a tiny step for mankind, but a giant leap for my baby

[oloriel]

Yesterday, Felix discovered reduplicative babbling. Now he will spend long stretches of time testing that new-found ability. He has been practicing his (adorable) little voice for a while now, but now that he can babble "properly", much has changed: instead of demanding input from me, he wants to hear himself talk! And so it goes "dadadaDAdadoydoyda!" and "nganganga" and "lalala" and "yayaya", interspersed with random other syllables. All with a very serious expression on his face as if to say "LISTEN MOMMY THIS IS IMPORTANT". When he is done with a string of syllables, he grins and waits whether anyone replies. Either way, he'll then launch into the next "sentence" - loud if necessary to drown others out. Yesterday we were trying to watch Avatar with the MIL, but not very succesfully because babbling!Felix was just more interesting...
*melts into puddle of linguistic goo*

Yes, you've all been waiting with bated breath for this exciting announcement, I know! :P

Other than that, he has also started to discover his body - favourite parts are, so far, his right ear, his left foot, and (when he is not wearing a diaper) his crotch. And when his fingers find a texture he likes (or finds interesting), be it wood, plastics, glass, different kinds of fabric, paper or skin, he repeatedly closes his hands so his fingertips and -nails brush over the exciting surface. When he kicks his legs and they hit something hard, he'll repeat the experience as well - my heels hurt just from watching. Somewhere in that little brain, I'm sure, all these sensations are filed away by the dozen!
Sometimes he is also succesfully proto-crawling, and the day before yesterday he intentionally turned from his back to his belly for the first time - previously he only did the other way round.
He wants to touch other children now, rather than just smile at them - the "mirror baby" (our bathroom mirror is now full of teeny tiny fingerprints!), our tenant's small daughter, Baby Quinn - whereas when a friendly acquaintance said hello to him in the supermarket today, he first pouted and then wept. He's a bit young to grow shy of strangers! But you never know. Maybe he was just tired.

Unfortunately, after a few weeks of succesfully eating his pureed veggies with great joy and appetite, today he has so far refused them pretty much completely. Same recipe as the past days, so it can't be the taste. And it's not that he isn't hungry because when I offered him my breast instead, he latched onto it at once and sucked as if starving. He just... doesn't want veggies today.
This is a little awkward as our pediatrist found him slightly underweight after all, and suggested that Felix should get veggies (with potatoes and fat) TWICE a day...
Oh well. Maybe he's just overwhelmed by his new abilities and thus longing for something familiar. >_> We will see!

Comments

[etoilepb.livejournal.com]

That's one of the most fun things about babies: you can practically see the gears in their heads turning as they experience new sensations and ideas and file them away into the great vat of human experience. Back in my nannying days I used to love those moments with the 18-month-old where I could visibly see her LEARNING. It was crazy and cool, and one of the reasons I hope to have kids in the future.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

It really is awesome! Now that Felix is so amazed by and curious about everything, I stop and think about things I've been taking for granted for decades just trying to empathise with him. It's like rediscovering the world and all the little things in it! Too cool.

[tuxedo-elf.livejournal.com]

I love the babbling. Marcus likes to say 'abrooo' a lot, usually followed by blowing a raspberry. :P

We decided to skip purees with Marcus and do baby led weaning instead. It's going really well and we rarely have to cook seperate meals! Might be worth a try?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Felix' favourite "word" initially was "erröööh". XD

I'm combining the two, sort of. I'm not "cool" enough to trust entirely on Felix' self-feeding skills yet, though!

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Yay! Babbling Baby!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well, it IS an exciting announcement! He's learned that he controls the sounds he can make, and some of them are like the sounds his grown-ups are always making - soon his first word will stand forth from the babbling, and then there'll be no stopping him.

This is the time to speak and sing in other languages to him, so his brain catches and holds the sounds of them. In his babbling he'll retain the sounds that match the language he hears, and gradually lose the ones that don't. People try to encourage their kids to be bilingual by surrounding them with electronically-reproduced foreign language, but that doesn't work: the nice lady on the TV screen is a moving picture, not a real person, and the noises she makes don't get mapped as 'speech' by the infant brain.

"He's a bit young to grow shy of strangers! But you never know."

About eight months is when that usually starts setting in - varies quite a bit by temperament and experience, of course. Many adults have no awareness of how big, loud, smelly and weid-looking they seem to children, or of how alarming even their 'friendly' overtures can seem to someone a tenth their size - there's no polite way to tell them, either; the only thing is to heed your son's cues and tactfully shield him from interaction he finds distressing.

If Felix doesn't want veggies every day, how about rice cereal, maybe with a tiny trace of butter and/or cream? But in all honesty, breast milk is way better for him than processed grains or potatoes, and vegetables don't have much protein OR carbohydrate, so they're unlikely to make him gain weight.

I would suggest nursing him more often; making sure you are getting all the protein, vitamins and fluids you need: if your milk supply is sufficient, he doesn't actually need any supplemental foods in the first year. Whey protein is the best stuff I know to support the nursing body without packing the belly-fat on. Your own body requires half an ounce of water per day for every pound of your weight, plus enough extra for the volume of milk your baby drinks - if he needs more milk, you need more water.

Anyway, it's much healthier for a baby to be a little on the skinny side, than to be a little on the fat side, because both fat babies and skinny babies both tend to get fatter over time.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I know, right? \o/

The English songs I sing to him tend to be full of non-English words like "Eärendil" and "Silmaril" and "Elbereth" and the like... *shifty eyes*

Yeah, and he's only (almost) half a year old! To be fair, though, she was wearing very blocky glasses, and has a man's hairstyle and a woman's voice - maybe that confused him too much. When he started to cry, she went to a safer distance all by herself, so in a way Felix defended himself, I guess!

I was wondering about that - the pediatrist seems to suspect that my milk isn't sufficient, but much of that can be steered (though I can hardly drink more than I already do - I'm at over 3 litres at the moment, twice as much as would normally be considered sufficient).
I am not certain that he isn't getting enough nourishment, anyway - he poops 2 - 3 times per day ATM, which (supposedly) means that he is getting more nutrients than his body can use. So, yeah...
At any rate, since he refuses veggies at the moment, I'm back to full-time breastfeeding anyway. I'm sure this is just a difficult phase for him and when it's over, he'll be wanting to eat the same stuff that we're having again...

Skinny would not be a problem, it's just that ATM he's a bit too skinny (say the scales). But yeah - he'll likely catch up over time!