baybeasts

I made these pants a while ago for a friend who recently had a gorgeous baby boy. Here they are modelled by our own gorgeous boy:

One of the more wacky parenting ideas that I have been interested in is “elimination communication”, which is just a fancy term for catching wees and poos in a bucket or something rather than in a nappy. I liked the idea because it involves really observing your baby, and getting to know your baby can only be a good thing. I also hoped it would mean less washing of nappies. When Loey was born it was the last thing on my mind - even just the basics of parenting were so overwhelming. But a friend recently suggested that some of his night-time unsettled behaviour might be because he wants to wee but doesn’t want to soil his ‘night nest’ and that taking him for a wee in the night might help, which rekindled my interest. So, just starting with the early morning nappy-off time, I’ve been attempting to work out both Loey and Huey’s weeing patterns and seeing if I can catch some of them.

Typically, I have not caught a single Loey wee. He confounds me every time. Huey on the other hand is an elimination communication star! He wees often and quite predictably so he makes it easy to catch them. This morning I even managed to catch a poo, which was very exciting and so much easier to clean up than a poo done in a nappy.

It is hard work though, and involves a lot of ‘misses’, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the novelty wears off at some stage. Especially given I was trying to do it for Loey but true to form he is not playing along!

Our tiny baby has morphed into a six month old bonny whopper! At six months, Loey:

- seems to have more hair on his head every day, and he was hairy to start with anyway.
- is talking up a storm. Favourite words so far are “did DI yeh” and “gah”, all said with great emphasis. He’s also experimenting with a variety of non-syllabic sounds - raspberries, squeals, and an alarming indrawn wheeze. We love hearing his little voice.
- is still working hard on his motor skills - he is now commando crawling backwards and getting up on all fours and rocking. He does this strange thing with his legs - lifting one very high as if he is about to roll, and then holding it there. We call him the sumo ballerina, because it is so chunky and graceful all at once.
- is still in love with tags.
- has worked out how to move food from the front to the back of his mouth, and so more is going down than out. He LOVES food - he’ll often make a grimace (a favourite expression at the moment) with the first mouthful but then lunges towards the spoon for the second. He has to hold the spoon, so there are usually several spoons on the go with every meal. He’s eating vegetables, fruit, baby cereal, yoghurt, and meat, mostly given as mash but with some finger foods as well.
- is mostly having two sleeps a day (fabulous) but still very wakeful at night (hard work).
- is beginning to be wary of strangers and to have a bit of separation anxiety - will sometimes cry if one of us leaves the room even if the other is still there!
- smiles at Huey and often tries to eat various bits of his anatomy.
- has a cafe latte birthmark on his back, that we only just noticed (we don’t think it’s been there all along, but it’s very faint and so it’s possible we only noticed it because of more light and nudey time with summer).
- really loves new experiences and new places so we try to get out every day.
- has started to grab the breast that he is feeding from as if it is a sippy cup - that is, he reaches out with both hands, clutches the skin, and drags the nipple into his mouth. We thought it was funny at first, but not so much anymore - it hurts! But we still love the expression on his face when he’s about to feed - like a man in the desert being offered water.
- has brown and dimpled hands (adorable) that have an amazing range of expressions, from the alarmingly strong grab and drag to the delicate fingering of a tag or a flower. He can hold objects in both hands and pass them from hand to hand. There’s also a lot of shaking and banging going on.
- has started laughing even a bit more, though still not as much as we would like. His laugh is just delightful - a kind of surprised chortle in the back of his throat.
- doesn’t have any teeth yet, but if we believe what other people say has been teething for four months! (We don’t believe in teeth any more.)
- has slightly different coloured eyes - one is lighter with a big light grey patch at the top.
- has learnt how to undo the velcro on his nappy cover.
- hates getting dressed, and would happily be nude morning to night.
- loves to splash in the bath, though looks a bit surprised when water gets all over his face.
- is still putting everything he can get a hold of into his mouth.
- still has a bit of a neck tilt and c-shape, but we think it will continue to improve.
- rolls over in his sleep. Mostly it wakes him up, but a few times we’ve come in to find him on his back fast asleep - something we never thought we’d see!
- is just starting to respond to his name, after we realised that we have been calling him too many different things (wombat, bug, nutella, Loey etc).
- has a special smile for us, his special people, and it melts our hearts every time.

We are still helplessly in love with our hairy wombat.

It’s a bit overdue this post. But anyway. On Christmas Eve we took Huey for a routine 6 week scan to check his hips - routine because his brother has CDH (congenital dysplasia of the hip). The internet says that the chances of siblings both having CDH is 6 per cent - doesn’t seem like much of a chance, hey. But sure enough, the ultrasound tech went quiet in that way that they do when they see something wrong. It’s mild to moderate in the left hip, just like Loey - the image on the ultrasound screen was exactly the same. And like Loey, the initial treatment is to wait six weeks and see if it resolves by itself. Because Loey’s didn’t, we are expecting that he will be in a brace by early February - but we’ve still got him in the biggest damn nappies you’ve ever seen to mimic the position a brace would put his legs in!

Both boys have a pretty minor case of CDH compared to what some kids have to contend with, but it’s still hard to watch Loey in the brace at a time when movement is everything to him - he is even rolling and trying to crawl in his sleep! And it will be hard to put Huey in one too (though, given he is a bit more chilled out than Loey generally, we’re hopeful he’ll cope a bit better). We are so glad that it was picked up, because it wouldn’t have been if it wasn’t for Loey. Huey’s hips don’t click, and his thigh creases are only a tiny bit uneven, he’s a boy, and he wasn’t breech - in other words, apart from the sibling with CDH, he doesn’t have any of the external risk factors you would expect to see in a CDH case.

Huey is pretty bloody gorgeous - eight weeks old exactly today. He is just so smiley, and even laughs. He loves to have whole conversations with us, noisy, laughing, smiling conversations. We’ve been trying to get it on camera but he doesn’t perform - he never has, right from the first ultrasound when he kept his head turned away and his feet across his bits! He still sleeps a good 5 hour stretch overnight, which is a blessing, but seems to be mostly doing 40 minute catnaps during the day (we won’t worry about that though unless the night sleep deteriorates). He loves to play with toys - smiling and laughing at them too, and batting at them with his hands. He also does this very strange thing where he reaches up with his hand, grabs his own hair, hard, and yells. Poor boy - he doesn’t realise that he is inflicting pain upon himself. I imagine it goes something like this in his head - “ooh, cool thing to grab with my hand…hey! whose pulling my hair! cut it out!” But the cutest thing is when he looks intently into my eyes as he is feeding, raises one eyebrow, gets a little squint around his eyes, and then breaks into a full grin around my nipple, tongue still nicely stuck out underneath and still sucking. It’s heartmeltingly adorable.

He stops people in their tracks when we go out - old ladies, the butchers, young women - we get so many comments about how cute he is with his head of thick blonde hair that it gets embarrassing! And he and Loey are beginning to really take notice of each other. They smiled at each other this morning, but more usually their interactions consist of us making sure that Loey doesn’t eat him (putting everything in reach into his mouth is second only to the crawling practice).

And here’s a picture of Huey in his massive nappy, laughing at one of our bad jokes: