Check it out, there’s an attachment parenting comic strip. You have to get past the fact that the main character is a woman in a cow mask, but otherwise it’s awesome. Here are a few I really liked:

One-handed typing

Freaking

The last few days have been hard, Griffin and I are both sick. He’s not sleeping well or napping much, we can’t really leave the house for fear of getting other people sick, and I’m having trouble figuring out what to do all day. I’d really like to curl up on the couch with some soup and watch a movie but that’s not an option when you need to keep a baby entertained. Today is kind of feeling like a long haul.

But I was thinking about it and I bet there will come a time when he’s 18 and leaving the house that I would give anything to be able to go back in time and spend a day with him at eight months old. Even a sick, teething day. Eight months old is such a fun age. He can crawl over to me and sit in my lap which means more than it did when he just had to be wherever we put him. He’s doing a new thing today where he pulls himself up on one of his toy tables and then sort of stumbles and falls onto the bean bag, trying to walk on his own. When he did this the first time I started clapping and cheering and he looked so happy and proud. He’s also starting to “dance” when music plays, he shakes his head from side to side and smiles at me. It’s amazing to see his face light up when he sees the cats. And because he’s sick he wants to be held more than usual, and he wraps his arms around my neck and nuzzles in. I need to try to keep things in perspective and remember how lucky I am.

Griffin turned 8 months this week (on Tuesday)! On that day he had his 3rd swimming lesson. I don’t know how this works, but in a pool full of screaming kids, he can enthusiastically dunk under water and come up smiling. The guy’s my hero! That night we captured our first incriminating photos:

We will not hessitate to use these to great effect during his early days of dating, or release them to the press should he ever run on the republican ticket.

Also this week his 3rd tooth is coming in. After the bottom front 2 arrived, the one just left of the top front two is coming in. The grand gummy smile is giving way.

Mobility is increasing rapidly. We can look away for a second and look back only to catch a glimpse of his butt wobbling round the corner as he seeks out trouble wherever he can find it. In a house chock full of toys, the only thing that matters to him is what’s dangerous and off-limits. Stairs, bricks, cat food, and definitely anything we’ve got in our hands (coffee, taser gun, thermonuclear devices). He’ll pull up on anything and everything, and is even conducting limited experiments with free-standing. The whole experience is a bit of a challenge to Darwinian dogma. The parents are scrambling madly on the childproofing efforts, and should have the majority of the first wave done this weekend. While the house is architectually pleasing, it seems well designed to do in the youngins.

Two new things, I think Griffin is getting all four of his top front teeth at once – the left one of the four is poking through and you can see the ridges for all of them on the front. He hasn’t been sleeping well recently and I’m hoping this is why. We might be in for a rough week or so until they all come through. We’re actually both sick today and I remembered we also got sick the last time he got a set of teeth. I think we’re run down from the lack of sleep and napping.

Another thing that happened yesterday is that Griffin showed a temper for the first time. We were grocery shopping and even though I’d brought in one of his toys from the car he turned around and grabbed a pack of tortillas from the cart. No harm in letting him hold the tortillas, I thought. Until we got to the check-out line and I tried to take the tortillas away. He closed his eyes and just flat out screamed. It was so intense I thought something else might be wrong but he stopped immediately when I gave him back the tortillas. When she had rung up everything else the check-out lady and I devised a plan where I took the tortillas for just a moment, she scanned them and stuck a “paid-for” sticker on them, and I immediately gave them back to the loudly protesting Griffin. Same thing when I tried to wrap him up in the blanket, he clutched those tortillas all through the parking lot and cried when he had to let go of them so I could buckle his car set. He held them half the way home and then finally fell asleep and dropped them. It was really pretty cute.

We’re officially parents now, we took a picture of Griffin taking a bath:

Griffin turned 8 months old yesterday. 2/3 of a year! He’s developing physical skills very quickly now, his balance and coordination are improving every day. I’m expecting him to start walking early since he seems completely focused on trying.

It’s funny now that he’s so mobile, if I look away for a minute he’ll be rounding the corner heading for another room. This morning Julian tried to read to him from “The very hungry caterpillar”. We’ve heard of babies who actually like to listen to books instead of just trying to eat them, so Julian pulled the book out of Griffin’s reach and tried to read it that way. While Julian was reading Griffin looked at him, then turned around and crawled out of the room. Heh, everybody’s a critic.

The mobility means Griffin is finding lots of ways to hurt himself, it’s kind of stressful. I can be right there even trying to guard him with my hands and he finds a way to bonk himself on the head. We had kind of a fiasco ordering baby gates from an internet company that isn’t shipping any products. I finally gave up and ordered the gates from a different company and they arrived yesterday. My dad is also cutting plexiglass to fit the upstairs balcony so Griffin can’t crawl off the edge. So, more babyproofing this weekend.

After a 2 hour stint shoveling the driveway Saturday, I finally decided it was time for a snow blower. After recovering from the physical exertion, the sticker shock still wins. The driveway’s steep and long, so a full power track drive seems to fit the bill. And the bill is $1300 + $150 if I want it delivered (unloading a 240 lb. tank is a bit of a conundrum). We only need it a few times a year, and if we move in to town in the next few years, we’re talking $200 a pop. Suddenly 2 hours of shoveling at $100/hr doesn’t seem so bad. So for the time being, I’m a fan of global warming! And I thought there were no positives to Bush’s re-election.

This morning the cats and I noticed some nice snow drift formations outside the (elsewise never used) front door.

snow?

snow drift

snow cliff

Tomorrow’s a big day! Griffin turns 8 months! Unbelievable kiddo! Coolest thing ever!

And so it begins.

Candy suggested I start a blog. I find them to be self-indulgent attempts at exaggerated self importance and ego gratification. It’s taken me until just about now to be rather comfortable and accepting of that. Plus, it’s not so effective if no one reads it (probably not so effective if someone does).

Candy’s point was that it’s a great way to log aspects of your life. We both suffer poor memory skills, and it’s nice to keep track of some things along the way.

There are additional concerns. Privacy. People scare me. I don’t want them to find out about me. This competes with my desire for admiration from the masses of the fantastic, incredible person that I am. Well, if I were. And what better way to pull the wool over their eyes than a blog?

Plus just exactly who’s reading? I have offensive thoughts. I’m eager to share them, because I’m sure they’re revolutionary and profound. But I don’t want to offend anyone. At least not anyone I might meet in real life. As much as I try, I can’t guarantee my anonymity [from my mom] (which, again, will compete with my desire to be renowned [by my mom]). Plus I might want to share my musings with others, which creates an instant security leak. If I let a friend read it, and then have to kill them to cover my tracks, that probably puts a massive dent in my readership.

But I find myself reading other folks’ blogs and genuinely enjoying the experience. And last week, for the first time, Griffin came crawling over to me when I got home from work. As unsentimental as I am, that’s the kind of thing I want to gush about. And ironically, although I’ve got a whole family now, I don’t really have anyone to gush to. Candy and I have involuntarily drifted, much to our dismay. In fact, blogging may become a key family communication tool! And I have political rants to make. Million dollar ideas to share. Keen social observations to proffer. Griffin’s my main audience, but at 8 months, he mostly smirks and tries to crawl through me to get to the ever-important electrical outlet.

So this is the beginning. Or if you reading from most recent post on back, This is the end.

I’m still slacking on the pictures, sorry.

Julian unexpectedly had Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr. day so we took Griffin to the conservatory at Olbrich Gardens. During the summer Griffin loved the leaves so much that it was nice to be able to show him all the plants and waterfalls. He also liked looking at the other people, and spent some time trying to “talk” to the fish.

Today Cassie had a party for work that she wanted to bring her kids to so I watched them this morning. It was a lot of fun to see them and they all had a good time playing together.

Since he learned how to pull up that’s almost all Griffin wants to do. Toys are nothing but a potential way to pull himself up this week. He can also sit back up from crawling which is listed in the Dr. Sears book as a major “relief milestone” for parents so I wasn’t expecting him to learn how to do it at the same time he learned to crawl. These past few weeks have been amazing, just an explosion of new physical skills. It reminds me of all the changes that happened between two and three months. At this rate he’ll be walking in another month or two.

My sister Chantel has been in the hospital since Saturday night having contractions. She was working on Saturday and was the head nurse in charge of a particularly stressful labor. She’s not sure if she got hit during the labor, if it’s just stress, or if it’s a coincidence that she’s having contractions now. The contractions were coming as often as every minute, but her cervix isn’t changing so hopefully they can just stop the contractions and everything will be ok. They gave her some medication to try to stop the contractions that didn’t work, so they gave her another medication which makes you feel horrible but is apparently slowing them down. They’ve also given her some steroid shots to try to develop the baby’s lungs quicker in case he had to be born soon. She’s at 28 weeks now so it would be difficult but if he had to be born he would most likely survive. I think it’s both good and bad that she’s a labor and delivery nurse. All the other nurses she works with are taking good care of her but it must be hard for her to know all the complications that can happen.

Update 1/18 – Chantel was allowed to leave the hospital yesterday, the contractions slowed down and since they didn’t seem to be leading to actual labor her doctor let her go home. Hopefully they’ll stop altogether sometime soon.

We have all these little rhymes and rituals with Griffin that I thought I’d write down so we don’t forget what they are.

One of the easiest and tastiest meals I sometimes make is Pecorino Romano cheese with the peppercorns in it ground up and served over pasta with some olive oil. This prompted Julian to come up with this rhyme which he does with Griffin pretty regularly:

Mmm, pecorino pecorino pecorino.
Ooh, pecorino pecorino romano.
The cheese is good, the cheese is good.
(Sometimes we improvise here “the cheese is tasty” or “it’s very very good”)

I guess you need to know the song that goes with it but hopefully someday we’ll read this and remember.

One thing that I tell Griffin a lot is “You’re my kid, and if ever a kid of mine there was it would be you”.

We had a thunderstorm the other day and I remembered the first one – On the night before you were born there was a big thunderstorm. The lightning crashed and the thunder said “Boom, Griffin’s coming, boom!”.

Julian is good with language and he named a lot of the toys. As an example, we have the “Levitating Lion of Literation”, and one of the teddy bears is “Beary Sanders – he cuts left, he cuts right, he goes in for the belly buzz”. Another one is “The lime green bear of death – but you can call me Seth”. I came in one time to hear Julian saying “Aaaaah, it’s the kiss of Seth!”. There’s one that I named that I’m proud of – a little teething ring in the shape of a fish that I named “Official”. Especially in the first few months when he wasn’t very interactive we had to keep ourselves entertained.