Father's Day

Sunday was Father's Day. It gave me a chance to reflect on how lucky we are to have Mitchy and what a blessing he is for us. In the evening we went to my parents house for dinner with Grannie and Grandad, Mike and Mandy and Uncle Rob. Mitch also got to play with Cousin Lilly again.

Here is a cute one of Mitchy by himself:


In other news, three out of four of Mitchy's eye teeth have poked through and the result is he's been a bit of a sooky boy during the last week or so. It's very unusual for him to cry for no reason and there has been a bit of that in the last week. It looks like our little boy has come out the other side though because he was back to his happy-self today.

More teeth and Mitch's favourite things

No photos today, but a few bits and pieces of news. Firstly Mitchy has his first eye tooth coming through. This is meant to happen from around 16 months, so he is a tiny bit ahead. He has been a bit of a pain, not wanting to eat his food and dribbling a lot, and as usual his teeth are the problem.

Some of Mitch's favourite things!

He loves playing chasings, but only really runs from the sofa in the lounge room to the arm chair in his room. It is very cute. He loves being outside too, and he can be outside a bit more now that the weather is a bit warmer. In the park next door there is quite a slope which he likes to "run" down. "Run" in the sense that he starts walking, but gradually gets faster until it is obvious he is out of control and is going to stack any moment.

He loves bark and dirt. He will eat dirt quite happily (perhaps he thinks it is chocolate initially, but why take a second mouthful?) and loves to pick up bark and move it to another place and drop it there. He'd quite happily do it all day if you let him!

He loves trucks and trains. He will stop and watch them when they go past the park or our house (trains don't go past our house fortunately, but when he is near a train line he watches them). He has two picture books with trucks in them which he "reads" (that is he brings them to us to read) over and over. After we have read them to him, he will go through the book by himself pointing and saying things.

His talking is coming along too. Some things he says the actual word for (e.g. duck, bath, ball, car, etc) but other things he will say the noise the animal makes. For instance "oof, oof" for dog, "grrrr" or "roar" for lions, tigers and even kittens (they are all related after all), and elephant noises for elephant. He also makes fire engine noises.

Anyway, that is enough news for now.

New photos

Just a few new photos to look at.

First Mitch and his Nana:


We went to Catriona's 30th on the weekend and there was a little trike there which Mitch liked the look of. First he sized it up and thought, "Yeah I can ride this thing."

"But perhaps with a little help from daddy"


"But this is the best way to travel":


In other news he has grown another tooth so now he has eight. Four at the bottom and four at the top. He's also mastered "ma-ma-ma-ma" and now it's poor daddy who is the forgotten one. Oh well, so long as mummy is happy :)

Learning new tricks

Mitch is learning new games all the time. He plays Peek-a-Boo with you by holding up a towel in front of his face and then pulling it down and he loves to knock down towers you build for him like in the pictures below.
First from across the room he sees the tower. It calls to him saying "Knock me down!"

The approach begins!

And after the fall, in the distance a boy crawls away, his work done, leaving boxes strewn in his wake


Sorry about the crappy quality of the photos. I'm a bit frustrated at the moment at the quality of the photos we can produce. The photos from the camera phone and video camera used to be good enough, but I have been wooed by what is possible using one of these or one of these. Oh well, keep dreaming with prices around the $1000 mark! Still it would be nice :) I have been using a new free image processing program which is just super and really powerful. It has most of the capabilities of ones like Photoshop, but it's free. It's called Paint.Net and you can download it from here. It uses Microsoft .Net, so you will need Windows XP (or Vista) and the download is 50Mb if you don't already have .Net installed or 5Mb if you do. It runs on our 6 and a half year old PC (P3 800 with 768Mb RAM), but not very well. Some of the effects are amazing, and you can do a lot to improve photos, although it obviously depends on the quality you start off with.

What else is news? Well Mitchy now has 7 teeth which he uses to eat all sorts of food. His favourite is still yoghurt, but he has added a number of things to his gastronomic repertoire. He has porridge with pureed apple and sultanas for breakfast along with a slice of bread with butter and vegemite. If you help him he eats it, if you don't he picks up the little squares puts them in his mouth, sucks all the vegemite off, and then spits them out. He also quite often has portions of what mummy and daddy have been eating - generally somewhat more chopped of course. He's had a couple of tasty pieces of steak recently, which he enjoyed a great deal. He even had some moussaka!

He now says "dadada", although that is pretty much directed at anything, not me specifically. We think he also said "car" the other day in reference to his "That's not my car" book, but that could have been anything. It's a bit hard to know. Meeks is sad that he still hasn't said "mama", but I'm sure that is just around the corner. He also likes to make a 'ssssss' sound.

He pulls himself up on anything and everything, including the garbage bin and toilet seat, so we have had to move the bin into the cupboard and make sure we keep the bathroom door shut. Some mornings he stands at the front window and bangs on the glass as he watches Daddy walk down the front stairs and go off to work. It's so hard to leave with this little face at the window watching. He furniture surfs around the lounge room and stands happily with one hand casually resting on the couch, but hasn't stood up without touching anything yet. Meeks thinks he'll be walking before he's one, and I guess with the amount of progress he's made in the last two months, he should be able to master walking in the next 2 and a half months before he is one.

He just loves the dishwasher for some bizarre reason. He can be in his room and if you open the dishwasher he hears it and you hear the slap, slap, slap of his little hands as he races down the hallway so he can crawl into the dishwasher. If you let him, he will crawl up onto the door when it is open, and into the dishwasher if you let him, crazy little boy.

He's brought so much joy to us over the past 9 and a half months. It's bizarre to think in a couple of months he will be one!

News for the week

Well, it finally happened this morning. I know that every time I pick up Mitch to give him a cuddle and say goodbye in the morning, there is a risk he will express his displeasure at my leaving by using the most potent of his four "How to make Daddy stay at home" weapons. This morning, after 5 months and one day (can you believe he's 5 months old now!) of waiting for it, as I was saying goodbye, he vomited all over my shirt. Fortunately he didn't get my pants. Satisfied he had delayed me, and smiling a lot because it's funny, he went off to sleep like a good boy while I got another shirt and went to work.

In other news Mitch's two bottom teeth are through and very cute. You have to be a bit careful with him now because anything he can grab he puts in his mouth and sucks on it, dribbles on it and if you're lucky he bites as well. My finger tells me his little teeth are quite sharp.

We're gradually trying him on a few solids. So far he's tried avocado (which he liked), plain rice cereal (which he wasn't mad about - no surprise there), rice cereal with pureed peach mixed in (which he liked better), potato (again, fairly dull) and today yoghurt which he was quite keen on as you can see below. In fact when he had finished the bit Meeks had given him (most of which ended up smeared around his mouth) he cried until Meeks gave him some more!



The only other piece of news is that last week he was off his food and we were a bit concerned about him losing weight (not that he's at risk of being too thin), but this week he's back into it which is great.

PS: For those of you who are wondering, his other three weapons are smiling, crying and pooing.

Another chopper

Mitch actually slept in until 7:30 this morning which was great for mummy and daddy. I was checking his bottom gum this morning to see how his tooth was going and well, now one tooth has become two teeth and he's a much happier little boy. Yesterday he was still not feeding properly though, only drinking half his formula for most feeds which is a bit of a worry. Hopefully that improves today now that both teeth are through. The doctor yesterday suggested making sure he drinks water to keep his fluids up and we have started trying him a few "solids" like rice cereal. He's not thrilled by them and most of it gets pushed out again by his tongue. One of the things the doctor suggested was trying a different brand of formula just for a different taste. I guess if you had to eat the same thing 5 times a day every day for 5 months, you'd probably get sick of it too!

Mitch had more shots yesterday and his second lot of immunisation for rotovirus with is taken orally. So he has bruises on his chunky little legs, poor little boy. Apparently he looked surprised and then bawled with the doctor injected him. Then he was just recovering and they had to do the other leg and he bawled all over again. As Meeks was walking out he did manage to give the doctor a smile though to say, "I forgive you"

Little Chopper

Mitch has been a bit funny recently. He's been waking up at 5am and has been generally a bit disgruntled. He's been a bit off his food and spending a lot of time with his hands in his mouth (which perhaps is not unusual). We thought it was carry over from his cold last week but then Meeks was looking in his mouth this morning and there was the problem. A little tooth was poking through! No wonder the poor little guy was unhappy!

So here we are at less than 5 months and he's already got his first little chopper! Hopefully we'll get a picture of it soon.