Sitting In the Crib

Gavin has been practicing many new skills such as crawling and sitting. His crawl is very similar to one of those autonomous robots you see on science shows, a.k.a. the creature crawl. In the realm of sitting, Gavin has much improved over the past week going from pushing up from on his side into a sitting position to backing himself up into a sitting position, which is oh-so-much-easier as well as being the quicker method. When he awoke early on Wednesday morning, I just knew I would walk in to find him sitting up in his crib for the first time.

The nights have been getting warmer, so Kiersten dressed him in his PJ's minus his usual sleep sack. Along with his new-found sitting skill, this freedom-of-movement was all he needed to achieve this crib-based milestone. He is not pulling up yet, although we are finding many encouraging games to goad him into it, so walking in on him peeking over the crib rail is an exciting moment that is still over the horizon.

Back to Messy Meals

In the beginning of feeding Gavin solid foods, things were very messy. After a while, though, he got the hang of things, we got the hang of things, and we all settled into a routine where all the food transferred from the jar to Gavin's mouth made it into his tummy. Of course, there were the occasional return-to-sender moments, but they were fairly infrequent or were small in quantity.

We recently turned a corner in the food department and are experimenting with various foods that are not the standard baby puree. Gavin's current favorite item, and mine as well, are Dr. Praeger's Spinach Pancakes. Yesterday, he even stuck his thumb in the pancake, pulled out some spinach chunks (no plums in this case) and deftly ate the the spinach off his thumb. I am calling it the first official moment that Gavin fed himself at dinner. But, we have returned to the days of the messy dinner until Gavin practices this new skill and we find our new equilibrium.

(Mountain) Lions and Tigers and Bears

For Mom's birthday, Gavin really wanted to go to the zoo to celebrate. So ten months after landing in Colorado, we finally made a trip into Denver to grant Gavin's wish.

Since he is the Kelty hiking carrier's biggest fan, we opted to treat the day as a hike instead of having Gavin use the stroller. We realized immediately that although we were the only family to opt for the baby/toddler on the back, it was the best decision because Gavin was able to see the animals over the fences wherever we went. Gavin got a special treat during snack time as there were free-roaming peacocks on the lawn where we stopped to setup our mini-picnic.

His favorite animals seemed to be peacocks, rhinoceroses, seals, fish, and polar bears. In all other cases, he was more interested in people-watching than animal watching. In the case of the peacocks, Gavin was so interested by them that when the peacocks let out one of their heard-around-the-zoo calls, he tried to echo their call back. His final achievement of the trip was to say "fish", pronounced "fsss", and make the sign at the same time.

Building Towers Is Child's Play

For months, Gavin has played with the blocks in the picture. This amounted to chewing on them, banging them into other toys, and throwing them as far as possible. While I have showed him how to build a tower on several occasions, all those structures were immediately leveled by Gavin's incredible right hook.

Tonight, Kiersten and I were discussing the fact that Gavin had not experimented with stacking his blocks. At the very moment we talked about this milestone, Gavin expertly lifted a block with two hands and placed it on top of another block. "The crowd went wild!" is an understatement. As Gavin has caught onto Mommy and Daddy's cheering as a positive sign, he was encouraged by our whooping and clapping and continued the exercise by picking up the third block and topped off the block tower.

It was a thrilling and bizarre moment. Gavin spent the rest of the evening practicing stacking with vary success. He is pictured here with his third successful stack.