Daniel has always been a bit of a daredevil. he loves being lifted into the air, swung around and especially loves airplane rides. His favorite thing however is wrestling with Michael. Often before bedtime, Michael will wrestle the kids - which basically means throwing them around his shoulders and over and under his arms while grunting and they love it to pieces. Michael added Daniel to the fun once he was about 6 months old and its been a favorite ever since. I remember Nora being afraid of it as a baby, and it took her a while to enjoy it. But Daniel from the first, gets this big smile on his face during the whole thing and cries as soon as its over and someone else's turn. He just loves every minute of it. 
Daniel is just a physical guy in general though. He crawls aggressively, pulls up to stand every chance he gets, is into
everything, cruises regularly and even often stands unassisted for a few seconds at
a time. His favorite rooms in the house are the pantry and the bathrooms. He loves to unwind the toilet paper roll and especially go fishing in the toilet. If the kids forgot to flush the toilet and there is bonus toilet paper in there, all the better! Gag! We are in the process of training the kids to close the bathroom door after every visit, but until they learn I will be doomed to bathe Daniel 3-4x a week it seems. I've never had so much baby laundry in my life, other than when Will was going through his reflux stage.
His other favorite room is the pantry, because there are so many cool things in there. Baking supplies and especially sprinkles and cans seem to be favorites. I am also trying to train myself to close the pantry door each time. And I am grateful that we even have a pantry door. When we built the house I had considered telling the builder to leave that door off (we also removed several other doors around the house), but now I am so glad its there!
Daniel is physical in other ways too. Unless he is belted down, he regularly escapes from his highchair and crawls across the table or stands in the chair unless once he gets bored with sitting there to eat. Several times I have served him food and walked away, forgetting to belt him in, only to look over and there he is, crawling across the dinner table, heading for the other edge - likely to make a nose dive off the side! He is a strong and determined kid. He gets this look of determination where he pinches his lips together and narrows his eyes and then you know its going to be hard to stop him. He has overpowered Nora on several occasions to steal things from her and he often wins. I even have trouble grabbing things away from him when he is determined to hold on! 
He is still a good little nurser and eater. Our nursing sessions are generally pretty efficient though if hes not sleepy, he loves to amuse himself by sticking his fingers all over my face, in my nose and in my mouth. He picks at my teeth, pulls on my hair, my earrings and my necklace. I feel like its a dance between his hands and my face as I turn this way and that to avoid his grasping hands. He also loves to eat solid foods more and more. We often start him out on a meal of solids cut up (often whatever we are eating) and then have him finish off a pouch to round things out. He can be voracious at times and generally always does a pretty good job, though its abundantly clear that he has food preferences and shares Will's habit of automatically being suspicious of new foods. He LOVES pickles and mandarin oranges though, which I find amusing. So far he just has the 8 teeth in front still but, but manages to eat chewy things just fine anyway. Babies are amazing that way! 
Things are improving on the sleep front at last. Hes only up 1-2x a night now thank goodness. Our nap schedule is pretty good too most days. He generally wakes between 6:30 and 7, goes down for his first nap at 9 and generally sleeps until 11. Then he goes down for his second nap at 1 and is up between 2:30 and 3. Then hes generally down for the night at 8pm. He will often wake for night feeds just as Michael and I are going to sleep, around 11, and again at 2-2:30am. I will be glad when he stops waking at night completely, but this is still a vast improvement over our previous schedule!
Daniel is a vigorous, healthy, social boy and he is ready to take on this family and the world!
Comments
Post a Comment