Week 12 Day 4: More quab!

Marilyn's arrival has been postponed again. She called today and said she was coming on Saturday morning.

We had another crabby day today. I felt pretty crummy yesterday, like I might be getting sick, too, and Stacy is still coughing like she has consumption. So with two crabby Bear days, I am wondering if he isn't coming down with something himself. His appetite was not great today. It was hard to get him to eat anything. He clamped his mouth shut and flailed at the spoon when I tried to feel him plain rice cereal made with breast milk. Rosemary had given us some rice cereal with mixed fruit and some oatmeal banana cereal and Gavin has clearly become accustomed to the taste of sweetness (something else he gets from me). So after barely getting a few spoonfuls of cereal down his hatch I gave up. He was clearly not having it. He ate his green beans, though not as eagerly as he usually does. And he ate his applesauce. But he still needed some protein, damn it, and right now he's getting that from breast milk. So Gavin and I headed off to Kroger to get him some new rice cereal with fruit. At the store I told him, "We need to find something you'll eat so you can keep growing at an alarming rate."

The next feeding the fruit rice cereal got a better reception, but not by much. Worried that he wasn't getting enough breast milk I decided to give him a bottle, something I haven't done for days because the last few times have not been pretty. He fusses, he fights, he cries. Bottle feeding is not something he's interested in now. But I thought maybe he'd be receptive to it since he was tired and hungry. Maybe it would be a good wind down. But I was wrong. It was a good wind up into sadness. He drank one ounce and one ounce only and wasn't going to drink the rest for anything. You can only explain nutrition to an 8 month old so many times before you give up, you know?

Tonight while Stacy and I were sitting on the couch together, me reading, she doing lesson plans, she mentioned how crabby he was today. "He was just really demanding," she said. "Just exhausting." So true. Today felt very long despite our Kroger outting. Oh, we also went to the credit union drive through ATM.

In baby development news, I saw Gavin go from a prone position on his tummy to sitting up all by himself. Also, Gavin wants to stand up constantly. The trouble is, he can't do it on his own since his balance is not his strong suit right now. His favorite thing is for one of us to hold his hands while he uses his legs to stand. But as you can imagine, this severely limits both of our mobility. But he's a very strong little dude. I suspect he might have thighs of steel, even if they look like thighs of pudding from the outside.