eating

Ollie Ollie Oxen Free

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Well, the big news is, Oliver is now crawling!

He started last Thursday or Friday. It was slow and difficult at first, but he’s been improving every day. He already could roll and pivot to get pretty much everything he wanted, so only the straight ahead part is new. It’s surprising how much more trouble he can get into, even though he’s hardly crawling at this point. However, I think the cause and effect relationship is reversed: I think he finally started crawling *because* he wanted to get into so much more mischief! It gave him the required motivation.

He’s doing pretty well eating solids. He certainly has his likes and dislikes. His likes are baby cereal, pumpkin, and anything he can hold in his hand. He really likes apple slices, cucumber slices, green beans, potato wedges, etc. I don’t know if he likes things like that so much more than Evie, or if we just never figured out that it was so much easier to occupy her with something like that. Certainly food seems to be going better with him than with her, although we have a much smaller sample size.

This has changed his…bathroom habits quite a bit. He goes a lot longer in between poopy diapers, but when he goes, watch out! (You can ask Sara and the bathroom wall about this one)(and the floor, and the bath mat…)

Also similar to Evie, he’s not keen on sleeping through the night. A couple of times a week he wakes up at 4:30 or so and just stays up for an hour, usually crying. He’s crying because we’re trying to put him back to sleep and he doesn’t want to go; I’m sure he would be perfectly happy if we just let him get up. However, this never seems like a good idea at the time, so I usually just end up tired and irritable. Sara has to remind me that we went through all of this with Evie and it didn’t last that long and we all survived.

Oliver is as rashy as ever, with no end in site. Some days are better and you think something you’ve done is working. Then the next day he will be as bad as he’s ever been. We’ve sort of gotten used to that at this point, and gotten a routine down. But I still feel really bad for him, because he still seems pretty itchy.

Evie and Oliver’s relationship continues to be a little strained. They are now getting into that area where Oliver wants to “share” her toys (read “eat” her toys). Naturally, Evie doesn’t like that too much. She is constantly yanking things out of his hands and telling him he can’t touch anything. However, I think she is starting to crack. Lately she has been designating things that he is allowed to touch, or giving him one thing so he doesn’t take something else. Also, she will occasionally “play” with him by building towers for him to knock over (which he finds *hilarious*). However, this usually ends in her deciding she would have even MORE fun if he wasn’t involved, and cutting him out of the action.

She still doesn’t quite get that she can’t force him to do whatever she wants him to. Something tells me he might be stuck with that for life.

Oliver vs. the Apple Slice

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I defy anyone to watch this video and not get a big goofy grin on their face.

We’re clearly starving the poor boy

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Oliver has been very interested in food for a while. If you are holding him and trying to eat, he will try to dive bomb any food that comes anywhere near his face. So finally we gave in and let him try some stuff.

The first thing we really tried was to give him some chunks of apples to gum up (eating is vastly less effective when you don’t have teeth). Every time he got a hold of a piece he would cackle maniacally, like he was really getting away with something. It was like he just couldn’t contain his glee. It was hilarious. After that we tried a few other times. The first time we put him in the high chair, he was again giggling like it was the funniest thing ever.

It is too stressful for me to watch him eat. I’m on the edge of my seat, adrenaline pumping through my system, ready to give him CPR at a moment’s notice when he inevitably chokes himself. He was stuffing this breadstick so far into his mouth, he would gag every time. But he still kept at it, like he was having a grand old time. I guess that’s how you learn.

With the way he attacks food, you’d think that we weren’t feeding him enough or something. However, he’s not going to fool anybody with that, considering he’s the size of a one year old. It’s just so odd since Evie was so ambivalent towards food. Oliver is anything but ambivalent.

The other funny thing about it is how lazy he is with his hands. If he can get away with not holding the food or bringing it to his mouth, he will. If you just try to help him get a better grip, he will drop his hands away like, “Oh good, you’ll be feeding it to me from now on.”

If you want it so bad, get it yourself, lazy bones!

Are you getting sick of hearing about my kid yet?

/ Shane / 4 Comments

It seems like every time I turn around I have to write another one of these updates.  She’s just learning things so fast it is hard to keep everybody up on it!

She says a lot of words now, well over 100.  My favorites are the really long words like “applesauce”, “exercise”, or “avacado”, and I’m also a fan of “monsters”.

If you ask her to count something that you see in a book for example, she will carefully point to each one and say, “two three”.  You’ll get the same answer if you ask her how many of something there are.  “Evie, how many clocks do you see?” “two, three.”

She is eating a little better now, especially if she can eat off of her mommy’s plate.  She LOVES tomato sauce.  So any kind of tomato chunks or spaghetti or anything like that, she wants to eat.  Unfortunately everwhere the tomato sauce touches her skin she gets a rash.  

She likes to eat the little jars of Gerber meat.  Because they have a picture of the Gerber baby on them, she calls them “babies”.  “Evie, what do you want to eat?” “Babies!”  Sounds a little sadistic.  Maybe I can get a bumper sticker, like “My baby ate your baby”.

She can correctly identify the color “orange”, but I think that’s the only one.  She can point to the orange crayon or play the orange key on her piano/xylophone (side note, her piano/xylophone is probably the greatest toy I have ever had…but I digress).  We think she learned that particular one because she has these alphabet books that she got for her birthday.  O is one of her favorites because she likes to say “hoo hoo” on the owl.  So we read that book a lot and it also has a page of oranges.

So she has some favorite letters that she can reliably find if you ask her.  Her favorites are X, O, F, B, H.  The last 3 are mostly due to the fact that we picked up a couple of random letters in a book set at a used book sale and the books have Elmo in them.  So we’ve read them about a million times.

Based on all these letter books, she has lately gotten into the “ABCBs” song.  She likes you to sing it and then when you get to X she yells “Exth!”  I don’t know how she remembers where exactly in the song that falls, but there it is.  She sometimes sings her own version of the song which roughly goes “A B C B FG..” and then a few more random letters that she’s already said, finally ending in “B B B B B…”

She will draw with crayons now, but she insists every picture is of a cat (Well, actually, the other day she also added a fishy).  She is consistent though, even when she’s shown a picture she has drawn previously, she points to it and says, “Cat!”

We bought her a Halloween costume, so we will probably have pictures of that shortly.