Half Birthday

Half Birthday

Matteo is so done with this baby thing. He's had it with the whole thing. At the ripe old age of 6 months, he's decided that sitting up by himself isn't the thrill it was, say, three weeks ago. Now he wants to stand. For a while now he's been standing up steady and straight, holding onto something sturdy, like the sides of his bassinet. He is gleeful, triumphant, until he topples over. Then he screams in rage. Tonight I put out my fingers for him to grab so he could pull himself to a standing position, one of his favorite games. I swear, though, he worked to find his center of gravity and tried to let go of both my hands! The kid is already trying to do a free stand by himself! In the bath tonight, Tina said she could see him working on discovering how to balance while he was standing in the water holding onto the side of the tub. You can almost see the wheels moving in his head.

He has also, in a short time, become quite the pro at swallowing. He is eating Earth's Best organic whole grain rice cereal, sweet potatoes, and carrots. We tried him on peas, too, but they seemed to give him more eczema so he's off those for a while. In a couple of weeks he went from eating about a teaspoon of sweet potatoes, doled out in miniscule bites that he mostly ejected from his mouth with his little tongue, to scarfing down tablespoons of sweet potatoes mixed with rice cereal (and acidophilus powder, his chiropractor's orders).

He is really starting to resemble an eager, enthusiastic fraternity brother in all he does. On Saturday we were visiting with a bunch of friends, and he started making raspberries at one of the 8-year-old boys at the party. The older boy was delighted, and made raspberries back. For the next hour, Teo made raspberries like his life depended on it, looking at us all for our response, delighting in the power he had over the crowd.

He is especially obsessed with laptops and if he is on the bed with Teen or me while we are working on a laptop he will mount an excrutiating effort to lunge himself at the laptop and scritch-scratch his little fingers on the keyboard. It is making both of us crazy. If you want to get any work done around him, you have to simultaneously type and use your whole body to fend him off. He is really trying to crawl; at this point he lies on his stomach and stretches out one hand in the direction he wants to go, stretches and stretches until the force of it makes him roll over onto his back. Then he cries for someone to come rescue him.

Last Wednesday we celebrated his first half birthday with cupcakes (his had a big 1/2 on it) and a little present--his first sippy cup. We let him demolish the cupcake with his hands, which he loved, although I had to keep catching his arms as he tried to bring his frosting-and-cake-covered hands to his mouth. In the paradox we always live as parents, it's hard to believe six months have gone by since Teo's birth, and also hard to believe he has only been a part of our lives for six months.