Swimmies & swimmies, Part 2

Again there is no sound with this, pero vale la pena de todas formas (but it's definitely worth checking out anyway). What a privilege it is, as parents, to introduce your child to all of life's joys and wonders for the first time! Happy Easter to all of you! Jesus is risen indeed!!!

"Swimmies & swimmies"

We've all done it. You new parents surely know what I'm talking about: the new language that develops once your little one has hatched. Ours at the Koel household could be best described as putting a word in the diminutive first and then adding an "s"... and this works just dandy with nouns or adjectives, if you're curious. So, we've got examples like hungries, milkies, sleepies, poopies and, as you can see from the title of this one, swimmies. (This grammatical phenomenon is most effective, by the way, if the word is repeated; hence, swimmies AND swimmies.) So we took our sweet son swimmies last weekend for the first time, and he seemed to really like it. At first he just looked around like, "I don't get it. It's kinda like a giant bath tub, but there are lots of people I don't know in here." We took turns holding him and letting him splash and kick on his tummy and an on his back. We didn't submerge him this time, and we kept the whole thing pretty tame in the adult swim lanes since Gavin was just recovering from his first cold.

I strongly encourage you to click on the above picture to get an enlarged view of this boy's bright blue eyes. He gets compliments on these a lot! And I really wish that you could all see just how adorable his 9 month, lime green swim trunks looked on him. Oh, and did I mention that he blew out his first swim diaper before we even left the house? There is no easy way to get a poopy swim diaper off, so Daddy ended up literally cutting it off of him so that we could put a new one on. Gavin enjoyed flirting with the lifeguards, and he honestly was the most precious thing in the rec center pool that day. Brent's mom tells us that Brent was a little fish as a kid, and I suspect that his son might be too! We can't wait to swim more this summer and take him down the slide.
This is Gavin's seriously adorable 3/4 long bear robe that we put on him when he got out of the pool. (Thanks, Great Aunt Patsy & Uncle Ron!) We're happy that his first swimming experience was a positive one! We took him to his 6 month doctor's visit today, and here are his current stats:

Weight: 17 lbs 10 oz...55 %ile (He's starting to slow down apparently.)

Length: 28 inches...91%ile (He is one long dude!)

Head: 17 inches around...40%ile (This has remained steady since the beginning.)

Tough times, but at least he's cute....

The long version...

A week ago we decided that it would be a great idea to start Gavin on his first solid foods...rice cereal. The prior week we started skipping the late night feeding (10 pm) as well, because we were waking him up half the time to get him to eat. He actually seemed to do pretty well skipping the last meal of the night, until we gave him the cereal.

We started with just a tablespoon of cereal mixed with some milk from mom to get a nice soup going. The first few days of trying to get him to eat the cereal, he couldn't quite understand what we were doing to him. We would put a spoonfull in his mouth and he would just smile and push it all right back out with his tongue. Nice! After 2 or 3 days of this, he finally understood what we were trying to do and swallowed his first bite. He actually loved it! We did a few more days of this without too much trouble, and then things seemed to go down hill.

He started getting up several times in the night (sometimes every other hour) and would just cry and be super upset. Since he generally is a fairly happy baby, this was a bit weird. Also, he started really hating being put on his changing table or anywhere else on his back. He would just instantly start screaming. What to do! After several nights of this, I think we realized it might have something to do with the cereal...maybe it was giving him stomach cramps or something. So we stopped feeding him cereal. Although that might have been the problem, he still continued with the same symptoms. At one point we thought, maybe its an ear infection. So, we took him into the doctor...but no dice there. A day or so later he started coughing in the night and had a raspy voice. Finally! I think we might have the culprit. I think he was getting sick for the first time and clearly that affected him. We have him on a nice treatment of humidifier/salt nose drops/the occassional tylenol, and that combination seems to be doing the trick.

That seems to be the hardest part of parenthood, especially for the first child: too many variables all changing at the same time. This too often leads to many sleepless nights for everyone involved. But, at the end of the day, when you get a face like this one (see above)...it is still all VERY worth every hard moment.

Jumpin' Around...

Here is our little jumpin' bean. We realize that there is no sound with this video clip, but we thought you would enjoy it anyway. He usually does about 3 or 4 shifts in the Exersaucer at about 15 minutes each. Sometimes he grabs the steering wheel and pretends he is driving downtown, or sometimes he grabs the purple bear-flower-thing and sucks on that for a good few minutes in between hops. At the end of the day, he gets a good workout and hopefully tires himself out for a nice long nappy.

Collection of pictures from this past month...

This past week was the first week we have attempted to feed Gavin solid foods. Crazy that he is already old enough to start that! His first solid food is rice cereal, which is kind of funny anyways because it ends up resembling something soup-ish more than anything solid. The first two days of attempting this, we seemed to get more on the outside of his face than inside his mouth. When we did manage to get some inside his mouth, he promptly would smile and push it back out with his tongue. The third day was met with some success though as I think he finally figured out that food is made for eating, and swallowed a few spoonfulls (we think). Fun times for sure!

This is Gavin playing with his Grandma Wills upstairs in his bedroom while Mom is getting a much needed break running some daytime errands.

Although not quite warm enough yet for the birthday suit to be worn out in the open, mom had him playing like this upstairs in his room. He sure is a little precious dude!

Gavin truly is fascinated by balloons. He just loves them and can't quite figure out how they just float there. He loves to try to catch and poke them. Here he is playing with a balloon with Mom.