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.)