baybeasts

We love our evening routine. Dinner is some time between 5pm and 6pm (chaos!), followed by playtime, then bath at 6.30pm and bed at 7pm. But they are just delightful after dinner and we love hanging out with them so much that playtime often stretches a leetle longer than it should…

It seems we have a climber on our hands. Heaven help us all.

Gee it’s hard to get back on the horse when you’ve taken a big blog break. There seems to be too much and yet too little to post about. Life goes on - up close, it is vivid and interesting, but from a distance (or a blog break) it takes on a rather bland texture. We get up, we get through the day, we go to bed, we get through the night, and then we get up again.

We haven’t posted much lately because bean being sick made the days harder to get through than usual for a little while there. But from Arlo and Huey’s point of view, life has been very eventful indeed. It is rushing by so fast - sometimes it seems like they hit new exciting milestones every day, and I can’t keep up. We’re long overdue for a list of milestones achieved and cute things done, but today I give you only a few:

• Sometimes they play together in the living room - well, more strictly, they parallel play, but it doesn’t always require our input (though we spy on them anyway!). And now that Huey can crawl, sometimes they set off on expeditions around the house together, accompanied by many delighted squeals and giggles. Arlo is still much faster than Huey (though Huey is catching up fast), and so he travels about twice as far as he goes backwards and forwards between Huey and their destination (usually the kitchen or the bathroom).
• Arlo’s love affair with books continues. Many times a day he will bring a book to one of us, waving it in the air and pushing it into our faces, then climbing into our lap so that it can be read. When we read to him he does his special concentrating heavy breathing, and cries if we stop before he is ready. He doesn’t like to share reading with Huey though, because Huey is still at the eating books stage and that really annoys Arlo. Pointing is Arlo’s second favourite activity after reading (accompanied by an emphatic ‘deh’, and either signifying want of an item, or wanting us to name or talk about the item), and now the two have come together so that he happily points to things he likes in the books (ducks, kittens, babies etc).
• Huey is now pulling up to standing, and cruising rather unsteadily around the furniture. His favourite place to pull up is the toybox, and he stands there for ages holding on precariously with one hand and pulling things out with the other. He’s working on sitting down but he hasn’t quite got it yet, so when he’s had enough he stands there grizzling and occasionally bending his knees until one of us comes to save him. With pulling up has come babbling - ‘hey-dah!’. It’s adorable.

But let me tell you the story of what just happened as I was writing this post. Both boys went down for a sleep around 10am (earlier than usual for Arlo because they have another cold). Bean went out to get a long overdue haircut, and I settled in for a bit of computer time. About 40 minutes later, I heard a sad cry from the bedroom. I rushed in to find Arlo red faced and upset and still mostly asleep, with Huey looking up at me from the far side of Arlo with a bright cheeky grin. Huey had silently crawled across the width of two queen size mattresses and over Arlo to play with his brother (or maybe the curtains), but his brother was not impressed with this feat at all. Somehow I managed to re-settle Arlo while Huey pulled up on me saying ‘hey-DAH!’ at the top of his voice (Arlo really is sick and sad to go back to sleep through that commotion). And now Huey is pottering around at my feet smiling at me and trying to amuse himself in the study (mostly by playing with the heater). Time to split them up for their daytime naps, perhaps?

And because we haven’t posted a photo of Arlo for a little while, here he is pushing around the pumpkins that he helped me pick from the garden. Cute, hey.

* For those of our readers who do not know us in real life, this is funny because sleeping is not, shall we say, Arlo’s best skill.

(Mind you, his daytime sleeps are fine - right this very moment he has been asleep for over two and half hours. We’re a bit sad though that he is insistent on having a one sleep day - it was halcyon days when Huey went to two sleeps and Arlo was still on two as well. He’s young for a one sleep day, and we have done our darndest to keep him on two sleeps, but he just will not go down until 10 or 11am now, and is sleeping for over two hours, so won’t go down for an afternoon nap either. Now we’re never going to be able to do anything as a family because at any given time during the day one of them will be sleeping. What a pain.)

Taking photos while my son plays with matches*:

Taking photos of my son dressed up like an extra from FAME!:**

* At least we didn’t give him the matches. He wandered off by himself, went ominously quiet, and was found engrossed in match play. I am, however, responsible for leaving them too close to the edge of the desk.

** The headband is because Huey’s hair is now so long it gets in his eyes, but I can’t bear to cut it. The stripy leggings are to keep his legs warm while allowing him maximum mobility to practice his new, wobbly, all fours crawling. The skivvy is to keep his top warm. There is a reason for everything, but the total outfit went way beyond the sum of the parts.

Can you see it? Can you see it? At nine and a half months, complete with drooly, rashy face, our biggest beast is cutting his first tooth. There is more than a little grief about the impending loss of his gummy grin, but we are excited to see what toothiness will do to his eating style…

And in baking news… I am back on the horse and getting the hang of sourdough. After a couple of shaky moments making the starter, I finally made a 100% sourdough loaf that rose beautifully. No commercial yeast added. Today - sourdough muffins. Tomorrow - I’m thinking sourdough pancakes. It’s very addictive setting out the sponge to proof overnight and seeing it all bubbly and risen and yoghurty smelling in the morning. I feel very protective of my ‘mother starter’. It’s my new little pet who happens to live in the fridge.

We seem to have had more than our fair share of respiratory disease in this house for babies that aren’t in childcare and are copiously breastfed. Loey’s had three colds, one hideous (couldn’t even feed because he couldn’t breathe through his nose). Huey’s caught two of these colds and last week he came down with something like croup. It was an upper respiratory tract infection that left him almost unable to breathe one night (the scariest night of my life), with a temperature for two days, and a horrible, painful, rattly cough. Worst of all it’s made him miserable - it’s been so strange and sad to see our normally cheerful smallest beast be sad and grizzly. (Although, the grizzly thing may also be something to do with being five months old, when one’s desires are thwarted by one’s lack of motor skills. I remember Loey going through the same stage - we googled ‘grizzly baby’ and the number one hit? ‘My five month old baby is so grizzly.’)

We can’t help but wonder if living on a main road has something to do with it. Bean googled ‘main road children respiratory disease’ and it was so scary that she told me not to look. But we’re kind of stuck here - the joy of having our two children close together is that we can stay home together, but the drawback is that our financial position is precarious to say the least. Moving would be a serious stretch and require some creative thinking. It would also be sad to leave this house. Despite the awful location there are things about it we love - north sun through the living room windows on cold days, a big garden full of fruit trees and herbs, proximity to an amazing support network of friends.

Do any of you more experienced parents than us know whether this is a normal amount of sickness for babies like ours? Are we worrying for no reason? Or do we need to urgently protect their health and find a way out of here?

Today, Loey has been nine months in and nine months out.

In celebration, I went on a photo taking spree (and also today Melbourne put on Autumn mystical magical hazy light that I wanted to try to capture). But it’s pretty hard to get a decent photo of a small person who moves incessantly - it reminded me a bit of trying to draw an amoeba wiggling around under a microscope.

But I caught him; our pensive, busy, beautiful baby boy.

It’s 10.15am and I have been trying to write this post for days. The boys are both in bed for their morning nap, bean is having a well-deserved shower, and I am researching broccoli and blue cheese recipes so that we can use up the enormous amount of broccoli that we got in our weekly vege box (next up: what to do with one and a half red cabbages?). The kitchen is still full of breakfast mess, there are nappies to hang out, toys and dirty nappies all over the loungeroom floor, the laundry hamper is full, and I am still in my pyjamas. In three minutes I have to go and watch Huey just in case he needs resettling (we’re worried that he’s lost the knack of the longer morning nap). The chances that I will get this post finished today? Almost zero.

Nine months and five months sure is hectic. But, in line with the paradoxical nature of parenting, we also feel like we finally have our heads above water and can see the horizon (even though we are frantically paddling to stay there). I was saying to bean the other day that this is my favourite age so far - both boys are past that precious-but-overwhelming newborn stage, and their personalities are blossoming before our very eyes. Every day we comment to each other a bazillion times about how gorgeous they are, or how much we love them, or how lucky we are. Every day we are thankful again for the twisted welfare loophole that means that we are both here together to enjoy our boys’ every smile and fart and milestone.

But it’s not all bread and roses. I’ve been thinking about how much this blog glosses over the hard things (I know this is not a novel thought). We don’t really write about our broken nights, the days we sit on the floor glassy eyed wondering how we will make it to bedtime, the tiredness-induced bickering, the sore nipples, the comfort eating, the anxiety (about their health, their personalities, our parenting decisions), the never-ending relentless list of chores, the sheer hard work of looking after every single need of two other people. This is probably a good thing - you know, accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and all that, but it does feel a teensy bit dishonest somehow. But I wanted to mention it because as they get older, it is getting easier. The work is no less hard, but the rewards are bigger and bigger every day.

But I digress. Onto the real purpose of this post:

At nearly nine months, Loey:
- Crawls like a professional, pulls up and cruises around us and the furniture, climbs (can get onto the bed and can climb up a parent reclining on the bean bag), can save a fall by landing on his bum.
- Is a lot more confident with exploring the house independently (loves the bathroom!), but still sobs in an outraged way if we leave the room without his permission.
- Absolutely loves roughhousing on the bed and the beanbag. He smiles all the time, but rough play is one of the precious few things that can make him laugh.
- Does very cute heavy breathing, lips protruding slightly, when he is concentrating very hard on something.
- Often takes himself over to his little bookshelf, pulls out a pile of books and spends ages (up to twenty minutes, which is a long time for an active kid like Loey) leafing through them. Sometimes he’ll bring a book over to a parent for us to read to him, and sometimes he seems to be showing the book to Huey. It’s magic.
- Prefers yellow objects (blocks and balls and rubber ducks).
- Loves being carried on a hip so that he can really watch what we are doing (we’re trying to work out a good sling solution for this one).
- Is fascinated by Huey, and spends a lot of time trying to interact with him by taking Huey’s toys and then giving them back, patting him on the head and bum, sitting on him, crawling over him, blowing raspberries on him and pulling his hair.
- Hated the first swimming class with a passion. He just couldn’t understand why we were putting him under the water. Mind you, we’ve always bathed as a family and so he has never been in water not plastered to a parent.
- Is finally losing his obsession with rubber ducks, sadly. It was so cute.
- Understands heaps of words now: up, book, water, Huey, duck, chook, cat, ball, toybox, puppy, roll the ball, and probably more that we haven’t noticed. His number one favourite word is milk - as soon as we say it he gives a massive grin and crawls over.
- As per the previous point, is completely breast obsessed. They are easily his favourite object in the whole world, and the sight of one brings a smile of joy that has to be seen to be believed. His idea of heaven would be for us both to be topless all the time so he could just ramble over and have two sucks whenever he wants. We are dreading the day that he realises they are always there, underneath the clothes.

At five months, Huey:
- Is crawling!!! Well, it’s a caterpillar crawl, but it’s forward locomotion and he can get himself pretty much anywhere he wants to go on the lounge room floor. Today he was experimenting with lifting one hand while on all fours, so it won’t be long now until he is crawling proper.
- Can sit up unassisted fairly well (still needs a safety net of pillows or parent though because sometimes when he gets excited he forgets himself and throws his little body backwards).
- Is therefore also working on pushing himself back to sitting, by doing lots and lots of twisty downward facing dog. He can almost get his legs underneath him - today one of them got stuck and he was most unimpressed!
- Still isn’t rolling at all (except accidentally).
- Has really slowed down on the talking work, we think because he is working so hard on locomotion. He still giggles and laughs and is as responsive as ever though, and does some chatting with a finger in his mouth, so we are not worried.
- Is putting everything within reach into his mouth. We’ve started giving him carrot sticks and chunks of apple to suck on, which he loves. We don’t think he’s ready for true solids yet though - we’ll wait another month for that.
- Always has a smile unless he is really, really tired, and even then sometimes he can summon up a tiny grin.
- Has discovered tag love, just like his brother did before him.
- Has begun to interact with Loey, by reaching out to touch his head, or trying to eat random body parts if they stray nearby. He copes very well with Loey’s attempts to interact with him, tolerating all manner of patting and being crawled over, and only getting upset if there is vigorous hair pulling or a toy he was really into is snatched away.
- Pulls a funny little square face when he is sad.
- Also loves to look at books.
- Gets very excited about certain toys, shaking and frowning as he plays with them. Sometimes he gets frustrated and has a bit of a yell, presumably because they are not doing his bidding.

There are so many gorgeous things about them, and I am sure I have forgotten heaps in making these lists. But I did finish the post on the same day I started it, even if it is now 8.30pm and I am eating into the precious few hours between their bedtime and ours (for no matter how much we love them, it is still lovely to have a break). Oh yes, one more thing - they both love to suck in their bottom lip!