baybeasts

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.