Liam Bottle Feeding: Holding Hands and Holding Bottle (2 Videos)

Here's a fun little one, just a snippit of regular daily life around here. He first one shows Liam drinking his bottle while he holds his own hands, and then shows off his standing abilities. The second one shows him with his newfound ability to "hold" his bottle with his own hands.

Let's Give Sitting a Try

We've been holding Liam in a seated position on our laps for some time, giving him some support on the trunk or under the arms. So one morning when he was doing particularly well I got the idea to let him try to do it on his own, with a little help from the Boppy pillow.

He did a pretty good job, just a little slumping to the side.



This early success then paved the way for his first experience using a high chair at a restaurant in Nashville. Again, some definite slumping, but not a total failure.

First Tickles (Video)

One day I was getting ready while Terry was playing with Liam on our bed, and I heard Liam start to regularly "coo." Terry was kissing him on his side by his hips right where his chubby little ham hock meets his belly. And each and every time he kissed him there, Liam cooed his little laugh. It was the very first time that either of us had ever done something that could so routinely get a laugh out of him. In other words, it was parental glory. And he's pretty darn adorable cooing like that.

I like to think of it as Liam's first ever experience being tickled.

Liam Rattle

Here's a little movie of Liam when he was first figuring out his rattle, long before he mastered two-handed play (ok, so "mastered" might be an overstatement). You can see that he shakes the hand with the rattle much more often than he moves the non-rattle hand, and he seems to check out the colorful rattle to see what's going on.

Starting solid foods! (aka rice cereal bath)

He is now taking a little bit of rice cereal mixed with formula before bedtime each night. This began as a really hysterical event where he spit it out, dribbled it out, looked seriously affronted by this inferior "spoon" technology we were foisting on him He has such a darn expressive face, and his arched eyebrows and vague shadow of discontent seemed to say: what is wrong with you people and this stupid little metal thing? hey, where'd that amazing bottle thing go? why aren't we using that?

That first night he wound up wearing most of it. I think I had to swab some out of his nose even. He started crying about halfway through the tiny serving (about 1.5-2 Tbsp) so we dumped the rest into his bottle and fed him his night bottle.

The second night was marginally better, but still no great triumph. The third night was a little better. He actually leaned forward with his mouth open each time, but then when he made contact with the spoon and the rice cereal his face screwed up into a look of consternation. He would reach up and grab the spoon in his little fist while I was trying to feed him.

The fourth night was something of a breakthrough. He's still no great expert at the whole spoon thing, so I spend a lot of time putting the food in his mouth, then scooping it up off his chin and putting it in again. But last night he finished his entire serving without crying or losing it. What a champ! And he seems to get the connection between the spoon and eating, because when he holds the spoon in his own hand, he puts the big round end into his mouth, but never the other way around.

Terry and I are both super excited to move into the realm of food. The pediatrician says that after four straight days of him doing well on rice cereal (eating the whole thing without negative reaction), we can move on to introducing pureed veggies! So if all goes well tonight, we can do veggies as soon as tomorrow. It is just another step on the road of watching our little guy become a little person. And watching him experience the world for the first time is a precious and wonderful thing.

Random details from the texture of life

Sometimes I just feel like I want to get down the little details that seem so much a part of the texture of life now, because I can feel already that even ten years from now I might not remember. I had all the best intentions of keeping a diary from pregnancy through... I don't know...college? And as soon as the not sleeping and working and keeping baby alive became a reality I realized I just didn't have the time or presence of mind to do that.

I have worked on Liam's baby book a fair amount already, mostly because I remember LOVING my baby book from a very young age. Maybe it was a particularly time-distended form of narcissism, but I just loved looking at those pictures of me young, of my parents smiling at me, seeing what people wore then, reading what I was like, what I did. So I have some of his pages lovingly assembled already, and I'm geeked out in advance about being able to fill in those pages for "first halloween" or "first christmas" and eventually (gasp) "first day at school" and more.

But I also realized that I should probably forgive myself for my inability to keep a journal, because essentially this blog is not only for you all, friends and family far and wide, but also for us in the future. Like today it is a cold rainy Fourth of July in Chicago. Terry took Liam downtown to the Art Institute to see the new modern wing. Liam seems to be a fan of art. He likes to stare at the paintings we have in our house from Ghana and his Aunt Bri. When Terry printed out different black and white images for him as a newborn, his favorite to stare at was one from Piet Mondrian. Mondrian is nice enough, and there are some abstract works that I like. But mostly I can't stand art that looks like my infant son could have done it, so I am using my time to work on a dissertation chapter.

So here are some random thoughts that I've been loving about our little family lately:

Nicknames come and go. We don't use "gremlin" or "fillet o'fish" so much anymore. Now if he's a cute sweet little guy we call him "the bugger" or sometimes "the little bugger." If he's being crabby or fussy for reasons we find confusing (this is probably our fault, not his) we call him "the critter" which can also be usefully turned into an adjective, as in "he was really critterific last night."

He still LOVES his play gym. We rotate in and out different things to hang from the top to keep him interested. Totally without warning a few days ago he became a manic "side roller." While in his crib or on his back in the gym he whips his legs up and then over to the side. This movement is usually enough to allow him to play footsie with the bars of his crib or the arches of his play mat. Often he gets his top half mostly over as well. So but for that tricky arm underneath him this would be a roll. And once he mastered this little side move, suddenly he was constantly doing it. So when I put him into bed at 6 pm last night I put him with his head to the right side of the crib. When I checked on him at 10 his head was facing the other direction. Neither Terry nor I had moved him, he'd just squirmed himself around. Once in the middle of the night he was making a bunch of noise and when I went in I found him perpendicular in his crib, laying the short way across. Like Austin Powers trying to make a y-turn in a short space, Liam was sort of stuck half way through his super rotation. I gently reoriented him the correct way in the crib and he went peacefully back to sleep.

Terry will often report that in the middle of the night he actually has started sleeping on his side while sucking his fist, fingers or thumb. He looks incredibly darling like this, so the two of us with stand quietly at Liam's door peeking in and gushing in hushed voices about what a cute little bugger he is. We had friends over for dinner last night, and I actually dragged some of the other ladies to the door to peek in just to bask in his cuteness, as he lay there on his side sleeping peacefully.

For about a week and a half or so he has also taken to "holding" his bottle while being fed. This is not as glamorous as it maybe sounds. It is a lot more like having a druken copilot. But when he is sucking eagerly on the bottle with his little hand holding it next to mine there is something very sweet about it.

And even before he took to holding it while eating, he learned how to swat it away when he was done. Before this when he was done he would purse his lips shut and if you kept pursuing him and got it back into his mouth he'd make an irritated face and push the nipple out with his tongue. He'd even turn his head to the side to avoid the bottle. And then came the hand swipe. At first I thought it was just random movement, because his hands are always flying this way and that. But then I realized that the hand swatting would happen once or twice when I tried to re-offer him a bottle towards the end. Then if I kept it up the hand swatting would happen in coordination with any of the other signs of being done: pursed lips, turning head, irritated face.

Liam's First 7th Inning Stretch (Video!)

Hopefully I'll get my act together in the next couple of weeks and post some of the little video snippits we've been taking of our favorite chubster. This first video comes to us courtesy of Emily, who had her fancy camera at the ready when Liam went to his first ever Cubs game this spring. You'll also see Davis Baker, and his parents Jason and Sarah. Jason is a college roommate of Terry's, and their baby Davis was born five months before Liam.

So here it is, a sort of confused but alert little baby rooting for the Cubbies.