I'm studying for my oral qualifying exam, which is on November 30. Completing that milestone moves into the dissertation phase of my program and gets us one step closer to moving to a play where it doesn't take 40 minutes to drive 12 miles to play a quick round of disc golf. This means I am studying on the weekends and every moment that I can (and is why I haven't written a blog post in two months). Nonetheless, we need to get Jim out to play for at least a few hours every weekend. This weekend we plan to try out the disc golf course in Golden Gate Park. We all had a good time and we always love getting out into trees and open space. We would prefer Tahoe or Yosemite, etc..., but we need to calibrate only until my exam is over. I'm hoping to do our Northern Cali/Oregon/Washington road trip this spring/early summer, so we will spend the winter doing little outings to prepare us for lots of hiking and a great big unwinding in the wilderness once Cooper is a year old, once Lucy can hike further on her own, and once milk isn't the main event in my life.
We are full into solid foods for Cooper and he LOVES it. He loves allll of it. Kale, beets, spinach, black-eyed peas, egg yolk, all fruit, squash. You name it...he devours it. The worst part of feeding him solid foods, for him anyway, is when we say all done. He gets quite upset and begs for more! We are doing the signs for eat, more, and milk with him so we can encourage clear communication that we can all understand as soon as possible. When Lucy started signing, which was long before a year old, it made a world of difference for everyone's frustration level. Cooper gets annoyed when we make him sign before food and milk, but I'm certain the training now will pay off soon!
I am enjoying making him food from scratch, just like I did with Lucy. I'm much less nervous this time and willing to try lots of different foods. I'm adding olive oil and bone broth to lots of his veggies. Lucy certainly ate a wide variety of pureed food, but I feel like I'm trying out even more with the second baby. I'm not as worried about when to introduce what, as long new foods are introduced one at a time over a three day period. He eats mostly veggies and protein from egg yolk and beans, but I'm going to introduce baked (pureed) chicken this week and plain greek yogurt after that. I also steamed up some carrots, green beans, and beets for him to try out as finger foods. He really enjoys eating tofu and avocado with his hands and, like I said, we are striving for independence!
This time around I wasn't nearly as worried about breastfeeding as I was with Lucy, however, I'm still grateful that it is going so well. I hate pumping, but my milk is still strong and plentiful so there is plenty for nursing and frozen milk. I have a pretty good system worked out. This semester I have a locker on campus where I can keep one pump and supplies right around the corner from a lactation room and kitchen with fridge and freezer. Keeping a pump on campus and knowing there is a clean, comfortable room for pumping has been a major stress reliever. Traveling between two campuses my first year made things quite complicated and difficult. In addition, Lucy hated bottles and frozen milk. Cooper has no preference. As long as he is being fed, he will take it however he can get it. We have almost made it 7 months on breastmilk and I don't see any predictable reason for that change in the near future.
Sleep is going so reasonably well I don't even have much to say about it. It seems all I talked about with Lucy was sleep. We are (I am) currently stretching Cooper's sleep time out and that causes some initial sleep disruptions. I'm willing to feed him at midnight and again at 6:00 a.m. I don't see a reason he needs to eat more than that in a night. Hopefully, he will shift his calories to daytime calories. At 7 months I'll add in another small solid food meal in addition to the two he is getting now and we will see if that makes a difference. I must pass my oral exam for the benefit of my entire family and that means I need to get a bit more than 2-3 hours of sleep in a row. A few nights ago I slept for 5 uninterrupted hours and I woke up dancing and singing and so full of energy for my kids and husband. It was such a blissful feeling and I want more of it!
Lucy is as precocious as ever. Last weekend she gave us a lesson on puffy clouds, complete with hand motions and the scientific word "cumulus." Jim and I about fell over when she said, "Can you say cumulus?" She has been really into audiobooks lately, particularly 30-minute chapter books from the Rainbow Magic series. The set of books is about fairies who get trapped by Jack Frost and the goblins. She can answer comprehension questions about characters, within and between books, plot, setting. She told us yesterday that Fern the Green Fairy "managed" to get untangled from the ivy. It amazes us both that she can listen without any visual input for so long. I'm grateful we left our TV in Ithaca when we sold our house. I recently heard that the average preschooler has 3 hours of screen time a DAY!!! Lucy has a total of 40 minutes a week on a heavy week. It's typically 10-15 minutes, usually consumed by vides of platypuses or snippets of Planet Earth as a bribe to wash her hair.
Over the weekend Luc was really interested in beginning sounds. She can identify lots of words that have the same beginning sound, she just doesn't know the sound/letter name match yet. I don't want to push her into anything she isn't ready for developmentally, but this child sure does seem like she wants to read. We have been practicing three ways to read a book, by retelling the story, reading the pictures, or reading the words. She seems to be more and more into reading the pictures and telling her own story which has been a complete joy. She spent a full hour during quiet rest time yesterday reading every single board book in Cooper's book basket. It brings me no end of happiness to see her so enthralled in language. Cooper watches her with books and I hope we can instill the same strong love of reading in him. |
| We did a photoshoot for Lucy after we took six-month photos of Cooper :-). |
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