8 months 1 week, 5 days

Griffin has another tooth coming in. It is keeping everyone up at night. He will go to bed, then wake up many times during the night. About 12am, he sleeps the longest (until 7!). Soon he will have two teeth on the bottom, and none on the top. A friend has nicknamed him "Fang".

He is also becoming more mobile, dragging himself where he wants to go, and spinning himself in place to face the direction he wants. He has become more clingy, and he will pull himself across the floor to grab a hold of my pant leg and cry to be picked up.

This new communication, holding up his arms to be picked up and crying, is new. It started all at once while we were all out at lunch. Griffin was sitting in the restaurant's high chair, looking up at me, and just lifted his arms. I love the new communication.

I need more books! He loves Green Eggs and Hama lot, but we need more! He tries to get the pictures off the pages, and chews on the cover. He also really seems to listen when I read. Next time we can, I want to go shopping for more Suess books.. and others!

Now it's his bed time. It was to be bath time, but it seems that's not to be tonight. I apologize for the shortness of this post, I promise a larger one next week.
Love,
Autumn 

8 Months, 4 days

He sure loves The Muppet show.

I was having my finger chewed on the other day, and suddenly realized that his gum was a little sharp. Lo and behold, a tooth is coming out! I will try to get a picture, but he's very shy about it. In order to see it I have to get very close and make him laugh, and know where I'm looking. Every time we try to just take a look at it, he sticks out his tongue, and pokes it at our fingers. He rubs it on hard toys, and is generally irritable about it, in a very cute way.

His Aunt Willow visited these last few days. He loves her, giggling and playing with her. I enjoyed having her here, I miss her a lot. While I write this, she sleeps on our couch, but she leaves today. :( I know Griffin isn't the only one who will be sad.

On MLK day, Eric had the day off. So he, Griffin, and I went to the science museum here in Buffalo. It was founded in the 1930's, and still has many of the same exhibits. Sadly, a lack of funding has reduced it from the very interesting museum it was, to a relic holding on by its teeth waiting for better days. Even so it was still fun, and Griffin got to see shells, stuffed lions, half an Egyptian exhibit, and some very shiny gems. In the shiny gem room, he discovered that since the room is marble, his voice echoes nicely when he screams. Griffin has developed a raptor like shriek, which isn't to indicate unhappyness, but just to play with sound. This echoed very nicely in the marble room, he discovered.

He can pull himself to a standing position if we give him our hands. I found him practicing it with the side of his crib. He hasn't quite gotten the hang of that yet, but I fear we will have to lower the mattress soon. His crawling practice has gotten quite good, and he will occasionally scoot his knees forwards while he's rocking back and forth. He's learning about this crawling business quite quickly!

Ta for now,
Autumn

7 months, 4 weeks, 1 day

Late again, I apologize.

From time to time I have had cause to pause, and look at my son in absolute wonder. The strangest of these came this weekend. We go to a house that belongs to two friends of ours every weekend. Griffin was set up in their bedroom in his portable crib, and when Eric brought him down at the end of the night I felt an almost physical shock, looking at him. At that moment, I saw him as he was, growing, learning; becoming. He is his own person now, and although we will direct his growth, he is himself. Our little Griffin, bonsai son.

He plays. He has not always played, and I fear I would have missed it if not for Eric's insistance on trying to put him on the rug to practice crawling. As I have said, he hated it, and I lost patience with it. One day, though, he simply played with the toys around him. He picks up the toys, pulls, chews, flails, throws them all. He enjoys himself, without constant parental stimulation. Then one day, he rolled. I am sure it was by mistake, but he did it, and then he continued to do it. He can sit upright, he can roll where he wants to go. He gets on his knees, he rocks back and forth, but he hasn't made the next step into crawling. My eyes are on him constantly, because I know he will do it, by accident.

He plays. It is my joy every day to watch him as he plays. I prod toys back into his play area, and I make sure that he's penned off from places we really would rather he not go, and to remove the laptop cord from eager hands.

Can it be possible that I bore him? That once he was not existant, that there was a time when I did not know him? Can it be real, conception? I can't wrap my head around it, that once he was inside me, that my blood pumped through him. I try to understand it, I read again how the egg drops, the sperm fertilizes, the baby grows. I look at his picture, the beautiful ultrasound, I try to remember how he would kick me, and his constant hiccups. I look at his little melon-head, his huge big toes, his ocean-dark eyes. I believe in miracles, he has saved me.

He plays! Give me strength, he plays. One day, he will understand the words that I read to him. We read Green Eggs and Hamtogether, we read Where the Wild Things Are, we read the little soft books about animals his grandmother sent. He scratches at the pages, he grabs the book. He giggles when he watches me as I read. I sit him in my lap, and talk to him face to face, and that makes him laugh too.

His hair has changed colour. He has quite a bit of very light blonde hair. It actually reminds me of my father's hair a little. I love to rub his fuzzy little head.

I say that I "can't wait" for things. I "can't wait" for him to read, to play board games, to play D&D with. It isn't true, I can wait. I already miss so much about how he used to be. This balancing act between joy of the moment, mourning the past, and the promise of the future can be exhausting, and exhilirating.

Love,
Autumn 

7 months, 3 weeks.

It feels like it's been forever since I posted. I will list Griffin's achievements in life so far:

• Sit in an upright position without aid.
  
• Roll around to go where he wants to.
  
• Reach for what he wants.
  
• Drink from a glass. Not only drink from a glass, but recognize that we are drinking from a glass, and want our beverage.
  
• He recognizes grape juice when he sees it, and reaches for it.
  
• Hold his bottle (though he is usually content to let us do that for him).
  
• Recognizes that food comes in a spoon, and tries to feed himself, occasionally grabbing at it when it comes to his mouth, and trying to do it himself.
  
• Recognize his name.
  
• Babble baby talk. Sometimes it sounds like words, but they haven't been repeatable.
  
• Grab his feet. He doesn't seem to remember that he doesn't like the taste of his own toes.
  
• Worship the ceiling fan.
  
• Dig himself under the bumper to view the world.
  
• Take off his diaper.
  

He now has a lot of hair, but it's very fine, and very light coloured, so it doesn't seem as if he has a lot until you get very close to his head. The little beard-shaped 'V' of hair in the back of his head has changed colour to match mostly with the rest of his hair, which makes me slightly sad. I'm someone who really does not like change, and he changes so fast that sometimes it's hard to see. I catch myself crying over a baby outfit that he wore when he was smaller, or a picture of him when he was incredibly small.

There's this teething ring that Eric bought for him. It's now Griffin's favourite thing. You'll see it featured in some of the Christmas pictures; it's a rainbow of hard beads on a string. Some kids have a teddy bear, he has this string of beads. It goes everywhere with him. He grabs it when we lift him out of his crib, and gets upset when he doesn't have it, or he's dropped it and can't get it back. He has taken to cuddling some of the stuffed animals he owns once and a while, which is incredibly cute. His three favourites are the tiger that our friend Rob gave him, a red dog that my aunt Julie gave him, and Eric's old stuffed monkey that he had as a child. The monkey is his favourite of all.

Griffin loves car rides. He sits and stares out the window, completely fascinated with the world. He also loves to get out of the house and go places, especially new ones. Sometimes when he's extremely grumpy, going outside will make him instantly a different Griffin. I suppose I can understand that. He wants to see different things, meet people. He'll be wanting to borrow the car, next.
-Autumn

 

7 months, 2 weeks, 1 day; Happy New Year!!

Griffin watched the ball drop with us. Our New Years have been very uneventful for a little while, but this year, we had plans with friends and Griffin. So, when the ball began to drop, we all turned on the television, and Griffin woke up from the activity. We watched the ball drop, I kissed his fuzzy little head, and then my husband.
Griffin looks like he might crawl soon. He clearly wants to crawl, but isn't quite to the point of understanding what to do with his limbs once he's on his hands and knees. He is making quite a bit of progress towards it, though. I've been noticing lately that when there's a toy that he wants, he will actually make an effort to get it, which is new.

During our new years eve visit to our friends' house, we had his portable crib set up in their living room. The 'mattress' is a little hammock like; a pad on a mesh net that attaches to the sides. It swings a little. We put Griffin on it, to practice sitting up, but it was too unstable. It would swing, and he would get panicky, and cry. I put the Boppy behind him and it stabilized him enough so he wouldn't fall over. Then he realized that he could make the mattress swing on purpose, and spent a while moving his hips and swinging the hammock. It was fun to watch him figure out his environment and then learn from it right in front of me like that. I see him do it on other occasions too, and it never stops making me proud and fascinating me.

From time to time we'll give him grape juice out of a glass. He sees us drinking from them, and wants what we've got. Plus, he loves grape juice. So we give him just a little from a glass. He is slowly getting down what drinking from a glass entails, though he still tries to lap the liquid, or chew on the side of the glass while he's doing it.

Love to all this new years, and I hope to be writing many many more of these.
-Autumn