Batboy

When Desmond is really happy he cracks this huge, manic smile and his eyes get really big. It's super cute. It reminds me of someone. Oh, I know.

Iz So Cute U Gonna Die

One of Desmond's favorite games is to stand in his crib and try to grab the mobile. For this game, I put pillows all around the inside of the crib, because he thinks it's a gas to fall onto a soft pillow while reaching for the mobile. He does not seem to enjoy falling and cracking his head against the crib rails. Go figure.
The boy is obsessed with laundry. He is inexplicably drawn to laundry piles. I threw this laundry on him, thinking it would please him. It did.
Yay, Daddy's home!


Comin' To Getcha





Bringing The Cuteness

Desmond loooves grass. The grass around here is full of Canadian Goose poop (ew), but this grass at Pixie Woods - a kiddie amusement park in Stockton, CA - was fresh and clean.
Desmond tolerates the park swing. he likes watching the other kids swing more than he actually likes doing the swinging.
Crawl. Pose. Repeat. Seriously, could he get any cuter?

And So It Begins...

Desmond picks out some CDs to rip



Good taste!


So now that Desmond is mobile--and a very fast crawler at that--his world has opened up, much to our dismay. He loves cords, and no matter how many spots you tack some cords to the wall, he still finds slack to pull and chew on them. He also loves the baseboard heater in the living room. Luckily it's about a million degrees outside so it isn't on, but we don't want him to get used to playing on/with it.


The thing we realized--and was proven during this post--was that we can make it as safe as possible, but he finds ways to bonk his head or escape in a flash. Just now he was playing with my suitcase I used for New York (his new favorite toy) and he stood up, only to fall over and loudly crack his head. That is the scariest sound in the world. Luckily because their memories are only for about 3 seconds, he was over it pretty quickly. I only hope that the bonks don't cause his 3 second memory to stay that way forever!

Incommunicado

Sorry for the posting negligence - our wireless router decided to route no more. We sent it back to the manufacturer and are awaiting a replacement, meaning the desktop computer has been without an internet connection, leaving me driftless in a low-tech void. (The stupid thing is, we have a laptop that works just fine when connected to an old-fashioned ethernet cable, but I don't like the laptop. Why? Dunno. Just don't.)

So. Desmond. He's a peach! He's finally sleeping through the night, in his own crib no less. We put him down around 8:30Pm each night and he's out until 7 or 8 in the morning. To accomplish this feat, we did resort to a little cry-it-out action. The first night he cried for 30 minutes, the next night 20, then 10, then 12, then 2. Now he cries for 30 seconds at most, and then - conk - he flips himself onto his belly and falls asleep. Hopefully this delightful phase will last, because we're really enjoying it. Naps are another story, he still only naps on me or in his swing. We're working on it.

We're also more or less on a schedule now. A typical day in the life of Desmond Riley looks something like this:

7:00am wake, nurse, play
8:00am eat solids, play more
9:00am nurse, nap
10:30am wake, go run an errand or play in the park
1:00pm nurse, nap
3:00pm wake, go for a walk in the stroller
5:00pm nurse
5:30pm play with daddy, eat solids
7:00pm bath (not every night)
8:00pm read a book, sing a song, nurse
8:30pm in bed for the night

The big news: Desmond is crawling. He started doing a sort of army crawl a few weeks ago, and today we caught him crawling in a typical baby way: left arm forward, right leg forward, right arm forward, left leg forward, repeat. This is very cute, but I am missing the days when I could just leave him to loll around on a playmat. I'm afraid to go to the bathroom now - if I leave him alone for just a minute, he will invariably be chewing on some sort of electrical cord when I return.

I've got a bunch of cute photos, but they're on the camera and I usually load them onto the desktop but this is the laptop and - can't - be - bothered - sigh. I'll get 'round to it eventually. Promise!

Last but not least, today Desmond is 7 months old. Happy birthday mon petite cupcake!