Procrastination

As you all may have noticed, my original goal of weekly blog posts has stretched to monthly posts.  We might start posting weekly photos instead of waiting until we have something clever to say or until Elliott does something awesome.  But, no promises.

Elliott actually has had some major achievements lately, which I will list:

1. Drooling (maybe teething), and more drooling.  No teeth yet, but he's getting good at chewing on his own fingers to soothe the gum pain.  Note the bibs in the rest of the photos.  These have become necessary if he doesn't want to sit in his cold wet clothes all day.
 
2. Sleeping from 8AM to 8PM, in his crib, waking up 2-4 times. On some of these wake-ups he fusses and goes back to sleep on his own. Woohoo!  He has even started falling asleep whiles sitting calmly:

3. Rolling over.  Don't get too excited. He has done this 2-3 times, front to back, and usually when he's mad. No pictures of rolling over since they would only capture the end results....but here he is dancing in his jumper:

4. Playing independently on his play mat:

And grabbing for toys:

5. Perfecting a smile that wins me over every time:

 

6. Playing peek-a-boo:

7. Swinging!!!!  As you can tell, he likes it.

8. Practicing his Zoolander Blue Steel look:

You may have thought my title (procrastination) had something to do with not writing blog posts.  Although true, I'm actually using this post to procrastinate right now.  My residency application is due tomorrow, and what better way to avoid the stress than by hanging out with Elliott and showing all of you his cuteness?  Today we went for our longest jog since January (1.5 miles woohoo) and stopped at the swings.  As far as the ideal procrastination aid, nothing beats Elliott's squeals of delight as I stride down a hill or push him in the swings. 

What a handsome little guy

You might have noticed that we haven't posted anything here in awhile. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Elliott hasn't been as cute this month as he was before (okay, so that isn't really true -- he's still awfully adorable. But he hadn't really learned many new tricks until recently, so you could just go back to the last post and enlarge him by 10-20%).
2. Summer entrusted this task to me so I could take an active role in Elliott's upbringing. I passively resisted this responsibility by being my usual slow self. As pressure to post mounted, I turned to self-injury in the hopes of shirking responsibility for one more round. Which brings us to reason 3:
3. Typing with one hand is slow.

Ironically, just as I've (temporarily) lost full use of my hands, Elliott has begun discovering his. Don't get me wrong -- he's been flailing his arms around from the very beginning, but until last week these hands were mostly used to punch himself in the face during restless sleep, or to unintentionally scratch at people foolish enough to lay him down on his back.

We first noticed something was changing when he accidentally grabbed onto a rattle:



This was followed by purposefully grabbing and shaking said rattle (all to the backdrop of Outkast's "Hey Ya" -- that's right, my baby don't mess around):



He has since expanded to grabbing handfuls of hair, Mommy's yogurt, and Daddy's fingers -- yes, we're quite proud. Bath time is now spent alternating between caressing his knees and splashing in the water (no picture of bath time -- we're saving those pictures for their future blackmail potential). If you've experienced a child's discovery of his own hands, you understand -- if not, then you're probably rolling your eyes at another overly excited parent fawning over his baby doing something incredibly mundane, but trust me: it's quite an amazing transformation.

Anyway, enough of me writing. Onto the pictures (which is really why you're here in the first place)!

Back when I had two fully functioning hands, Elliott and I used to bond over games of guitar hero (that's me on the plastic guitar -- Elliott's backing me up on the air guitar). Can't wait to get back to it. Given his new skills, I think we're in for some pretty awesome air guitar solos.


Unfortunately, a recent bicycle spill left me with right ankle/foot and left thumb fractures. Elliott was very comforting in the E.R.



Seriously, who could feel the pain of broken bones and bloodied hands when faced with such cuteness? It's a pity he went home before they got to my thumb, but that's what vicoden and lidocaine are for (they weren't nearly so effective).


At first he was kind of creeped out by my new thumb.


But he's warmed up to it. Look at us playing together! I like this game even better than guitar hero.


Aww, so cuddly. He used his new hand skills to insert my thumb into his mouth and promptly fell asleep. If I wasn't his parent I'd probably find it gross and a little forward, but I'm his dad and I think it's awfully sweet.