Last Wednesday (17th September) it was time for Conrad’s next set of jabs. (He was really supposed to have these at 12 weeks of age, not 14, but I completely forgot to book him in…) Again I wasn’t really looking forward to it, or rather the potential aftermath: Conrad becoming poorly and feverish, or restless and crying all night (or both…). The nurse said that there was ‘no reason to expect a different reaction to last time’, which my suspicious mind interpreted as a very non-committal thing to say, but as it happened, the only bad reaction Conrad had was crying when the jabs were put in his respective thigh (one each side). The night was normal and the next couple of days too.
After the jabs I fed Conrad in a half-full waiting room. A school boy was sitting next to us, watching with interest as Conrad got restless during the feed. As this usually means a bit of trapped air, I lifted Conrad up to my shoulder, and as I did so, Conrad’s burp echoed through the waiting room. I could tell the boy was impressed – and amused…
When it comes to daytime napping, Conrad has fallen asleep quietly quite a few times by now, either in the baby gym or the baby bouncer. Sometimes, when I’ve noticed him starting to drift off, I have put him in the carry cot, which we still have on top of the old gramophone in the living room (although Conrad is almost as tall as it is long now), and even if he’s sometimes cranked a bit, he has settled for a nap after not too many minutes. During the day, he seems to last about two hours before needing his next nap.
Daytime, he divides his time between the baby bouncer – sometimes in front of Jessica’s control panel toy, which he bashes the buttons on (and which he amazingly actually fell asleep in front of the other day, even as he was pressing the buttons…!) – the baby gym and a ‘play nest’, an inflatable ring with a printed fabric cover, which Ian bought for Conrad to practise sitting upright in. For a few weeks now, he’s been trying to sit up when in the baby bouncer or in the push chair. In the ring, he has to be propped up using soft toys, and gets frustrated and cries when his legs start to slide forward so he ends up more on his back, but it’s a good start.
When you surround him with soft toys, like Jessica’s monkey toy Molly or Upsy doll, and put them with their faces turned towards him, he smiles at and ‘chats’ to them. Needless to say, Jessica’s quite keen on the lets-cram-as-many-soft-toys-in-the-ring-with-baby-brother game and can get a bit carried away at times, but Conrad just beams from behind the mountain…
For a couple of weeks now, Conrad has been putting his fist in his mouth sometimes, not for any apparent reason such as hunger or tiredness or anything else that we can see. We’ve not given him a dummy, as we don’t think he needs it, but it still remains to be seen whether he might take to sucking his thumb.
Gabriella