Gametes In Love

… he would SO be sporting a set of these right now:

I have girl crush ‘cuz of these shoes right now 🙁

Hmn… how much therapy do you think G would require later in life if I had him wear these?

G is now 9 months old. My little man’s on his way to becoming a toddler, which is both really cool and kinda sad. I miss the little wrinkly ball he used to be already.

His 9 month check-up was pretty uneventful. He’s tracking on his curve for height and weight, but his head is now in the 50th percentile. Our child sure has one big noggin’, so there better be a smarty brain baking in there. It certainly explains why his clothes fit just fine on his body, but I have one heck of a time getting his head through. It’s OK though: Dr. M assures us G will grow into his head. If not, at least he has a good prospect at a job in the Charlie Brown movies.

For his 9 mo birthday G got a visit from the sniffles faerie. He’s had a runny nose for the last two days. Unfortunately for us, that means a whiney little man. Unfortunately for G, that means that the bulb syringe has been coming out and he can’t run away from a box of tissues.  The kid protects his boogies as if they were gold and hates the sucker with a passion. You’d swear we were sucking out his brain from the face and sounds he makes. I’m just hoping he won’t be getting any worse.

R, Special-K and G — pics of an afternoon of fun.

and just think — a few months ago they were THIS tiny:

Boy are you lucky — you get 3 for the price of 1 today 🙂

We went to the Zoo today. Of all the things we saw, G liked the swings at the Zoo playground the most.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYOGraC7VgU]

G had the hiccups earlier this week. You know how “they” say to try to scare hiccups away? Yeah, that only makes G laugh.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDjHl_FPjzY]

G has a Sofie (the Giraffe) of his very own and he’s figured out how to make her squeek.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp5xKjB5qc0]

We spent the day yesterday cleaning up our home. We tidied up, vacuumed, and did laundry. Well, come laundry folding time (a task I HATE by the way), I was on the floor with G by my side making my piles of clothes. I was doing pretty well with the folding under I turned around to see this:

Yes, mommy has a little helper — he wanted to fold the t-shirts himself. Doesn’t he look Oh so proud of himself? I’m excited at the prospect for someone else wanting to do folding. Child labor laws don’t apply when it’s your own kid, right?

In other news, we’re moving forward with enclosing the patio off of our master bedroom. The cleaning of the house, believe it or not is because of our renovation. You see, because we live in a planned development we not only need to apply for a building permit, but we have to get our project be approved by the city planning commission first. This means a formal, public hearing where we have to notify our 300 ft radius worth neighbors. We needed to hold an open-house and give our neighbors an opportunity to come and talk to us about our project. Yes, all this to enclose a 11×12 ft existing patio, in the back of our house, not seen by anyone. No neighbors came, which is just fine by me. I got exactly what I wanted out of this week-end: no renovation complaints, with the added bonus of a clean house. Now wish us luck!

Look at this!

Does this look to you like the sight of a child that is taking a nap? Yeah — I didn’t think so.

This is G, just minutes ago (and still going) up in his crip trying to go down for his mid-day nap. And he’s having none of it. He’s been clapping his feet, swinging his monkey and generally having a grand ole’ time up in there. Everything but napping of course.

My favorite part of the image? The pacifier stuck up in his diaper while he was rolling over. Classic!

You know what I wish baby stores did? Test-drive programs for baby gear.

I want to be able to rent a different stroller each week and test-drive it around my ‘hood to see how it fits in my lifestyle. Sure, a stroll around the baby store is fine, but my kid might not like sleeping in that stroller; or it might not fit in my car; or go up and down stair quite right. Sure, I can spend a grand on a fancy Bugaboo, but is it $900 better than a Graco for how I live my life? I tell you rental programs could be a hit!

Second up — baby carriers. These little items can be the difference between graying hair within baby’s first birthday, or not. A carrier that baby likes is a God-send. We went through 4 before we found one G likes, we like and is easy to put on. I’m thankful that two of them were hand-me-downs from friends so that I didn’t spend any money on them. The soft-sided carriers can be expensive, running around $100 for the Ergo’s or Beccos. I’ll happily spend $40 on a trial rental program, if it saved me $200 in the end from buying stuff my kid won’t stand to be in.

Thirdly, diaper sample packs! (This is an S idea!) JilliansDrawers does an awesome job with doing starter kids for cloth diapers, but how about disposables? You don’t know if your kid fits better in a Huggies, a Pampers a 7th gen or the Target generics. Why not buy a sample pack that has a week’s worth of each?

That’s my business idea inspiration for the day. Sigh… if I only had the capital 🙂

I’ve given up on G crawling. I think he might consider trying it when he turns 2. The moment I put our little monkey-boy down on his belly, he 1) verbally (and in a high-pitched tone might I add) protests; 2) immediately rolls over. I believe our child has learned to roll specifically to avoid belly time. As such it is very difficult to get him in a position to encourage any type of slithering movement.

At day care there’s a 9 month-old girl, even smaller (in size) than G if you’ll believe it. She’s doing circles around our child while he is perfectly content to play Bam-Bam-Bam with whatever toy he’s got on hand. That, or nap. Yes, why do today what you can put off to tomorrow? Our little man, as it turns out, spends much of his day snoozing while at day care. He takes 2-3 naps during the day, each averaging between 30min to 2 hours. It’s awesome! Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE that our child sleeps so well — wouldn’t change a thing, but it’s no surprise his mobility has taken a back-seat: he’s sure not practicing crawling in his sleep, that’s for sure.

A part of me wants to try to push him a little bit more. On the other hand, there’s the part of me that knows we’re travelling to the East Coast in a few weeks and I’d rather have a Happy-to-be-stationary baby than one that wants to wiggle out of their seat to go somewhere. I’ll have plenty of those trips in my future to want to start now.

None-the-less I’m skipping over crawling and moving onto walking. At the moment we’re just getting through standing. He’s a much better stander now. He doesn’t bend at the knees constantly, so he’s able to take his body weight while standing… and support that big ole’ head of his. Although he isn’t able to balance himself on his own just yet, we have a few good moments where we can let go while he shuffles his hands over his music table.

I know he’ll get there at his own pace and I really AM enjoying where we are right now. Yet seeing a bunch of his peers so much ahead, I can’t help but wonder if he is considered delayed and I need to speak to his pediatrician about it. What do you think?

G’s practicing for the Terrible 2’s. You see, he’s working on the “No! No! No!” head-shake. I don’t know that he realizes what it means, but he’s got great timing at delivery.

The other week-end we were out at breakfast and S had a great little exchange with G. I only caught the tail end of it, but there was a great refusal on G’s end on anything offered up by S.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuXPQqoCrMw]

Yes, that is a Margarita S is offering to G… and the kid approves — yep, that’s how we know he’s ours.

…Ok, or maybe you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway.

I’ll start off by saying that our diaper bag is the Lite Hobo bag by California Innovations. It retails at BRU for about $45. It’s nothing special to look at, but it’s big, priced right, and neutral enough for S to not mind wearing it (and believe me he does). I’ve come to the conclusion that as far as diaper bags go, you can never find anything too big. Now… in terms of the contents:

• The obvious: diapers (about 1 for every 2 hours of outdoor fun)
• A diaper bag for the dirties
• A changing pad and bootie wipes
• An extra outfit for G
• A hooter hider for yours truly
• Water bottle
• A snack for me (it’s come in handy on more than one occasion)
• Sunblock (yeah, G and I are whiter than white)
• Rash creme
• Hand sanitizer
• Hand lotion (who’da thunk that baby care would be so brutal on the hands?)
• Sunglasses for the little dude (yeah, he’s stylin’ in those)
• Tissues (‘cuz my nose will cry you a river come allergy season)
• A paci
• A camera
• While we’re out and about I also use the bag as my purse, so I carry my wallet, phone, keys, and sunglasses
• Occasionally a toy or two
• Sometimes a jar of food if we’re out around that time of day

About a year ago I had posted this question to my mom’s group and my manager (whose wife is on the list) to this day won’t let me live it down. He swears I’m anally retentive, must-be-prepared-for-anything type of person. Ha, like it’s a bad thing ;p