Pither.com

After many, many months of pulling himself up on furniture and crabbing his way around it, plus a short lived (twice I think) attempt at standing on his own around new year, Edward has finally decided to consistently balance himself on his own two feet.

He continued to practice that for a day and the following morning decided it was time to try out a few steps! I think his current record is three, or possibly four (do you count the stumble down to the floor?).

He still prefers a rapid crawl to actually get somewhere but seems quite happy to practise a few steps when encouraged. So we'll keep encouraging and hopefully he'll be properly toddling before too long!

This morning Edward took the last dose in his course of antibiotics and he seems to have made a good recovery. Certainly our fear that he would be allergic to antibiotics appears not to be the case. :-)

The strange rash that doctors couldn't identify has also largely cleared up and will hopefully completely vanish in the next few days.

He has also been making up for lost time, being especially mischievous today - trying to play with cables, the Sky box and attempting to eat a radiator!

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

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!