baybeasts

These last few weeks with just Loey seem very precious. At the same time as we are both desperate (and I mean DESPERATE) to meet tootle, we are also devoting a lot of love and attention to Loey, with a slight sense of sadness about how that attention will drop off as soon as tootle is born. This is, of course, common to all parents of two children, and we do know that Loey will be just fine - that in the long run it will be fantastic for him to have a sibling so close in age.

He has been rewarding us by being delightful in every way possible (except for sleep, which is as tricky as ever). When he catches my eye, he smiles with this surprised, joyful expression that never fails to melt me. His smile involves his whole body - the tongue quivers, the eyes widen and then crinkle, the arms are brought into the chest and the whole body wriggles with glee. It’s magic. Sometimes he will smile at himself in the mirror, and we are nearly wetting ourselves as we anticipate him smiling at tootle when he or she deigns to make an appearance.

He has just started laughing as well, especially when we sing to him and make him do the actions. We’ve finally started singing him baby songs as well as eighties classics - I’m a little teapot, Incy Wincy Spider and so on. Sometimes when we sing to him I could swear that he is trying to sing too - he moves his mouth and makes little cooing noises and smiles madly.

He’s talking to us a lot - even his cries seem to have changed into a more conversational tone, like “I’m really pissed off here, what are you going to do about it?” rather than “wah”. He has these long, reciprocal conversations with us where he coos and ahhs and then waits for our response. For example, last night he spent a good five minutes telling bean about his day before he would settle in for a feed and sleep.

His physical development is racing along too. Bean started the sitting up game with him - when he is lying down, we hold his hands and say ’sitting up’ and he lifts his head and shoulders and basically gets himself into a sitting position by pulling up against the hands with very little input from us. He has discovered his penis - we wondered a lot whether we should blog this but it is really so impressive that it is worth recording. It’s making nappy change time interesting! He has got so strong that we no longer wrap him, not even at night - there is just no point because he breaks out of it too quickly. We’ve decided that he is teething - it’s a very convenient excuse for many things, including the bad nights. But it is incontrovertibly true that he is drooling like a cartoon predator, pulling at his ear, and chewing hard and long on anything he can get into his mouth. Apparently this can all go on for months before we actually see a tooth though.

Some things haven’t changed - he still likes to sleep upright with movement best of all, and the new sling has been brilliant for this. He is still ridiculously pretty. He still wakes up about every hour after midnight. And we are still completely, and utterly, besotted.