Lab Rat

Victor has been a good little shopper this week as my mom and I have been checking out all the stores in the area. Hey, it's good cardio! ;) Thursday, though, we did something a little different (and then went shopping afterwards). I signed Victor up for the babylab at UCSD in La Jolla about a month ago, and they finally called us in. They are testing four month olds (I know, he's going to be four months old on Tuesday!!!) for vision preferences. They've already tested adults for how they associate the colors black and white with the shapes x and o, and they found divisions along racial lines. This is most likely learned behavior, so they're testing babies of different races as well. Mr. Victor was a very good test subject, despite his initial reluctance to wake up on time. The grad student in charge, Katie, held Victor up to a TV screen and watched his face on a monitor above him. I got to sit at the keyboard and bring up the next screen for him to see and record his results. The monitor was split into halves, left and right, and different combinations of x's and o's in different colors (black and white on a gray background) were shown on each half. Katie watched his eyes to see which way he looked as soon as a new image popped up. He was a good boy and finished all the testing at a nice pace, and flirted with Katie and her two minions before and after. At the end, Victor earned $5 and a shiny new piggy bank to put it in!

We got Victor's prescription refilled on time this time. No more messing about putting him on and off and back on again, especially with the plane trip coming up! I can't believe we're leaving a week from tomorrow--we're so excited! First, though, Victor has to get his 4 month shots on Wednesday. Poor baby! I hope he takes them as well as he did his 2 month shots, but with his new lung capacity and maximum volume upgrade, somehow I doubt it. In the meantime, I'm going to be making lists and lists of all the stuff we could possibly take, then cut it down depending on what Victor's grandparents have already eagerly stocked up on. :) Can't wait!

Busy times

Busy week so far! On Monday morning Victor managed to scratch his eye before I could catch him. I kept an eye on it, and it kept getting red and puffy, so I called the doctor's office and they recommended that I bring him in. Of course it was fine as soon as I called them. But I brought him in, and they checked it, and there was indeed a little scratch on his poor little eye! That was fun for me to watch--they put a yellow drop into his eye, and then used a black light to check it out. His eye glowed! Nifty! Of course it somehow managed to leak over into his nose and he had orange boogers for a while. But they gave him an antibiotic to put in there just in case, then had me bring him back on Tuesday to get checked. Aaaand he was perfectly fine, no scratch! So that was $70 for peace of mind. Oh well, anything for my baby ;)

The good news there was that Victor's tummy medicine FINALLY seems to have kicked back in again, and he's his usual talkative happy self instead of the crying meltdown baby. Lesson learned! We're keeping him on the medicine at least until we come back alive from our big trip east.

Strangely, though, he only weighed in at 13 lbs, 1 oz, which is rather less than they were expecting, since his weighed 12 lb, 4 oz on May 10, over a month ago. I think it was probably because he was crying so much and not eating as much as he might have, either because his tummy was upset or because I couldn't distinguish his hungry crying from all the other crying he was doing. Since then, though, his appetite has resurged with a vengeance--I haven't been able to keep up!

Wednesday morning my mom flew back into town! Commence the walking and the ice cream and the grammy cuddles, stat. Victor has been showing her all his new tricks, including rolling over, picking up and eating his blankets and toys, pulling his ball down from the velcro strap, and sucking on his first two fingers and his big toes. He has also showered her with affection in the form of spit up. Such a considerate baby! :)

Rolling!

Yes, that's right, Victor rolled over today! Front to back, twice in a row. Quite surprising, considering how little tummy time he's had lately! It's actually been a rough couple of weeks. Victor has been extremely upset about something, most days, which is pretty wearing--and it's not just for a little while, it's all afternoon or something most of the time. But he has had the occasional good day. Today was pretty good. He is definitely a loud talker now though. I used to describe him as a mellow baby, but now he's way too loud for that ;) What I find interesting, though, is the stuff he chooses to talk to. Like in one of our bathrooms, there's a row of lotion bottles on the counter that he just talks and talks to. He loves them so much that I can even use them to snap him out of one of his crying fits sometimes! He loves plants, too, and being outside in general. If I wear him in his little baby carrier outside, he just chills out for hours and hours. Too bad it's usually too sunny to take him out like that very often! But I do fully expect him to write the first baby-to-lotion and baby-to-plant dictionaries, though. Big plans for my big little man! And man is he getting hefty! He must be around 15 pounds or so. Still within the 6 month clothing size right now (which has labels going to 16.5 lbs), but I'm a bit worried about him outgrowing the clothes we got him to wear to his Uncle Matt's wedding! We shall see...

And another!

Different toy, more playing! Notice how he tries to eat this one too, but it's a bit harder to get to. He can hold it up for a bit, though. And when it's off to the side he tries to roll over to get to it. Considering how little tummy time he gets he might end up flipping from back to front before he does the easier front to back move. His latest move, though, just started these past couple of days. When he is semi upright (leaning back a little like in his car seat or in someone's lap) he starts to leaaaaan forward veeeeery slowly.... but I can see attempted headers onto the floor in his near future...

Movie Time!

Victor is so much fun to play with now that he actually plays instead of flailing around randomly! When I put him under the little dangly toy set he'll even smile at his toys when he grabs for them and hears the music some of them play. Here's a movie of Victor playing with one of his toys and trying to eat it--another recent development. Notice how the legs go up--I don't have to hold his legs up when I change his diapers any more, he does it for me. So considerate! The hard part is getting them to go back down when it's time to strap him in... ;)

Note to self

5 hour nap before bedtime is not a good idea. But I can't just go around waking him up in an obvious way, I have to try things to get him to wake up on his own or he just starts screaming until he falls back to sleep--never wake a sleeping baby, indeed. Obviously we need to regulate some naptimes, but he wants to have a different schedule every day. Sometimes he falls back to sleep right after he gets his breakfast. Other times he waits until lunch. Sometimes, like today, he won't have much of a naptime except for the 1/2 hours I'm holding him after feeding him--nice because he isn't trying to wiggle around and escape while I'm holding him upright, but dang it's tiring. I'm going to have the biceps of a professional weightlifter soon. It's not helping anything that we ran out of his medicine (we forgot to bring it on the roadtrip and he was fine, then when we started it up again during the week he repeated his original reaction to it (i.e. crying a lot and spitting up a lot for 3-4 days), and then we ran out with no refills. So we thought we'd see how he does without it, because the sooner we can get him off it the better. So he hasn't been taking it since Monday I think, and already he's doing the painful-spitup-in-my-mouth dance. Guess I have to call the pediatrician's office and see if I can get them to renew the prescription without having to go back in. Though it would be nice to see how much he weighs now, otherwise we'll have to wait until his four month birthday in July. It's not like I have anything better to do, after all. Oh, except wait for the dang kid to go to bed because I'm exhausted and Damian's exhausted, and which one of us just finished staying up late to work on his final project for his class. Bummer for me. Maybe this weekend we can take turns sleeping...

RT: continued again

So Victor is starting to suck his thumb. He's been working up to it--sucking his fist, sucking his fingers, sucking other people's thumbs--but now he seems to have figured out how awesome his own thumbs are for chewing and/or sucking. As a former thumb sucker myself, I can only express pride in his accomplishment.

He's also much more grabby and aware of things now. Just this morning he was trying to grab a hat I have hanging off the back of a chair. In his little jungle gym dangly toy thingy he actually grabs for the toys instead of flailing around randomly hitting them. And I think he's been going through a growth spurt the past few days because he has been sleeping sleeping sleeping and eating. He even feels heavier! I wish I had an accurate digital scale at home because I would totally weigh him every day and make graphs of his progress. Maybe for child # 2.... ;)

Now back, back, back to the roadtrip. Over a week ago. Sheesh. So last Saturday we had an early night, which means Victor got us up even earlier than usual. Which turned out well because we wanted to go see the redwoods! So we drove about an hour north to Big Basin, a park of, you guessed it, redwoods! It was so nice to drive through actual forests on small two lane roads again! Although some of the roads got REALLY small and windy with blind corners for oncoming traffic next to sheer dropoffs.... eeeeeee! But we made it, and it was just gorgeous. We stopped for a bit and went a little ways down one of the trails. Of course, Mr. Victor decided to get hungry so we had to turn around before too long. Which wasn't bad, either, because I wanted to meet up with some of my cousins who live in San Jose. Cara and Alyssa are my second cousins, and Cara lives there with her husband Ben, and Alyssa just happened to be visiting her that weekend--lucky coincidence! We managed to meet up with them (spotty cell service because of giant trees! Who knew!) in a cute little town on the outskirts of San Jose called Los Gatos. Nice little lunch, nice little chat, a little bit of ice cream, what more could you want! It was really hot out, though--in the 90's, easily the hottest we've been since moving out to California. Victor didn't seem to mind too much, though, and he had lots of fun new people to drool on!

After a few hours of catching up Damian and I headed south while Cara, Alyssa, and Ben followed our trail back to the redwoods (oh the joys of no babies to get you up early!). It kind of surprised me that we drove through mile after mile of farmland--I guess this is where California grows all the stuff it is known for growing! The place we stayed in on Saturday night even called itself the "salad bowl of the world." We drove back down the 101 instead of taking 1 again (the winding road up the coast). We stayed Sunday night in a town called Paso Robles, which is known for its wineries--we got there too late for tasting, of course, but there were plenty of liquor stores with souvenirs ;) It was a strange little town--at first we thought it was a cruddy little abandoned place, but we drove around and finally found an adorable city center with nifty restaurants and lots of people.

Monday was our big driving day. We cut east through brown hills of nothing to meet up with the big road, I-5, where, for a change, we drove through miles and miles of orchards--including nut trees, I think. OK, trees on one side, brown nothing on the other. Fairly uneventful trip home, even through LA. We stopped off in the middle of nowhere at one point for feeding and watering because we didn't want to stop in LA. Damian made it through mile 994 of the trip before we had to stop for food and a sequel to the book we had been listening to on tape. They also had a DQ where I was introduced to the buster bar blizzard. If I ever leave Damian for another man, that man will be named Buster Bar Blizzard and we will be very fat and happy together. Fortunately Damian doesn't mind me keeping one small affair, for now ;)

So after 1040 miles, we made it home! hooray! :)