Fireside

Aaron loves the fireplace. When we read Goodnight Moon he likes to point at the fireplace in the bunny's room. On every page.

Last night we started a fire just before his bedtime. He thought it was great fun. He was laughing as Thom was getting it started.

New Pajamas

As Aaron starts to outgrow his 9 month sleepers, I have been in search of 12 month sleepers with snaps down the front. I love snap up jammies. They are easy for diaper changes and don't leave his chest cold during diaper changes like the zippered sleepers.


But for some reason, after nine months, nearly all sleepers are the zippered kind. Carters - one of my favorite brands, doesn't seem to make snap up sleepers beyond the 9 month size.


When I told my mom I was having a hard time finding these sleepers, she couldn't believe me. She went to several stores at a couple of malls and realized I wasn't as crazy as I sounded.


So she not only set out to find me snap up sleepers, but she put her friend Fran on the case, too. Fran found this adorable sleeper on sale at Gymboree's. (The pattern has little toy train tracks with trains.) It is size 12-18 months and is quite form fitting, as you can see. All baby jammies need to be either snug fitting or fire retardant. They come with these big warning labels when they aren't fire retardant making sure you know that it isn't fire retardant and that it should fit snugly. No problem there. Although it looks like a perfect fit, there is plenty of room in the arms and legs for him to get longer.


My mom also found a two piece set that has snaps to hold the top and bottom together. This is like jammies she says she had for her kids as babies, although the ones she had had two rows of snaps so they could expand as the baby grew. How smart! I don't know why they don't make them like that. My only concern with two piece jammies is that Aaron moves around a lot at night and I thought the top would ride up and leave his midsection exposed and cold (since we don't put him down with a blanket). So the two piece jammies with snaps also work for us.

I also found some 12 month sleepers from Under the Nile (they make organic cotton clothing and toys) that snap up (through a 3rd party merchant on Amazon.com), so it's not impossible to find alternatives to the zip up sleepers, but it is a challenge.

Shape Sorting Baby

Aaron has a shape sorter that used to belong to our friends Travis and Tara's son Alex. I thought he might still be too young for it, but we let him play with it and he quickly began to put the green cylinder in the round hole.

Tada!

He can also get it back out again.

He seemed really smart until we realized that he tries to put the square block and triangular piece in the round hole, too.

Future Soccer Player?

When Thom and I were at Target a few weeks ago, we wanted to get Aaron a ball to play with. Just a medium sized rubber bouncy ball. I remember seeing wire bins of them years ago full of colored bouncy balls. But now that I was looking for one, we couldn't find the big bin of balls. When we finally found them on the back wall of the toy section, they all had licensed cartoon characters on them, which is not what we wanted. (Read Buy, Buy Baby if you want to understand my repulsion to licensed characters.)

But then in the sporting goods section, Thom found a child's size soccer ball that was shiny black and white. We decided to get that. Below is the video of Aaron's first response to the ball. He never had this same reaction again, so I'm glad I caught it on video the first time.

Bathtime 2.0

I realized a little late that Aaron had outgrown his infant tub. I didn't want to put him in the big tub just yet, so I found this great inflatable tub. Now he can sit up for bath time and he loves it. He loves to splash and he is obsessed with trying to pull out the plug in the bottom (not that he knows what it is, just that is is something and he has to try to do something with it).

At the end of his last bath, I gave him the container I use to rinse his hair. He has always been obsessed with that, too, but for some reason, I didn't think to just give it to him when I was done with it. He played with it and then ended up dropping it outside of the bathtub.

Bath time used to be a hassle. He had started disliking baths less, which made it a little easier (without all the crying), but it was still difficult in the infant tub. Now that he sits up so well and we can use this little tub, it's much easier for us and he actually has fun with it. Now I can understand why people like giving their babies baths every night. We never bathed him that often (and probably still won't do one every day), but I no longer dread giving him a bath.

Chatterbox

Aaron has been vocal for a long time, but only recently has he taken off with consontants. Before it was all "aaahhs". Now he is doing a lot of "da" "ga", etc. A typical conversation goes like this:

Aaron: Da da da da da da
Mommy: Ma ma ma ma ma
Aaron: Da da da da da

On the plus side, when he won't go to sleep and he's in his crib going "Da da", I tell Thom "He's calling for you."

9 Month Update

Aaron turned 9 months last week. At his checkup, he weighed in at 20.8 lbs, which surprised us since he feels like he gains a pound every time we pick him up. But a friend of ours with a 1 year old said their chubby baby seemed to take forever to go from 19 to 21 lbs, so it must be a normal slowdown. He is now in the 50th percentile for weight and the doctor thought his weigh gain was good. His height is 28 3/4 inches, which is also down around the 50th percentile. She thinks he is en route to a physique like his father - tall and lean.

Aaron is still not crawling, and the doctor was a little worried about this. Since he had trouble sitting up on his own, we've been focused on getting him to sit (which he does really well now). But we probably haven't given him enough time on his tummy (which he's not a big fan of). We have to go back to the pediatrician at 10 months and if he is still not crawling, she may want to refer him to a physical therapist. It seems a little extreme to me since he's advancing overall, but she just wants to be proactive. She said chances are the physical therapist would say he's fine and that she is crazy, but she wants to be sure.

But now that we know that he should be crawling by now, we are actively focusing on that. I did read in one of my books that they need to sit up well before they can crawl, and since he had trouble with that, it stands to reason that he'd crawl later. The book also said that 7-10 months was a normal range for starting to crawl, so I'm not really concerned - just trying to avoid the referral to a physical therapist. Since most of our house has hardwood floors, we have made room in the carpeted dining room for Aaron to move around and play on the floor. He also has an area of our carpeted bedroom where he plays with toys, but we thought he needed somewhere more central.

Her other concern was that when she held him up with his feet on the exam table, he stood on his toes, and/or bounced. She had a hard time getting him to stand flat footed and support himself. No doubt this is a result of spending time each day in his Jumperoo. He has really strong legs, but strong for jumping, not for standing. He should be pulling himself up to standing position which he is not doing. So we are laying off the Jumperoo and giving him chances to stand holding onto furniture. I didn't realize that the 30-45 minutes a day he spent in the Jumperoo (over 2-3 sessions) would have such a strong impact, but apparently he got used to jumping whenever he is in a vertical position. I'm not ready to throw the thing out, but I will definitely be more cognizant with baby #2 (sorry Aaron, you are the experiment).

Other than that, he's doing great. And he only had to have one shot this time, but they did prick his toe for an anemia test.

January already??

I can't believe it is already January again and Aaron is almost 9 months old. This picture of Aaron was taken at the house of our friends Crystal and Eric who hosted a dinner party last weekend for us and 5 other couples (7 couples total). Everyone had a baby, ranging from about 4 months old to 19 months. Crystal and Eric did an amazing job - with all those people and babies, I expected a buffet style dinner, but we had a multi-course, sit down dinner with a beautifully laid table (although I don't think everyone was ever all seated at one time). Before dinner, I fed Aaron in his brand new travel booster seat, strapped to one of Crystal and Eric's barstools.

This past week, Aaron's top two front teeth finally made an appearance. At least one of them did. Last time I checked, I could feel one tooth and the other was nearly there. And he's still chewing on his fingers in the side of his mouth, so I think he's working on even more teeth.

It also seemed about time to introduce some finger foods, so we've been experimenting with a few things. Rice cakes were fun, but he just filled up his mouth with rice puffs without swallowing and we worried about choking, so we'll try that again later. Pieces of ripe banana were well received, but not soft cooked carrots. And just yesterday we tried Cheerios (actually, Trader Joe's "Joe's Os") which were quite entertaining. He didn't get the idea to eat them, but he got a lot of practice with his pincer grasp, pushing them around the high chair tray, dropping them on the floor. He's going to be a great tiddly wink player - he can shoot those things off his tray quite well.

Today, after letting him play with some Os for awhile, I showed him how I ate them, then I gave one to Thom in front of them, and then he let me put one in his mouth. He ate about 3 total. Each time we were watching closely, waiting to make sure he swallowed them (which was hard to tell), and on the edge of our seats whenever he coughed, worried we might have to put into practice what we learned in our CPR/first aid class.

On the 17th, he'll be 9 months, and we can start giving him meat and wheat. I don't care about the meat as much, but the wheat opens up a lot more possibilities for foods, especially now that we are starting on finger foods - pasta, crackers, toast, pancakes...