, he tires after half an hour. Other times he seems really tired but still won’t sleep more than short stretches.

My cautious assessment is that his stomach problems have improved during the last 10 days, since I excluded milk from my diet. We actually had 4 days of no reflux screaming at all. While it hasn’t been that rosy more recently, he spends some time awake and happy after every feed. The doctor told us that if the milk-free diet seems to help, keep it up and re-evaluate at the next checkup in a month’s time.

Adrian now seeks eye contact when held (since about 2 weeks ago), and works his facial muscles hard when I talk to him or make faces. Smile-like movements have been observed but no unambiguously clear smile yet.

Unlike Ingrid he likes his dummy and wants to suck on it when going to sleep, no matter whether in bed or in sling. Also unlike Ingrid he does not like the pushchair or the pram. Both have been banished to the basement for the time being.

Most recently he’s started to like being completely upright, not reclining in his bouncy chair or against my legs. He pushes away from my legs with his head in order to be more upright. When held upright he can hold his head pretty well. Sometimes he pushes away with his legs and refuses to sit, so I hold him standing up on my lap.

The first two or three weeks Adrian spent pretty much all his time eating and sleeping. Honestly, he was like a newborn kitten, with his eyes closed all the time.

Now he is actually awake some of the time, occasionally over an hour at a time. The downside is that he no longer falls asleep without any effort from us. At first he would easily fall asleep no matter what; now it’s not that easy any more. But it’s nothing like Ingrid’s sleeping troubles: when he is tired and I put him in the sling, he generally falls asleep without much fuss. And with a bit of help (such as a dummy or someone’s finger to suck on) he can actually fall asleep lying down. But since I usually have more important things to do than to sit by his bedside, I often tuck him in the sling anyway.

Unfortunately Adrian spends much of his awake time crying and screaming due to tummy troubles. I have forceful letdown and plentiful milk supply, so he chokes, splutters, gasps for air, and generally struggles to feed. (No comfort nursing here.) As a result he eats way too fast and swallows a lot of air. I burp him several times during a feed, as well as afterwards, and every time he lets loose a huge burp more befitting a champion beer drinker. But it’s hard to get all the air out, so for a good while after every meal he cries and throws up as he tries to burp it out.

On the plus side, he’s developing good strong neck muscles, because he spends so much time upright, being burped or comforted.

He seems to dislike being naked, so he doesn’t enjoy nappy changes or clothes changes. Partly because of this he’s only had two proper baths since he was born. (The other reason is that there aren’t many opportunities: either he’s asleep, or upset, or I’ve got other, more important things to do.)

He has a strong startle reflex and is startled by many things. Putting him down on the changing mat, unbuttoning his body, tearing the nappy open, picking him up, and so on.