The official stats are in! At 6 months,
He got his 6-month shots and a flu shot, and is currently napping off the morning’s excitement. Hopefully he won’t have much of a reaction to this round!
Griff is SIX MONTHS old today! Unbelievable! If you’re also having trouble with this concept, here’s a helpful diagram showing Griff’s progress in orbit.
Griff is still very cute.
He’s able to sit up unassisted for 10-15 minutes at a time. He’s not fond of being put down on his back these days. He can’t lift himself into a sitting position on his own yet; mom or dad need to prop him up first. When he falls over, he’s less upset about it than he used to be, and will try to crawl or roll around and generally make the best of it.
He’s also trying hard to crawl. Right now, he can either sort of hump forward like an inchworm (sometimes pushing up on his toes), move backwards, or move at a weird diagonal.
Here’s are a couple videos showing his technique. (He’s gotten a lot more use out of that yoga mat than I ever did!)
Griff at 6 months, almost crawling from Heather Sarik on Vimeo.
Griff’s Early Crawling Techniques from Heather Sarik on Vimeo.
Feet are still an important part of Griff’s life. Here he’s momentarily distracted from his toe-sucking by some tickles, but returns to his favorite body part with relish.
Giggly Griff from Heather Sarik on Vimeo.
These butterscotch cookies (recipe link below) are insanely yummy. The browned butter…the crunchy salt and sugar on the outside…the chewy middle…I’ve eaten four already. 🙁 Don’t try them right out of the oven; the flavors are better once the cookies have cooled. Also, making them is much easier if your almost-6-month-old takes a short but timely nap.
The recipe is here at Simply Recipes.
PS: Yeah, Greg, that’s your plate…I’ll try to remember to return it this weekend. 😉
Jag and I have found that we’ve started talking about ourselves in the third person a lot ever since Griff came along. We now frequently use phrases like, “Mommy’s making lunch, so hang on, sweetie” or “Daddy needs to put you down for a moment and run to the potty before his bladder explodes”. As a result, we’ve started referring to ourselves as “Bob Dole”. This isn’t too weird when it’s something like, “Bob Dole needs to go get a glass of water, so wait here in the exersaucer”. But it gets pretty creepy when you’re telling your kid, “Bob Dole knows you’re hungry and will give you a boobie in just a minute!”
On the crafting front, I’ve taken a little break from sewing to do a little knitting, instead. One project is a not-yet-presented gift for a new baby, so I’ll show you this one instead.
Meet Mister Scoopy!
Mister Scoopy magically appears to reward good children who take naps longer than 15 minutes. (This is so their mothers have time to finish knitting him, stuff him, and embroider his face on).
Napping Griff seemed to like Mister Scoopy.
Wakey Griff was a little more skeptical. “You used my rare super-long naptime to knit me a fake ice cream cone instead of baking me more sweet potatoes? Get your priorities straight, woman!”
The pattern is very well-written with lots of cone and ice cream scoop variations, it’s free, and it can be found here.
We finally broke down and bought a stroller, since Griff is a few ounces short of 20lbs now, and long walks with the mei tai were becoming not fun. We’ll probably reserve the stroller for walks and places like the zoo and whatnot; the mei tai is still working fine for the grocery store and other shopping trips, and will be fine until Griff is able to sit in a cart comfortably.
It’s a pretty inexpensive “Dream on Me” model, but it’s very nice so far. The ride is very smooth, the height is great, and I don’t kick the back of it while walking. It’s pretty lightweight as well; we wanted something more substantial than an umbrella stroller, but smaller than one of the giant “SUV” strollers. Griff fell asleep in it on our walk this morning, so it’s apparently comfy for him, too. 🙂
Today’s random project was a sun hat for Griff. We have one for him that’s almost too small, and another one that might fit him when he’s three. I cast about on the intarwebs looking for a suitable free pattern and ran across this one:
http://www.ottobredesign.com/fi/kaavat/pdf/girls_hat_EN.pdf. It’s supposed to be a girl’s hat, but aside from the rose decoration, which I left off, I can’t see what’s so girly about it. The brim does widen at the front and give it a bonnet-y look, but Griff’s a baby, so he gets to wear a bonnet if he wants to. It would be easy to modify the brim pattern piece to give it a uniform width, though.
I found some of the pattern directions a little confusing, so I applied Heather Logic and made it the way I wanted to. It’s not reversible the way I put it together, but I only used a single fabric for this prototype, so it doesn’t matter. If I make another one, and I probably will, I’m planning to use several different fabrics for the 6 crown “slices” to give it some variety.
This was a really good weekend. On Saturday, we visited my parents and celebrated Robin’s birthday. There were enough potato pancakes to sink a battleship and a very tasty cake.
Griff ate his first (baby) oatmeal, and seemed to really like it. This is the first food he’s gotten that’s a commercial product rather than something I made. (For example, his ‘rice cereal’ was brown rice that I ground up in the blender and cooked.) It just didn’t seem like a huge money savings to buy organic oatmeal and throw it in the blender when I could get a box of pre-pulverized organic baby oatmeal for around $2.50. I think we’ll need to evaluate on a case-by-case basis what makes sense/saves money for us to make at home, and what’s easier to just buy.
Today I made homemade pizza with 1/3 whole wheat flour in the crust, and my favorite combo of toppings: mozzarella and goat cheese, red onions, bell peppers, and a whole pound of Italian sausage. (Luckily, Jag likes these toppings too.) Two slices of this beast and you are full, full, full.
Jag took Griff out to visit friends for a few hours this afternoon, which went really well even though Griff still isn’t taking a bottle. I spent the baby-free time going to the library, doing some grocery shopping, cooking plums for a batch of puree to make into baby food ice cubes, and making the pizza dough.
Over the past week, Griff has started sitting unsupported for surprisingly long stretches. It’s amazing and a little scary how quickly babies can master new physical skills. He also loves to play peekaboo these days. 🙂
Yeah, I did it again. Griff is such a good sport about modeling these things while mommy bobs around taking pictures.
Swooping death from above!
And after his bath:
“Daddy, why does Mommy make me wear these things?” “There, there, Griffin, it keeps Mommy off the streets.”
The emotional trauma doesn’t seem to be THAT severe. 😉
I have one more towel/washcloth set left to use. They’re blue. Hrm hrm. Blue lizard? Blue fishie? Blue dinosaur? Jag suggested a whale, but I’m not sure I can pull off a felt blowhole and spout. 🙂
So yeah, I made Griff another hooded towel. This time: a frog! Complete with a tongue! With a dead fly on it! Whee! I lightly stuffed the eyeballs so they’d stick up better.
And here’s Griffin after his bath, all clean and happy and amphibious.
And this one is just because he’s cute.
Earlier today I stopped at the library and picked up Suzanne Collins’ “Catching Fire” (second in the Hunger Games series), which I had on reserve. Griff was in an extraordinarily nappy mood this afternoon, so when he fell asleep in my arms, I had no choice but to start reading. And reading and reading (with a little nursing thrown in). I managed 300+ pages before dinner. So far I think it’s every bit as good as the first book, and I’m hoping to finish it tonight. At which point I’ll be chomping at the bit for Book Three, which came out today!
Why me and Jag are very tired today.
7:45pm: Griff goes to sleep in crib.
10pm: Me and Jag go to bed.
11:30pm: Griff wakes up, is hungry, needs changing. Jag changes Griff, I feed Griff.
2:45am: Shastes sneaks into the master bedroom and starts playing with the closet doors, waking us both up.
3:15am: Griff wakes up, hungry again. I feed Griff.
4:30am: Upstairs smoke detector decides battery is dying, starts beeping loudly. Jag drags smoke detector off somewhere to shut it up.
5:15am: Griff wakes up, starts babbling cheerfully at great volume. Griff volume is too much even with baby monitor turned off, so action is required. He goes back to sleep after reswaddle and pacifier reinsertion.
6:15 am: Griff is really really really awake. Jag takes him downstairs so I can get some extra sleep.
7:15am: I wake up from lovely dream about going to a fiber festival (that exists only in my dream, sadly).