A little Journal about Tyler

It's nice to write about some of the smaller moments if only to have a catalog of all the things that happened back when we were new parents. This all seems clear and eternal now, but I'm sure I'll forget it all inside a year.

"Baby Cakes" (no, I don't know why I call him that) is developing new skills slowly, but with confidence and flair. His latest escapades involve squealing. He gets really excited about something and you can see it working up from his toes up through his legs and then his body and arms and then..."EEEE!" Either that or nothing. He's still figuring out how to engage the system sometime. But you can always tell when he *wants* to make the noise. Just sometimes you get a "aaaaoooh" or "pffffft" or just silence instead. All are cute.

I think the discussion is over, Tyler is definitely a Florida baby. He loves hanging around outside. One of the most surefire ways to calm him down is just to walk around outdoors. I'm not sure if it's the warmth, or the sun, or the fresh air or all the bright green grass, but he calms down very quickly. This means we've gotten a lot of use out of the hammock in the front (and, consequentially, I'm getting much better at getting into and out of hammocks). I like to put him up on my lap and then lean back and swing in the hammock. He just stares at whatever happens to be in front of his face, be it either the grass or the light playing off of Daddy’s shirt. We got a patio swing for the backyard and assembled it yesterday. And, of course, it rained for the first time in months, last night, so it’s all soaked.

He’s also starting to move around, though I’m not sure he realizes it yet. He’s definitely doing a back-arch thing when he’s on his back that gets him moving around on his play matt, and when we put him on his belly he will put his arms out and occasionally drag himself along an inch or two. That’s nothing, though, nothing compared to Tyler’s sleep time. We swaddle his lower half so his default motion is just to lift up his legs and bring them kicking down. You can get a lot of distance out of that as evidenced by the fact that the position we find him in in the morning is entirely unrelated to the position we put him down in at night. This morning he was kicking the monitor.

Grandma Swanson is here, and this is our first day with both of us at work and someone else in charge of the little one. I suspect he’s not having a great time, but I give it about two days before the whole thing is routine and normal and he’s totally back into the swing of things. Also, G-ma Swanson is very patient. She has been a mother before, and did a fantastic job of it. Jess is worried that between his ever-increasingly-early bedtime and the fact that he spends most of his waking time while we are at work, we won’t get to see him anymore. I have my doubts.

Oh, and I had a great father’s day weekend. Jess let me play a lot of video games and made me a little collage of Tyler pictures for my desk at work. I like the ones with the bottom lip best.

Tyler is discovering his thumb, which I attribute greatly to his ability to put himself back to sleep several times at night. He is rapidly approaching 12 hours a night. He is also starting to grab cloth and shove it into his mouth. Unless he has something specific in mind, this usually involves chewing on his shirt.

-N