Well, I’ve been home for three weeks now. How are things going?

Griff is doing great. He remains the cutest baby in the world, which is a good thing, because he’s still waking up more than once on most nights.

He’s still not a great fan of “tummy time”, but he’s slowly becoming more tolerant of it, and holds up his head and upper body pretty well. (Sometimes I wonder if this “back to sleep” stuff isn’t taken to such an extreme that 95% of babies end up with a total complex about being on their stomachs. I suspect that very few SIDS cases are actually traceable to sleep positioning alone, with no other factors like soft bedding, history of breathing difficulties, etc. I’d love to see data on this.)

We got the all-clear at his 4-month appointment to start giving him solids, so we’re moving forward with that at a leisurely pace. Given the recent recommendations from various organizations (WHO, AAP, ACOG, etc) that babies should only consume milk/formula until 6 months, we’re being very casual about the process, offering solids just at dinner time and only a few times a week.

Since I’m home and have the time, we’re doing homemade baby food. Our pediatrician recommended feeding him veggies and fruits with the same level of spice/seasonings that we would use. So far we’ve done “rice cereal” (brown rice whizzed to a powder in the blender, cooked up with water, and thinned with a little milk), and peas (steamed peas pureed in the blender, with a teeny bit of butter). He’s been very enthusiastic about both foods. Here’s a video of his reaction to his first solid food ever; he seemed to enjoy it quite bit.

Griffin’s First Solids from Heather Sarik on Vimeo.

How about me? Well, I’m still adjusting. A lot of days it’s all I can do to take care of Griff and get the cleaning, laundry and cooking done, and I’m too tired for much else once he’s in bed in the evening. Griff is an awful napper, so I can generally only count on one good 45-minute stretch during the day to get things done. I’m also running over to my townhouse at least once a week to deal with the renovations we’re doing to get it ready to put on the market. Boredom is definitely not a problem! I’m still figuring out how to balance the baby/household stuff with fitting in a little fun time for me.

Speaking of, here’s the Three Waters Farm merino/(tencel? bamboo?) blend I spun on the drop spindle. I got 490 yards of fingering weight from 3⅞ ounces of fiber. I’m really pleased with the yardage! Definitely enough for a small shawl.

I also got a few stupid but useful projects done today, which makes me happy. First, I modified a too-small onesie into a t-shirt. We got this from Jag’s parents recently and it was just too small to snap at the crotch, but plenty long enough to be a shirt. I used the overcast foot on my sewing machine to do a poor man’s serging on the chopped-off edge. It looks pretty similar in size to the Dharma t-shirts that I bought to dye.

Second, I turned an old guest towel and washcloth into a hooded bath towel. We have a ton of cute hooded bath towels, but they’re getting to be too small, and they’re all quite thin and not very absorbent. For this project, I cut the decorative embroidered edge off the guest towel, finished the raw edge with overcast stitch, cut the washcloth in half diagonally and finished that raw edge, zig-zagged one of the embroidered motifs onto the washcloth, and then sewed the washcloth onto the corner of the towel. Et voilà!

The best part is that Griff looks like a hilarious little gnome wizard when he wears it. 😀