Leo’s been here nine months

That’s as long as it took for him to cook inside my belly!

Here is what Leo’s into:

Not sitting still in his chair while having his nine month picture taken:

But he’s also into:

Crawling
Exploring
Pulling up to standing (on furniture, on people’s legs, on two-year-olds)
Grabbing everything
Doors—shutting them, specifically
Banging on things
Clapping
Chasing and being chased
“Big-time” Peekaboo (where the person actually leaves the room or hides behind furniture and then pops out…none of this hiding under a burp cloth anymore). His Leo music CD
Eating—in addition to mushy fruits and veggies, Leo eats cheerios, Puffs, avocado and bananas. He likes EVERYTHING! I can even make up the weirdest combinations and he’ll eat ‘em—carrots and bananas—yum! Green beans and applesauce—give me more! Squash and pears—yes, sir!
Mommy and daddy—he definitely prefers us over other people but will usually go to most women (unfamiliar men, beware!)
Being totally freakin’ adorable

The Mommy Show in the Garage

Yesterday it was rainy, cold and generally yucky. What are a stir-crazy baby and a mommy in need of exercise supposed to do?

Hang out in the garage, of course!

Leo watched me as I...

...jump roped and hula hooped.
I thought we were safe from neighbors driving by because it was about 4:30 in the afternoon so everyone should still be at work. Apparently, nobody works anymore. Plenty of people drove by and saw us looking foolish. Just another thing to blame on the economy.

The Chase

Splish Splash

Unlike his mom as a kid, Leo seems to enjoy bath time (even on Fridays). This week he ventured into deeper waters by graduating from the baby bath tub to the big boy bath tub. (Okay, the water is still only up to his ankles):

"Come and Get Me!"

"If I stand here at the edge of my crib and look really cute, somebody will walk through that door and pick me up. It's like magic!"


"Yea! Here's mommy! It works every time!"

Sleep Sitting

It's 1:25 am. I don't usually blog at this hour because Leo is normally an excellent nighttime sleeper. And I can't say that tonight is any different. I'm not up because Leo isn't sleeping. I'm up because Leo IS sleeping. He's just doing it sitting up.

11:34pm--Leo makes a sound on the monitor that wakes me up. I glance at the monitor and see that he is sitting up in his crib. We have one of those new fangled video monitors. "Go back to sleep," I tell the baby in the monitor.


From 11:34 until 12:00am I drift in and out of sleep, holding the monitor. Leo is still sitting up all this time but he's clearly sleeping. He's done this once before but it didn't last this long.

Then I have this crazy dream about working at an ad agency except it's at the office of where Jeremy Piven works on Entourage. In this dream I started out as an intern and quickly moved up the ranks. Then one day I'm yelling at someone and this co-worker of mine says, "Hey, when did you become an 80-year-old drill sergeant?" And I realize I've become a jerk. And then I wake up.

I glance at the monitor. Leo is still sitting up. I glance at the clock. 1:04am. Oh, shoot. Has this kid been sleeping sitting up for an hour and a half?

I ask this question aloud to Frank who answers, "I'm really out of it with this floaty medicine." (This is what he calls Nyquil or Nitetime which is the generic Kroger stuff we bought. Lucky him. I wish I was on floaty meds.)

"I think I'm going to push him down," I tell Floaty Frank.

"But what if you didn't have the video monitor? You would just think he was sleeping," Frank says, which surprisingly made a lot of sense for a man who was in a medically-induced float.

So I came up here to the computer to Google "Baby + Sleeping Sitting Up" and I really haven't found much on the subject. Our baby is a freak of nature.

Oh, and as I've been writing this he laid back down. So I guess if any other parents are up in the middle of the night and Googling the same thing, they might find this blog. So I'll just say this: Give it about two hours and your kid may just lay down.

I don't have any pics to accompany this blog posting since I don't dare take his picture while he's sleeping sitting up. So I'll just find another picture where he's sitting up...

There. He looks just like this except his eyes are closed:

Good night. I'm going to lie down now. Or maybe I'll just sleep right here in my desk chair.

Speaking of fun...

Since Leo is mobile now we put up a partition/gate across half of my office. Behind the gate is a slew of baby toys--his rocking horse, the jumperoo, his drum and instrument set, Edison the talking catepillar, rattles, the kick and crawl aquarium, a toy cell phone, a singing book...

So I try to put Leo in here and if I stay with him, he plays with all of these things just fine:

As soon as I go to the other side to work on Writinggal stuff, he crawls right up to the gate and requests to be set free:

Aw, how can I resist that pathetic look?

Leo does too have fun

Here is a conversation we overheard from the row behind us at church on Sunday. It was a little girl (probably about four), asking her grandmother questions about Leo, who was sitting quietly in his car seat, playing with a rattle:

“Grandma, why does that baby have a toy?”

“Because babies like toys.”

“Why is he sitting in that seat?”

“Because babies sit in car seats sometimes.”

“Where does he sleep?”

“In a crib.”

“Can he walk?” “No. He probably can’t even crawl.”

“So he can't walk?”

“No.”

“Then how does he have any fun?”

At that point I couldn’t pretend to keep looking forward with a straight face. I had to laugh. If Leo could talk he would say, "I have plenty of fun!"

Playing bongos with John:

Playing with the pop-up animals with John:

Chillin' with Dawson and Hunter:

Wondering if Dawson is a toy or a person:

"Sharing" toys with Dawson:

And sometimes he has fun hanging out by himself:

Or the most fun, hanging out naked:

Back on the Horse

At first Leo wasn't sure what to think of the rocking horse he got from his godparents, Tia Kristin and Uncle David:



Another encounter with a stuffed horse this weekend left us thinking that maybe he had something against horses in general:

But now, I am happy to report that he has been on his rocking horse for about 15 minutes, playing and giggling. We have to go somewhere in a couple of hours, I might have to pry him away:

Cheeri-oh-no

Leo was showing all the signs of being ready for finger foods like “O Shaped Cereals” (as the BabyCenter emails call them): he sits upright by himself, crawls, puts everything in his mouth… But when we put the O shaped substance in front of him, he looked confused, even a little angry.

We tried spoon feeding him one but he spit it out as if it were the grossest thing he’d ever tasted. This is coming from a boy who will eat carrots mixed with oatmeal mixed with milk mixed with vitamins mixed with pears.








We will keep trying. I mean, he eventually liked apples.