Happy Monday

For some bizarre reason, I am weirdly happy today. Like, giddily happy. It's kind of sad that that feels so weird, isn't it? I'm not sure why, but hey. :-)

We had a good weekend with Carter. It felt good to spend some relaxing time with him. His nanny had come every day last week, and I really missed having all that time to spend with him. We did lots of cooking, and went out for lunch and grocery shopping on Saturday. Carter really enjoys being out in crowds, and it's fun to take him places and watch him react to all the new stuff he sees.

Here is a cute picture of him watching Doug cook dinner:



He gets around really well these days! He can pull up on just about anything, including me and Doug, and will now stand and hold on to objects with one hand. He also is getting pretty good at cruising on the furniture. He's not too quick yet, but will make his way down the couch or along the ottoman. He's crawling all over the place, and is pretty quick at it.

Another thing he likes to do now is pull things off the ottoman. We finally realized we were fighting a losing battle, and starting putting his toys on the ottoman. Now he will stand there and happily pull them off one by one.

I realized not too long ago that I probably should have been brushing his teeth for a while now, and so I bought him a baby toothbrush. (Before that I would give him a washcloth to chew on during his bath, and I hoped that would do.) But the thing is, nothing goes into Carter's mouth unless he puts it there himself. I didn't want to make toothbrushing a traumatic experience for the next two years, so I decided to give it to him during his bath to see what he would do with it. To my delight, he will spend as long as 5 minutes just chewing on it and moving it around in his mouth. It looks for all the world like he's really brushing his teeth! Hopefully that will do for a while, and at some point we can get him to actually do some cleaning.

He is pulling up on my knees right now and trying to get at the computer, and so I need to cut this short. I wanted to mention that I'm going to be doing a series of reflective posts over on my blog about the NICU experience of a year ago. We recently got some software to convert our HD video into something that can be uploaded to YouTube, and so I'm going to start uploading stuff, none of which has been seen by anyone other than me and Doug. The first post is here, so go check that out if you want. :-)