Hellobee

Mr. Bee and I went on our first “date” in a year last night! We had dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s The London, and then watched Jersey Boys. Loved the food and the show! It’d be awesome to have a regular date night, but just paying our nanny overtime is so much money. Then you add in the cost of going out to a movie + dinner, and it’s a couple hundred dollars just for a couple hours out. Yep it’s just easier to stay home when you have a baby and no in-laws nearby to babysit.

Food – I’ve mentioned that Charlie is a horribly picky eater. For the longest time he only ate 6oz of solids/day. And he would only eat that much for our nanny – not me! But in the past couple of weeks, he started eating 12oz a day regularly. I feed him breakfast and dinner and our nanny feeds him lunch. Sometimes he even asks for solids by signing “more” when I’m preparing his food, or he tries to climb into his high chair. He’s still not a big eater and I suspect he won’t be for a very long time, but that’s ok.

Purees – Charlie can eat all kinds of chunky foods like beef and chicken, but he will only eat a couple of bites of chunky food even if he likes something. 10 bites is considered a lot. He also loves to stuff his mouth full of food, chew out all the flavor, and then spit it out. He has a very strong gag reflex and aversion to swallowing which sucks for eating, but has been great for him not choking. We’ve removed so many things from his mouth that he could have potentially choked on, from plastic bottlecaps to a penny to a pill of excedrin a couple months back.  We still feed him mostly purees because he can’t spit it out like chunky food, and otherwise he’d never eat enough. The key is to keep him occupied and he’ll open his mouth when we put a spoon in front of it. An empty baby food jar and a spoon usually does the trick.  He is very generous with his food and loves to feed us whether it’s his bottle, snacks or spoonfuls of his purees. Charlie also prefers jarred food over fresh food, so we often mix fresh food in with a 2 oz jar of Stage 1 Earth’s Best Organic. Yep he’s still eating food that’s designed for 6 months olds. It’s ok though. We recently met a baby girl who’s 16 months old and only eating purees. Charlie will eat chunkier foods on his own time.

Bottle Weaning – Charlie drinks about 28 ounces of milk a day, and we’ve been trying to reduce it so he eats more solids. But he actually eats solids better when he’s had a little milk maybe an hour or two before he has solids. It’s recommended that you wean your baby off the bottle and onto a sippy cup around 1 year of age, but I know there’s no way we’re going to be able to wean Charlie any time soon. He doesn’t drink milk when we give it to him in a sippy or straw cup, but he will drink tons of boreecha (barley tea). PS this is the only sippy cup Charlie will drink out of (recommended by virtualberta) and this is his favorite straw cup (by far leaks the least of all the ones we’ve tried).

Favorite Foods – Charlie does like snacks much more than real food, but we try to limit them so he doesn’t get full on them. The only meals Charlie really likes are elbow macaroni w/ cheddar cheese and beef porridge (plain or mixed with a vegetable). He also likes Yo Baby yogurt most of the time. And then the rest of the time it’s purees – carrot, peas, green beans, zucchini, spinach, broccoli (he likes green veggies), cauliflower, squash, sweet potato, parsnip, corn, pears, apples, and bananas. He looooooves things that are salty (I catch him licking the soy sauce bottle), but babies his age aren’t supposed to have any salt added to their food. Once he had a taste of salt though in the form of pretzels, saltine crackers, and goldfish crackers they serve at a local indoor playspace though, he lost interest in Cheerios and Mum Mums. In case you’re looking for healthy, organic snacks for your little one, these are Charlie’s current favorites: HappyBaby Banana Mango HappyMelts, HappyBaby HappyMunchies Cheese Puffs, Little Duck Organics Dried Blueberry and Apples, and Earth’s Best Organic Barley Teething Biscuits.

Talking – Charlie can say 5 words – mama, bubble, ball, more, and uh oh. Whenever he drops something, he says “uh oh!” He babbles all day long like he’s speaking a real language and we just can’t understand it.

Walking – Once Charlie mastered walking, he never crawled again.

Obsessions – It’s very normal for children to have obsessions, and Charlie is obsessed with shoes, particularly this pair of blue Adidas he has. When I tell him to go pick out a pair of shoes, he always chooses his blue Adidas from the big pile of shoes he has in his closet. He brings them to me and asks me to put them on his feet. We call them magic shoes because when he was learning how to walk, he walked better with them on.

Here’s Charlie picking out his magic shoes:

And here’s Charlie asking me to put my boots on him:

Sleep: Phew Charlie’s sleep has been a saga the past couple of months. Charlie woke up in the middle of the night every night while we were in LA. I often had to give him a bottle or push him in the stroller in the middle of the night just to get him back down. When we got back to New York, he started sleeping through the night again most nights, but soon he was waking once in the middle of the night. I’d give him a bottle and he’d go right back to sleep. Typically this is a huge no no. If you feed your baby in the middle of the night, waking up will become a habit because their bodies will get used to being hungry at that time. But since Charlie isn’t a piggy, it wasn’t that big a deal. I’d give him a bottle, and he’d go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later than his usual ungodly 5:30am wake up time. Then little by little his sleep got worse. He’d only fall asleep in the stroller for his morning nap. Luckily he stays asleep when we transfer him to his crib. Then he’d only fall asleep in the stroller at bedtime. Finally he’d only fall asleep in the stroller for his afternoon nap — a nap that he has happily and easily gone down for since forever. And then he started waking up 2-3 times a night some nights and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I have a hard time falling back asleep no matter how tired I am, so I’d be up for hours in the middle of the night. We had to nip this in the bud. We were so spoiled by having such a great sleeping baby from 4 1/2 months – 1 year post sleep training. He slept through the night, he took such long naps we had to wake him up from practically every single one, and even through some of the worst illnesses, Charlie’s sleep quickly got back on track. Having a baby that sleeps well is seriously the biggest blessing. Anyway once Charlie started waking up 2-3 times a night and needed to be pushed in his stroller in the freezing cold to fall asleep for his naps and bedtime, we knew we had to sleep train again.

Sleep Training the Second Time Around – Last week on the night we decided to sleep train, Charlie woke up at 2:35am and started crying. After 15 minutes, Mr. Bee went in to soothe him and tell him it was ok. I’m usually the one that gets him in the middle of the night and he’s less likely to try to manipulate Mr. Bee. Charlie was PISSED and was hopping up and down with outstretched arms asking to be picked up. He stood crying for 35 minutes, then he stopped and stood there for 35 minutes completely silent. He whimpered on and off, mostly off, for another 2 hours after that. I actually fell asleep during that time, and I wake up at the smallest sound Charlie makes. I kept checking the video monitor and he pretty much stood up for 3 hours straight waiting for us to come get him. Once it was 5:30, his usual wake up time, we gave him a bottle and he fell asleep. Since that night 6 nights ago, Charlie has slept through the night. Maybe I’m just a mean mommy now, but it wasn’t that hard this time around. And I don’t know why, but sleep training works. A couple of times he’s woken up, stood up, cried for 10 seconds, and gone right back to sleep. As a bonus, Charlie now wakes up at 6:30 – 7:00 instead of 5:30am. It’s made a HUGE difference in my quality of life. Your body is just exhausted at 5am even if you go to bed early. But 6:30 – 7:00 is something even a nonmorning person like me can handle!

Naps – Charlie is still taking two naps a day, but we have to wake him up after one hour to keep him on schedule for bedtime. Charlie can sleep up to 4 hours if we leave him alone. He’s not quite ready for one nap yet, but I hope he will be soon. It’ll be much easier if he takes one long 3 hour nap in the middle of the day than two short naps. On days he wakes up late (after 7:30) we do only give him 1 nap, but because he’s not used to that schedule it usually throws him off a little.

Schedule – This is Charlie’s current sleep and eating schedule:

6:30 – 7:00am – Wake up, 2 oz milk
7:30am – 3oz solids breakfast
8:40am – 6oz milk
9:00am – 10:00am – Morning Nap
11:00am – 4oz milk (sometimes he skips this bottle)
12:00pm – 6 oz solids lunch
1:45pm – 6oz milk
2:00pm – 3:00pm – Afternoon Nap
4:45pm – 4 oz milk
6:00pm – 3 oz solids dinner
7:00pm – Bath
7:20pm – 7 1/2 oz milk
7:30pm – Bedtime

Charlie is shamefully getting 6 bottles a day! We need to cut it down to 4. And he eats very frequently when he should be going at least 4 hours between meals.

Jealousy – I’m #1 in Charlie’s book. When Mr. Bee rests his head against me, Charlie immediately runs over and lays his head against me and pushes Mr. Bee’s face away. It’s the most hilarious thing!

Personality – Charlie is becoming so much easier and fun with each passing day. When we hang out in his playroom, he can entertain himself for a very long time while I watch American Idol haha. Luckily he’s not into tv at all, though most babies his age seem to be. Once he started walking was really the turning point. I wish I could give birth to another one year old and skip the entire baby stage altogether. That’s how much I hated the newborn stage! Charlie is a pretty good baby that hardly ever cries. He only cries if you dump water over his head (so we only shampoo his hair twice a week) or if he’s really hurt, and even then it’s only for a couple of seconds. He does throw minifits every now and then if you take away something he wants to touch like a screwdriver. He’s obsessed with shoes, tools, cleaning products (spray cleaners, vacuum, mop, broom), the keyboard and mouse, the freezer (ours is on the bottom and slides open), the cats, cat food bowls and cat food. He loves to dance. He loves to hug my leg. He loves to blow kisses when he’s saying bye, which charms women to no end. His favorite place to visit lately is the supermarket. Charlie walks down the aisles and picks out things to put in our cart. He’s just a hilarious little man.

This turned out to be a novel phew. Ok I should go play with Charlie now.