Little Scientist

It occurred to me this week that being a baby is like being a scientist. Zane is constantly probing and testing and experimenting with his world. It's a good thing he can't handle chemicals yet. Now that it is springtime in Seattle he's been having fun exploring sunbeams and shadows.



Food is mostly experimented with and used as a textural art project and not eaten; here Zane explores the yamness of his yam through all senses but taste. He is also exploring the boundaries of the house, and he discovered the pet door to our front porch. He was pretty proud of himself. I've locked the door for now, but once I can clean off the porch I think I'll let him back out when he wants to. It's is a very small porch with high solid walls, so it should be a nice safe place for him to play while I'm getting ready for work or whatever.

This week more teeth are coming in! The two top incisors are cutting through, and they are causing Zane a lot of discomfort. Last night we were up for about an hour and a half in the middle of the night with a sad Zane. I took him into bed to try to console him. He took the opportunity to launch a 3am attack on Daddy's beard. In a week or two I should be able to get cute pictures of a new smile.

Speaking of mouths ... I've been trying to make most of Zane's baby food, and there are some really delicious vegetable combinations out there I never would have thought of, but I highly recommend to people of all ages. Try them, try them, you will see!
Sweet potatoes with orange juice
Butternut squash with pears
Lentil and vegetable soup with sweet potoes, apples, and garam masala.
With delicious food like this (plus the World Baby Foods jars), I don't mind when Zane won't finish his food, because I gladly finish it off.

Monday Zane and I went in for his 9 month checkup. Everything looked wonderful, except Zane has dropped again in his weight percentile. He is now at 3.14% (Pi!). It's not so much that he's skinny compared to other babies, it's that he is getting skinnier and skinnier. At least on paper. He's not roly-poly, but he does have fat creases on his wrists (e.g.). He doesn't have ribs showing, he's full of beans, and he's hitting all of his developmental milestones (we also went to another free child development assessment). So, he's probably perfectly fine and just takes after his mom string-bean-wise, but the doc is still keeping an eye on him. We go back in six weeks, and if he hasn't fattened up we will have blood and poop tests done. I don't know what they would be looking for, and I didn't ask because I don't want to start doing research and get all paranoid.

Zane's still loooooves the bath and water so much that he goes crawl-trotting to the bathroom whenever he hears the water turn on. Now that he can stand he can peek in at Michael having a shower. Zane gets his head wet, but he doesn't care!

Monday I took Zane to his first parade. Ballard is a big Scandanavian neighborhood, and every year there is a big parade on the seventeenth of May in celebration of the Norwegian Constitution. I stuffed Zane into our backpack and trucked on down to the starting line just a few blocks from our house. We only stayed for about 30 minutes, but he seemed to like it. Lots to see and many people to watch! It was a good backpack test run for doing the same thing at Folklife next weekend.

Tuesday's excitement was that he slept all night. Ahh. Unfortunately the long days of sunlight are interfering with Zane's sleep, even though we have the windows blacked out in the bedroom. He's only sleeping about 8 hours at night and then having long naps in the day. Babies are supposed to sleep much longer at night.

Wednesday we took a backpack walk to a new park and had another picnic and fun on the playground. I'm sorry I forgot again that I can't turn the camera. Please tilt your head to the left and click play. Have a fun week!