Month: June 2008

The most exciting thing about this week was all the food that Ruben’s been eating. We had planned to follow Annabel Karmel’s very helpful meal planner, in which she suggests that for the first week we just do a little lunch and gradually build up to 3 meals a day. Ruben, however, had a different idea, and we’re pretty much doing 3 meals a day already – just one week after he tried his very first taste of baby rice.

Very impressive.

In addition to baby rice, Ruben has added a range of foods to his repertoire including: apple, pear, banana (he likes to chew on it whole, doesn’t like it mashed), honeydew melon (sharing some breakfast with mum before going to see the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy with his buddies Theo and Issac), butternut pumpkin, sweet potato, potato and carrots, potato and pumpkin, straight carrot, and a mix of roast vegetables from our baked dinner the other day (carrots, parsnip and sweet potato). His least favourite is mashed banana and, I think… most favourite was pear with some baby rice for breakfast. It’s hard to tell which is the favourite though because he really does love his food. Clever boy.

Without going into too much detail – nappy changing has become a whole different and sometimes surprising experience for us now. Wow.

As you can see, Ruben is getting really good at sitting up these days. With a bit of concentration, he can sit for as long as he wants to (usually until he gets bored of it or distracted by something more exciting). His two bottom teeth are growing bigger and sharper by the day, and his talking is getting better and better.

We regularly hear things that sound very much like ‘hello’, ‘mamma’ and ‘dad dad dad’ and even one ‘hola’, but it’s not entirely clear that he has a clue what he’s talking about, so we’re not really counting them as ‘first words’ yet… this whole ‘first word’ thing is a lot more complicated than you’d imagine. Perhaps we’ll just make up something funny and tell him later it was his first word. Suggestions?

As mentioned before, this week’s outings included a Friday trip to the Royal Academy to see the Summer Exhibition which was a lovely day out. On Thursday we caught up with most of the NCT crew at Ros’s place for lunch (see video above) which was lots of fun. We brought mini strawberry pavlovas for everyone – we’ve been quite addicted to over the past week or so.  Well, not Ruben, because he’s not allowed to eat strawberries yet…

On Saturday the boys spent the day hanging out together while mum headed into town to a conference where she was speaking – for a bit of change, she was talking not about work stuff, but about Ruben! (Well, mostly about how baby’s brains develop after they’re born and how clever that is, using Ruben as a particularly cute and interesting example).

We also got a new toy – a tiny little video camera that fits perfectly into mum’s handbag so expect more like these in the coming weeks!

Hold the press re: Ruben’s new tooth – as you can see above, we are now no longer working on just one tooth, but a second has emerged to balance up the bottom jaw a little. Very impressive. Rube’s continues to handle teething very well, although sleeping at night has become a little disrupted again meaning poor mum is often pretty sleep deprived for her day of work. This really just goes to show how spoiled we’ve been getting lots of hours of sleep until now thanks to Ruben’s usually excellent nights of sleep.

We have, however, been on the look out also for signs that it might be time for Rube’s to start his hopefully happy relationship with solid food and disrupted nights of sleep are also one of those signs apparently, so it is hard to know what is behind it for certain. We had been waiting to see him show some interest in food – watching us eat, trying to take our food from us – but frankly, unless it came in a crinkly sounding wrapper, he hasn’t been the slightest bit interested… nonetheless, his liquid diet seems to be less and less satisfying, so on Fathers’ Day (15 June) we decided to give him a try with some baby rice, just to see if he’d be interested…

… the results are pretty self evident. I think our boy is ready for food. He did quite a good (albeit messy) job of getting down a few spoonfuls of baby rice and really did seem to enjoy it. So we’ll give him another serve of that and then get down to some serious pureeing and see what be makes of the amazing world of fruit and vegetables!

Speaking of Fathers’ Day – Michael had his first this week. Ruben got him a big box of chocolates, a nice green and blue striped polo shirt and some undies. He seemed fairly impressed… with the chocolates at least! Happy Fathers’ Day Mick 🙂

On Friday we went into town and spent the day at the British Museum with our NCT pals Ange and Issac. We had a lovely day, hung out in both the cafes (but not the fancy restaurant), saw some American prints, the Rosetta Stone, and lots of Egyptian mummies. It was a lot of fun, and Ruben was particularly interested in hanging out with Isaac – which is probably the first time that he’s really paid much attention to the fact that there are other babies in the world than him! 🙂

We got some new toys this week including enormous buzzy bee. Buzzy bee (we’ve decided bee’s are Ruben’s favourite animal for now due to the fact that he finds the sound ‘bzzzz’ hysterical) is as tall as Ruben when they are both sitting on the bed together (which Ruben can now do.. eh, I’ll have to get a photo of that for next week). He’s not 100% sitting yet, but very, very close! Rolling or making attempts at crawling are much less interesting to him – he’s happy to roll onto his side for a chat, but doesn’t really see the point of doing full rolls.

He also got some snazzy new outfits this week, including his excellent Australia shirt (below) and his first denim – a pair of overalls/dungarees that I bought in the ‘9 month’ size hoping that he’d grow into them, only to find that the very first time he put them on, they only just fit! Yikes.

Which reminds me – we have taken him back to the baby clinic in the past few weeks (just not when we were updating the blog) to have him weighed and to get his last set of jabs. That was on the 29th May and he weighed 17lbs or 7.75kgs. Phew! He moved up off the ‘average’ mark just a tiny bit, so I can’t imagine what size 90th centile 5 month old babies are wearing! Nevermind – we think he’s quite enormous and growing every day – and getting more clever and handsome and talkative etc. etc.

ok. Enough gushing for one week. Over and out 🙂

Yes, we have been very, very naughty and not updated Ruben’s blog for a long time… don’t despair, I plan to go back and ‘retro fill’ as much of it as I can and we’ll aim for monthly rather than weekly updates going forwards I think. Everyone is just so busy these days!

However, important milestones are piling up so thought it best to give a quick update!

First of all, today, 10 June, Ruben cut his very first tooth with an absolute mimimum of fuss and a maximum of drool… but that’s nothing new as he’s been drooling for *weeks*, perhaps even *months* now! We are all very excited and think he is the cleverest baby ever.

He’s also right on the verge of sitting up by himself – he can manage it for even a minute or two, but only with significant concentration – once he gets bored of concentrating he’s toppling over in every direction!

Rubes is not so interested in mobility, and rolls only when absolutely necessary. Talking is much more his thing and he chat, chat, chatters away morning, noon and night. He’s been through his blowing raspberry phases, onto ‘bub bub bub mum mum mum’ (which we are not getting over excited about and calling his first word… although, personally, I think he’s being saying ‘hello’ for months), another favourite goes something like ‘oiy ya, oiy ya, oiy ya’ and more recently he likes to talk in his high voice, a kind of falsetto. Ruben’s favourite sound is ‘bzzzzzz’ (like a bee) – he laughs and smiles almost every time he hears it (some jokes don’t get old), and when he’s in his cot and thinks that no one is listening, he likes to practice buzzing to himself. V cute.

The other day we spent a full day at the Home Office getting Ruben his Visa so that he can now officially reside in the UK (since they keep trying to deport him when we try to get him back into the country, it seemed like a sensible option). £600 later, he now has yet *another* bit of paperwork and more stuff in his passport. Just as well though as he has trips to Turkey, Italy, Australia and Thailand coming up later in the year. V exciting.

Ruben also got his new high chair the other day which means he can sit at the table with the rest of the family. He’s taken his rightful place at the head of the table and love it there. He’s not actually eating any food yet as we’re waiting for him to show the remotest about of interest in it first. He’s very interested in drinks and will try to take your glass out of your hand at any opportunity (resulting in a bit of a mess if you’re caught unawares!), but not the least bit interested in food just yet. Perhaps now that he has a tooth… 🙂

Ruben is now also sleeping in his very own cot, and doing a splendid job of sleeping. We’ve had a few full night sleeps, and most nights involve a good long chunk of sleep. Some do involve waking up at 4am, but he tends to sensibly go back to sleep not long after. He is brilliant at putting himself to sleep and doesn’t really fuss at all. Touch wood it continues!

More updates soon, we promise!