b e n j a m i n f a l k e n b e r g

When Benjamin used to suck his thumb while eating, we initially got annoyed by it, because it generally ended up creating a huge mess of baby food everywhere…more on the baby than in the baby. It was pretty frustrating for us as parents.

Eventually, he stopped doing it, and we were relieved.

Zachary, on the other hand, is a regular thumbsucker…but only when he wants something. He doesn’t suck his thumb unless he is hungry or tired…or, well, both.

He sucks his thumb while he eats his cereal or whatever, too, but we think this falls under the “hungry” category. With each new spoonful of food, he follows it in with his thumb and sucks, and it appears to help him ingest the food. And yeah, it sometimes makes things a bit messy. But it also seems to help him get the food in and down, and he pulls his thumb out when he’s ready to take in more spoonfuls of food, so we just don’t worry about it.

The net result of basically letting the thumb sucking while eating thing go is that it’s less hassle than it was before when we were constantly trying to control it with Benjamin. It’s proven to be one of those choose-your-battles things that we’ve decided to just let go.

We’re not experts of any sort, so do whatever you want with your own children…but from our perspective, if your infant can’t stop sticking their thumb back in their mouth after every spoonful of food, well, just let him or her do it. Engage with your baby–talking, smiling, etc–and you’ll find that all that thumb-related hassle was mostly created by you and not your little eater.

For us, everyone–everyone–is soooo much happier in the end.

And of course, you still need to watch your baby and see if they’re engaging in extreme sucking of thumb or pacifier that might affect their development of new teeth or jaw, etc. Zachary isn’t strong or frequent with his sucking, so we’re not worried…and like Benjamin, we anticipate the thumb need will eventually just vanish on its own.

And this time it’s peas… Zachary’s first ‘real’ solid food not counting rice cereal.

It went really well; he really enjoyed the peas, happily smacking his lips with each spoonful. His reaction to the first taste was more like “hey, what IS that, I don’t know that!”, but he had already recovered by his very next bite.

We’ll do peas for a few more days (4 days per food starting out, according to the pediatrician, to stay on top of any possible allergic reactions), and then switch it up a bit with some sweet potatoes or something.

And in case you’ve forgotten or are trying to remember, Benjamin’s first real food was peas, too…

And yes, Zachary is six months old today, too. Where does the time go?

…his first rice cereal!

It wasn’t much earlier tonight, but it was enough. About a tablespoon of dry rice cereal, mixed with breastmilk, fairly thinly. For his first time, it probably seemed like a lot to him! He wasn’t quite as adept as Benjamin was at taking it in his first time, but he did a pretty good job for his first time.

Benjamin started rice cereal right around five months, too. And yeah, our pediatrician told us at four months to start, with both kids, but we waited both times because we’ve read solids shouldn’t start until at least six months, or later. Both were (and Zachary continues to be) breastfed, so we feel fine with it all.

Anyway, we’re pretty excited to be moving into Zachary’s next big phase of existence.

No, not the TV show…

Benjamin turned 24 weeks old today!

We ‘celebrated’ by giving him peas for the first time tonight at dinner. He wasn’t quite sure what to think initially, but he still finished the half-jar serving he was supposed to eat. We gave him the odd spoonful of rice cereal too, just to keep him interested.

Anyway, wow, nearly six months old! Only twelve days away (August 20th)…

Benjamin’s getting to be more and more active. He’s also wanting to be more mobile than he’s currently capable of being, and it seems to be frustrating him a little bit. He’s rolling over back and forth like there’s no tomorrow, and he’s even kind of figured out how to mini-steamroll around the room, but only for a couple of flips before he stops… He can spin himself around pretty easily, either while on his back or his belly, and if you’re not paying close attention, he can move about ten feet across the floor and be in a totally different orientation, leaving you wondering how he even did it…

He’s still not quite crawling, but he is up on all fours now pretty often (and more and more every day). He rocks back and forth now, and he’s been occasionally bunny-hopping his way across the floor in very short spurts. He’s got the idea of crawling down, we think, but he’s not quite coordinated enough to make it work; he gets on his stomach, realizes he can’t do what he wants to do, and eventually gets frustrated and needs some help.

He sits up for an hour or longer at a time now, so we think he’s got that pretty well under control, unless he’s hungry or tired or bored, in which case he very readily falls back/over and cries for assistance or additional entertainment. Smart kid, heh. He’s getting so much better at entertaining himself for longer stretches of time, too, playing with different toys…and he’s quite the little talker when we’re playing with him, too! He is increasingly ticklish and loves to laugh–great sense of humor so far!

Benjamin’s still on cereal twice a day (in addition to regular breast/bottled-breastmilk feedings), and that’s going really, really well. We’ll be introducing some vegetable baby food in a couple weeks or less, we think. He’s been sleeping really well all night long, too, which is fantastic… it’s so nice to have some quiet, alone time for Mom and Dad in the evenings. He’s up earlier in the morning now as a result, which has obliterated Dad’s morning 1.5 hours or so’s free work time…but Dad will get used to it.

We started babyproofing the house recently, too. Fun! (ok, not really…) Outlet covers, some cabinet locks, etc. Crawling around on the floor trying to see things from his vantage point… We have some openings between rooms that aren’t the right size for standard baby gates, so we’re not sure what we’re going to do about that just yet, but we’re shopping around still hoping we’ll find some that will work. We finally got around to buying a new vacuum cleaner, too, so that’s taken care of now.

We were also talking a couple days ago how he’s starting to look more like a little boy and less like a baby (cue Dad’s excuses about the lack-of-pictures situation here). We were also talking about how everyone has told us how quickly this time would fly by, and how we were prepared for it to go by quickly, but we’ve still been stunned at just how much more quickly it’s gone by than we ever could have imagined! We’ve probably said it a billion times in the last nearly-six months: amazing!

Friday we were excited that he’s been sleeping through the nights again, only to be awakened Friday night by a boy with an upset stomach… We were on Day 10 or something of this most recent run of all-night sleep. Darn. At least he’s not waking up for food or attention, so that’s good. :) He was only awake for 20-30 minutes, needed some comforting through his stomach gurgling (from the cereal? we don’t know), and went back down for the rest of the night.

As for his progress crawling, it’s an ongoing thing, but he’s been making big strides this week, and in the last few days in particular. He’s getting his legs and knees up under himself and rocking back and forth, and making small gains in the forward–and occasionally backward–direction(s)… It won’t be too long, we figure…and we still need to babyproof the outlets, etc. We’ve gotten down to baby level on the floor and taken care of a lot of the lower stuff he could get into, but we still need to rearrange some furniture, cover outlets, move cords, and buy a new vacuum cleaner that works better than our current one. It’s amazing how dirty your carpet suddenly seems when you’re down with your face in it with your new child!