Damien started “crawling” at a week past 9 months… except, his way of moving isn’t really crawling, it’s actually bum scooting. As soon as he learned how to go from his tummy to the seated position, he absolutely refused to do tummy time. Although he’d been previously rocking up on his knees for a while, he would skip straight to sitting instead, once he learned that. I was frustrated that he’d never learn to crawl!
Thankfully, he found his own way to be mobile. One day, he put up his foot and pulled himself forward a little bit and he hasn’t looked back. His movement was painfully slow in the beginning, and limited in range for a week or two, but he’s building up both speed and confidence as he goes. Yes, it is very funny to watch him scoot around this way! I love it when he decides to play catch with himself, chasing after a ball.
Damien Bum Scooting from Ianiv Schweber on Vimeo.
With his newfound mobility, Damien is growing less fussy, no longer needing to be held to stand all the time, and is exploring the world on his own terms. He’s much more independent. Of course, this comes with a price and my days of running errands are over – he wants to get down and play, not run errands!
I spend a lot of time singing with my boys. I thought for sure that Aiden would grow into singing, but he’s been slow to begin it. Just like with his song actions, he became very reticent about developing his singing skills. For a few months, we heard him singing a line or two in his crib before bed, but it was not a phase that lasted long. Since then, we have encouraged him to sing or at least fill in the words in songs, though I didn’t want to press the issue (since he was obviously shy about it). Still, I continued to sing. Oddly enough, he still likes it when I sing children’s songs even though he quite dislikes any children’s music I play on the stereo.
Perhaps thanks to preschool, where all kids are encouraged to participate in circle time, Aiden has begun to open up with his singing. His hand motions came back last year when he began preschool and this year he has begun to sing!! Just recently I was able to coax him into singing twice in the bath (second time recorded below) and today he sang several songs with me in the car!
He’s not very confident of his singing yet – he says he doesn’t know the words – but I’m going to try to build up his confidence with practice. Damien loves to hear Aiden in the car so it will be a great time to do it.
Damien loves to kick. For over a month now, he has purposefully dropped toys into his lap in order to kick them away. He made a game of it. We’ve built upon that by introducing him to ‘catch’. He will grab a ball that is tossed to him (sort of) and will kick it away again. He loves to play this game and has for several weeks now.
Do we have a future soccer star on our hands??
Damien began eating solids about a week before he was 5 months old. Just like Aiden, he began showing early signs of being ready. If a baby could demand to be included in mealtimes, that’s exactly what Damien would look like. We began with a few simple foods, but he really just wanted to eat what we were eating. So, although we felt we were pretty liberal with Aiden (who also started early) in terms of texture, Damien tops him in terms of variety.
Following more of a ‘baby led weaning’ technique, I have not been as concerned with introducing multiple foods at once. I keep track of what he eats so I can back off several items if an allergy appears. His first foods were apple, banana and rice cereal, though he is not a fan of bland or mushy food. I only mushed his banana twice before he was totally fine chewing or swallowing lumpy pieces. He’s totally off rice cereal and even baby oatmeal got a big ‘No’ from him this morning. Who can blame him, really, when his other meals include tasty things like lasagna or meatballs?
Feeding Damien table food that is well cooked / soft has made it possible for him to eat almost everything we do with no extra preparation. He eats chunks of chicken (which I recall briefly making into a chunky puree for Aiden), rice and pieces of vegetables with no issue.
In the video above, Damien is enjoying two of his favourite foods: chicken and mango.
As part of language development, babies experiment with different sounds. Damien experimented with this sound for about a week about a month ago and has brought it back for a day here and there again. Those are hard days…
Yes, in this video, he is annoyed… but he also used the sound for when he was happy.
