Six Months

Good heavens! Has it really been six months since Ike was born? Yes, it has.

I still think my kid is the best in the world. He goes to bed at six and wakes up about six. He takes three naps per day. He usually plays pretty happily between naps. He comes to work with me still, and he is my best little buddy. I feel odd when I go places without him.

This month he has really taken off with rolling. Because of that we stopped swaddling him and switched him to a regular crib very shortly after the five-month mark. Whenever we go get him out of his crib, he is found in a completely different position than the one we left him in.

Along with the rolling, if we put Ike on the floor with a toy just out of reach, he will scoot forward to get to it. I'm not very eager for him to crawl, so I don't do this exercise with him much at all.

We've gotten a few giggles out of him this month. He actually does this very funny thing where he tries really hard to control his laughter. You know when something is funny and you are trying not to laugh? That's what he does when we tickle him. It's adorable, but we like it even better when we actually get a chuckle from him.

He's on the verge of sitting up on his own, and I'm excited about that. I also started giving him solid foods this week, and he pretty much thought it was the best idea I've ever had. (Three cheers for butternut squash!) He loves to hold the spoon and suck on it when I'm done feeding him. His spitting up has really abated this month, and it has been very nice to clean up far less spit-up than I used to.

Ike has finally really gotten control of his binky. We can hand it to him in just about any position, and he can get it in his mouth right-side up, as long as he doesn't lose his focus in the process. (If something else distracts him, he will abandon the binky altogether.)

He loves being thrown in the air. He loves staring at people. He loves to grab anything he can reach, especially hair, necklaces and paper. He loves to stand with support; he'll almost always push himself into a standing position when anyone holds him. He loves to stare at mirrors. He loves the exersaucer that I keep for him at work.

His favorite toy is his orange monkey (see below). The below picture is also the one that I think best captures Ike's most regular face. It's the face he makes when he is neither happy nor sad - when he just is. It also happens to be when he looks most like Winston Churchill.