“Toenails”
(As composed by Ella and performed by the Alexandria Pez Dispenser Choir)
You can cut your toenails
You can do it, I know
You can do it in the south or the weeeeeest
C’mon everybody let’s go to the exersaucer!
You can cut your toenails
You can get a special treat, like a potty treat
You can do it in the south or the west
You can do it I know know know know know
I missed writing a four month update for the D-man, in part because the people who clamor for these updates — er, OK, the person — got to see him right around that time, when he got baptized. But now it’s been over a couple of months and so it seems more than likely that he has changed a bit since the last time.
Dominic is definitely well into the Chubby Baby Zone — his legs have those hefty rings of fat on them. At his last appointment he was 75th percentile in height and weight, with his head even bigger. Even people who don’t know him sometimes comment on the size of his head. I don’t think it has much to do with ego yet, but he does manage to score more than his share of adoring gazes from adults, so who knows. If you are a random person and you are saying ‘hi’ to Dominic and making googly faces at him, he is more than likely to smile at you, which of course only increases the feeding frenzy. His usual smile in these situations only happens on one side of his mouth, which is kind of his trademark expression. Though he has a new trademark expression, just in the past few days, where he’ll suck on his lower lip and occasionally make a lip-popping sound.
He still sucks down bottles with aplomb, mostly breastmilk but now with a formula one here and there. He’s in the grey zone between 6oz and 8oz bottles. And he’s started on rice cereal which, like all other food transitions, he adjusted to without the slightest hint that there was anything unusual or difficult about the New Thing at all. This step, combined with the usual process of Poop Consolidation, means that he’s at the lovely age where one has to constantly be on the lookout for bowel movements that exceed his diapers’ Factory Rated Operating Capacity. That, and his ability to stick stuff in his mouth so far that it makes him spit up, make for frequent clothes changes during an average day.
He fishes for attention, with cute little noises and whatnot, in a way that I don’t remember Ella doing. I have a theory going right now, no doubt overly reductive, that says that Ella is an introvert and Dominic is an extrovert. Hard to say for sure, since contentment at being passed around is ordinary for his age, but he really does seem to feed on social interaction and lots of activity around, whereas Ella is always trying to pick one person to separate from the group and come play with her one-on-one.
Boy, does he love his big sister. He’ll hear her from across the room and contort his body however he can to get a view of what she’s doing. Sometimes all it takes is for her to enter his field of vision to cause him to laugh out loud. Keeping tabs on her activities is, for the moment, his raison d’etre. I have to remind her every day to be gentle with him, and she is constantly exploring the boundary between what is OK and what is too rough — fortunately not in any manner that has caused permanent damage.
Rollover Watch: I’d put him at about 75%. We’ve seen Assisted Rollovers and Rollovers on an Incline, but the whole question of what to do with his arm is holding him back from the final stretch. As I write this I realize — typical second kid stuff — how much less we’ve paid attention to this with Dominic than we did with Ella. With her it seems like every day I’d have an update for Suanna about how fractionally closer she had gotten to completing the task. With Dominic, it’s more like “Oh, look, he’s rolling over . . . oh, look, he’s crawling . . . oh, look, he’s going to college.” He does seem determined to skip the “sitting up” milestone and move straight on to standing up. He loved to straighten his legs and peer around as you hold him up. I haven’t the heart to tell him yet that sitting up isn’t one of the skippable ones.
Lots of times we just call him Dominic, but as far as nicknames go, the following are most common: Dee, D-man, Big D (that’s Ella’s favorite one), Dom, the Deliverator. OK, that last one hasn’t caught on at all, but I have plans for it.
There’s a long-overdue picture update up, featuring scenes from Dominic’s baptism weekend and a recent visit from our friends Eric and Rebecca. Start browsing here.
Yesterday Dominic reached two milestones:
After I finished feeding him, he realized that he hadn’t breastfed, and I had been home for a whole 30 minutes! So he immediately started making his familiar hunger noises. Nate kept warning me that he had had enough, but I fed him anyway (chalk it up to mother pangs of seeing him eat something not from me for the first time). He spent the rest of the night spitting up. Lesson learned – for me at least.
Last week, Dominic started grabbing my hair and reaching for my face as he nursed. It’s one of the sweetest things in the world to have your baby gently pat at your face while you’re feeding him. Pulling on the hair isn’t that great, but he doesn’t do it that often or that firmly. This was how Ella developed such an attraction to my hair. To this day, she loves touching my hair. While I was reading her stories in bed the other night, she quickly stuck her arm out as I was laying my head down on the pillow next to her. She smiled guiltily and said, “I put my arm out so I could put my hand in your hair.
The other thing that Dominic has developed a desire for in the last week is standing. While he’s not doing it by himself, all he needs is a little support. His legs are quite strong. A couple weeks ago, the thing to make him happy was helping him sit up to see the world. Now he wants to stand up to see the world. We just hope he isn’t disappointed to learn that the next developmental stage is not standing on his own.
The Scene: Barrett Library, Old Town Alexandria
The Event: Story Time, or rather, the kids-make-crafts period immediately afterward.
The Accomplishment: After a somewhat, shall we say, “abstract” construction of a pirate vessel, Ella signed her creation with her own name — without assistance! At first I thought she was drawing very small waves, but then it became clear she was working on her name. My only help was in suggesting that she make the sides of her L’s a little taller, which she resolutely declined to do.
