A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Unsurprisingly, after our first foray into the world a couple weeks ago, Calder came down with his first cold outside of the NICU. I gave him the treatment I've learned to give myself, which is sleep, sleep and more sleep, which he did not protest against in the least. Lucky for us it did not really seem to affect his breathing too terribly – he had a bit of a cough (outside of his typical coughing) and a slightly stuffy nose, but he recovered in about a week’s time.

I’m also happy to report that he started crawling today. He had been pushing himself with his feet to climb over my legs, the back of our glider, etc., but hadn't yet translated it to the floor. He appears to be skipping over the kind of crawl where you drag your belly (can’t blame him) and launching right into knee-crawling. His “crawl” wasn't a smooth one-hand-in-front-of-other coordinated with a movement of each leg, but he did manage to inch himself across about three feet of the mat. I’m counting it. We expect that when we get to Cincinnati next week where my parents have plenty of carpeted floor, Calder might be a little more comfortable and have a little more traction to work with.

We also recently celebrated Kraemer’s first official Father’s Day. Kraemer was getting over a cold but that made it a perfect day to take it easy (silver lining, right?) In between World Cup matches, Kraemer took his little man out and about the neighborhood and hung out in the shade of a tree on the lawn of a school just around the corner. We don’t have much of a lawn at our own little row home but thankfully public parks and other green grassy areas abound. I also captured some super adorable shots of the father-son duo in matching bow ties that I have been forbidden from posting, mostly because Kraemer doesn't do matching and only posed to please his wife. J They’re awfully cute, though. Maybe if you petition Kraemer to let me post them he’ll let you see.

And PS. Have I mentioned how much Calder likes yogurt? Oh wait?! Have I mentioned that we are easing him into dairy? When we saw Ginny a little over a week ago she told us that instead of introducing dairy via my supply – where if it did not work I’d have to wait two weeks again before it was out of my system, and why waste all that milk? – we could just test the yogurt with him directly. I've figured out that there are different levels, you could say, of dairy, with some stuff having greater potential to cause a reaction than others. If it’s been cooked or otherwise processed in some way, the structure of the protein has changed and may be more digestible for them, for example. I found this plan online, which is clearly British (um, fish pie?), although by the time I located it we were already onto yogurt and even had given him some butter in our homemade pureed carrots. So now that I know he tolerates that, guess what’s next? Yogurt for ME!!! Followed closely by ice cream because, hey, according to the Brits its in the same category, isn't it?

He doesn't appear to have gained much weight, still hovering just below the 18-pound mark. Ginny doesn't seem concerned so for now, neither will we be. He has been eating much better and more consistently now that we've spaced his feeds out more, and sometimes he is so eager to eat whatever puree we have whipped up and ready for him that he nearly kicks himself out of his seat. Since we've been weaning him from the tube, she wasn't surprised that his weight has leveled off and still told us to start dropping the tube feeds entirely. Moving right along, thank you very much!