6 months old

How on earth have I gotten SO lazy with the boys' blog?  I had really hoped to be able to maintain both, one mostly pictures of the boys and one about my thoughts and stuff.  But this week I have definitely dropped the ball on both and this one for sure has been pretty pathetic lately.  I'm just getting worse and worse about taking pictures of the boys.  I mean, we do the same things over and over.  Oh well, if you promise not to get bored with repetitive pictures I will promise to try to do better.

All that said, moving on to the most wonderful and precious baby ever...

Judah turned 6 months old on Thursday.  It has seriously flown by.  I want to keep him in the 6-10ish month age for longer than four months.  I just love this stage.  To watch them grow, learn and develop but yet they are still babies.  It doesn't hurt that he is sleeping great, still nursing well and has finally started some solids.

This is how he sleeps.  Hands behind his head.  I could just eat him up!

Face close up.  The sweetness is almost too much!

I did Judah's stats a day late but here they are:

Weight: 8.6 kg (barely under 19 lbs) 68th%
Length:   71 cm (28 inches) 87th%
Head: 41 cm (16.1 inches) 3rd%

A week from tomorrow I leave for Bangkok and while we are there Judah will have a real check up.  I am really excited that Judah's regular pediatrician is an American certified Pediatric Pulmonologist and Allergist.  I am going to get his lungs checked out and may see if the doctor thinks allergy testing would be a good idea before we try out too many foods.  I just want to head off any issues we could avoid here if possible.  Especially since Kirby had a random food allergy.  Also, I'm a little concerned for his head size.  Kirby has also always been in the low percentiles for that so it may just be that they both have tiny heads like their Daddy or it could quite possibly be that I'm just no good at measuring the head.

Since Exersaucers are really expensive here I opted to buy a walker (gasp).  This one actually has feet that pop down to make it stationary.

He is still a little unsteady for it but he was getting bored with the couple of other toys we had so we let him play in it for a little bit each day.  He's starting to figure out what all the things on the dashboard do.  And yes, Judah has become a paci face in the last couple of weeks.

The day after Christmas (and a few days after turning 5 months) I thought it was a good time to start Judah on some rice cereal.  I was moving him to a 4 hour schedule and he would be going 12 hours at night (which he wanted to move to straight away without trying to move back slowly which goes to show that I held on to that late night nursing session too long) so I thought a little cereal would help him out.  He was interested...

...but not so very much.  He didn't fight it or cry or anything but pushed most of it out with his tongue.

I gave it a few days and he was still not so interested.  So I took about four days off and tried again.  Still a no go.  So we gave it another week or so and I just really started to look for his hunger cues.  He was finally showing me that even after nursing (no matter how much I tried to boost my milk supply) he was hungry.  So we tried again just a few days ago and you would have thought he was a cereal eating pro!  He just took it right down with not problems.  I'm trying to determine if I will start veggies before we head to BKK or if I can hold him off.  I would like to not have to worry about trying to find jar food (it's hard to find foods that aren't combinations and most have meat) for him so I'm going to hold off if I can.

Judah is still the apple of his brothers' eyes and just a joy to be around.  If he's crying it's usually because he's hungry, tired or has a brother in his face just a little too long.  I'm amazed each day at the things he can do.  Last week he started sticking out his tongue and blowing raspberries.  Either his brothers taught him that one or he figured it out on his own cause I certainly didn't show him.  He also has his two front bottom teeth sitting just below the gums.  I'm checking each day to see if they have broken through yet.

And one last cute picture.  The bouncey seat has been Judah's favorite place but I don't think it will be too long until we pass it on to another baby.  And yes, Daddy got him dressed.