There is so much going on in Adrian’s life right now that I don’t know where to begin.

The most practically useful development is that he can now eat pretty well with a spoon. In the beginning of the month he liked forks best, but now he’s focused on spoons. He can dip his spoon in the food in his bowl so that food sticks to the spoon, and then put it in his mouth. Sometimes he even manages a scooping sort of movement. It only works with thick, sticky food – anything loose will fall off because he often turns the spoon this way and that, inspecting it before he puts it in his mouth. The oatmeal porridge I’ve been making for breakfast for myself and Ingrid has been a particular favourite, so now I make a little bit extra for him.

We’ve also started mashing our food for him, which we’ve never done before, just so he can eat it with a spoon. Sometimes mixing our food with some binding agent also works, e.g. some tomato paste to make the rice stick together better. He isn’t interested in eating squishy gooey food with his hands. And he is by now familiar with both spoons and bowls so he no longer turns the bowl upside down to look at it from all angles. On the whole both he and his surroundings are often surprisingly clean after a meal – except for the back of his head, because he often touches it with his hands.

While one of us is cooking, Adrian is now almost invariably sitting on the kitchen counter. He absolutely wants to be where the action is, and to do what I do. The kitchen cupboards and drawers have lost most of their charm. Instead he sits on the counter and plays with the utensils in the jar, or the dish cloths, or whatever ingredients I leave within his reach. Today, for example, he had three small chunks of pumpkin, two or three large spoons or spatulas, one small plastic wrapping, one large wooden jar, one cutlery holder, one tea sieve and probably other odds and ends.

He has learned that the knife block and the salt cellar are absolutely off limits, and that he isn’t allowed close to the stove.

The two most common activities – both during today’s dinner preparations and in general – are putting things inside other things and then tipping them out again, and dropping things on the floor. Spoon in jar. Pumpkin piece in cutlery holder. Turn cutlery holder upside down; pumpkin piece falls out. Spoon in compost bin. Spoon in sink. Cutlery holder in sink. The combinations are endless!

This is pretty much all that Adrian does with toys, too, so his favourite “toys” are things such as the chestnuts that Ingrid gathers, fridge magnets, and other smallish items that can be put inside things. For a while he also liked picking apart knob puzzles but I think that has lost its charm. He likes things with lids, too, such as the Lock N Lock food storage boxes we have everywhere in our kitchen, and the jar with beeswax salve I use. When he sees them with the lid off he grabs for the jar or box and tries to put the lid back on.

He also likes putting magnets and chestnuts in his mouth, so we’ve had to confiscate all the small ones.

Things that roll or spin are also fun, for example a plastic mug or a water bottle that rolls around on the floor, or a wooden disk from his stacking tower that I set spinning on the floor.

When he drops things on the floor he does it with great attention. Takes spoon, holds it over the edge of the counter, drops it. Puts both hands down on the counter and peeks over the edge to look at the spoon on the floor. Points at the floor and says “päääh!”. Repeats this with two or three more utensils. I pick them all up, and we start all over again.

Adrian is using pointing very deliberately now in his communication. Sometimes he wants things. (Food, for example, that he cannot reach.) Sometimes I think he just wants to show us stuff – and then I usually say the name of what he’s pointing at, and say something more about it. He can also communicate by taking things in his own hands. When I’m holding him he sometimes takes hold of one of my hands and moves it away.

He understands waving and good-bye. I make a point of waving and saying good-bye when I leave in the morning, so he knows that I’m going. He doesn’t wave back immediately, but after considering the situation for a while he waves, too. Today he waved good-bye when our cleaner left, when the only clue was us shouting good-bye: none of us waved, and we weren’t even in the same room as her.

Adrian reacts very clearly to his name. Usually I have to repeat it a few times but then he turns towards me and looks at me.

He likes mimicking me, and finds it even more amusing when I mimic him. One day when I was scraping off old glue from the leg of chair, he grabbed a table knife of his own and poked at another leg of the same chair. He found it inordinately amusing when I once mimicked him by taking the other end of the wooden spoon he was chewing on, and putting it in my mouth. But then HE tried putting it in my mouth, which was not very comfortable, so I’m not doing that again. Sometimes he tries to put his dummy in my mouth, and he likes to play on my lips.

He has shown very little interest in walking or standing. When he is standing, holding on to my hand, and wants to go somewhere, he lets go of my hand, drops and crawls. But a few days ago he tried a baby cart walker at playgroup and since then he’s been slightly more likely to take a few steps while holding on to the side of a chair or a cupboard. He is most likely to try standing on his own when he is standing on a chair or a stool.

He’s started using his dummy at night again, sometimes: sucks on the breast but seems dissatisfied, and when I give him the dummy he turns the other side, snuggles up close to me and quiets down. In general he goes to sleep very easily. He may object while we’re on the way up the stairs with him (makes me think of Ingrid’s “I’m not tired at all!”) but once we’re in bed he is happy to go to sleep, and often does so very quickly.

It only takes long when he is too wound up, when there’s too much activity and excitement just before bedtime. Then he can spend 10 to 15 minutes just getting all the energy out: sits up, waves his arms, lies down, kicks his legs, and repeats that 25-second cycle again and again. Then he finally realizes he is tired, lies down, and is asleep within seconds. Motion is also his tiredness signal: when he starts crawling around, climbing up, climbing down, asking to be picked up, etc etc at an increasing pace, we know it is time to put him to bed.

We’ve turned his stroller to face forward because he very clearly prefers it this way.

He is one size ahead of Ingrid at this age: Ingrid’s first boots were too small for him and he is now wearing the shoes Ingrid wore at 18 months. And the jacket and hat that Ingrid had during her second winter (in London) are almost too small for him.

I think his first molar is on its way.

Today I ate my first cheese sandwich since I went milk-free last November. It was good.

Now Adrian is sleeping like crap, waking all the time. Either it’s because of the cheese, or it’s because of all the commotion here today because of Ingrid’s birthday party.

To be continued.

We celebrated Adrian’s birthday today.

Well, it wasn’t that much of a celebration really… he does like to have people around him but an actual birthday party with the whole extended family would be too much for him. And perhaps for the family, too, considering that they’d be invited back here for a second party a month from now. So we saved the partying for Ingrid’s birthday and just had some cake today, and invited my mum.

Except that we ate the cake after Adrian went to bed (which he did early because he had slept badly both last night and today during the day). And my mum mostly played with and read for Ingrid rather than Adrian, since Ingrid appreciates her company a lot more.

So really Adrian just had an ordinary Sunday, and the rest of us shamelessly used his birthday as an excuse to have fun. But I don’t think he minded.

Adrian’s current favourite game is increasing entropy. Nature abhors a vacuum; Adrian apparently abhors excessive order. When I stack three blocks on top of each other, he picks them down, one by one. He doesn’t just hit the stack to make it fall, no, he carefully picks it apart. When I put his 8 stacking cups inside each other, he picks them out, one by one. I line them up in two rows; he knocks each one over so it doesn’t stand straight any more.

He has also learned to bang things against each other. Sometimes he does this with toys, but it is even more fun to do this with cutlery. We have heavy cutlery with solid handles, and they make a lot of noise when banged against the table.

Until very recently he only used cutlery for banging, but now he suddenly developed an interest for using them for eating, too. This morning at breakfast he took the spoon I had handed to him and started poking at my food with it. When I loaded the spoon for him, he got it in his mouth and managed to lick off some food. (Oat porridge with blackcurrants. Yum.)

We’ve tried introducing a bowl and a spoon before, but they’re both tricky: he wants to investigate them from all angles, so the food falls out and little gets into the mouth. But perhaps this was the wrong end to begin from: spoons and bowls are for spoon-fed babies. For a BLW baby, forks may be easier to get started with. So for lunch today we gave him a fork for his food. He can’t yet spear any food on it, so we do that part for him, but he had no trouble putting the fork in his mouth or getting the food off – laughing all the way as if this was the best thing ever.

He still likes climbing. Most of the time, when I want to take him upstairs, I lift him over our jury-rigged “gate” and then he dives for the stairs, away from my arms, so he can climb up himself. In a new place with no toys or other objects to play with, he will immediately explore all climbing and standing opportunities. He will climb up on the step stool in our kitchen, and on our bed. In trains and buses he will fight with his whole being to be let out of the stroller or baby carrier so he can instead stand up on a seat. He will climb up into shop windows in shops, if given free rein, and stand up on park benches.

With most of these, I let him climb, with various amounts of supervision. He is not overconfident (yet?) and won’t forget, for example, that he is on a stool and step sideways. And none of these places are so high that a fall would lead to serious damage ’ perhaps a banged head but no broken bones. The stairs is the only place where I am always right behind him and don’t let him climb on his own.

I’m less happy about his new ability to climb out of his highchair and onto the kitchen table, not so much because he will fall but because everything else would fall or be sat upon. So we can no longer leave him unattended there, and have to take him out of the chair as soon as he makes it clear he is done.

Climbing up is easier but he is also slowly learning to climb down from things. He can’t yet get down from step stools, but he can get down backwards from our bed and from the sofa.

He also climbs around when nursing. He sits, then kneels, then sits with one leg underneath him and one somewhere else, then stands up… The weirdest nursing position he has used was standing up and then bending forward from the waist – not quite 90 degrees but maybe 60, i.e. pretty far forward – staying upright by planting his face on my chest, and letting his arms dangle and wave around.

He wanders around in his sleep. When I go to the bedroom at night, he is never where I left him. Almost always I find him lying across the bed, with his head towards Eric’s side and his feet towards mine. Usually he sleeps on his tummy, either flat or with his bottom up in the air. Sometimes he then lists to one side and leans his bum onto a pillow or a warm body. When he’s napping with Eric he likes to burrow his head into Eric’s armpit. With me, especially when he wakes at night and has trouble going back to sleep, he likes to lie on his right side across the bed, with his bum and his feet against me, and his head away from me, sort of as if he was sitting on my chest.

He still likes being carried in a sling or baby carrier. When he is out with Eric, he is content to stay in the stroller, or so I’m told. With me, he sometimes accepts the stroller but more often he wants to sit in a baby carrier. I suppose he knows that with Eric, he doesn’t really have any choice, and he’s OK with that.

I carry Adrian for many reasons. Sometimes for the closeness: when I’ve been away from him all day, and then take him out for a quick trip to the supermarket I’d rather hold him close than at arm’s length. Sometimes for convenience, especially when there are stairs, hills, or narrow spaces to be navigated. Sometimes for the safety of things around him: on my back he is further away from stuff he shouldn’t touch (especially in small cramped shops) than when he’s in the stroller. Sometimes to keep him calm: when he wants out of the stroller, he often wriggles if I hold him in my arms, but is somewhat quieter on my back.

He hates lying down on his back for nappy changes. He screams as if he was tortured, and fights us and flees as soon as he can. I try to get as much as possible done without putting him down on his back: unsnapping the poppers on his clothes, taking off his trousers, even taking off the wet nappy. Sometimes I can entice him to stand still in one place long enough so I can actually put on a dry nappy with him standing up. But with dirty nappies there is no option; if I let him go he will sit down on the floor and there will be poop everywhere, so I have to put him down and listen to him scream. Toys, singing, silly faces, no distraction works.

To counterbalance this torture, I often let him loose without a nappy when I’ve cleaned him up. He loves that part. The moment I let him go, he usually laughs and crawls away from me. Then he makes a game out of crawling away when I call him back or follow him, looks over his shoulder and giggles at me and races away. We call it his chasing game. Unfortunately he often pees small puddles on the floor, so I can’t let him go free without constantly watching him.

He likes waving and smiling and babbling at people. He’s learned that this usually gets a pleasant response.

He likes my mouth. He pokes at my lips and my tongue, and hooks his fingers around my teeth. Sometimes he puts stuff in my mouth.

For a week or two he really liked playing with and chewing on Ingrid’s paint brushes, and my old toothbrush. That seems to have ended as suddenly as it came.

He likes pointing with his finger but I’m not sure if he actually points at any particular object, or just points. He likes holding out objects towards me and triumphantly announcing “täääh!”, but not giving them to me. He just likes to show them off I think.

Adrian’s favourite foods are puffed rice cakes and wafers. You can’t go wrong with these. Prunes and meatballs are also safe bets. With fruit his taste is unpredictable: some days he has no interest in bananas, other days he eats a whole banana in a single sitting.

By Mats Halldin [GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday the Estonian playgroup got started for this season. For Ingrid it clashed with a birthday party, so Adrian and I went on our own. As usual, Adrian loved the new environment and the crowds and the action. But afterwards when we got home he was pretty knackered.

This was also my first long outing with him without a stroller. I’ve been doing shorter trips with him on my back, especially to the supermarket, so by now I am pretty confident that it works well. He used to not like back carries when he was younger but now he has no objections. And he is tall enough to be able to almost look over my shoulder, or around me, which also means that I can reach him to give him the dummy when needed. For all the stuff we need to bring with us, I take our trusty IKEA shopping trolley.

This is a much more mobile setup than a stroller. Yes, I know, a stroller is a contraption on wheels that exists in order to provide mobility – but on steep hills, escalators, and cobblestoned streets, it can be suboptimal. (The photo here shows what our destination looks like – the entrance to the Estonian school is at the far end of the house on the left, almost at the top of the hill.) Without Ingrid and without the stroller, I think it took us 15 minutes to get from the train station to the playgroup, instead of the usual 25.

I let Ingrid paint my face again today, while Adrian and Eric had gone out for a walk. When they came back and Adrian saw me with my painted face, he was shocked into speechlessness. Rather than crawling or leaning towards me to be picked up, like he usually does, he sat quietly in Eric’s arms and just stared at me, without making a sound. Then he picked and poked and pulled at my face for a while. Then we nursed, after which he poked some more. When I washed off the paint after dinner, he was quite happy to see my real face again.

Admittedly Ingrid’s rough brushwork tends to lead to scary-looking results, even when she chooses a non-threatening design to imitate. This time the design she was guided by was a cute kitten. The outcome… more like a bloody ghost.

Many of our neighbours, friends and acquaintances have been asking us about the remodelling – Are you done now? How did it turn out inside? What exactly did you do? – so we decided to invite them all to view our home in its new incarnation. Today we had a houseviewing party. Well, not quite a party, a houseviewing afternoon with coffee and biscuits. Lots of people came, we had a lovely time, and lots of biscuits got eaten. Now we’re all knackered. Except for Ingrid, who came into her second wind some time around 7pm and was still singing and hammering at the piano at 8.30.

We put up before-and-after photos of the house for the guests to look at. Going through the photos was interesting – already I myself am starting to forget what the house felt like before we started changing it. (I’ll be posting more of them here, too.)

Adrian was feeling quite a bit better today. He was sort of unwell on Friday, and really ill on Saturday, with a fever and a runny nose, and barely sleeping at night. Last night he slept a bit better, and today he actually had enough energy to crawl around and play and look at all the people. He loved the crowd so much that he barely slept at all during the afternoon.

The stairs that were of so little interest to Adrian last month are now very interesting. One day he discovered that he could go up the stairs and he immediately proceeded to climb all the way up (with me just behind him). No practice needed.

Now we have barred the bottom of the stairs, using a stylish solution consisting of one chinup bar and one shower curtain bar. I don’t really worry about him losing his balance or not being able to climb – but he hasn’t yet learned that the floor is not always there behind him, so he could decide halfway up that it’s time to sit down, and sit down on thin air.

He’s also already found the ladder up to Ingrid’s play house and tried climbing that. I wish the surroundings were safer and softer for any falls – I don’t mind him climbing, but I do mind him climbing in a place where a fall could lead to a concussion or a cracked skull.

Other fun stuff includes kitchen drawers and cabinets. He knows very well how they open, but has some trouble making it actually happen on his own: the drawers glide too easily for him, while the cabinet doors require a bit more balance than he has. So I usually help him a little bit. It’s a good way to keep him occupied while I’m busy in the kitchen. The best cabinet is the one with all our (empty) food containers and picknick bottles; the one with pots and pans is the least interesting one.

The kitchen is also good for baths. The sink works so well for bathing him that we haven’t even tried the tub again. He’s at a convenient height for us, the sink is easy to fill and empty, the worktop is great for bath toys etc, and Ingrid can sit in the other sink right next to him.

As for actually eating in the kitchen, well, he’s been so skilled at feeding himself for a while now that there’s not much new to say. He has now also mastered his sippy cup; water mostly ends up in his mouth and not on his tray. We haven’t tried introducing plates or bowls or cutlery yet, but I’m starting to think that perhaps we could/should try soon.

We still complement food with breastfeeding. He nursed a lot during our vacation. Then during my first week back at work his nursing was a bit erratic, while he got used to me being away during the day. Now we’re settling into a more predictable pattern again. Nurse in the morning as he wakes; get some expressed milk during the day; nurse frequently during the afternoon and evening; nurse a few times during the night.

He’s pretty distractible during the day and is completely unable or unwilling to staying still while nursing. He climbs around on the sofa and on myself, pulls at my clothes, looks around whenever someone passes. It’s like a gym session. For the last evening feed we go up to the bedroom: it is much easier for him to focus when we’re in a quiet, dark room.

At night he sleeps pretty much as he’s always done. He wakes for nursing once around 10 or 11 in the evening; nurses thirstily and efficiently for five minutes, and then immediately goes back to sleep. Usually he does the same once or twice more during the night. Then at some point between 6 and 7 he wakes for the day.

During the day he now takes two naps. A long one at around 9 or 9.30 in the morning, often lasting an hour and a half, and then a shorter one in the afternoon, around 2pm, maybe 40 minutes or so.

If he’s really tired, he sometimes rests in a sling for half an hour between 5 and 6pm. He likes that a lot; when I bring out a sling or baby carrier he gets all excited and makes happy noises at me.

He’s not averse to sitting in a stroller when we’re out, but when we’re someplace new or crowded, he often wants to be carried instead, so I always pack a baby carrier of some sort when we leave home for more than a quick trip to the supermarket. He likes front carries best, especially for sleeping, but back carries work OK as long as I move around with him. The ring sling he doesn’t like much at all.

When he’s tired, he often shows it by pulling at his hair and sort of slapping his head, or rubbing his eyes and face. As he is often tired towards the end of dinner, it’s not uncommon for dinner to end with him smearing food all over his face and hair. Another sign of tiredness is that he does not want to be on the floor at all and demands to be picked up immediately.

He hates having his hands and face wiped after eating, almost as badly as he hates nappy changes. And he’s not very fond of me brushing his teeth, either. Basically he dislikes most things that involves us doing stuff to his body.

The thing that best distracts him during these activities is making funny noises or funny faces at him. He likes looking at our mouths, and – given the chance – to put his fingers in them, pull at our tongues or lips, or poke at our teeth. He also likes making sounds with his own mouth and hands. (What do you call it when you make your lips flutter with your finger, like this? That’s not Adrian in the video, by the way.)

He continues to make varied speech-like sounds, but nothing that I would call word-like. He obviously understands both words and the few signs we use, but doesn’t respond in kind. Or if he does, it is so indistinct that we miss it.

He likes books even better than last month, especially a touchy-feely one with textured patches. I’ve tried reading some very short baby books for him but he will not look at the pictures. He grabs the book from me and turns the pages instead.

He also likes handling DVD cases (grabbing them from the shelf, turning them around, dropping them on the floor) and pens and pencils. Mobile phones are also fun.

There are now palpable 9 teeth: four incisors at the top, four at the bottom (the two new ones barely visible) and the eye tooth that appeared early on but hasn’t progressed much since then.

Favourite foods: meatballs, puffed rice cakes, nectarines, gooseberries.

Milk protein allergy experience of the day: apparently IKEA’s chips (French fries) contain milk. Or perhaps their bread does. I knew McDonald’s has gotten into trouble for having both milk and wheat in their chips but didn’t think that IKEA would do stuff like that. In any case Adrian threw up his entire lunch an hour after eating there. The only things he ate from their menu were bread, carrots, and a few chips.

Counter-intuitive allergy experience of the day: it is safer for me to eat butter than to eat margarine, even though butter is 100% made from milk (OK, water and salt, too). Butter is milk fat only and does not appear to have any significant amounts of milk protein left in it. Not enough to trigger allergic symptoms in Adrian, at least. Margarine on the other hand is an unpredictable mixture of stuff, often including skimmed milk powder or whey powder, both of which do contain milk protein. So when a restaurant serves margarine with their bread, I skip it; when they serve butter, I eat it.