More things about Tyler

I was in charge of Tyler this week while Jessie was off traveling for work. Below, you will find some highlights, I trust you will enjoy them.

First off: what didn't happen. Tyler slept fine, seemed happy, and behaved quite well with his slightly less experienced parent. He played with me a lot, explored all of the everything, and was a great baby to take care off.

The first morning I tried to feed Tyler some green beans. It...didn't go well. He wasn't having it, and while I'm sure I got a few molecules in, most of it ended up on his bib, shirt, or pants. I had to change his clothes, and that was frustrating. After that I mostly fed him fruit: apples and pears, he really liked that.

He had sort of a rough first day at day care, but after that Jess made a point of getting on Skype with us after that, and Tyler really liked seeing her in the morning. I think it put him in a much better mood. It meant that he wasn't all excited when Jess got home, but I'm not actually that sure that he knew she was gone.

One evening I tried veggies again, no luck. But since I had them out anyway, I thought I'd just let him play around with them. I'd put some on the spoon and hand it to him. About half the time the thing in his hand went right into his mouth, predictably. The other half of the time he'd flail it around and get peas all over the place. After that Tyler and I took a bath together. Lots of splashing and giggling. That's a definite highlight.

Jess needed a lot of Tyler time when she got back. So Friday was a little 'event' at the day care, where they wanted kids to dress up like characters in some of the books they had been reading. Tyler's class was reading 'if you give a mouse a cookie', which a lot of people know about, I gather, and I made Tyler a crayon costume, which was a bunch of red clothes that I drew crayola patterns on. Jess and I want to watch the event, which was mostly getting all the babies together and reading the books to everyone in the activity room. After that, there was a little parade through the halls where all the older kids cheered for the cute little babies. It was neat to see.

After that, we went back to work...for a while. It wasn't too long before Jess came strolling into the room with a baby and a sheepish look on her face that she uses when she wants to pretend that she doesn't know she can do whatever she wants all the time and I have to be okay with it because I love her so much. Anyway, we stayed at work and showed him off for a little while, and then we went home for a short day and extra mommy-cuddling time.

We've tried to start Tyler on some finger foods, but he is having a rough time of it. He doesn't know how to chew things yet. It's hard enough for him to get to food into his mouth, and when he does, he just tries to send it right down his gullet. All that accomplishes is him coughing it right back up and scaring the crap out of his mom. I got some 'textured' baby food which will hopefully make a better intermediate step.

That's all I can think of for the moment. I'm having some relax time with Jessie after being a single dad for a while. Stressful, but knowing it would come to an end eventually helped immensely. And it could have been a lot worse if Tyler wasn't, you know, Tyler.

-N