Because I Said So
My life as a Mom

…today.

1. Head injury.  Pickle can now pull himself up from a sitting position to standing…almost.  He’s done it exactly twice and his balance, to put it mildly, sucks.  One wobble and BOOM!  He’s back down on the ground, and pissed about it.  Meaning that Mom’s job is to hover around him and cushion the fall, except when he’s too fast for me.  Oops.

(On a side note - any moms of older kids reading this whose kids pulled up sitting–>standing before they mastered lying down–>sitting?  Because the Pickle has never once pulled himself into a sitting position.  I’m not worried, just curious.  How many babies actually go through all the stages of mobility in the “correct” order?)

2. Poison. Pickle likes to play with paper.  And by play with I mean chew on.  And by chew on I mean eat.  And because I’m mean, I try my best not to let him actually swallow any because lord knows what kind of toxic chemicals go into newsprint.  The key word being “try.”

3. Electrical fire.  Did you know that if you over-microwave a chunk of butternut squash, it will turn into a toxic-smelling black lump that sticks to the bottom of the whatever you had it sitting in?  Okay, maybe that one was my fault.  But it was supposed to be for his dinner.  (He had some pureed peas instead.  Gotta get those veggies in somehow!  Otherwise, dinner was a teething biscuit, a piece of banana, half an apricot, and some yogurt.)

4. Drowning. My dear darling boy, pulling up in the bathtub is such a bad idea I don’t even know where to begin.  Looks like the end of the baby bath for us, which means I need to buy a big squishy bathmat this weekend.

It takes a LOT longer to eat finger-food than it does to scarf down a puree.  Oy.

How quickly things change!

A few short weeks ago, I was despairing of ever introducing the Pickle to finger foods, and now, suddenly, he loves them. It was like a switch was turned on - it happened that fast. One day he would do nothing but gaze disinterestedly at the lovingly sliced pieces of banana I had laid out before him. Now, at breakfast-time, he eyes my bagel and pitches a minor fit if I don’t offer him at least a handful of Cheerios to nibble on. Purees from a spoon are becoming increasingly passé as well - he’ll still take sweet potato mush from a spoon, but he’d rather have a hunk of it to gnaw on himself.

Yesterday at brunch with my parents, he was introduced to home fries (with the skins and the bits of rosemary painstakingly removed by yours truly) - YUM. Today at brunch (multiple brunches per weekend is all the reason I need to have visitors over) he nibbled on a piece of toasted brioche (with the crusts torn off). Also YUM. He is absolutely determined to master the whole Cheerio thing - once in his mouth, he knows how to chew and swallow (you don’t need teeth to chew a Cheerio), but the pincer grasp required to pick one up and get it there is still a bit of a challenge.

I’m looking forward to introducing him to noodles, and silken tofu. And re-introducing him to all the foods he currently knows only as purees - green beans, peas, squash, peaches, pears, apples. With a few exceptions (due to the prevalence of food allergies in my family), I can now make his dinner out of whatever we’re having for ourselves, which means less shopping. At restaurants, he can now have soft bread even if the kitchen doesn’t have a banana or an avocado they can slice up. It’s a wonderfully freeing thing, the ability to chew and swallow.

This post was originally going to be a comment over at Bad Mommy No Biscuit, until I decided I’d be better off putting it here and not spamming her journal with my navel-gazing.

Anyway.

The funny thing about having an infant in the 90th percentile for height is that I have a really skewed mental image of what 7-month olds look like. At least seventeen times a day, I’ll see a baby and think “oh, they look about Pickle’s age,” and then become incredibly insecure when that baby, say, stands up. Or eats a Cheerio, or drinks from a sippy cup, or any other of a million things just the other side of the Pickle’s developmental horizon. And then I realize that Other Baby is probably closer to 10 months than 7, and that I am not, in fact, a complete failure as a mother. I hope.

There is another baby in our building almost exactly 4 weeks younger than our Pickle, for whom we sometimes babysit (and vice versa). The last time we saw him was about a month ago, and I was amazed at how tiny he seemed. (Not entirely age-related - both of his parents are smaller in stature than DH and I.) But even moreso, I was amazed at how well he held his bottle and was able to feed himself. 4 weeks younger, and already holding his own bottle! Why doesn’t the Pickle do that? What were we doing wrong??

I consoled myself with the knowledge that the Pickle can sit up on his own and roll around and do all sorts of mobility-related things that Neighbor Baby wasn’t doing yet. And who needs fine motor skills anyway?

And, of course, within a couple more weeks, Pickle was holding his own bottle and perfecting his pincer grasp and doing all the fine motor skills things I’d been so worried about. He’s fine. He’s perfect.

And it’s not a race.

You see this recipe, and instantly think, “Ooh, my 7-month old would LOVE that!”

In other baby news, Little Pickle slept through the night last night (he only woke up at 5 because DH went in to check on him after HE woke up and realized that he’d skipped his usual midnight feeding), but woke up with a low-grade fever, almost certainly a side-effect of the flu shot & other vaccines he got yesterday. (And boy do I know that feeling. Being old enough to know I’m not actually sick doesn’t make the immune response feel any less crappy.) So I’m not holding my breath for a repeat performance tonight - I’d rather have him feeling well and waking up than feeling lousy and sleeping through, you know? DH stayed home with him and he’s been getting lots of love and infant Tylenol. Hopefully he’ll start feeling better by tomorrow.

When the Pickle was a newborn, my mother told me that when the four of us were babies, our sleep would always get screwy for a few days before a major milestone. I think she must have been onto something, because the Pickle has been working really hard on crawling the past few weeks, and just this weekend managed to push up onto his knees and scoot-crawl backwards. Not exactly what he was going for, but still very exciting! And last night, he slept almost straight through, waking up just twice to eat, and going back to sleep easily without a pacifier both times. (Yes, two easy wakings is “almost sleeping through” for us. It’s one waking each, meaning I got almost 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night. I call that a win.)

I also attribute some of this to my new policy (which I’m really following for real this time) of not going to get him unless he’s *actually crying*. I remain philosophically opposed to the “cry it out” method - I don’t want to teach him that I won’t come for him if he needs me - but letting him fuss it out is a whole nother matter. And I’ve been doing this for long enough now that I can hear the difference between “I’m hungry/scared/have flipped over and am stuck in the corner and can’t get out” and “I’m awake and bored and I bet if I yell loud enough I can get Mom to come in and feed me.” The first, I’ll respond to. The second - sorry kid, you’re on your own. Go back to sleep. And you know what? He does! What a good little boy I have.

You Know You’re A Parent When…

…you’re doing the dishes on New Year’s Day, and you reach for a bottle brush to clean the champagne flutes.

(They’re the *perfect* shape! In fact, I’m sending this to ParentHacks right now. We’ll see if it makes the cut.)