The Narrowed Lens: Tales of *tiny* Ty: Six Month Round-Up

Whew.

It's been a hard month. I can't say I'm sorry to be on to the next one. And it's not all baby related...it's just been a hard month altogether. Just in case I thought I was sanctified, I've learned there are lots of areas in desperate need of improvement. Turns out I don't need to worry about being the only holy person on the planet just yet.

I can barely remember what things were like last month...what was he doing again? If I remember correctly, not much was going on developmentally but we've been on quite the ride this time around.

Ty is now a proficient roller but he's not exactly comfortable with his new mobility and freedom. He flips from his back to his belly without much effort and sometimes he'll flip himself back just as effortlessly, but often he finds he didn't really want to be on his belly as much as he thought (the grass is always greener, no?) and instead of doing the logical thing and rolling back to his back, he just kinds of...melts down. Not all the time, but a lot of it. Sometimes something will fascinate him and he'll just talk and play and try to grasp. It can be really cute :)

Also new this month: solids. I've really been enjoying feeding him things, even though my original plan was to hold off until he hit six months. We ended up starting him 1.5 weeks ahead of schedule due to his sudden night wakings. Yep. You read right. My baby, my glorious angel of a nighttime sleeper, has hit a funk in his strongest subject.

My heart is broken.

Ok, that was dramatic. Here's reality: for a good three months he slept through the night almost to perfection. That was from 8:30 to 6:30 most mornings, give or take a few minutes, and included no night feedings or wakings. I could count on him falling asleep (99% of the time without any fuss at all) and sleeping soundly. It was WONDERFUL and made me feel a bit guilty about complaining about his naps.

Then I read a book on baby sleep and decide to try something. I'd heard before that sleep promotes sleep and thought that maybe if I tried to give him more nighttime sleep, he'd be more encouraged to take nice naps during the day. So, I gradually moved his bed time. I got all the way to a 6:30pm bed time and if I remember right, he was still sleeping to 6ish most mornings! It seemed too good to be true!

Yeah...that'd be because it was.

One night around 3am, I think, I got up for the bathroom and on my way back to bed I heard this thumping coming from his room. I stood there by the door, waiting to see if he'd start to fuss, but all I heard was this constant thumping. He was raising his legs and pounding them back down on his mattress (ab much?), a practice we came to refer to as "pounding." I was already awake, so I decided I'd nip it in the bud and see to him now rather than wait for him to get really worked up and start crying. I went in, picked him up, gave him his paci, and held him for a few minutes, his eyes wide and curious. I dubiously laid him back down and retreated from the room, expecting to hear that awful pre-cry cackle indicating that this party had just gotten started, but nothing happened. It was really bizarre. I went back to my bed and never heard another thing from him until morning.

I think this may have happened one other time but I don't recall going in to get him. It wasn't until my sister came for a visit that I was seriously confronted with it. Oh, yeah, my sister came for a visit :) It was great. I suppose you could say it came at both the best and worst of times, but I think she had a good visit. I know I did. I was very sad to see her go, but that probably goes without saying.

Anyway, back to my being confronted with Ty's nighttime waking. We put his crib in our room so Courtney could use his and that's when things turned south. He woke every night/early morning and this time there was crying. To make a long story short, I decided that if this was going to become a regular thing (and it did) it might be time for me to take drastic measures. It might be time for food.

So, one very long and anticlimactic story later, that's how Ty came to eat solids before he turned six months. Truth be told, it hasn't proven to be the cure-all I was hoping. He still usually wakes at some point, either in the middle of the night or sometime in the 5am hour, and even though I'm almost always lying in bed awake by 5am (it's a curse), that's just too early to have to start the day. I've relinquished my dream of a 6:30am rise-and-shine and have settled, for now, on 6.

On the subject of food, he has tried butternut, sweet potato, peas, apple, papaya (barely), banana and yogurt. Apple and banana have been the winners (no surprise there), but he hasn't put up too much of a fight in general. I've had fun feeding him. I was going to look into baby-lead weaning, but at this point I've decided I'm just not comfortable with it. I like making him mashes and feeding him. It's fun for me. We'll stick with it for now.

I guess we can move on to the pictures...this has really gone on much longer than I expected :)

This was taken the day he turned five months. We put a weight in the laundry basket with him so he wouldn't topple, but he is standing all by himself!

Enjoying his high chair! Sophie Giraffe is standing by :)

I love these little polos, but they make him look so grown up!

He really enjoys licking my apples.

These are just too adorable. He was so happy and smiley...and so was Ty ;)

Look at them...little best buds....

Don't be fooled...this picture was just a happy accident. Ty was neither overly fond of Aunt Coco, (it's nothing personal, believe me) nor was he in a good mood this afternoon. This is the magic of rapid fire mode on the camera.