Friday, September 28, 2012

Baby B at 7 Months



Happy seven months, Baby B!

You started solids on your sixth month birthday. You had pureed avocado. You seemed to like it because you ate the whole avocado! You have solids three times a day, at each of our meals. After avocado you had pureed banana, and then peach. You made really funny faces when you ate peach and didn’t seem to like it. I think the taste was a bit too tart for your tastebuds.

Foods you’ve tried in your seventh month: avocado, banana, peach, broccoli (your favorite so far), cauliflower, mango, carrots, peas, corn, zucchini, butternut squash, pumpkin, strawberries, pears, prunes, apples, egg yolk, tomatoes, cantaloupe, potato, leeks, apricot, yogurt, and rice cereal. Many of these foods were blended together, for example leeks blended with potato or corn blended with butternut squash. You've been quite le gourmand this month.

Now that you are eating solid foods, your schedule has changed a lot. You dropped two of your naps and extended your awake time to two to two-and-a-half hours instead of just one hour. You have just two long naps a day, two hours in the morning from 9:00-11:00 and then three hours in the afternoon, from 1:30-4:00. You go to bed at 6:30pm and sleep until 7:30am. This schedule is so much nicer for us: your long awake time allow us to get out of the house for a few hours during the middle of the day and your long naptimes line up perfectly both with morning homeschooling and afternoon quiet time. 

For the past few weeks your babbling has gotten a lot more sophisticated. Instead of your normal cooing sounds, you're trying out different ranges of sounds, from super high pitched to deep sounds.

This month you started physical therapy for a slight developmental delay. You have something called "truncal hypotonia", which means that your trunk muscles have low tone. At this point, you should be able to sit up tripod style, but you're not able to just yet. You usually just bend right forward when we try to sit you up. So your physical therapist showed me different activities I can do with you to try to promote stronger muscles. We've been doing the exercises for just a few days and you're already showing a big improvement. I think you'll be sitting up independently in no time.

Foster Update:
This will be our last update on Baby B. She is going to live with her new parents 'as soon as possible', in the words of the court. We are still waiting to hear exactly when that will be. We will miss our little Baby B so much, but we know she will be in good hands.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Thomas Matisse

This month we are studying a few paintings by Henri Matisse. I keep four prints displayed on our bulletin board so the boys can see them throughout the day. When it's time to do our picture study, I ask the boys to choose their favorite painting, and then I ask them to describe it to me. Tommy's description of this painting, The Green Stripe, went something like this: "This man has yellow skin. It's all splotchy and rough. He has a green stripe down his face. I'm not sure why. He has blue hair and red lips. He looks sad."  

After he described it, he drew it himself: