Six Months

Lewis is six months old this week and has been here for an entire half a year, as impossible as that may seem. He is such a happy baby, so full of humor and joy and cheerfulness at the world around him. He has four teeth, two still-blue eyes, and many delicious chubby rolls of baby fat. It rather boggles the mind that he has grown to his current self ingesting nothing but breastmilk and a smidge of baby Tylenol; we've made two little attempts at feeding (scrambled eggs once, pureed apricots once) that have not gone super well and I think I'm going to give him a few more weeks before trying again.



He is such a big, strong baby. I don't think we are just projecting some societal sense of maleness onto him; it is pretty much empirically unquestionable that he is both big for his age and a bit advanced in gross motor skills. He weighed 20 lbs at 4 months and had just moved up into 12-18 month clothes then. Now at 6 months, he weighs pretty much the same and is still wearing the same size, but he has gotten much taller and the arms and legs are not at all long on him anymore. He might spend THREE WHOLE MONTHS in this size of clothes. A friend recently commented that he looks like he is growing into his body, and I think that's true; his proportions are shifting from the long torso and shorter curled-up limbs of early infancy to the longer (albeit chubby) arms and legs of later babyhood. It is a bit of a relief to see his growth start to plateau out. Otherwise carrying him around would have become immensely arduous and there would not be a diaper anywhere that would fit him by the time he is 2!

And as for strength, he's been rolling from back to front for quite a while now. He has been pushing himself up into upward-facing dog for a few weeks and has been somehow wiggling himself around on the floor for about a month. You know-- he's not really crawling but somehow he rolls and wriggles himself so that you put him down in one spot and you find him a few minutes later across the room. Just this week, he has started pushing himself up to his hands and knees, belly off the floor, and will rock back and forth. Right now this most often results in him face-planting on the floor but we are looking at honest-to-goodness crawling very very soon. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! And baby gates! Ugh. He is less advanced when it comes to sitting, although I'm sure that won't be very far behind either.



Every night when we change him from his clothes into his pajamas, he laughs and laughs and laughs, with a gurgling chortle that comes from his belly. Apparently it is the most hilarious thing ever, although only at night-- changing the other way in the morning from his pajamas to his clothes is not funny at all. It is a gift every night, a unlooked-for gift of joy and beauty that takes my breath away. Much like him.