First Blood

Emmett has had one of his top front teeth ready to pop out for some time. This morning A, E, and I were hanging out in the front room and he was standing up using the coffee table to keep him upright. Both Andrea and I had a feeling that we were making a mistake by letting him do this, but we didn't act on that feeling fast enough and Emmett fell to the ground, catching his mouth on the table on the way down. We lifted him up to find a bit of blood coming out of the side of his mouth and he was definitely not happy. After he settled for a bit in him mom's arms, we had a look at the damage and the tooth had completely broken through the surface by a well-placed table impact [note: after posting this Andrea read it and has corrected me (I believe the word she used was liar). She argues that his front top tooth was already poking through and the one second from the front was the one that broke through. A few minutes ago she held him upside-down (the only way we can see in his mouth these days) and proved that, indeed, it was the second from the back that we broke through---although I still don't believe that the front was all the way through. Also note that I am updating this on the laptop and Andrea doesn't know what I am working on, and she just said that I also lied by saying that she shared the blame in it and that it was only her kindness that kept her from blaming me right then. Also, in light of these two "lies" as she terms them, she has decided that she is going to start a rival blog with the sole purpose of there being the possibility of a true record of Emmett's upbringing). We are going to have to see, now, if this speeds the teething process and he doesn't get all upset about the fact a tooth is coming in since we rushed it in already. We will also have to see if the trauma we underwent in seeing him clock himself and seeing blood trickle out his mouth was worth the possibility of speeding the teething process. Definitely no fun to see that happen.

Tonight Andrea was feeding Emmett and started to sing a song from her youth and there was a part where she would say "pick 'em, pick 'em" and Emmett would start busting up laughing. It is so funny how you try and try to get him to laugh and suddenly the dumbest thing will get him going. He was really laughing hard so I took a little video (of course he wasn't laughing as hard when I took it, but you get the idea). Also this gives an idea of what feedings are like these days. Emmett is eating some combination that Andrea makes of plain yogurt, tahini, brewer's yeast, avocado, broccoli, carrot, and butternut squash all blended to a silky smoothness. I can't believe he eats that stuff. The good part, as is apparent by the list I just gave, is that he is mostly off of bananas as a necessary supplement to every meal.



I threw up one other video to show how Emmett is moving about these days. He is amazingly efficient at getting about the house this way...hopefully he figures out how to actually crawl sometime soon, too. It is funny how suddenly the house is filled with all of these objects that we never knew he had interest in and now all he wants to do is grab them and bite them or break them.



That is it. Tomorrow is Emmett's first Thanksgiving, so we will see how he battles his hit of turkey tryptophan (OK, maybe he won't have turkey---why would you if you can have one of Andrea's wonderful concoctions)?

More days out than in

We didn't celebrate it, but last Wednesday marked the day that Emmett had been outside of Andrea longer than he was inside of Andrea (Emmett's big day was March 5th, ours June 20th). I never mentioned this as I didn't start this blog until after Emmett was born, but it is plain wacky how they count weeks when a woman is pregnant. Human gestation is about 260 days, which works out to just less than 9 months, but they use this 280 days or forty weeks calendar thing now that is measured from the first day of the mother's last period to birth. I know that there are all kinds of debates about when life begins, but I am quite confident that all are in agreement that life does not begin 20 days before the swimmers start their way upstream. It is crazy as it results in all kinds of misconceptions now like that pregnancy is 10 months. Weird.

Anyway, Emmett has been out longer than in now and things have been changing pretty rapidly since I last posted (the reason for the hiatus is this teaching thing which will be the death of me...luckily there are only 3 more days of lectures left). Emmett is now worming around and easily makes forward progress---it definitely wouldn't be termed crawling, but when the worm is used in combination with the belly-rotate, he can get pretty much anywhere he wants in a room. If he employs tears as well he can get to pretty much any room he wants. (I have a video of him doing the worm, but he is really whiny and he isn't making much progress...I will try to take a better one tomorrow).

Emmett really seemed to be all about standing for a while, but I think that the new-found independence that he has with his mobility abilities has made him so he doesn't need to stand as much (not that he doesn't still like a good stand every once in a while). I had a new invention, though, for a device that makes it so I don't have to hold him upright all of the time---I call it the stand-trainer allowing a parent to free their hands to fold laundry, turn the page of the newspaper, etc. The best part of the device is that when it is done being used for this purpose it can be converted into a laundry container or trash receptacle simply by removing the child.

Emmett is fascinated by Malcolm these days and Malcolm has reached new levels of annoying by climbing on everything resulting in broken vases, candle holders and pigs (Belinda gave Andrea a cast pig which was knocked off by a painting that fell off of the wall---we have no evidence that it was a chain reaction initiated by malcolm, but all signs point to the hairless one). I fear that Andrea is about to give Malcolm away---at least he has been good around Emmett and has tolerated Emmett grabbing handfuls of what fur Malcolm hasn't already licked off (perhaps Malcolm sees it as less work he will have to do later?). When we are playing in Emmett's room, Malcolm likes to jump into the crib or onto the changing table to watch Emmett play. This makes Emmett laugh. It also makes Andrea mad. Malcolm gets mixed signals around here.

Sleep has been really good for us of late. Emmett is down by 7-7:15 and has been sleeping straight to 6 or 6:30 the past couple of weeks. There were a couple of strange nights in a row last week where he would wake up screaming, but that seems to have passed. Oh, and I don't think I mentioned it before, but Emmett got his first fever about two weeks ago. That was no fun at all, even though it wasn't that bad in the fever world. He only got up to about 102 (which is about 98.75 for an adult), and we got lots of practice taking temperatures in the other end.

The other thing has been food. He is eating more and more things and is getting the hang of chewing even though he still has only 2 teeth. (Oh, we pulled up his upper lip one day to see if there were any other teeth on the way, and we were both pretty grossed out with what we saw. I guess I had never put it together before, but teeth come into your mouth by passing in front of the bones of your mouth---which means that it looks like there is a thin layer of skin over fully formed teeth (which there is). For some reason, I always pictured that teeth came through nice little holes in bone and slid into place. I was very wrong, and what I saw I found to be very troubling and I wish that I never would have looked.)

the many faces of emmett

We just got back from a family trip around town on the bus which ended with lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant. Emmett was really good (we had brought him food, too), and at the end of the meal A & I were still eating when Emmett started to have a bowel movement. These days there is no questioning the fact that he is having a bowel movement as his face turns bright red and he makes the stereotypical expression that you see in comedy movies when a character is supposed to be having a bowel movement. At this point Andrea and I were just staring at him laughing at the fact that he doesn't realize that doing this at the table is a bit of a faux pas when the server comes up and comments "he makes so many different expressions" --- immediately making it clear that she doesn't have a child.

vids and pics

It definitely feels like it is getting hard to come close to keeping up with this here blog. The whole teaching thing feels like it is taking all of my free time, but luckily I am done in just a few more weeks. I am yearning for Thanksgiving.

Things have been going well with Emmett. I think we are nearing the point where he needs to be switching from 3 naps to two. He took a very long first nap today and I just put him down for his second. He has been a little cranky of late, which is making me wonder if another tooth isn't on its way. Yesterday was the first time in a very long time that he started to cry and I couldn't figure out what he wanted.

Three nights ago Andrea and I were doing some chores around the house and we had Emmett in one of those plastic playthings playing away when we heard him laughing up a storm. We peeked in on him and he was watching Malcolm play with a tag, where Malcolm was throwing the tag up in the air with his paws and then pouncing on it. This was only the second time we had heard him laugh when someone wasn't trying to make him laugh (the first being watching skateboarders wreck a few weeks back). Anyway, I hurried off to get the camera, but Malcolm lost interest in the tag so we decided to reenact the situation. The following video is Andrea entertaining Malcolm with a string which in turn entertains Emmett. The video gets pretty dull after about 30 seconds or so, but I (again) didn't edit it down. I will try to do this with later videos.

Just after the above video, Andrea and I decided we would see how Emmett's reaction time with the scarf/string thing compared to Malcolm's, so we made the following video. It is pretty short because about 7 seconds in you can see the lightning-quick black paw of Malcolm enter from the left and swipe the string away right in front of Emmett's face. Very fortunate that Emmett didn't take a claw to a cheek as they are big targets.


Emmett is getting closer to crawling with him spending some time getting up to his hands and knees. Today when I took him to Andrea's school she put him on the floor into his version of "downward facing dog" which he held for quite a while, as seen in the picture at left (note that though his butt and thighs run against the right-hand-side of the photo, there was no support for him in this pose). He was getting up to his hands and knees quite a bit while he and I were in the backyard just before his nap. We definitely need to start taking care of the childproofing.

Halloween also happened since I last posted. I worked a long day and didn't see him dressed up, but Andrea put him in a hand-me-down monkey outfit from her sister which Tyler wore last year. Read what you will from the expression on his face in the picture at left. It was no fun missing out on halloween, and hopefully this isn't an example of what the rest of his life is going to be like with me never showing up for golf tournaments, ballet recitals, and benchpress competitions.

Other than that, just keeping on keeping on. I have a lot of cleaning to do while he finishes his nap.