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.

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.