Ten months and counting.

So, Jim turned ten months old. That's double digits. That's almost a year. Holy shit.



Anyway, he's big and strong and boyish and funny. He can do SO MANY THINGS this past month. I'm not even going to try to organize them, so here's a list.


One week, five months, ten months. Doesn't look like a huge difference in the past five months, does it?

• Stand up completely on his own with nothing to hold, and remain standing indefinitely.
  
• Walk really well with someone holding his hands, and take 1-2 steps on his own.
  
• Wave hello when he feels like it (but it's up and down, not side to side). This, of course, only really applies to me and Noah. He won't do it for strangers or the camera.
  
• Give you things if you hold out your hand. This one is actually useful. He can now pick up pens and stuff and give them to me. He also likes to feed things to me and Noah.
  
• May or may not be able to sign 'milk.' I'm really not sure if he knows what it means or if he's just mimicking me for fun.
  
• Eat all his food and not drop any on the floor. Well, unless he's finished, in which case he'll methodically pluck one piece after another and carefully drop it, checking each time to make sure it actually hit the floor. Also he has realized that if he drops food sometimes the cats will come over. But mostly he just eats all of his food like a people.

Most pictures came out like this, because Jim is terribly interested in the camera this month.

• Makes jokes. Well, makes joke, anyway, in the singular. He thinks putting things on heads is HILARIOUS, whether it's his own head or someone else's. He also thinks it's pretty funny when I wear one of Noah's hats, although the hats are not amusing at all if they're on Noah's head.
  
• Tan lines and bleached-blond hair. He's been in the sun a lot.
  
• Recognizes the cats and the word 'kitty cat.' Thinks the sign for 'cat' is hilarious, but doesn't try to mimic it.
  
• Looks for things behind and/or under obstacles. His favorite game is being chased around the bed and then looking under the bed at whomever is on the other side.

Sitting still = BORING.

• Turns pages. This makes story time a bit tricky, but he has a great deal of fun
  
• Uses the Xbox controller. He knows which button turns it on, and he knows that pushing buttons makes things happen on the screen. He also knows that it doesn't work if you take the batteries out and will abandon it immediately if that happens. If you give him back the battery pack, he knows where to put it on the controller, but can't quite get it in.
  
• Better at making wants known. If he's sitting in his high chair, he will shout until the food arrives. If someone else is eating or drinking, he will be RIGHT THERE until he's given a share.

Busy month for Jim, no?


Jim exults in his progress.

How to Take a Compliment?

Babies are pretty much public property. If you have the temerity to take them out in public, everybody feels it necessary to comment on them. We've been lucky enough to avoid the annoying bossy comments (Why isn't he wearing socks? Isn't he cold? Are you feeding him enough? Why don't you try what-the-fuck-ever?), though, and most of them are either comments on how bizarrely serious and watchful he is or compliments on his enormous eyes.


Gratuitous picture of Jim impersonating a bazooka.

This week we've gotten two comments that I found particularly entertaining. The first was at Home Depot (getting chicken coop supplies!), when the most stereotypical good ol' boy ever walks up and bashfully goes, "Y'all sure got a purty baby." You don't expect rough-looking farmboy types to comment on babies, so it was just terribly sweet and adorable. The second was at Dairy Queen yesterday. Jim and I were sharing a Blizzard to kill time while the car was being worked on, and this crotchety old lady walks in. After letting the staff know her extreme displeasure with several elements of the establishment, she marches up to us and goes, "That's a very handsome baby you got there, and I bet he looks just like his daddy, 'cause he sure don't look a thing like you."

Um. Thanks? How exactly is one supposed to respond to that? I said "Thank you," of course, 'cause my mama raised me right - that's what you say to compliments, even weird possibly-not-complimentary ones. But still, it kept me busy for the next ten minutes or so trying to figure out a better reply.

Baby human + baby chickens

Turns out that baby humans like baby chickens a lot more than baby chickens like baby humans. Don't let the above picture mislead you. Sure, sometimes Jim will just stand and peacefully watch the chicks running around and peeping and trying to eat one another, but generally he prefers to play the marauding giant. He beats on the side of the tub and yells and tries to knock their water over and send their heat lamp spinning about. After a visit from Jim, the chicks generally stay huddled in a terrified mass on the far side of the tub for a good fourteen seconds until they forget all about it.

In which Jim looks all big and grown up.

He's just happy to exist.


I love this picture so much, but it makes me all teary-eyed. He looks more like a little boy than a baby. *sob*


Hahaha, babies are weird.


BIG Jim!

PEEP.

Look what I have!


Yes, they're in the bathtub.

I've been craving chickens for years (seriously), but we were planning on holding off until we bought a place out in the country. Well, it looks like buying a place might have to wait until next year when we have more saved for a down-payment (our current budget would get us a double-wide and that's about it), so we went ahead and got some chickens NOW. Hurray!

Now admire my chickens, dammit.


We got four of these little red ones. They're all girls, so they ought to be good for lots of eggs later.


We also got six of these 'easter eggers,' so named because they lay green and blue eggs. Don't know if they're male or female, though, so Noah is probably going to have to kill about half of them for chicken soup.


We also got four of these little cornish rocks, which are good for meat, because Noah wanted to try to raise some. As long as he does the dirty work, I don't mind.

They're pretty entertaining. I've spent a few hours sitting in the bathroom with my laptop watching them.* They're much like newborn babies (which makes sense, considering that I got them at a day old) in that they can sleep anytime. They'll be prancing across the floor to get to the water and just stop halfway and fall over dead asleep. A minute later, they'll be well-rested and up to finish their original task. They're also barbaric little monsters, though. If one tries to nap for more than its allotted minute, the rest will find their way over to start pecking it on the off-chance that it's edible.

* Um, I'm watching them, not the laptop. That was badly parsed.

Nine months update, more or less on time!

A week late, but whatever, that's fine. Just so you know, I also just updated the pictures for his eight months and seven months updates, so go look at them. Or don't. Your call. See if I care. *sniff*

There isn't really a whole lot of NEW stuff to report, just some refinements of old stuff. He can stand alone for 20-30 seconds at a time now. He cruises on all the furniture. He says mama and dada, but doesn't mean it. He got two top teeth, so now he's up to four teeth total (still not much good at steak, though). He's crawling like a fiend. He is SO fast. If you turn your back on him for four seconds, he's at the other end of the house. Remind me to post some amusing pictures of our various efforts at roadblocks - we've got two baby gates, but that's nowhere near enough. He has also learned how to open cabinet doors. Taking things out of other things (blocks out of the bag, toys out of his toy crate, hazardous chemicals out of the cupboard) is a great deal of fun this month, so this new skill is a wonderful thing for Jim.


Face-off with Captain Jack.

Bad parenting story: A couple days ago I was washing dishes, and he was busily taking trash bags out of the cabinet near the sink. I figured he couldn't hurt himself with some bags and cardboard boxes, so I let him continue amusing himself. I foolishly took my eyes off of him for about half a minute, and when I looked down, he was sitting there brandishing a freaking steak knife. Don't ask me how the hell a steak knife got in that cabinet, but you can bet I immediately sorted through every single cabinet we have just so I'd know for sure where all the scary stuff was. Well, almost immediately. I disarmed the baby first.

Other things of note: Jim had his nine-month doctor visit today. No shots today, which was awesome especially because Noah couldn't be there. Working days does have some disadvantages after all. Jim is 18 lb 7 oz, which is about 14th percentile. He's 27.5 inches long, which is around the 25th percentile, so he's a little dude, but proportionately kind of long and skinny. They couldn't get a good measurement on his head (he's a squirmy guy), but it's around 47 cm, which is 90th percentile. So there you have it, long skinny baby with a huge head. Picture a lollipop in a onesie.


That's funny. He doesn't look grotesquely disproportionate.

There's not a lot else to report. We're all really enjoying this age. At the moment he's just a pretty jolly guy. We've got a fairly predictable schedule, he sleeps about ten hours a night, he eats enough solids that I'm not totally tied to him (although he still nurses 5-6 times a day), and he very rarely gets unfixably fussy. Life is good for Jim and his folks.


One picture for each month of Jim's life.

If I designed in-store dressing rooms...

...I would have the door come all the way to the floor.

Recapturing an escaped baby with half your clothes on is less fun than you'd think.