Foosa at 14 months

My mom keeps telling me I should write things down, and since I'm apparently terrible at the baby book thing (as in, even with the best intentions, I never started it...thank goodness a friend of mine gave me a sticker calendar that I could use to record his firsts...when I remembered), I figured I should force myself to start jotting a few notes down from time to time. (I'll use the baby book for the next child. It's too adorable to go unused.)

So, that said, the little guy is 14 months, 3 days old today. He is not walking yet, but yesterday he did shove himself away from the furniture he was clinging to and stood unassisted, so it's going to be soon. No 14 month drs appointment since he is no longer FTT. Short version of long story I intended to post, but will likely never get around to: at 4 months his weight dropped dramatically off of 'The Chart,' a terrible metric doctors use to determine if a baby is developing properly. This led to monthly weight checks and a diagnosis of 'Failure to Thrive.' Scared his poor parents half to death, especially when he was sent for blood work (on a Friday!) to check for indications of organ failure or something else terrible. Longest weekend ever. Everything came back perfect except for an elevated count of something I don't remember that was indicative of eczema - which it was quite apparent he had because he was already seeing a pediatric dermatologist about it. (I will write about that at some point.) As an eczema sufferer myself, my logic was that since his skin was so bad and his body was working so hard to repair it, the calories he was consuming were going straight to that duty instead of being stored as fat, especially since his plateau in weight gain coincided with when the eczema first presented. So I refused any further testing, and sure enough, the older he gets and thus the stronger meds we can give him for his skin, the quicker the weight gain. He climbed back into the chart, and currently I estimate he is between 22 and 23 pounds, which puts him right about in the middle.

He says 'at' for cat, and can say 'hot' perfectly but doesn't know what it means. Lots of things are 'hot,' even very cold things. We're working on it. Mother in law claims he says up, but it's really more like, 'aahp,' and he says it indiscriminately, so I'm not willing to give him that one yet. Also, both MIL and SIL think he knows 'Santa Claus', which I have never heard and maintain it is impossible, because that's not something we've said around him. Oh, and dadadadada means I want. Said at a higher excited pitch it sometimes refers to his father as well.

He loves looking at pictures, especially of himself. Vain child. :) He eats just about everything you put in front of him. He understands when you tell him to 'do the pig.' (He wrinkles his nose and attempts to snort.) And he knows 'So big!' and how to high five.

Favorite non-toy is the vacuum cleaner. Has loved is since he was a little baby. He babbles to it, and shrieks with delight if you turn it on. He also loves 'helping' with the dishwasher (grabbing spoons out of the silverware holder and throwing them on the ground).

Naps are getting more regular. Usually only one, starting at 1:30 or 2 and lasting an hour or two. Goes to bed anytime between 7:30 and 9. Will wake once, sometimes twice, usually because of gassiness or hunger, between bedtime and about 1am. If we are lucky (and don't have to wake him up to come to work with me) he then sleeps until 9am or later. Sometimes as late as 11. It's glorious.

He is outgrowing his current batch of clothes. Everything he has worn lately has been its last hurrah, when I did the laundry I packed away all of his stuff instead of putting it back in the rotation. He has about six outfits left. So after next weeks laundry I will unpack everything and repack it away. Currently the newborn stuff is at the bottom and the larger items on top, which makes no sense. Then last of the current wardrobe will max out the storage tub, so I will reorder it with the larger items on the bottom and newborn stuff on top. That way whenever baby #2 is born, I can just pull out the top section.

With the clothes go the sleepsacks, which is sad. In the morning we let him crawl around with his legs out but arms still in it. When he was little it looked like a cape. Now that he is bigger and creeping along furniture 95% of the time, it looks like a bathrobe. Too cute.

So there. I've finally written some stuff down. :) Now I have to see how much of the house I can get cleaned before his nap ends.