Six Months in the Life of Levi

This update is a week late, but I've been busy working on my online ASL project (more on that later) for International Week of the Deaf. Anyway, it was great to celebrate Levi's half-birthday! He is at such a sweet age. We love to see him react to new things, and it's nice that he's still a floor-wiggler (non-crawler) so I can leave the room for a few minutes without fearing he'll go find something to choke on or electrocute himself with.

Growth & Development

• 15 lbs. 13 oz. (14th percentile), 26 inches (44th percentile!)
• Clothing size: 3-6 mo. & 6 mo.
• Diaper size: 2 or 3
• Can "prop sit" (leaning forward on his arms)
• Smiles a lot
• Laughs sometimes too!

Likes

• Bouncing on my knee
• Silly voices (that's why he likes books!)
• Swimming

Mohawk day!

Dislikes

• Pretty much just the normal things babies dislike: being tired, hungry, bored/lonely
• Sometimes he doesn't like being thrown in the air. Mostly he just looks mildly disgruntled.
• Sweet potatoes (his first baby food ... it will take some getting used to)

I was trying to make him smile.

Fun Facts

• Common comment: "His back and legs are so straight!" He likes to arch his back and straighten his legs, especially when he's unsure of something (like when I was trying to get him to sit in the corn pit at the corn maze!)
• He might understand the sign for "milk." Sometimes he seems to get excited when I sign it before he eats. Sometimes he seems to ignore it though.
• Doesn't sit up or roll back-to-front, which means he gets a little beat up when he's around his baby friends that are just a bit bigger.

Sleep

He's regressed a bit in this department, waking 1-2 times to eat every night. We started to do a "dreamfeed" around 10:30/11 each night; sometimes it helps him sleep until 7, sometimes it doesn't. We transitioned him out of the Miracle Blanket swaddle and into the Zipadee-Zip, which was recommended by a lot of my friends. The first few nights were a little worse, and now he seems to be back to normal. I'm hoping that as we continue solids, he'll be able to sleep longer more consistently, but sometimes new foods mess with babies' digestive systems and make sleep more difficult, so we'll see. He takes a good morning nap and afternoon nap, though, and usually a shorter third nap in the early evening.

Eating

We started solids (baby food) a little after he turned 6 months. He seemed to like it at first, but now his spitting up has gotten worse so he's turned off of it. I think I'll try bananas tomorrow and see if that goes down better. Breastfeeding is still going the same as it did last month, with an additional nighttime feed (hungry baby!), and he's still resistant to the bottle.

Looking forward to:

• Sitting up
• Being able to wear his cute little baby shoes. He needs socks and pants first. Except for the flip flops: