We’ve been introducing Sean to solid foods for awhile now. Most recently, we’ve been trying something called “baby led weaning“. Basically, we give Sean foods that he can pick up and let him decide how much he wants to eat. When feeding him purees, we hand him the spoon and let him try and get it into his mouth. This is considerably messier than if we were doing the spoonfeeding ourselves, but it’s also a lot more fun. Sean really enjoys mealtimes and it has been fun to watch him devour some of the food we’ve given him.
Below are some pictures from Monday (9/20) where I gave him a pear. Not pear puree, not slices, an entire pear.
Sean with his pear (early in the destruction)
Sean shows off some of the work he has done on the pear
Sean demonstrates his technique
We're letting him choose when to drink from the sippy cup too. He's still working on that part.
Sean is turning the pages of his board books (using his left hand to cross his body and pull), which Ben knew about already, but I just discovered. He apparently likes some pages more than others. And he definitely prefers some books over others. It’s neat to see his preferences start to emerge.
He also moves a bit now. Not in any of the customary ways, though. He tacks. Like a boat. Lying down, he rolls to one side and then pivots his lower body. Then he rolls to his other side and repeats. (He does also give a little foot scooch on the roll, but most of the distance come from the roll-pivot action.) As a side note, he would also willingly roll himself off a bed; he tacked his way up a bed today and I was curious if he’d go off the end or stop and do something else. Result: yep, happy to go off the end — after all there was something interesting on the floor. No, I didn’t let him actually fall off the bed.
And he’s fond of turning lights on and off. Wall switches here in Minnesota. But he quickly got the hang of pull-chains in Maine:
Okay, so we were on vacation during Sean’s seven month birthday and forgot to take birthday pix. And the next two days we were traveling. And the next several days we were settling into temporary housing. And so finally, we have pictures of the seven-month-old Sean. Just nine days late… And since we’re in a temporary place with temporary furniture, there’s a different background than usual. But the same stuffed animal friends.
Oh, and in case you couldn’t guess, Sean loves to ham it up for the camera.
When he was littler, we would lift Sean onto his feet and see if he could support his weight a bit. He wasn’t super fond of this exercise and bored with it quickly.
Fast forward to now. Now Sean constantly wants to be on his feet. He prefers it to sitting or lying down, but needs help still to stand; he can support his own weight briefly, but then his legs give out. Those legs are strong enough, though, to push off with and there’s nothing more fun than pushing off the ground when standing.
In other words, jumping.
It gets a bit tiring to hold Sean while he practices his jumping skills, but luckily we have a door jumper. And once Sean figured out how to use it, it’s become one of his favorite activities:
Two weekends ago, Foxtail Farm had their annual Kids’ Day. The only time we’d been to Kids’ Day was when I worked on the farm, and we were glad to finally have a kid to grant us access to this exclusive event. Walking out to the fields, Sean was interested in some leaves:
Out in the field:
Sean is used to riding in the Bjorn on his dad’s front, but this was the first time we got significant use out of the Ergo on my back. It was apparently comfy enough that he fell asleep there! (Just in time for me to miss lunch…)
‘Baby: fashionable hip accessory’
It’s been so hot out here recently that Ben’s ears have been glowing red hot.
Finally, it’s never too early to start learning math. We’ve starting Sean on the abacus.
