Linnaeus 9.0

I can haz sammich?

New things this week:

First bread: we're still waiting on the wheat, but I picked up dense little loaf of spelt bread from European Breads Bakery on my way home from Stroller Bootcamp yesterday. The look of concentration on his face as he tried this new texture was hilarious. He ate two pieces, or really, ate about one & played with the rest until it was only fit for the birds...

Today he gleefully ate one piece of toast with cream cheese. He refused to touch the second one until I gave him some of the mango I was slicing. If he sees me holding any of his favourite foods without giving him some, he pitches a fit. The fruit sitting in the bowl on the table is fine, but if I'm holding it, eating it or slicing it up, he will protest until given some.

I love that he's now made the connection between the pear-shaped black thing & the light green, fatty chunks of slippery food he loves, or the round red & green thing & the sweet, juicy yellow cubes.

Learning to use a straw cup! Yay for independent drinking! Since he started solid foods, I've been giving him sips of water from a regular cup & he's gotten better at that, but I still have to hold it for him & he spits half of it out, or even better, rinses whatever bits of food are in his mouth back into the cup. Even if he were able to hold the cup himself & not spit water everywhere, he still likes to play with dishes--turning them over, throwing them on the floor--so a regular cup is a pretty labour-intensive way to get a little water into him.

I tried two kinds of sippy cup, but he can't hold them & tip them up to drink, so I have to tip it into his mouth. This inevitably gives him a bit more than he wants & a lot gets spit out onto his shirt/bib/food. After a few tries Sunday & Monday, he sucked on the straw & got water out of a Playtex straw cup. Then he spent ten minutes playing with the cup, getting every side of it covered in damp, avocadoey breadcrumbs.

Today when given the cup, he was still fairly interested in gnawing on the handles & flipping it over, but he sipped a few times without spitting any out. 

Belly spinning: Sprout now spends a lot more time on his belly & seems to have mostly gotten over his aversion to tummy time. He still doesn't really like to be put on his belly, but if he's sitting & decides to fall over onto his side, he'll roll onto his tummy. Then he moves around a bit, rotating like clock hands, still not quite crawling yet. If you give him ten minutes or so, he'll move himself off his play mat. I suspect he's going to be commando crawling within a week.