If You're Happy and You Know It

I know there hasn’t been much update on Colin, but I think it’s because things come fast and furious with the growing boy. It’s also a little that we’ve seen the changes before, and our reactions are more, “Oh, wow. You can do that, too?” as opposed to “OH, WOW. YOU CAN DO THAT!?!” This is not to say that we aren’t happy to see Colin doing some of the things that he does now, because we are.

So what’s new? The Boy’s nine months old now, which is amazing to us. Kindra and I were looking at some old photos and video, when we started watching this:



The video was shot just a couple of days before we had Colin; it was unbelievable that she could barely get out “Wa-wa” for “Wall-E” back then. How is that so much time could have passed, and so much could change with the kiddies without us even realizing the leaps we’ve made as a family?

Colin’s got his two bottom front teeth in and has taken a couple of playful (and not so playful) bites out of our fingers. Of course, those teeth have been around since roughly December 29th, so that’s not big news. However, he has started to get his top front teeth, which may or may not have been bothering him over the past few weeks.

I’m pretty sure they were bothering him two weeks ago when we first noticed them, but the past couple of nights, he’s not been sleeping well. Usually, we’d put him to bed around 6:30 p.m., and he’d be out for the night. Recently, though, he’s been getting up crying and/or screaming at least a couple of times a night and not because Danica’s woken him up. (Oh yeah, did I mention that we moved them back in together (sorta)? More on that later…) We’re hoping he’s not taking after his sister’s sleeping habits.

One habit Colin does have from his sister is that it’s next to impossible to get him to eat baby food anymore. Danica was the same way – introduce “real” food and the ability to self-feed, and that baby food crap is out the window. Problem is, there’s only a limited number of items he can gum down, so Kindra has to force him by giving him some food to eat himself, and then shoveling some baby food into his mouth between bites. He also used to love Cheerios, but now, if there’s something else available, he’ll ignore those.

As far as mobility is concerned, Colin’s started to want to stand more and can pull himself up onto things of a certain height. Heck, it was weird to us that one day he just decided to be able to go from being on his stomach to sitting up. He still does the worm to get around, and I don’t think he’ll ever pick up actually crawling. I guess it’s mostly because I haven’t shown him what it is like I did with Danica.

He’s still happy and smiley, but has begun to develop a bit of stranger anxiety. We just had my two cousins come by, and while he stared at them when they came in, he decided to burst into tears when it appeared that they were going to be staying for a while. One of my cousins, Tsu-Heng, swears that he cries whenever he looks at her (possibly true: he cried when he was having a bottle, and I handed him to her so he was facing me, and he started to bawl).

In just the last couple of days, he’s picked up waving and clapping; I think he learned to wave consistently on Sunday or Monday. This morning, in fact, we were having breakfast when I asked him to wave, and he promptly shook his hand at me. It took him a while, but after I asked him to clap, he did that, too. He gets a kick out of it because he knows he can manipulate us into waving back at him. He also gets a kick out of seeing his hand wave, as he’ll be waving, notice his hand is doing it, and then stare at it as he continues to wave. I’ll get some video of it soon.

Our little newborn boy has been replaced by a little baby boy. I know, I know… time to work on another one. Um… don’t count on it (unless they change child labor laws, or we win the lottery).