My mom has been teaching Andrew a Chinese song called "妹妹背著洋娃娃." It roughly translates to "little girl carries a doll." The verse goes something like this:
Little girl carries a doll,
Comes to the garden to see the flowers.
The doll cries for its ma-ma
The birds in the trees laugh aloud.
Andrew can't sing yet, but he contributes what he can.
Andrew wakes up around 5am or 6am for a feeding. Mark brings him to me and I nurse him in bed. Surprisingly, he continues to sleep after this feeding. Sometimes he doesn't even drink from both breasts before he falls back to sleep. It's as if he just wants to make sure Mommy and food is around, halfway through his sweet slumber.
Andrew wakes up for real around 8am or 9am. I am so totally happy with this turn of events. No more sunrise watching for me. Yay. I nurse him before heading off to work; and Andrew stays home with A-Ma (grandmom) for the day. A-Ma says he typically takes his first nap soon after I leave for work.
He plays with A-Ma around the house. Sometimes they play the piano. Sometimes Andrew cruises around the dining room going from chair to chair. He loves to open cabinets all around the house, and take whatever is inside of the cabinet out. He pretends to read. A-Ma teaches him simple motions. When A-Ma says "hallelujah," Andrew raises both of his hands up in the air. Andrew also learned how to 搖搖頭 (shake head) and 拍拍手 (clap hands). This past week, he allegedly learned 抓耳朵 (grab ear), but I have yet to witness this in person.
After his first nap A-Ma also feeds Andrew porridge, which is usually made with brown rice and oatmeal mixed in with meat and vegetables.
In the early to mid afternoon Andrew takes his second nap. This nap lasts 1-2 hours and gives A-Ma some much needed rest. He gets a bottle of pumped breastmilk either just before or just after the nap.
I get home by 6pm. Andrew always greets me with the biggest smile. He runs towards me like he has missed me all day. I nurse him and we play around the house. If I feel up to it we would go for a walk. When I say "feel up to it" I mean I need to be prepared to carry a 23-pound-boy on my back for a couple of miles. Andrew always starts out in the stroller, but after about a mile he starts fussing and wanting to get out. Maybe he is bored in the stroller. I don't know. When he fusses my mom and I put on a circus show. Sometimes we jump up and down, sometimes we sing silly songs, sometimes we high-five him or give him leaves and branches to play. But he will not be distracted. We almost always end up taking him out of the stroller, and yes, I get an extra-special workout.
Andrew eats dinner with us at the dinner table. He is an eager eater. If the food doesn't come to his mouth quickly enough, he protests with a loud and clear "ehhh! eeehh!!"
Bed time is always so much fun for Mark and I. We read Andrew rhymes and stories in his room. Then we dim the lights and read him "Goodnight, Moon." All the while, Andrew keeps busy crawling, climbing, cruising, and walking all around the room. If we try to sit him down on our lap to read, he grabs the book and casts it to the side. So in the end we just let him do whatever he wants while we read aloud. We put a memory foam on the floor and that's where Andrew sleeps now. He knows he can safely fall on the foam, so he would run up to the foam and throw himself into the pile of pillows and blankets.
After Goodnight Moon it's lights-out for Andrew. I nurse him in the dark. Sometimes he falls asleep after nursing. Other times, he practices drunken tai-chi for a good half-hour before eventually falling asleep. It's adorable to watch him sit up, then fall over to the side because he is too tired to even hold up his head. Sometimes he stays lying down, but strokes my face, or nose, or ear in a futile attempt to keep his hands busy and himself awake. Sometimes he moans and rolls around before giving in. But by 9pm or 9:30pm, he is sound asleep.
p.s. Since I started writing this post a week ago, Andrew has dropped the 5am feeding. Now I get to sleep until 8am. It's like totally awesome.
He's sleeping peacefully beside me as I'm typing this, but it took a looong time to get him into his present state. While he's managed to sleep a little bit since we started traveling, I don't think he's slept for much more than 2 hours at a time...
I'm happy to report that he was pretty well behaved on the plane. The seats we got up by the bulkhead are extremely spacious (so that the bassinet will fit), so it was fairly easy on us as well. He stayed on my lap for most of the trip.
While the new environment had him pretty keyed up, we think the biggest problem was that he's teething again (top front teeth). Fortunately his fussiness was pretty low key and mainly manifested in difficulty sleeping (though part of the blame for this lies with the people who were always moving about). In the end, I just took him into the bathroom to eliminate all external stimuli and stayed there until he fell asleep. The trick was to position myself so that he couldn't grab at any of tissue or toilet paper from the dispensers on the walls.
He's napped a couple times since we landed, but at 2am local time, he was wide awake. His "midnight" snack was more of an afternoon nibble by his clock. He finally went down around 6:20am.
We're not really sure how quickly he'll adjust to the time change, but we've built in a couple relaxed days into our schedule. Here's to hoping that it won't take much more than that...
Month 9 has been relatively calm. No big changes, but lots of teeny tiny improvements. He's getting better at the act of walking (and running!) and can now stand without any support for quite some time (10+ seconds), even when he's not standing on something firm (e.g. the bed). He also took his first couple steps all by himself last week.
The funnest change is that he can now shake his head, and do so more or less on demand. And if he does it at just the right time when you're talking to him, it's hilarious. He hasn't equated shaking his head with "no", but I'm pretty sure he has equated shaking his head with "making the adults laugh".
A few random observations:
When Andrew flips over from his back to his tummy he invariably turns to his right.
Every now and then Andrew gets to watch me put on my motorcycle gear. All seems to go well until I pull on my helmet, and then he gets upset. I'm not quite sure if he thinks I'm now someone/something else or if the helmet has eaten my head, but he definitely doesn't like it.
When Andrew laughs his nose crinkles just like mommy's does! The amount of crinkle is directly proportional to how hard they're laughing.
Andrew now knows to either remove or move the pacifier to one side of his mouth before coughing or talking. He's also started to spit the pacifier out when he sees Charity give him the sign for milk!
Andrew slept through the night! Woo-hoo!
This is the first time he's not needed a night feeding. He woke up a few times, but was content to be comforted back to sleep.
Oh, he's definitely moving now. Not just crawling, which he's really gotten the hang of, but he's starting to walk as well (with help of course). While it's an exciting development, it also has its drawbacks. The most annoying is when we're trying to change his diaper. It has now become a race to see who's faster: us getting the diaper on him or him getting bored and flipping over and crawling away. If you've never tried it, trying to get a diaper on a squirming baby bent on escaping is no easy task.
On the upside, it's great fun when he crawls up to you, grabs your legs to stand up, and insists on you taking him for a walk. His goal is to grab your hands to help balance himself, at which point he'll happily drag you from one room to the next for as long as you're willing (or he comes across something shiny to chew on).
Andrew has also been working on his assertiveness this month. He's added his voice to his actions so when he doesn't want to do something, not only is he pushing back against you, he's also being vocal about it. This new behavior has been manifesting itself with increasing frequency at bedtime.
All this has led us to abandon the crib. He's now sleeping on a queen-sized mattress that we've put on the floor. This gives him the room he wants to crawl about before falling asleep, as well as enough space to roll around after he's fallen asleep. On a restless night, it's entirely conceivable that he'll roll to all four corners of the bed. We've found him in some pretty hilarious positions...
Alas, all good things must come to an end -- I'm heading back into the workforce as this month comes to a close. Fortunately for us, Charity's mother has retired and will be helping us with Andrew during the day.
