2 months!
Spencer was too healthy to warrant a 1-month checkup, so he just went in for 2 month visit.
As I suspected, he's growing fast. 12.5 lbs or so, up from 6.5lbs at birth. He's almost double his birth weight already! Although to be fair, he has become a worrisome 4 day or more pooper, and when he was weighed, he was overdue. He's up to 75th percentiles in weight and height. I don't remember what his head was, but it's not freakishly off the charts like Jack (yet).
There have been a few baby smiles and coos now, but still infrequent. He still sleeps a lot. He was both earlier and mellower than Jack. He doesn't hold his head up as well at 2 months as Jack did, but Jack worked a lot harder at tummytime because he hated it so much. Spencer sometimes just falls asleep.
He also is firm on his bedtime. He starts to get restless and fussy around 7-7:30 if there is no movement towards bedtime, but he settles once it is clear we are heading to bed. I nurse him and sit around to make sure he is content, but I can then leave him wide awake in his bassinet and he eventually falls asleep and sleeps until around midnight. He then wakes at 4. So I'm getting ok sleep, although not great.
He is so cuddly, and cute, and good-smelling, and BABY *squee!* Babies are even better the second time, because you know that they will eventually grow up and learn to pull hair and say No and demand that all flat foodstuffs be cut into fancy shapes in order to be edible. Little babies just are. They are cute and innocent and don't require out-smarting. You can just say " oogie boogie" to them. or say nothing. They can't stop you from hugging them, and they seem to like it. Babies are awesome.
Jack is delighted with Spencer, but still can't be trusted at all. He still tends to get over-excited and will squeeze an arm, push his chest, pinch his head. I have to keep them physically separated even if I am in the same room, so Spencer lives in a bouncer on a counter, or on his playmat inside a playpen, or in my arms. Jack's violent tendencies are slowly receding, but there is a long way to go (and he occasionally develops a new behavior, like kicking Finn.)
In other ways Jack is a lot of fun. He talks so much that we can have actual conversations (if the subject matter is occasionally repetitive, simple, and full of non-sequiturs). He now can pronounce just about anything except "r". He still says "banklet" for blanket, although he can say "blanket" just fine. He says long convoluted sentences like, "I will give this shirt to Daddy when he comes home from work and then he will geebe happy." Geebe is still a Jack-ism, which he inserts in various places as a special Jacklish tense of "to be".
Jack started taking swim lessons. He had been in a pool exactly twice before his first lesson. It is pretty amazing to see the improvement from lesson to lesson. The first lesson he was very clingy and refused to go on his back or to let go of my hands, even though he was having fun. Then he started to kick, then he started to use his arms, etc. In the bath he actually requested to float on his back! He seems to approach new things slowly sometimes, but he doesn't then dig in and refuse--he lets himself get comfortable with the idea, then tries it.
I also bought a "tracing" book for him, which is basically a big book of pictures with paths to trace from simple lines to complex curves. I suppose this is a pre-writing type of thing, but he went from being unable to grasp the concept to being able to trace a fairly complex path, not perfectly, but recognizably. He loves to do crafts, (especially glitter, sadly), and will often ask "Do a cwaft? Do a cwaft?" Painting, playdoh, cutting with scissors will all keep him busy for a while. But coloring with crayons? No. He prefers to ask us to draw him things on the Magnadoodle instead of doing it himself.
But the big thing he does these days that is both awesome and OMG-KILL-ME tiresome is "Talk about it?" I guess where other kids would say "What's that" or "Why?" Jack wants to endlessly have us discuss things. In the car it's "Talk about the zoo?" "Talk about that man that crashed our car?" "Talk about Mac?" He is sponging up every word we can think of to say, and wants to repeat conversations over and over. At the zoo, we were watching the elephants and I kept pointing out to Jack things to notice about the elephant--how wrinkly they were, how they walk slow, what their trunks look like, what they were doing. Another mom said, "You're so interesting! I'm just translating what you're saying!" (her kid only speaks Chinese). I realized that Jack had trained me well. I was storing up things to say for when he would eventually demand to "Talk about the elephants?" We will think a given subject has been utterly exhausted but he will continue to demand to talk about it. I took a lot of photos of the animals so that I can make a laminated little book of them so we have something to look at when we "talk about the zoo" for the zillionth time.
Of course, if he is feeling especially talk-about-it-y, he will drive us up the wall. He will ask to read a book, and it will go like this:
Me: The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss.
Jack: Talk about the Cat?
Me: The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play. So we sat in that house--
Jack: Talk about Sally and that boy and the ball and tennis racquet and the rain?
Me: I AM talking about them, just listen Jack--
Jack: TALK ABOUT SALLY? Talk, talk about--
Me: So we sat in that house on that cold, cold wet day. I sat there with Sally--
Jack: Talk about Sally? Talk about the Cat in the Hat?
Me: Be patient! Listen to the story!
Jack: TALK ABOUT IT!!!
Me: *head explodes*
So either I ignore him and barrel on, or I stop reading the text and just comment on things in the pictures.
Next thing to master: cause and effect. Jack will say, "I'm sad because I cwied." He does not yet understand correlation vs causation, I guess. Also, if he is feeling sad but cannot actually articulate the reason why, either because he doesn't understand or it is too complicated, he will just say, "I'm sad because I lost my wallet." We have no idea where that came from.
As I suspected, he's growing fast. 12.5 lbs or so, up from 6.5lbs at birth. He's almost double his birth weight already! Although to be fair, he has become a worrisome 4 day or more pooper, and when he was weighed, he was overdue. He's up to 75th percentiles in weight and height. I don't remember what his head was, but it's not freakishly off the charts like Jack (yet).
There have been a few baby smiles and coos now, but still infrequent. He still sleeps a lot. He was both earlier and mellower than Jack. He doesn't hold his head up as well at 2 months as Jack did, but Jack worked a lot harder at tummytime because he hated it so much. Spencer sometimes just falls asleep.
He also is firm on his bedtime. He starts to get restless and fussy around 7-7:30 if there is no movement towards bedtime, but he settles once it is clear we are heading to bed. I nurse him and sit around to make sure he is content, but I can then leave him wide awake in his bassinet and he eventually falls asleep and sleeps until around midnight. He then wakes at 4. So I'm getting ok sleep, although not great.
He is so cuddly, and cute, and good-smelling, and BABY *squee!* Babies are even better the second time, because you know that they will eventually grow up and learn to pull hair and say No and demand that all flat foodstuffs be cut into fancy shapes in order to be edible. Little babies just are. They are cute and innocent and don't require out-smarting. You can just say " oogie boogie" to them. or say nothing. They can't stop you from hugging them, and they seem to like it. Babies are awesome.
Jack is delighted with Spencer, but still can't be trusted at all. He still tends to get over-excited and will squeeze an arm, push his chest, pinch his head. I have to keep them physically separated even if I am in the same room, so Spencer lives in a bouncer on a counter, or on his playmat inside a playpen, or in my arms. Jack's violent tendencies are slowly receding, but there is a long way to go (and he occasionally develops a new behavior, like kicking Finn.)
In other ways Jack is a lot of fun. He talks so much that we can have actual conversations (if the subject matter is occasionally repetitive, simple, and full of non-sequiturs). He now can pronounce just about anything except "r". He still says "banklet" for blanket, although he can say "blanket" just fine. He says long convoluted sentences like, "I will give this shirt to Daddy when he comes home from work and then he will geebe happy." Geebe is still a Jack-ism, which he inserts in various places as a special Jacklish tense of "to be".
Jack started taking swim lessons. He had been in a pool exactly twice before his first lesson. It is pretty amazing to see the improvement from lesson to lesson. The first lesson he was very clingy and refused to go on his back or to let go of my hands, even though he was having fun. Then he started to kick, then he started to use his arms, etc. In the bath he actually requested to float on his back! He seems to approach new things slowly sometimes, but he doesn't then dig in and refuse--he lets himself get comfortable with the idea, then tries it.
I also bought a "tracing" book for him, which is basically a big book of pictures with paths to trace from simple lines to complex curves. I suppose this is a pre-writing type of thing, but he went from being unable to grasp the concept to being able to trace a fairly complex path, not perfectly, but recognizably. He loves to do crafts, (especially glitter, sadly), and will often ask "Do a cwaft? Do a cwaft?" Painting, playdoh, cutting with scissors will all keep him busy for a while. But coloring with crayons? No. He prefers to ask us to draw him things on the Magnadoodle instead of doing it himself.
But the big thing he does these days that is both awesome and OMG-KILL-ME tiresome is "Talk about it?" I guess where other kids would say "What's that" or "Why?" Jack wants to endlessly have us discuss things. In the car it's "Talk about the zoo?" "Talk about that man that crashed our car?" "Talk about Mac?" He is sponging up every word we can think of to say, and wants to repeat conversations over and over. At the zoo, we were watching the elephants and I kept pointing out to Jack things to notice about the elephant--how wrinkly they were, how they walk slow, what their trunks look like, what they were doing. Another mom said, "You're so interesting! I'm just translating what you're saying!" (her kid only speaks Chinese). I realized that Jack had trained me well. I was storing up things to say for when he would eventually demand to "Talk about the elephants?" We will think a given subject has been utterly exhausted but he will continue to demand to talk about it. I took a lot of photos of the animals so that I can make a laminated little book of them so we have something to look at when we "talk about the zoo" for the zillionth time.
Of course, if he is feeling especially talk-about-it-y, he will drive us up the wall. He will ask to read a book, and it will go like this:
Me: The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss.
Jack: Talk about the Cat?
Me: The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play. So we sat in that house--
Jack: Talk about Sally and that boy and the ball and tennis racquet and the rain?
Me: I AM talking about them, just listen Jack--
Jack: TALK ABOUT SALLY? Talk, talk about--
Me: So we sat in that house on that cold, cold wet day. I sat there with Sally--
Jack: Talk about Sally? Talk about the Cat in the Hat?
Me: Be patient! Listen to the story!
Jack: TALK ABOUT IT!!!
Me: *head explodes*
So either I ignore him and barrel on, or I stop reading the text and just comment on things in the pictures.
Next thing to master: cause and effect. Jack will say, "I'm sad because I cwied." He does not yet understand correlation vs causation, I guess. Also, if he is feeling sad but cannot actually articulate the reason why, either because he doesn't understand or it is too complicated, he will just say, "I'm sad because I lost my wallet." We have no idea where that came from.