Ben at twelve months

Ben at eleven months

Good news - sleep!

Benny's sleep has gotten slowly better since Christmas, and it is SUCH a relief to get a good night's sleep. After our very consistent bedtime routine, we can actually put him in the crib awake and drowsy and he will go to sleep by himself. He used to sleep on his side, but now he puts his hands behind his head - so cute. Or he rolls over and sticks his butt in the air.
He's been waking either once at 4:00 or twice at 4:00 and 6:00, then most of the time sleeps until 7:00. (Bedtime is 8:00.) I feed him at 4:00, and we know how to train him out of that if we feel it is necessary, but I don't mind getting up once. Plus, it is so dry here, he's probably thirsty. I drink a glass of water after I nurse him!
It seems like he just grew into sleeping, but I guess we'd have to say the Kaiser Permanente specialist helped when she told us we had to let him cry it out. We did have many miserable hours of heart-breaking crying, but it seems like it wasn't just what we did - he helped a lot just by being ready to sleep.
There are still bad nights and will be plenty to come. We think he is getting a huge molar, which must hurt and he has been up more this week.
Naps are still pretty impossible. I think we need a consistent routine, but that's hard when he splits his week between Daddy, daycare, and me.
Yippee - sleep!!

Cute things this week

Benny loves to eat, and his current favorite foods are bananas and oranges. Sometimes if you show him a banana or one of his bowls, he says "mmmmmm." I don't remember doing that, but he must be mocking us.

Last week I was pushing Benny in his stroller and someone said to me, "How cute! I love the gumming-the-banana trick!" I went to take the banana away from him and was shocked to see that he had bitten off the bottom of a banana and was devouring it! Ick! He ate banana peel!

He continues to be obsessed with balls and can play "catch" for hours. His obsession carries over to balloons and most other spherical objects. He's as happy playing with an orange as he is one of his bouncy balls. Shopping with him is really fun - he can point and tell you all about balloons that are completely across the store, and can look down an aisle and spot all the balls immediately and have a conversation with you about them. "Ba ba ba ba baba bababa ba!"

New videos finally..

Our old computer died on us and the laptop is very slow to download videos (about 45:00 per). I bought a new computer yesterday so we will try to get as many videos up as we can!
Here's a couple of the walkie-talkie Benny.

Talking!!

We thought my cousin, Will Chieves, was more than adorable when he talked in his own expressive language - nonsense words with adult gestures. I'd never really seen a child do that before. We're amused and delighted that Ben is starting to do the same thing. Most of his conversations consist of "ba ba ba ba," but his vocabulary is expanding a little, with some ma, me, gig, ja, da, dit thrown in. But what is so cute is that he looks like he's giving a lecture or telling a story with his body language. He'll hold something in one hand and point repeatedly to it with his pointer finger on the other hand and give us meaningful looks, all while "ba ba ba-ing" with different inflections and emphasis. When he wakes up, he starts babbling immediately, like he's trying to tell us what his dreams were about. Sometimes he laughs in the middle like he's telling a funny story. We'll try to get it on video to share, but so far we haven't caught a good "conversation" on camera yet.

Snowsuit and sled

We've been looking for a snowsuit for Ben and finally found a really cheap one and were disappointed when the torso was too short. If Ben's torso is already too long for an 18-month-sized garment, then he takes after me! I took out the crotch and before I sewed it back up, I tried it on him. He lay immobilized on the floor (a la Christmas Story Randy, "I can't put my arms down!" and just laughed at me while I laughed at him and scampered around trying to find the camera (didn't find it). Then we went out to try the sled that Grammy found for him. We didn't go down any hills, really, we just took a walk in the snow with the sled. After a while he looked sleepy, as he usually does in moving vehicles. I tried to lay him down in the sled, but it was a little too short, so he was all crumpled up. He didn't complain and soon fell asleep in a very awkward position, with his legs (or at least the snow suit legs) poking straight up into the air. If anyone had seen us, they would think I was carrying a rag doll along in the sled. We usually leave him asleep no matter where he is, since sleep is such a precious commodity with him. So he slept outside in the sled for a good 20 minutes after we got home. Tim found the camera and took photos of him. I guess you had to be there, but it was pretty humorous.