Gulliver Update

I know, I know. I'm a horrible blogger lately. Clearly I need to hire someone to do all my work and then I can resume my blogging duties! Work-wise, things have been pretty exciting around here. And very (much too) fast-paced. I have this delusion that one day I will actually catch up and keep on top of it all and do my laundry on a non-crisis basis and make real dinners and actually sit down to read a book and take Saturdays OFF!! (And take Sundays off---shh!)

But this isn't about me. This is about the sorely neglected babe of mine. Not that he is sorely neglected, but that I am neglecting my duty of updating you all about him. So here goes.

SLEEP SCHEDULE: The sleep schedule was well-implemented and we now have a good sleeping babe. This is especially good because my mom recently read an article talking about sleep in children and teens, and how they need that time to turn the day's lessons into memories and proper learning. (A group of high-school teens whose bedtime was pushed back only 15 minutes were less able to retain information than those who had a full night's sleep. Makes me wonder what I could have retained in high school if I had been getting more sleep. Is this a case against early morning seminary??) We go through a similar routine every night to put him to sleep, and this includes singing "It's In Every One of Us." Now Gulliver begins to cry every time he hears that song. Not exactly the intended result... He still cries most times we put him down for a nap or for bed, but not for long and then he's gone to dream land.

MIMICRY: Gulliver is a great copy cat, so he's learning some fun tricks. If you scrunch up your nose and breath out of it, Gulliver will make the same face back at you and breathe out his nose furiously. Yesterday in the car, Murray opened a bottle of soda that hissed, and then we heard Gulliver in the back breathing out his nose exuberantly. Haha! He also likes to try to scare you (I guess this shows that I'm less likely to play peek-a-boo and more likely to try and scare my baby?). While we're all sitting around, suddenly Gulliver will sit up, slap his hands down, and say "Maaaaaaa!" in a gravelly voice. Too cute even to describe here. He's the awesomest baby.

MOURN WITH THOSE THAT MOURN: Gulliver is his father's son. He is a sensitive little soul. Murray discovered recently that if Gulliver thinks he's made you cry, he will immediately burst into tears. This discovery was made when Gulliver grabbed Murray's belly button, and Murray did a fake cry. Immediately Gulliver started to cry. If Gulliver hasn't done anything to hurt you, and you do the fake cry, he will not cry. Murray told me to try it out some time (not that we're that cruel, but we really wanted to see if we were on to something). So Gulliver, who loves to bite, bit my arm, sunk his teeth in, and shook his head side to side. It legitimately hurt. A lot. And left a welt. So after my initial "Owwww!" then I made a crying face and some crying noises and my poor perfect little boy immediately started crying. I let him know that everything was okay, and we were able to smooth things over. But this is 100% consistent. If he has done something to you and you cry, he cries.

MOBILITY: Gulliver is still an expert crawler. He started worming his way around when I had my surgery in July, but within a month or so, he started crawling on all fours. Now he can go wherever he wants by crawling around. He pulls himself up to standing and will take a few steps on his feet while holding onto furniture.

TOWERS: Gulliver loves towers made of blocks. The first time I made him a tower, he would laugh every time I added another block to it. He soon caught on to the knocking down aspect of towers and then the game became how quickly could I stack on blocks before he knocked the tower down.

I think that about brings us up to speed. Photos to come when I can find my phone!