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Sunday, September 20, 2009

21 weeks old

Dio's been looking so big to me lately--not just chubby, but long/tall as well. I weighed him on Friday at my midwife's gram-positive scale, and he was 18 1/2 pounds! Yikes! He's mostly in 6-9 month clothes now, as the 3-6 month clothes were getting too short in the crotch.

We're still trying out sleeping arrangements. I like starting Dio out in Zari's room, but at least half of the time she takes too long to fall asleep, and I don't want to wake him up to move him. I really like having him start out in her room, though. It's wonderful to be able to turn the light on when we're going to bed, to talk to each other, and not to have to creep around silently all the time. He still wakes up with about the same frequency, but some nights have been better recently.

So what's new with Dio and Zari? Dio has discovered his feet. And his crotch. Every time we take his diaper off, one hand grabs his foot and the other hand goes for his crotch. It cracks me up. He can roll over, and over, and over. He's not crawling yet, but he can manage to scoot himself several feet using a combination of rolling and commando-style wiggling. He loves playing with plastic keys, Zari's dragonfly teething toy, stuffed animals, burp cloths, and a jingle-bell shaker toy.

He's gone through several phases with his vocalizations recently. For a while we dubbed him R2D2 because he was making lots of high-pitched squeaks and squeals. Cute but annoying. The past few days he's been grunting as loud as he can, all the time.

In the past month, Zari has started doing a lot of imaginative play. She'll pretend she's a dinosaur or a dragon. She'll give me (pretend) clouds or ice cubes or food. She tells crazy made-up stories. She has the beginning down pat: Once upon a time, there was a ____... She can distinguish between things that are real and things that are pretend.

I'm constantly amazed at her developing linguistic and reasoning skills. Not in the "my child is a genius" sense, just that it's so fun to see your child change and grow and understand more about the world around them.

I'm still feeling a lot of pressure to get various academic projects done. But I'm also feeling well-balanced overall. I work out in the mornings three times a week. I'm playing in our university orchestra, which rehearses once a week. We go on an outing almost every day to playgroups, library story time, post office, etc. The weather has been gorgeous: cool and crisp in the mornings, warm and dry in the afternoons. It feels like fall.

Dio's waking up--no more blogging for tonight!

2 comments:

  1. Oh, he sounds adorable! I'm glad you're figuring out a workable sleep situation for you. That makes such a huge difference, doesn't it?

    I love hearing how Dio and Zari are progressing. Your post last week about Zari was quite inspiring for me.

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  2. 18 1/2 pounds, wow! I thought my little monster was huge and he only weighed 15 lbs 14 oz at his appointment last Monday (he's almost a week younger than Dio but you gave birth on my due date so they're really close). My little man is also into the 6-9 month clothes (especially the footed sleepers) because he's so tall (28 inches!).

    I hear you on the high pitched squeaks and squeals. Liam just really started with that yesterday. It was a big hit when we were visiting the in-laws yesterday; not so much when my husband had him yesterday morning and I was trying to take a nap.

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