200 days old and beyond

We've been busy looking for a suitable nanny, so this post is coming a little late.  Grandaunty BL has been watching Junior for almost 4 months now.  Everyone is sad to see her leave, but she promises to come visit as much as possible.

The days are getting longer and warmer, so Junior is getting more outside time.   He goes out for walks twice a day now.  Once with Grandaunty and once with Mommy after she gets home from work.  His favorite is when Mommy puts him in the hiking pack and takes him up the hill.

He's getting closer to crawling forward now.  He can push himself up on all fours and lunge forward after he builds some momentum.  He likes to practice on mommy and daddy's bed since it's softer than the floor mat.

When it comes to eating solids, he's definitely Asian.  If you mix anything with rice cereal, he will gobble it right up.  He still loves cauliflower and carrots.  We introduced peas and zucchini recently, and those are also on his favorites list.

His bottom two teeth are almost completely out, and the top two are about 1/4 the way out.  He's already bitten one of his sippy cups to uselessness.  Mommy also caught him trying to bite a piece off from her pretzel stick.  We can't let our guard down around him.

90th percentile

Junior's growth seems to be leveling off a little now.  For his 6 month well-baby checkup, he weighed in at 20lb 7oz, 28inches.  This may seem big enough for most babies, but compared to 95th percentile at 4 months, he's now down to 90th percentile.  Maybe he's burning off more calories now.  He is considerably more active compared to just a couple of weeks ago.   He's finally mastered rolling over from stomach to back.  This morning we caught him practicing his new skill over and over.  He now squirms and moves (mostly backwards) all over his playmat.  He'll even do some yoga poses like upward dog, downward dog, and child's pose.

We're also making some more progress with introducing solid foods.  So far he's had rice cereal, oatmeal, avocado, banana, cauliflower, sweet potato, carrots, oranges.  Surprisingly, he did not like sweet potato or bananas very much, but he enjoyed eating cauliflower.  He still prefers his "solids" more on the runny side.  We'll gradually try to thicken his food, but for now he prefers the consistency of tomato soup.  We've given up trying to use infant spoons since they don't hold enough food.  We noticed that he was getting impatient with waiting so much between spoonfuls.   Now we'll either use adult plastic soup spoons or just let him drink straight from a cup.

6 months old

Junior is a half-year old!

He's such a smiley little dude, especially in the morning.  He consistently gets about 11 straight hours of sleep, now that he's eating solids in the evenings.  He would probably sleep for longer, but mommy wakes him up at 7am so that she can see him before heading to work.  At night, he waits for daddy to get home and give him a bath before bedtime.  This schedule has been working well for the past month or so.  We may have finally found a successful routine.... for now.

Here's Junior with Great-grandma when she came to visit last weekend.