how in the world do you wash your kiddo’s hair?!!!

BB hates having his hair washed and I’ve come to dread this part of the day every day.  The rest of the bath is completely fine…all smiles and splashes.  As soon as something touches his head, he freaks out (this was even before the haircut and probably the reason why he reacted the way he did).  He hates having the water touch his face…and if it starts to even run down the side of his face, he starts to thrash wildly.

We’ve tried everything, but he knows as soon as we touch his head, it’s coming and will start freaking out.  Before, he was more manageable because he was smaller and wasn’t mobile.  So I just tilted his head back and tried my best not to let too much water run down his face.  But now, it’s impossible…he’s up on his feet in a second and I don’t have enough hands to hold the shower head/water container, rub the suds out and hold him down.  That’s 4 hands (I need 2 to keep him down).  On the nights that PB is home, it’s okay, but when he’s working, it’s just me and I honestly think that little boy is stronger than me!

The easiest thing would probably be to get him used to having water on his face.  But how do I go about doing that?  He usually ends up breathing it in and choking on it.

I tried to fix it…I think I made it worse.  Now he has a bowl cut.  It looked so easy on the youtube videos…grab some hair between your fingers, snip snip snip and ta dah…a nicely layered haircut.  I think I should just get that layering scissors.  It was almost impossible to even grab his hair between my fingers.  oh well…it’s just hair…it’ll grow out in no time!  Maybe next time we’ll just buzz it.

Before:  This is the morning of d-day….when he fell asleep in his highchair after a nice big meal.  His bangs were quite…uh…atrocious.  He also had these wisps on the sides of his head which was the hair he was born with and never fell out.  He only has two small sections of it, one on each side.

BB walking while holding on with just one hand!

After (at the salon…I don’t have pics of my fixer upper yet):  It doesn’t look as bad in the pics…but in real life, it was not good.  The right side of his bands and “sideburns” were cut, but the left side was barely touched and was still hanging over his ears.

Poor baby drama king.  (I love this pic that PB took of us)

Mr. Guapo playing his bongo (you see how the section leading to his ears is cut at an angle on the right side…and in the above picture it’s not)

BB’s hair was getting out of control and it was always sweaty and smelly…so we took him to a kiddie haircut place for his first hair cut.  It was not good.  He cried and freaked out the second the woman laid hands on him.  He was shaking his head left and right, twisting and rolling everywhere and pushing her hands away.  I had to be called in to try to restrain him…but sadly BB is stronger than I.  He cried the entire time (it was pretty quick….5 minutes?) and we walked out with quite the uneven cut since BB wouldn’t let her touch him anymore.  It was so bad that the woman asked, “oh, is it almost his naptime?”  We were like, uh…no…he just took one and was just fed.  She was pretty impressed with how fast he was in dodging the scissors.

He did get his certificate of bravery (that they give out for everyone’s first haircut) and I got a few locks of his hair in an envelope to keep for memories….and a comical 5 minute video.

I guess I’ll try to fix it myself.   Eeeek.

We made the transition from purees to table foods in, uh, 2 days.  I’m terrible…I just didn’t have the patience to sit there and watch him play with his food for almost an hour and THEN have to feed him purees afterwards.  The first day, he would not put anything other than cheerios,puffs and blueberries in his mouth.  Everything else was smushed in his tiny fist and then rubbed all over his hair and face.  It was cute….in the beginning.  Then I got fed up and started feeding him myself.  He only tolerated that for one feeding and then clamped his mouth shut and refused to let me feed him.

The next day, he let me feed him in the beginning…and then I gave him the food to play with after he ate a couple of pieces.  He started to hesitantly put the food in his mouth during breakfast and giving me his wth-is-this-look.  By dinner time, he ate a slice of mozarella cheese, 14 of a chicken thigh, some blueberries, some cheerios….and he still looked hungry…so I fed him 2 oz of puree (that sounded like an excerpt from The Hungry Caterpillar when I re-read my post).  That night, he was up all night and I only slept 1 hour.  I thought maybe I overfed him…or that his tummy was getting used to having to digest bigger chunks of food.  The following day I felt the beginning of one of his top teeth.  So I don’t know if the food was to blame or the teething (he has always been up the night the tooth starts to cut through). 

We also gave him egg…the WHOLE egg….because our pedi kept telling us to try eggs for breakfast and forgot to tell us NOT to give him egg white.  It was our babysitter who told me she didn’t feel comfortable giving him egg whites based on what her pedi told her.  I googled it and she was right….all the allergens are in the whites.  Gah.  He was okay though…he only got it once.

So now, he is all table food.  It is really much harder to do table food.  You can’t really freeze stuff beforehand (or can you?) and I stay up late every night cooking and cutting stuff up for the next day.  I try to be creative with the meals, but it always ends up being the same every day.  Can I introduce spices and herbs?  And if you could please suggest your yummiest recipes, that would be wonderful!

We are starting to introduce more table foods to BB.  Other than puffs and cheerios, he’s just had a quick bite here and there of our meals, a nibble of  pizza, mashed potatos…nothing substantial.

We tried having him taste other stuff cut up into small pieces, but the only things that he’ll pick up and put into his mouth are puffs, cheerios and blueberries.  We were surprised to see that he could actually tell the difference.  We thought this would be a piece of cake…he would just grab whatever and stick it in his mouth.  Instead, he carefully examines the food, turns it over in his hand, examines it some more, squishes it and then examines it again.  At the end, he usually ends up putting it down.  He won’t let us feed him either.  He’ll clamp his mouth shut and turn away.  But if we show him one of those 3 things, he’ll grab it and eat it.  His meals take FOREVER now.

What is a normal serving size?  I made a grilled cheese sandwich about 1/4 the size of a normal piece of bread.  It seemed tiny at the time, but after I cut it up and started trying to get him to eat it, it looked huge.  I can’t tell if he’s turning away because he’s full or turning away because he doesn’t want to eat it because of the taste/texture.

Did you just switch completely to table food…or did you do part table food, part purees and slowly phase out the purees.

How did you wean off the bottle?  BB can drink from the straw sippy and a regular cup, but there’s no way he can do all 6 oz that way.

BB is now:

Height: 29.5″ (84 %ile)
Weight: 19 pounds, 3 oz (25 %ile)
HC: 18″ (60 %ile)

He has been on the same height curve since birth, but has been dropping curves in weight since about 6 months.  The docs all say that it’s normal because he’s now so active, but he used to be around 90%ile for weight!  He’s tall and lean now!

They gave us the okay for table food and told us everything was a go except honey and nuts since he wasn’t allergic to anything so far.  The banana incident was a fluke…it just coincided with a teething rash.  We’ve tried it a few times a month later and no reaction.  They want us to do 3 meals a day, simulating regular meals.  Breakfast foods for breakfast, yogurt and some sort of starch for lunch and meat for dinner.

We tried yogurt with quartered blueberries and small pieces of  bread when we got home.  It was so much work to prep.  I’ll probably have to prep them the night before.  What is the best thing to store stuff in….I hate washing tons of tiny tupperware.  Should I just do a bento box type thing?

He’s finally starting to get the sippy cup…both the traditional kind and the straw kind.  Does it matter which one I use as long as I also introduce a normal cup?  He’s better with the straw…he thinks of the other kind as a teething toy.

Suprisingly, they didn’t even ask about crawling…I guess they really don’t consider that a milestone anymore.

BB got blood taken from his finger for a HgB and lead levels.  He didn’t even cry!  Then they surprised us by telling us that the HepB vaccine was now given at 6 months instead of 9 or 12, so he was late.  So he got a shot today…we didn’t even prep with the Tylenol or anything.  He seems okay…I guess since it was just 1 thing…and the fevers are more from the pneumococcal  vaccine anyway.

That little faker finally crawled for real today.  He could do one or two steps before, but then he would flop down and whine and cry until we got him whatever we wanted.  He played Mama and Papa.  Today, I just refused to give in…and then up he went and crawled over to the object, crying the entire way.  I KNEW he could do it.  He kind of does a mix of classic crawling and crawling on all fours (hands and feet)….he skipped the army crawling part.

So I guess now that he knows it works….he’ll whine/crawl over to something he can pull up on and then just cruise around.  I put him across the room and tried to get him to crawl to me.  Instead, he pulled up on a nearby sofa and cruised around the perimeter of the room until he reached me.  oh well.  At least I can check off crawling…..they never said he had to crawl well!!!

So now the crawling, pulling up, cruising combo is a little bit of trouble since I can’t take my eye off of him at all.  I did for a minute today to put dishes in the sink and came back to find him holding onto our floor lamp, shaking the heck out of it.

What to do if your footed jammies make it too slippery for cruising?  Tie the legs above your butt!!!

  

Has anyone tried Flor tiles?  One of the mama’s in my playgroup had them in her house.  They’re sort of like the rubber ones, but they’re padded carpted tiles that stick onto the floor with non-toxic adhesive stickers.  And when one gets dirty, you can just remove that one tile, wash it in the washing machine and stick it back on.  It comes in different colors and patterns too.  We were thinking about getting that to replace our rubber ones because BB just rips them up and chew on them.  And the only way to wash them is to wipe them…which doesn’t seem clean enough for me.  The Flor tiles are kind of pricey though…they run about $7 per 19″x19″ tile.  But they did seem to stick well…I had a hard time prying a tile up.  And they’re so much softer and cushier.

This is all going by so fast…I can’t believe he’s almost 1!!!!

We got our [mostly] happy boy back this month.  I’m not sure what happened, but something clicked and he’s so much better now.  He’s still VERY clingy and will whine as soon as we put him down and cling to our legs.  But that’s better than whining while we’re holding him/sitting next to him.  He seems to be really trying to understand what we’re saying.  He will stare at us intently while we’re talking to him.

Crawling is still a no go.  He can manage to shuffle a few steps, but as soon as he gets remotely close to the object of desire, Mr. Impatient will do a full out lunge instead of just crawling up to the object, except he is actually still several feet away.  So his “crawling” looks more like he’s doing the worm!

He’s cruising like a champ though…back and forth and back again along the length of the couch all day.  That’s all he wants to do.  If you try to pick him up in the middle of one of his laps, he’ll get mad.  He can transfer himself from object to object and can manage to bend over and pick something off the ground while holding on with the other hand.  He loves to “walk” holding onto our hands and sometimes he’ll actually “run”!  He has one tight grip though….my fingertips literally turn purple from the circulation cut off!

He can climb the stairs….he gets tired after a few, but he’ll get his knees up there, pull himself up and then stand on the step…and repeat.  The playground steps are the best since they’re nice and shallow and have little holes (that mesh metal playground gym material) for him to grab onto with his fingers.

He no longer looks like a baby….at least I don’t think so.  He’s really starting to look like a big boy.  sniff sniff.

He can follow a few commands.  He’ll lift his arms up when we say “up” because he knows we’re going to pick him up….and he can “pat pat” things when we tell him to…and he can “splish splash” during bath time.  We think he is trying to sign “more” and “milk”, but it’s hard to tell because he does similar motions normally anyway.  We’re more definite on the “more”…since he’ll do the “milk” at seemingly random times (unless he really is hungry).

He is starting to be able to be more gentle and deliberate with his motions, especially his fine motor movements.  He used to just destroy books and magazines as soon as he saw them…but now, he will actually flip the pages back and forth and examine what’s on each page.  His pincer grip is spot on and I’ve seen him pick up individual strands of hair off the ground!

He LOVES to dance.  As soon as he hears music, he’ll bounce up and down when he’s sitting, or he’ll do Elvis like hip movements if he’s standing…and if he’s lying down, he’ll start wriggling back and forth.

So far, only two teeth have popped out.  He still has no idea that they’re there and keeps running his tongue over them.  He chops down on our fingers as we cringe and he leaves red marks on his wrist because he usually sucks his wrist to self-soothe.

I was a little lax with photos this month because it was hard to take pics and keep and eye on him.  But here are a few (taken over 2 days to represent the month hahaha).  I love the B&W of him stuck under the sofa.

   

Trying to figure out what those two things in his mouth are

Pulling up & cruising
    

His new toolbench

Finally some pics of BB and Mama (in which I don’t look horrid).  That’s one of my fave carriers custom made with one of my fave fabrics!

PB and BB….same head in different sizes.

    

This is the plaground area at BB’s future elementary school.  I think it’s pretty amazing…although this may be the norm in suburbia…I’m not sure (all we had were fenced concrete yards in Queens).  This is only 1/4 of the school yard…the rest of it is a beautifully manicured grassy lawn filled with trees and benches.

I remember someone blogging about this portable plastic food masher…I think it was either a Japanese or Korean brand.  I think it had ridges on the bottom and there was a spoon thing that you used to scrape it against the bumps.  What is it called and where can I get one?

We’re trying to give BB a little of our normal food to kind of get him used to table food.  He can handle the soft stuff, but for meats, I’ve been chewing it up and giving him that.  hahaha.  I know, gross.  I feel like a mama bird.  But he’s not great at swallowing larger chunks yet and I’m not going to use the blender all the time!

Do I let him handle the food himself?  Everytime I give it to him, none of it goes in his mouth…he just mashes it up in his hands and then smears it in his hair!

I found this online…but it’s from the UK.  http://www.annabelkarmel.com/products/feeding/food-masher-bowl