Booogity booogity boo

Ok, so this isn't Liam making ghost sounds. But Terry taught him to make funny noises and...well it is easier to watch than describe. But now he wants to do it all the time!

Pumpkin Farm

Ready to go to the pumpkin farm in a cute little outfit for the unusually chilly day.


Konked out on the way there.






In the corn maze.


Cute little baby with pumpkins


Ferocious dragon with pumpkins

Turning pages, sitting in crib, and reports of scooting

So it seems my baby lives to prove me wrong. I thought that wasn't supposed to start until high school. First there was taking him to the doctor at 8 months and saying that he was only rolling in one direction and having the kid roll forward and then backward on the doc's table 45 seconds later.

Now it appears he may have been practicing scooting forward on his belly while no one was watching. Terry swears he saw him do it this morning. "Scooting? forward? not rolling?" I ask. He swears it was so. I've yet to see it, and rolling still seems the preferred method of locomotion.

Two other firsts happened this morning. I was reading him "Brown Bear" board book just before his morning nap. And as I was getting ready to turn a page, I would put my finger behind the page. When I did that, he would lean over and try to peek behind the page, then he would grab it with his hand and turn it. At first I thought it was just an accident, but with each and every page, as soon as I picked the next page off the stack of other pages, he'd reach out, grab it, and turn it from right to left. He never tried to turn the pages in the other direction, which seems like an indication that it isn't accidental, but a learned behavior. I was so excited about Brown Bear that I got out Pajama Time to see if he would do it again. Sure enough, the kid's a page turner!

(I am filing this behavior away in my brain next to "faucet turner" in "things that should keep you from worrying your kid is cognitively delayed" for the next time I'm tempted to go off the deep end of worry for my little guy).

After his story I put him in his crib to try to get a nap in and was cleaning up in the kitchen while Terry got ready for work. Liam had been quiet for a while, so I asked Terry to peek in on him and see if he was asleep. After a pause, Terry said, "Come here, you have to see this." I put my head into the room, and what do I see? Our kid has pulled himself up to a sitting position in the crib! He is happily holding onto the rail of his crib, with his little feet sticking out the slats. I lower my face down to his and smile at him. He gives me a gummy smile back and happily starts chewing on the rail.

Him pulling up to sitting by himself is exciting because it is a sign that he is learning to better manipulate his environment to help him get around. But it is really really going to suck for our backs. Because the safety guides say that when they can pull themselves to seated you have to lower the crib mattress so they don't fall out. That means we are going to be hauling 25lbs of baby fat from much farther down.

I might have to get one of those thick brown leather weight-lifter belts that the studly guys at the gym use.

Mom-onesty: On not crawling and preschool waiting lists

My mother-in-law Denyse, a super mom in her own right, got me a book called "After Birth" and it is a hysterical collection of stories from moms and dads about dealing with the less glorious sides of parenthood. Reading it frequently made me snort with laughter, and occasionally cry, and from time to time gasp and recognize myself in the story.

So in the interest of that, of full disclosure and breaking down the wall of perfect motherhood that weighs so heavily on us that we should all probably get free samples of prozac when we take these kiddos home from the hospital:

Today is a crappy mom day. I feel wimpy and insecure about the whole works. I am tired and sick and that doesn't help. I feel insecure that Liam still isn't crawling. He gets himself around now, doing little laps of the living room and occasionally venturing into the kitchen or dining room. But he pushes himself up on his arms or on all fours, checks out the terrain, and then flops down into rolling position and steam rolls himself wherever he wants to go.

And I feel deeply deeply insecure about this. Maybe it is all okay. Maybe a flood of better people than I will write in with comments telling me to chill out and not worry.

But it is hard to watch other kids pass him by. There is a January baby in his playgroup who has been crawling since he was 6 months old. When I first saw that I was startled but reminded myself that it was okay if he was early. Now all the other January babies are crawling, and one kid born at the end of February is both crawling competently and pulling herself up to a standing position. Meanwhile there sits Liam, good natured and smiling as his playmates wiz by around him. He sits. He goes onto all fours and rocks, and then he sits again. or he rolls. But scooting forward? Nah. Nothing doing.

At the last playgroup there was another baby who was born within days of Liam's due date who is not crawling exactly, but is scooting himself forward in a sort of military crawl.

Today we toured a montessori that accepts babies. My heart just aches to give him that opportunity. I can still remember with startling clarity what my montessori was like, and I only went there through first grade. The rest of elementary school is a blur, but I have tons of memories of Montessori. When we toured the preschool they have beads for counting and learning multiples that are the same things we had in my classroom growing up. it is just such a rich exploratory environment, and I truly believe it is the seeds of self motivated learning that are still with me today.

We were told chances are close to nothing that he will get in until about 2 years from now, but we're on the waiting list. The reason for this was in evidence: the other parents on our tours were women who looked scarcely pregnant. And it was the first taste of the effort to secure your schild every advantage. If I really wanted to get Liam into this Montessori I would have had to call to get on the waiting list as soon as I saw that second pink line on the pregnancy test. They actually told us that there is a better chance we could get our as-yet-imagined-nonexistent second child into the program before Liam gets in, and then Liam would have an advantage as a sibling of scooting up the waiting list. Sigh.

But when talking about the infant room and cruiser room and when they move, the director told us that they move when each child is ready. And then she told an anecdote where a third child with lots of siblings to carry him who never got any tummy time didn't crawl until he was 8 months old, so he was in the infant room until then. And my heart sank and I thought "oh please dont ask me if my big giant 18-month clothes wearing baby can crawl, because the answer is still no."

It isn't so much that I think he will never learn to crawl before he goes to college. Its more that in my heart I worry that his inability to figure it out reflects some deeper cognitive issue, and dredges up a host of sadness and guilt about his early birth that seems to be always available just beneath the surface. I just want him to be totally okay. I hope and believe this worry will go away, or diminish at least, but somehow I need more tangible evidence to banish it...like seeing him do linear algebra.

Liam Learns to Work the Sink

As I've mentioned before, now that Liam gets messier when he eats his dinner, we have started a habit of taking him to the bathroom sink after dinner to wash him up. I rinse off his hands and face, and then he likes to play in the water in the sink for a little while.

For the past few days every time I turn off the water he looks up, puzzled, and starts grabbing parts of the sink. For a while, logically, he would grab the actual faucet nozzle itself and sort of pull on it. You could almost hear his little gears turning, trying to figure out how to make the water come back.

Well, last night, he worked it out. And you can see the results. Perhaps a little engineer in training here...

Liam plays peekaboo, with himself

This weekend we got to see Liam's buddy Davis, who is now over a year old. When Davis plays peekaboo, he clearly understands the spoken cues. When his dad says "where's Davis?" he hides his eyes behind his hands.

Liam does not do that. But he does love to look at himself in the mirror, and he will laugh if you play a game with him where you appear and disappear. Sometimes I'll duck behind a wall and then pop out.

But here he is playing peekaboo with himself (with the help of his babysitter Eliza) in the little mirror on his playmat.

State Fair, Unhappy Baby

Our friend Rebecca stayed with us for a few days, and before she left she said to me that when she saw all those happy pictures of Liam, she always wondered if I was just being really selective about what I put up for everyone to see. But after staying with us for a few days she said she realized that he really was that happy. And, in perhaps one of the sweetest compliments ever, she said that she hopes the baby she is now pregnant with is as sweet and happy as Liam.

And really for the most part that is completely true.

But just in case you were wondering, sometimes he gets tired and overstimulated and fed up and well, cries like a baby. We took him to the Tennessee State Fair. I thought maybe he would be old enough to be interested in seeing some of the animals. We walked around with him for a while. The thing he seemed to like best were the colorful quilts. While walking through the quilt exhibition we accidentally wandered through a tiny tykes beauty show, where toddlers barely older than Liam toddled across the stage in tutus and tiaras. It walked that fine line between cute and creepy. And Liam really worked the room, winking at all the ladies.

He was pretty indifferent to the animals. But by that time he was probably getting a little tired. After the animal barns we stopped to get some super greasy traditional fair food. I got a corn dog and a lemonade. For the first time, Liam was emphatic and insistent about wanting to drink from the same cup I was. I let him chew on the straw and he seemed super excited about that. As Terry put him back in the carrier and walked him out of the fairgrounds, Liam would from time to time lean dramatically in my direction to grab the straw to put it in his mouth.

I was disappointed I had forgotten the camera in the car, because I wanted a picture of the baby at the fair. As we got to the parking lot I grabbed the camera and the baby just lost it. I snapped a quick picture (in the larger picture there are some cars and a peek at carnival rides in the background), and then we put him in the carseat.

In cute little overalls in honor of the State Fair, this baby has finally had too much.

Approximately 35 seconds later. Sleeping like a log.

If you are traumatized by that crying picture, go ahead and treat yourself to a little Gratuitous Baby Laughter.