Ten
What a difference a month makes. Noah seems to have grown quite a bit since my last post on his development.
Noah took his first ever plane ride, turned ten months old while we were in Bali for our first family holiday, and came down with the flu there too. He still has quite a bit of mucus, and struggles crazily when we try to wipe his nose or give him his nose drops. He has problems breathing through his stuffy nose, and has been sleeping a lot more on me, either because it keeps his head elevated, or because he needs the extra comfort. Oh and for the first time in ten months, he actually fell asleep while C was holding him in the car! C was rather pleased with himself when Noah fell asleep in his arms, but after a while, he started shifting uncomfortably and tried to find ways to prop his tired arms up. Welcome to my life, I told him.
Awww…
Our little boy is now extremely busy crawling around and pulling himself up to stand. He definitely has to be watched more closely now, because he gets up to so much more mischief. He makes a beeline for the electronic devices placed on our bedside tables, and hasn’t figured out that he has to stop when he gets to the edge of the bed, so we’ve been lunging quite a bit to catch him before he falls off. He’s usually rather cautious, and will stay on his playmat if we leave him there, but strangely, that same caution isn’t exercised when he’s on our bed.
Everything he gets his hands on still goes into his mouth for an examination, and I’ve had to dig tissue paper out of his mouth twice so far. He even ate some paper when C was ‘watching’ him, but by the time I noticed him happily chomping away on it, it was too late to get it out of his mouth. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but he looked very pleased with himself for ingesting paper. I found it in his poop the next day, so no harm done there I guess.
Pulling himself up in his cot just so that he can try to eat his cot mobile
It’s a lot more fun playing with Noah these days, as he seems to understand us better. He tries to get our attention by cocking his head to the side and peering at us, beaming happily when we look up at him from whatever we are doing. He also seems to enjoy giving us whatever he’s holding in his hand, and taking it back from us, though most times, he finds it funnier to pretend that he wants to give it to us. He’s such a cheeky little boy!
I love that he’s a lot ‘chattier’ now, babbling away to himself and to us. My heart wants to believe that “Mum mum mum mum mama mama” is him calling me, but my mind tells me that those are just the easiest sounds for him to make at the moment. I often wonder what his first word is going to be, and I hope we’ll find out really soon.
Noah high-fives us and bounces on cue, and we often make him do both ‘tricks’ to entertain ourselves when we have nothing else to do. I’ve been trying to teach him to clap, but so far, he just laughs a lot whenever I clap his hands together and sing. You can tell when he’s happy too, because he will bounce on his own, without any prompting, and this usually happens when I pick up his favourite books to read with him. He also grins at his reflection in the mirror, and never fails to reach out to touch it, before smiling at my reflection too.
Weight-wise, there’s been a bit of progress, mainly because he’s been eating porridge at least once a day. He rejected the hotel porridge while we were in Bali, which made me fret that he had gone off solids again, but thank God that he finished up his usual portion last night. He also started enjoying the Baby Bites biscuits which I bought a long time ago, though he still refuses to hold it himself. I usually break off small bits of it for him, or allow him to bite the biscuit directly, though he sometimes tries to bite off too huge chunks of it. Same goes with the Happy Puffs. He’s more than happy to eat them when I feed them to him, but if I give him some to self-feed, he decides that it’s more fun to throw them off his high-chair, and peer over the tray for them.
I’ve also swapped his sippy cup with a straw cup instead, because he was gnawing on the sippy cup’s teat too much for my liking, and I thought a straw might work better. He had no problems drinking from it when I first offered it to him, and seems to enjoy drinking water from it, so that’s good. He doesn’t try to hold as much water in his mouth as before, though when he does, he enjoys spitting it all out and spraying it all over the person unfortunate enough to be in his line of fire. For some strange reason, he finds it hilarious to spit his water and porridge out every now and then, and does it with even more glee when we react and tell him to stop. I get really annoyed by the mess, but C always tells me to ignore it, so that Noah will stop doing it. This boy is really testing my patience, but that’s parenthood, I guess.
Noah has four teeth at the moment, and is always keen to test them out on us. He bites our clothes and even us, but when we scream in pain, he knows he’s in trouble and preempts the scolding by pretending to cry. He has his ‘so poor thing’ routine down pat: stop whatever he’s doing, sit down, scrunch up his face, then let out a pitiful, soft wail, which crescendoes if we don’t comfort him immediately.
Last night was one of those nights when Noah was being extremely whiny and refusing to sleep. I lost my temper with him, and had to take a physical time-out away from the baby, by sending him out into the living room where C was, before holing myself up in our bedroom for a while. Noah spent most of the night sleeping on me after that, crying each time I tried to settle him back into his cot. Hopefully, this is just a phase, and a fellow mummy reminded me on Twitter that this too, shall pass.
Writing this post reminded me that it really has been such a joy to be able to stay home with our baby and watch him grow. There are definitely plenty of moments when all I want to do is collapse on the bed and sleep, but I’m thankful that Noah is growing well and that we can spend so much time together as a family. 🙂