Pither.com

How has it been 45 days since my last post!?

I knew it had been a while, but time is definitely flying a bit too fast at the moment. I think it's what comes of being busy at work and then just as busy at home.

At least I get some variation though, Liz is busy at home and then busy at home! Thanks to the flying time though, even that will only be for another 4 months now. I'm not sure if Liz is looking forward going back to the "real" world of work or not!

Someone else who isn't taking things slowly is Edward (now a whole 8 months old). No sooner had he got the hang of crawling than he started trying to walk! He seems to love climbing and generally moving. This includes getting most upset if you try to keep him still for more than a few seconds though (which isn't helpful when trying to change nappies!).

He can now happily cruise all of the way around his cot and regularly delights in treating the mattress as a trampoline (I think we'll have to get him a real one for Christmas).

We were out shopping (I'm very thankful we don't get time for this too often) a couple of weeks ago (for something completely different) and decided to get Edward a walker. Apart from the odd occasion when he manages to pull it over on top of himself, he really enjoys it. These days he can quite happily trot across the lounge with it. We do still have to help a little with the three point turns though!

While I'm doing the general Edward news thing; he now has five teeth well on their way through and at least one more not far off. It is now definitely a mistake to let him get your finger in his mouth!

Apparently most babies first start their crawling career in a rather backwards direction. The problem with crawling backwards is obviously that it doesn't take you forwards towards the object you're staring at and wanting to reach.

So the straight forward answer is not to bother with going backwards, and just keep concentrating on the object you really, really want to reach just in front of you (never mind the fact that it's almost certainly something you're not allowed to have).

Edward hasn't started to crawl backwards. In fact I don't think I've ever seen him manage anything other than an occasional, accidental stumble in a backwards direction. Edward has, however, started to crawl forwards.

For some time he's been able to put himself up on all fours, rock for a while, then fall forwards and repeat. This was actually very effective at getting him towards those elusive forbidden objects. However it obviously left him moving so slowly that we pesky parents kept catching him in time and moving either him or the target!

The answer; crawl better. So that's just what he's been working on.

At the beginning of this week he was fairly consistently managing three distinct arm/leg/crawl motions before having to throw himself forwards. He still needs fairly frequent breaks, but he's definitely now managing more and getting himself further!

I think we'll be tidying up some cables this weekend!

In the last week Edward has discovered a whole new purpose for his rolling - to enable him to rock! And he hasn't been holding back.

Pretty much the moment you leave him, he'll put in just a single roll to get himself onto his tummy and then he'll be straight up onto all fours.

He's yet to actually manage to move anywhere, but he's certainly very keen on rocking on the spot. He's now able to do this for several minutes at a time before he finally lets himself collapse back to the floor. However it's normally only a matter of seconds before he's back up and trying again.

Here he is rocking away last weekend...

So how do babies know to do this? We've certainly encouraged him to play on his tummy, but we've never shown him how to rock. Apparently all babies do it for a while before crawling as a method of strengthening their arms. But how do they all know they need to? Edward seems to know that he wants to go somewhere (understandable when that toy is just out of reach), but how does he know that rocking on the spot will eventually help him to accomplish movement?

One of the things the NHS give you as a new parent is a small red book in which to record your child's first few years of medical history.

This book has pages that cover basic details of the baby's birth, lots of pages for notes, various pictures (eg for recording teeth) and a number of charts.

One of those charts is to track your baby's weight and another their height. Each graph includes a number of guide plots, one for the average, another for the 25th percentile, 75th percentile and a few others.

Ever since Edward recovered from his initial dip in his first few weeks he has been quite nicely tracking just under the 91st percentile. However this week, for the first time he has landed directly on the 91st percentile with a whopping weight of 9kg! And he's still less than six months old!

Despite still having rather chunky thighs; the height graph tells us that he is also exactly on the 91st percentile, so apparently in perfect proportion!

Approximately two weeks ago Edward discovered that lifting one leg up underneath him and pushing hard while pulling with his hands could propel him quite rapidly across the floor.

He spent a few days doing this very successfully, although intermittently. He could easily cover a couple of feet in a minute or two when the mood took him. Since then he has been progressing further towards a more traditional form of crawling.

This currently means that he's quite good at getting either his legs or his hands in the right positions, but not so good at doing both at once. His general ability to cover distance also seems to be, temporarily I'm sure, reduced to almost nothing; or a small distance backwards.

On a related note, I'm quite convinced that Edward is perfectly capable of sitting up on his own. However he's yet to really prove this as he will never sit still. There is always something just out of reach that's far too interesting not to try and stretch for, which inevitably means falling over.

A short while after Edward was born, it became apparent that we needed to start cutting his finger nails (as he was starting to scratch his face).

Since that time it has been my job to perform this task as Liz has been too concerned about cutting his fingers off.

So every week or two I have been using a pair of baby nail scissors to cut Edward's finger nails. The complexity of this task has varied a lot depending on how long his nails were and how much he wanted to struggle (he doesn't even like having them being cut when he's asleep!). Overall though it has been getting gradually easier as he, and his fingers, get larger. He has certainly managed to maintain all of his fingers throughout.

A few weeks ago I decided that moving from scissors to baby nail clippers would make things easier and reduce the risk of any fingers falling off.

Unfortunately on one of my first attempts with the nail clippers I managed to include a small amount of finger! I drew blood and everything! :-(

Surprisingly Edward didn't seem to mind, so at least there weren't any screams to make my guilt even worse.

With the confession over, I'd just like to add that since then I think I've worked out what I did wrong and have managed a couple of further clippings without any more fingers getting in the way. The lesson remains though - nail clippers really aren't any safer than scissors for cutting baby nails.

While trying to get a new Ruby on Rails application up and running on one of my servers, I came across this:

$ ruby script/server   
./script/../config/boot.rb:29: undefined method `gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)
        from script/server:2:in `require'
        from script/server:2

Being the first thing I ran after rails <myapp> this is quite an early point in the process to start failing!

The fix turned out to be:

$ sudo gem update --system

The slightly puzzling bit is that this machine already has other RoR applications running on it! I suspect the key difference is that they were developed elsewhere and only run on this machine under apache.