Since Jeyanth has taken to solid food with such enthusiasm, we decided to move him up to three solid meals, to introduce his second vegetable, Avocado, and to make one meal pure vegatable.
This experiment has been 50% successful so far. Breakfast remains a milk meal, but Avocado was a big hit.
The biggest problem with the Avocado was keeping his attention. During his morning nap I painted one of our walls (a nice rich orange/brown colour), and he kept looking at the wall with a puzzled look on his face.
Tea time will complete the experiment, as we have undiluted pumpkin. Yum yum.
So, I've survived the first three days of being at home alone with Jeyanth, and, I'm glad to say, so has he. After a more or less perfect day on tuesday he's been a bit more fussy (absolutely refusing to nap even though he was so tired he was gouging his eyes out), but still far more happy times than hard ones.
And he's taking to solid food like the glutton he appears to be.
So, today I have my first day alone with Jeyanth. Sureka gave him detailed instructions on how to be a good boy, and so far he's followed them to the letter. Woke up on the dot of 7am, fed, played, went down for a nap without much fuss, woke up, had a big bowl of paste (aka rice cereal), went out shopping with Daddy, played alone happily while Daddy fixed a light and a toilet, played with Daddy, got tired, went down for another nap, and has just now woken up right on cue.
Just a bowl of pumpkin and one more play until Amma gets home...
I DON'T WANT TO GO TO WORK TOMORROW
I've been grouchy all week, and now it's almost here. My last buffer-day is almost spent, and I'm worrying if I still fit into my work clothes.
I have been obsessively monopolising Jeyanth over the last few days, counting down my last few daytime feeds, measuring out each cuddle, and trying to build up a good credit balance on books read, songs sung, games played etc..
Anyone would think I was going away for a year. But the thought that it's going to be next Saturday before I can do another feed of solids is enough to almost make me cry. Boo Hoo.
Over this last week Jeyanth has mastered the art of eating rice cereal (aka tasteless icky mush). Having at first disdained the idea that anything good could come from things that were not bottles, he is now happily polishing off 2 meals of solids a day. The consistency of the said mush has moved over the week from being really quite runny to reasonably stiff paste. Tonight, to celebrate his achievements he will be having some pumkin mixed in with the rice.
A tradesman once said of Dibley that "she didn't look like she was last in the tucker queue". It could be said that the same may be true of Dibley's new young master.
As an aside, I must say that I have been fascinated by the rheology of rice cereal. The stuff mixes with milk, sucking up the liquid to form a fairly stiff paste with quite a remarkable increase in volume. However, over time the viscosity will decrease slowly, till you can be left with something that is essentially liquid. This change is accelerated by any manipulation, such as stirring or mixing. I suspect the rice powder has a high surface area, causing a rapid absorption of the liquid, making it stiff, but also contains a high fraction of soluble components, which dissolve over time, causing it to change from being essentially a thick slurry, to a liquid with a light suspension.
Interesting chemistry, but darn inconvenient if your baby takes 20 mins to finish a meal.
Sigh! Its the end of another era. No longer does Jeyanth sleep flat on his back with his hands flung up on either side of his head. He is now sufficiently mobile and active, that it really is rather unpredictable how you find him after a nap, when you've tucked him in neatly at the bottom of his cot. Nowadays he almost always rolls over and sleeps tummy-down, but there is almost endless variety in where his feet will be pointing. How does a small baby manage to rotate a full 180 degrees such that his head is pointing into the bottom corner of the cot, where his feet used be, when he is in a cot that is too small across it's width to fit his length?
WARNING: This is an excruciatingly boring blog entry unless you're really interested in Jeyanth's development.
Standing: At his last clinic visit before Christmas, Nurse Helen had mentioned that Jeyanth showed a surprising reluctance to lock his knees or take weight on his legs for a baby his age. Though Chris and I tried to give him lots of chances to bounce on his feet, he never seemed interested. And then, on the flight over to England, little Jeyanth, while being held on my lap, realised that there was a much better view to be had if he could only get his eyes over the back of my seat. And since his mother seemed somehow reluctant to hold him up in the air for several hours at a time (which was his first preferance), he could achieve the same end by locking his knees, taking his entire weight on his legs, and standing on her lap while she helped him balance. By the time we got to England, sitting was definitely passé.
Speech: As blogged by the doting father, Jeyanth has started babbling on cue. The consonant count remains at 3, with GaGa, BaBa and the really qutie exciting DaDa. Jeyanth has been steadily increasing his vowel range as well, now being able to both hoot and screech. His latest development is a new mode of conveying bored dissatisfaction, a deep 'gnnnuuuu' sound, reminiscent, well, of a gnu actually.
Solid Foods: We blogged about the adventure with ricecake. Since our return to Sydney, we have now started Jeyanth on solids 'properly', meaning he is offered almost entirely tasteless, very runny rice cereal twice a day. He's only been at it a couple of days, and his reaction has varied from complete rejection to avidly polishing off a serving and crying for more! He isn't absolutely convinced by it, and we are still working on the idea that this is not just a passing fancy for entertaining bored parents. So far our only clue is that he seems to prefer it cold. There will no doubt be some photos of these adventures soon, for the strong of stomach.
Drinking: He's managed to hold his cup on his own, and get it to his mouth and succesfully drink from it. This is huge surprise to both of us, as he didn't have his cup in England and he was miles away from even knowing what it was for, when we left. Incidentally, he's also worked out what bottles are for, as he managed to reach out and grab my water bottle and get it to his lips, and was only prevented from drinking (well, spilling water all down his front) by the weight of the water being too much for him to tilt it forward.
Crawling: Ok, crawling is too ambitious a term for it, but today, this very afternoon, he made a huge breakthrough in terms of tactics. All this time, he has been really enjoying lifting most of his body up on his hands, getting his head up for a good view of the world, and when he wanted to move, he has wagged his legs wildly from this position, and inevitably slid backwards.
Today, he realised that in order to get some purchase with your knees to push forward, you need to drop to your elbows and put your head down and stick your bum in the air. Chris and I witnessed Jeyanth make this discovery and manage two decent heaves forward with his knees to get to a toy lying just out of reach. This may not seem exciting, but though he's managed get to toys in the past by rolling, wriggling or shunting backwards, he's never managed to go forwards before!
Hands: A week ago we noticed that Jeyanth had learnt how to pass things from one hand to another quite deftly. But today we noticed another step in the evolution of dexterity. Though he rolls over to his front every time you put him down, he often gets frustrated there, because he cannot handle any of his toys while his hands are busy holding his head up. Picking up one hand to do something interesting with it just resulted in a bumped nose. Today, Jeyanth dropped to his elbows, thus sacrificing head altitude, but gaining little paws to hold things with, and then, to top it off, managed to pass a giraffe from one hand to another in this position. Sadly, we are parents who think this is really quite exciting.
How to summarise a fabulous three weeks, specially when it's such a big chunk of J's life.
England was full of people. Grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins etc. After a fairly humdrum life at home, Jeyanth was thrilled to be in a whirlwind of people, watching wide-eyed as his little cousins rushed about in noisy play, soaking up cuddles from any available source and absolutely refusing to go down for daytime naps lest he miss a minute of it.
England was cold. Jeyanth, who normally objects noisily to wearing a single vest, did not take kindly to bundling up. In the end, we discovered that he had no objections to being warm, only to wearing clothes. So, he ended up being tucked under a blanket when in his pram or car seat, and much more amusingly, being buttoned inside Chris' coat while perched inside the Baby-Bjorn while we were out on foot. I spotted many an indulgent smile in Guildford when being accompained by a man with a very large stomach, out of who's chest peered a hooded baby.
In England, Jeyanth watched his first few episodes of Thomas and Friends, and watched them so avidly and with such disconcerting absorption, that he had to be removed from the room with the TV.
The key feature of Jeyanth's character that emerged during our visit was his intense curiosity. He was alert and attentive to every activity around him, eyes darting madly, neck craned and torso twisted so that he could take in absolutely every piece of action in his vicinity. He didn't even restrict his interest to what was happening in same room, as raised voices or laughter in adjoining rooms (specially if they were parental voices), would bring about such energetic contortions of his little body, that his keeper would be forced to bring him round to the next room so that he could see what was going on and calm down. As mentioned before, it was almost impossible to get him to go down for naps during the day with so much happening around him. Hence 'Nosey' and 'Sticky Beak' are titles he proudly bears home from his travels.
So, we're back in Australia, after another long journey in which Jeyanth showed off his ability to cope with air travel, mostly by charming everyone in sight with big smiles and happy gurgles.
There is so much to blog about the three and a half weeks we spent in the UK - it's a fair proportion of J's life, so not suprisingly he has changed a lot, learned lots of new tricks. Watch this space.
But... I can't resist mentioning his greatest acheivement of the last few weeks. Jeyanth can now say "dada" :). OK, I know he is babbling, I know he has no idea what he is saying (or why it gets quite the reaction it does), I suspect he isn't even aware yet that there is a difference between dada, gaga, baba, and the various permutations thereof. But nonetheless, he does now say "dada" from time to time, and it's quite sad to observe the effect it has on his generally rational father...
You might remember that we had decided, on advice from the clinic, to not start Jeyanth on solids till we returned from holidays. Though we had seen some signs of interest in solids from Jeyanth in Sydney, we had no qualms about holding off from starting him, since he was thriving on milk.
In England, for the first time in Jeyanth's little life, he became part of big family mealtimes. Either in a high chair, or on a lap, he repeatedly found himself part of a group of 6-10 people around a table, with delicious smells, and every mouth he could see busy chewing and swallowing. Oh, poor little Jeyanth, he reached out for food, he chewed his own fingers, his little mouth chewed and swallowed while he watched other people eat.
So, we took pity on him and bought him some pure baby-rice-cakes, completely tastless and as light as air. At lunchtime yesterday, after he had had his bottle, we sat him on the high chair at the table with everybody else, and gave him a rice-cake.
He completely ignored the food for the first half of lunch, preferring to look around and chew on his bib, then he finally found the wafer with his hands, and waved it around wildly, occasionally smacking it into some part of his face, but not showing any inclination to actually put it in his mouth. And then, quite near the end of the meal, he managed to get a piece of wafer into his mouth. For a split second, you could see the quizzical surprise with which he rolled it around his mouth. Then, witnessed by 8 adults and 3 children, he spat out the rice with an expression of profoundly comical disgust, and proceeded to stuff his muslin in his mouth, in what looked like an attempt to scrub his tongue clean. As the wafer had disintergrated in his mouth into 4 or 5 pieces, it took him some time to lose the expression of distate from his face.
Well, he might not have eaten anything, but it did keep him busy during a mealtime, to say nothing about entertaining the rest of us.
I think we'll try it again today.