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.