No, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth...

I'm still here. As I said in my last post, (almost a month ago!) I am back at work. Even though it is only two days a week, they are two very busy days and then I have other class prep and grading that has to be done the other days or on the weekend. And taking care of the J-dog on all the other days is always fun, but still very tiring. It is hard to find a moment to breathe. We have the sitter on the two days that I go to work, but I really need to think about having her come a few more hours during the week so I can take a break or get some work done.

The J-dog is growing by leaps and bounds. He will be 10 months on Sunday and it seems like we have had so many milestones lately. He has been doing the army crawl for maybe three weeks now (I need to look that up), but last week I put him in "standard crawl position" and he just took off. So now he is crawling normally, though he sometimes reverts to the army crawl. He loves to chase the cats, and once even got one of their tails. We need to keep an eye on that, because I'm afraid one of these days they will lose their patience with him. And I just noticed last night that the poor little guy has bruises on his knees from the new crawling! We have an area rug and also his play mat in the living room, but the area between the two is hardwood, and he does travel all over. He also pulls himself up to kneel and plays with his musical table and stuff like that. But he is not yet pulling himself to stand.

About a month ago I tried to trim his bangs and made a horrible mess of it. They were totally too short and much shorter on one side that the other. So last weekend, after they had grown out a little, we finally took him to get his hair cut at a kiddy salon. It was awesome. He was so baffled about what was going on, and there was definitely a surplus of stimuli - his own TV playing Elmo, another TV past that also playing a different Elmo dvd, music, people talking at him, kids making noise, a woman blowing bubbles, and another woman wetting his hair and pawing at his head. He looked all around in awe for a few minutes, then started to get fussy. Fortunately the whole cut took all of 6 minutes and then it was done. He looks so incredibly handsome! It cost $30 and when I told one of my mom friends she was aghast at the price, but I think it was totally worth it. I mean, this woman had scissors within centimeters of my son's eyes, ears, neck - you want her to be good. And unlike in my case where I spend a pretty good amount of money to get my hair cut and expect my stylist to take her sweet time with me, you want this hair cut to be as fast as possible! Plus, we live in NYC - what do you expect to pay for a haircut?

He is just getting over his 4th cold in 2 months. This is getting a little absurd. This time he has had a cough with it, and sometimes when he coughs he starts crying. I think his throat hurts. Yesterday he had a tough day with the sitter, but I came home early and snuggled him and he fed for almost an hour and then seemed happier. He slept great last night and seems much better today.

He is doing a little better with the bottles with the sitter. He will drink about 5 ounces of breastmilk/formula combined once or twice a day. I feel like a baby his age should be drinking more than that at a time, but I'll take what I can get. His eating is great and he has started having little bite-sized pieces of things like melon, string cheese and Che.erios! So that is fun. The only thing is that he loves to pick them up and play with them, passing them from hand to hand, but then he waits for me to put other ones in his mouth. He doesn't quite have the concept that he can put food in his own mouth.

And he finally has a tooth coming in, which might have also contributed to yesterday's fussiness. There is just the tiniest sliver of one tooth poking out from the gum. He has been chewing on his fingers a lot and loves it when I rub his gums. But overall it doesn't seem to be bother him too much.

We are working on waving bye-bye. He did it for the very first time last night when the sitter was leaving. It was very cute. It was just a little floppy-wristed bounce of the hand, but it was definitely a bye-bye wave. And I think he is getting very close to saying "Dada" with meaning. That will most likely be his first word.

Oh, and this is the cutest thing of all. I taught him how to do an Eskimo kiss. So when I'm holding him facing me, I'll say "Eskimo! Eskimo kiss!" and he will lean into me and touch my nose with his nose, waiting for me to rub my nose back and forth. It is so sweet.

Ok, I lied. That was not the cutest thing. The cutest thing, or rather the most heartbreakingly sweet thing that he has ever done, was this past weekend when he crawled over to me, climbed up in my lap and pulled himself up to snuggle me. All by himself. Because he wanted to be with mama. I just melted. This is what it's all about.