February 26, 2004
Melting brain
One thing all the books say about talking with your baby is to avoid the use of personal pronouns, as they are confusing when the child starts to talk. So, instead of "I'm going to give you your breakfast now", it's "Daddy is going to give Jeyanth his breakfast now".
That's all well and good, but I think it is a sure sign that your parental brain is in meltdown when you walk into the kitchen, thinking to yourself "Daddy needs a cup of coffee"...
February 25, 2004
Toby
As of the evening of Febuary 24th (UK time), Jeyanth has a new cousin, Toby. Congratulations to Andy, Janette and Simeon. More details to follow.
Update - birth weight was 3.15kg (6lb 15oz), born at 7:50pm in Cardiff, "Mother and baby both well". Photos will hopefully follow soon - www.goringe.com will probably have them late on wednesday (UK time), if Toby's grandfather is on his usual form, and we'll just lift them from there.
February 24, 2004
Pumpkin boy
Today, Jeyanth decided that he wasn't going to eat anything from his bowl until he had been allowed to play with the bowl and all of its contents. The result...
February 23, 2004
Toast
Jeyanth just fed himself a (very small) piece of toast. Daddy is very proud of him.
February 20, 2004
Chewing Gum
I've just read Dayan's entry on Jahan's ability to interact with unseen objects. It amazes me how consistent the progression of development is in babies. Of course there is a broad standard deviation, but somehow, the little things, the small but significant achievements seem to me to follow in an age-associated progression, particularly in cognitive development, which is nothing short of miraculous. They crawl and walk at widely varying ages, but the pace at which they seem to figure out the universe seems to be remarkably similar. (This observation is made from an obviously statistically significant sample of ~7 babies; Chris is right, parenthood obviously cancels out any scientific training when it comes to making conclusions.)
I remember a clinic visit a month ago, when Helen asked 'Is he banging yet?'. Till then I had no idea that Jeyanth's recent predilection for whacking any toy he picked up repeatedly on the surface next to him, was actually a significant developmental stage due around 6 months.
So, clearly there is maturing proprioception around 7 months. A couple of weeks ago, Chris described to me how (alla Jahan) Jeyanth played happily kicking a ball from foot to foot while lying on his tummy and facing straight ahead, only whipping round to look for the ball when it rolled out of reach.
These babies are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made.
Clinic visit
I went for my first clinic trip without Sureka today. Our regular nurse, Helen, is on holiday, so Jeyanth saw a very nice stand-in. So, how are we?
First, the numbers. 70cm long, 46cm head circumference, 9355g. That's just over average length, 70th percentile head and 80th percentile weight. So, J is in a bit of a growth spurt around the head, and dropping back down towards a sensible weight for his height. Although the margin of error on these measurements really ought to make someone with a scientific background not make any such observations.
Our feeding regime got the thumbs up, with meat, cheese and natural yoghurt to be introduced in the next couple of weeks. Oh, and broccolli. Our two minor concerns going in were J's propensity to skin rashes (currently there's a bit of heat rash on his forehead) and the way his nose is still blocked up a week and a half after his cold. Apparently neither is worth worrying about - our current skin treatment is appropriate (but heat rash will happen), and the nose probably isn't an allergy, and even if it were, there are no tests worth doing until the child is three or four years old except in more extreme cases. If it gets too bad, we can squirt sterile saline up his nose, a trick we have tried once before and seems to work, although J didn't appreciate the treatment too much.
In other news, we appear to have developed a new trick to get J to eat the vegetables he struggles with. Take a separate bowl with just pumpkin in it, and coat spoonfuls of veggie mix with a layer of pumpkin before offering them...
February 19, 2004
February 17, 2004
New photos
A few new photos are up, including some evidence of the haircut
Mobility
I've been puzzling over the fact that in the last couple of days, Jeyanth has become much more mobile (and therefore much happier to be left to his own devices on - or off - the playmat), despite the fact that he still can't move forwards however hard he tries.
This morning, I realised what it was. Until now, he almost only ever rolled over with his right shoulder down - so when he rolled front to back and then back to front, he ended up not moving. Now he will roll on either shoulder, so can move sideways with considerable efficiency, allbeit without clear intent.
4am
For the last three nights, after months of sleeping through the night with only the occasional hiccup, Jeyanth has decided to wake up at 4am. Whether he's hungry, or thirsty (it's very hot in Sydney at the moment), or just being bloody minded we don't know - what we do know is that Sureka and I are far less good at getting up at 4am now than we were four or five months ago. We've gone soft...
Since he seems to be making an unfortunate habit of this nocturnal wakefulness, I think we're going to have to bite the bullet, turn the monitor off, and only wake up if he really shouts for us...
Earworms
What is it about children's music that makes them so prone to getting stuck inside your head?
( The ants are marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!)
Jeyanth has a little collection of music (Wiggles, Play School, PEEP etc) that we play for him quite often. They are fun, have strong rhythm and melody lines and lots of fun actions.
(The ants are marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!)
However, they are incredibly contagious and persistant earworms! And they seem to be only curable by displacement, often sadly by another even more potent ear-worm!
(The ants are marching two by two)
I assume I am not the first parent who has had to put up with this disease?
(The little one stops to tie up his shoe)
There must be more of you out there, hearing Wiggles when you're in the shower, when you're trying to get to sleep and when you're trying to work at the office?
(They all go marching home to get out of the rain.)
February 16, 2004
The funniest thing in the world
According to Jeyanth, the funniest thing in the world is to sneeze with a mouth full of sweet potato, pumpkin and peas. The second funniest thing is to blow rasberries through the said mouthful.
Daddy feels slightly differently about this sense of humour.
More on food
You'll understand that we are a bit obsessed with Jeyanth's eating habits at the moment - having started solids quite a bit later than most babies, we, being the performance orientated people we are, are keen to make sure he keeps up...
Anyway, the last few days have seen Jeyanth move onto three solid meals a day - breakfast (cereal and apple), lunch (sweet potato and veg) and dinner (veg). His veggie repertoire has expanded to include peas, which, despite having lots of little bits in them have gone done quite happily, as long as they are diluted with carrot or pumpkin, and he's happily eating apple.
This week, we'll be adding pears for some breakfast variety, beans, and, hopefully, steak.
Mums group
I wonder if that should be "Mums' group", because the group is the possession of the mums, or "Mums group" because it is a group of mums. Anyway...
On thursday I went to my first "Mums group" meeting. Sureka has mentioned these before, it's basically six of the nine mums from the antenatal classes we took, and their babies. Now, of course, it's five mums and a dad. We meet every three weeks or so for lunch and general baby chat. Apparently in the early months the talk was all of cracked nipples, a topic I might have had some difficulty contributing to, but now its all food, and crawling, and sleep patterns, and day care - stuff a dad is quite capable of having opinions on :).
Well, I had a good time, the babies all ignored each other (except when trying to put each other's feet in their mouths), and the mums didn't seem too spooked to have a dad there...
Pregnant waiting
I swear waiting for Jeyanth to crawl is MUCH worse that waiting for him to be born.
He's up to the stage where he's pointing in the direction he wants to go, (to a toy just out of reach,) gets up on his hands and knees, rocks backwards and forwards, and occasionally manages to draw one knee forward. And then he has NO idea what to do next (sitting next to him saying "left leg, right hand" has no effect!).
The reason we are so impatient for him to crawl is (other than looking forward to having our living room demolished) that he gets so frustrated at not being able to it. He tries and tries till he's practically crying with frustration. That is, on the occasions where he doesn't accidently roll over, get completely distracted by another toy (one within reach) and start playing happily with that.
Cropped Top
This weekend saw another trip by Jeyanth to the local hairdressers. You might have noticed from recent photos the luxuriant mop of black on top of little J's head. We had to do something! We blame his long black lashes when people think he's a girl, but with hair long enough to start curling, it was all getting too much. Besides, its stinking hot in Sydney.
The plan was to give him a No5 all over. But the nice girl at the hairdresser's discouraged us saying that babies hate razors and will often turn against haircuts for ages if terrified by one early. (I think she was scared of making him cry.) So she popped him on my lap, gave us both a plastic tent, and then proceeded to snip and snip till little Jeyanth's soft silky mop was nothing more than a thicket of dense bristles.
He was very well behaved, mostly preoccupied with smiling at himself in the mirror, occasionally needing to have something dangled in front of him to make him look in a particular direction. The hardest thing was of course trying to stop him from turning around to smile at the nice lady who was playing with his hair. Oh, and he thought he was VERY clever when he managed to get one paw out from under his plastic tent - thus ensuring that his t-shirt was covered in little hairs!!
We've got before and after photos - I'm sure Chris will put them up today. He looks like a little BOY!
February 10, 2004
More orange food
Today Jeyanth took a foray into his fifth solid food (following baby rice cereal, pumpkin, avocado (which he doesn't like yet), and sweet potato) - carrot. He seemed quite keen on it at lunchtime.
This does mean that everything going into him, except his milk, is orange. Which has some obvious implications that I will leave to the imagination. Let's just say it relates to this.
If all goes well, later this week we can move onto our first fruit. But what is it to be?
February 09, 2004
Super Dad
This entry is not about Jeyanth, but his dad. Or should we say, the living legend that is Chris Goringe. I just thought that I should blog this, since otherwise, nobody will know.
Today, Chris cleaned out the freezer, moved all our pictures so that they aligned at the top (including spak-filling and painting over old nail holes), organised for an electrician to come and move some lights, did extensive phone research to try to locate some Prevenar (pneumaccocus vaccination currently in worldwide shortage) in the country , did the grocery shopping, dealt with a real estate agent, cleaned out the air-conditioning filters, oh and fed, changed, played with and cleaned up after a baby.
When I stayed at home with Jeyanth, I thought I was ahead if I managed to have lunch and a shower in the same day!
February 08, 2004
More on food
Well, Jeyanth is certainly back on his food with a vengance; pumpkin and sweet potato and baby rice are all disappearing in alarming quantities.
In the comments, Dayan suggested that the best way to prevent stained clothes was a plastic bib. I think this somewhat misses the point. My problem isn't food that slips off the spoon or out of the mouth and falls, somehow missing the bib, onto the clothes. My problem is food taken off the spoon, or out of the mouth, by small hands, and smeared liberally over the face, table, ears, hair, chair, clothes, daddy...
February 07, 2004
Strange reasons to visit Jeyanth's blog
I hope that the visitor who found their way into Jeyanth's blog because of a google search for "slugs in dog food" found what they were looking for...
Baby with a cold
It seems as if what might have been bothering Jeyanth is that he has a cold :(. Yesterday his nose was streaming, and last night he was sufficiently blocked and snuffly and generally unhappy that he had a very unsettled night. He was particually unhappy between 4 and 6 am, as, of course, were his parents.
Today he seems to be much better, and is playing happily as if it never happened. And his parents, ever ones to try to find a consistent narrative that describes his behaviour, are now blaming the cold (perhaps a sore throat?) for his unwillingness to eat solid food over the past few days. An unwillingness, by the way, which appears to be passing - pumpkin and rice has return to favour.
Speaking of which, does anything stain quite as readily as pumpkin? Great idea, whoever suggested it for a first food for babies. Ah well, he'll grow out of his formerly white babygrows soon enough.
February 04, 2004
Steps forwards and backwards
Further to Sureka's last post - over the last couple of days, Jeyanth appears to have completely forgotten how to eat solids. I know that babies just do this - one day they eat, and the next they don't - especially when first starting to eat solid food, but it's still frustrating, when you know that he likes the food you are offering, but he won't touch it. Possibly it's because he seems to have a tooth coming through...
On a positive note, Jeyanth has been setting new personal bests in the 'Standing holding onto my play table while a parent hovers to catch me when I fall over' competition this week. Today he lasted over seven minutes before toppling. The play table (a musical contraption with lots of lights and buttons and stuff) is a big hit - I've even caught him trying to reach up to play with it while lying on his tummy. He'll need to work off a bit more of the fat before he can pull himself up, though...
Moving forwards on the floor still seems to be eluding him; he'll turn around on his tummy, and roll over from front to back, and shove himself backwards - but moving forwards is still a mysterious thing that just sometimes happens by accident.
Solid Foods II
I have a whim to jot down a few of the discoveries made in the last couple of weeks. I don't know if these are Jeyanth-specific idiosyncrasies or not, but none of the books mentioned these.
Spoons: Those fancy 'changes colour when food is too hot' plastic spoons are a complete waste of time. Jeyanth likes his food at room or fridge temperature, definitely not warm. Besides, these spoons tend to be pointy in front. What we've discovered that a shallow shovel shaped spoon is much more useful for front loading with food, as the little mouth will often close pre-emptively when only the very tip of the spoon has made it in.
Tommee Tippee make a short white spoon, where the handle is short and curved into a loop, which is by far the best we've come across.
Constipation: Avocado!!
Goldfish Brain: Jeyanth seems to forget all about what solids are between each meal. The very first mouthful is always a smear on firmly closed lips. He then picks that up with his tongue, the little gears whirr in the brain, and then enthusiasm sets in. More recently, we've given him a spoon smeared with food, and he gets it into his mouth on about the seventh attempt, and then the light goes on.
Milk: Jeyanth still prefers milk when he is hungry, and letting him see a bottle when you're trying to feed solids is a big mistake. It is also a big mistake to think that you can get him to eat solids if he's had a bottle in the last 3 hours!
It feels a bit unfair for me to blog this, since Chris is the person who has done mos of the solids feeding. Perhaps he will add and refine?
February 02, 2004
First Week at Work
So, I've been back at work for a week. People keep asking me how I feel, so I'm trying to work it out. Work itself is quite pleasant - I know all the folks there, but don't yet have a huge amount of work to do, its a bit like starting a new job, but with old friends. Everyone has made me feel welcome, and in some ways it feels like I never left.
Missing Jeyanth is the biggest deal. I have a photograph on my desk and I confess to more wistful gazing than any photo of Chris ever merited. Since he normally wakes up around 7, when I'm getting ready to go, I still get the first grin of the day as I get him out of bed and change his nappy. But it's still a long haul till the evening when I get to do his last bottle and then bath and bed.
I also find it alarming and frustrating at how quickly I have become not 'in tune' with his daily whims and fancies. I have to ask Chris how much food he takes, whether he wants his curtains drawn for his nap etc. I'm so used to being the one 'in the know', and being the control freak that I am, I'm finding it hard to adjust.
When you've just had a baby, everybody will tell you, ad nauseum, how 'they grow up so fast' and 'you'll wonder where the time went' and 'if you blink, you'll miss it'. In the early days of motherhood, when days are just arbitrary divisions in the sleepless grind of three-hour feed cycles, this sounds absurd. If only time would pass a little quicker, and they actually did something, you say to yourself.
But I'm afraid all those people were right. Time does fly by. And I've decided that 'quality-time' is a phrase invented by people who somehow got too busy to spend time on their relationships and needed a rationalisation. I've decided that quantity really matters. It's the hours you put into your child that really lets you know them - there is no short-cutting this process, there is no means whereby you can cram a days worth of loving into a few hours at the tail end of the day.
Swimming
As the more observant of you may have noticed, recent photos provide evidence that Jeyanth has now been swimming. We took him with Dayan, Duncan and Jahan to Dayan's parent's swimming pool, and, after some hesitation, he seemed to love the experience. He didn't even notice when Daddy accidently went out of his depth and had to rapidly about-turn and casually backstroke back to the shallow end...
The only negative part of the experience was when Jeyanth, following his instinct that everything, without exception, needs to be placed in his mouth, sampled some of the swimming pool water. His expression suggested that we won't be adding chlorine to his culinary repertoire very soon.
February 01, 2004
The new decor
This is what was distracting Jeyanth when he was trying to eat. For those of you who are cringing, digitising doesn't do the colour any favours, its actually quite a nice shade of russet, not the luminescent orange that it may appear on your screen.